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Before reality TV and social media, there was 'Madonna: Truth or Dare'


Luiz Ribeiro
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Chicago Tribune
 

There’s a moment early on in “Madonna: Truth or Dare” — the 1991 documentary that chronicled her “Blond Ambition” tour — when feedback is marring her soundcheck ahead of a performance in Japan.

“Stop, stop, stop,” she says from the stage, wearing a cap and pair of Wayfarer sunglasses.

And then:

“I’m sorry but the level up here is not that loud and there’s no reason for all this feedback. If we can’t get it to sound better than this then I’m not doing a show — so someone who knows about sound better come up here and explain something to me.”

She pauses. “I’m waiting.”

Off camera you hear someone mutter: “She’s getting pissed.”

It’s such a great scene because her frustration is warranted. This isn’t a pop star copping an attitude. This is about business and she’s instructing her team to identify the problem and fix it.

The film (which screens Tuesday at the ArcLight Cinemas) is from director Alek Keshishian, who was 24 when he started shooting the tour’s first leg in Japan. Madonna was 32 and had already married and divorced Sean Penn by this point; had her video for “Like a Prayer” condemned by the Vatican by this point. Had already made “Dick Tracy” with Warren Beatty by this point (the latter of whom she’s dating during the early portions of the tour).

The resulting documentary is a mix of exuberantly shot concert footage (color) contrasted with grainy behind-the-scenes footage (black-and-white) of the singer and her entourage of dancers, backup singers and other staff that make the tour possible.

Concert films and rock documentaries are a genre unto themselves, but “Truth or Dare” came at a unique moment. Capturing that split second before reality TV would spill into our lives, it arrived in theaters a year before MTV’s “The Real World” would premiere.

 

Watching it now, what stands out aren’t necessarily the things that caught my attention when I first saw it as a teenager (including Beatty’s smirking bafflement that Madonna would allow cameras to follow her without limits) but what’s missing from the film.

“My show is not a conventional rock show but a theatrical presentation of my music,” she says in a prepared statement in Italy.

So: Less a concert than a work of musical theater — and because it was steeped in Catholic iconography (and at least one number where she simulated masturbation) it was causing controversy. “Like theater,” she says, her show “asks questions, provokes thoughts and takes you on an emotional journey.”

But that journey is stripped out in “Truth or Dare.” You see different numbers interspersed throughout the film but they are out of context and leave you without a sense of the show as a whole — or what it’s saying as a narrative. The film never captures Madonna making creative decisions about the show either; all of that was already in place by the time filming began. And yet watching it now, what comes through is that she’s most interesting when she’s working. The other stuff, the goofing around, feels contrived — though I suspect Keshishian would disagree.

He declined my interview request, but spoke about the film in 2016 after a 25th anniversary screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In all, he shot 250 hours of film. “And we don’t know where it is,” he said of the remaining footage.

“Back then there wasn’t Instagram, there wasn’t Facebook,” he said. “She was the new guard, which was already kind of foreshadowing what was going to happen with social media. And you see that transition in the conversation between Warren Beatty and Madonna when Warren’s going (sarcastically), ‘Well, why would you want to live if it’s off camera?’ And he’s very much the old school of, like, Stars: You gotta keep your mystery. Madonna was kind going to this modern thing of like: Actually, I want to get rid of the mystery.

“The irony is that social media has actually made it almost impossible to ever make a movie like that again about a celebrity — because now celebrities curate themselves and they present you behind-the-scenes stuff, which is obviously what they want you to see.”

That’s such an interesting observation because to my eyes, Madonna absolutely curates herself in the film as much as any contemporary celebrity.

“The whole family thing — that Madonna was the mother figure to all of us — that was a situation that she spun so that she could be seen in a different way for her own brand,” dancer Carlton Wilborn told me last year.

He’s featured in the 2017 documentary “Strike a Pose,” which is available on Netflix and catches up with the dancers nearly three decades after their career-defining experience with the “Blond Ambition” tour and “Truth or Dare.”

“Madonna made it appear that she collected us and made this kumbaya scenario,” Wilborn told me. “I never bought into it, but (for the film) I played like I was buying into it.”

I mean, it doesn’t really feel like she has a maternal relationship with the dancers because we don’t see her having the kinds of conversations that help forge those kinds of deep friendships. Who knows, maybe they did happen ... and are lost in those 250 hours of footage.

When the tour stops in Madonna’s hometown of Detroit, her visit to her mother’s grave feels stagey as well; her brother Christopher — credited as the tour’s artistic director — stands watch by a tree while she lies down next to her mother’s headstone. The moment is striking in the way it frames this loss of a parent as Madonna’s experience only, rather than something these two siblings share.

It reminded me of her tribute to Aretha Franklin at the VMA’s earlier this month, a rambling story that was about Madonna rather than Franklin. Madonna, you sense, tends to consider the world as it relates to her. Maybe that’s a fact of celebrity at her level. Or maybe it’s just her.

You know who would know? Christopher. And it’s odd that we never hear from him in “Truth or Dare.” He’s presumably the one person on the tour who knows her best. Certainly the longest.

 

“There’ve been other pop stars who’ve approached me in the past to shoot documentaries, and there’ve been a couple where I’ve been, like, intrigued,” Keshishian said at that MoMA screening in 2016.

“And I go and I usually say, ‘I want to test for one week’ … and inevitably, both times they were like: ‘Well, we don’t want you to use this part.’ Or: ‘We don’t want you to show me doing this.’ And I would say to management: ‘There’s no movie here,’ you know? And so I would walk away from jobs because I just didn’t want to begin that. They would have watched ‘Truth or Dare’ and that’s why they wanted me to shoot it, but they didn’t reallywant me to shoot it.”

It’s hard to picture 1990-era Madonna as someone who was fairly accessible, but that’s how she was with Keshishian.

“I think today, management, agents — these artists have ‘creative directors’ — there’s so many layers. That wasn’t the case then. She was at the height of her fame right there, and I would pick her up in my Volkswagen with the bad brakes and we’d go out to dinner.”

He ends the talk with a funny line that’s also seems emblematic of Madonna and her charm: She doesn’t mind a little pushback and attitude if there’s logic behind it.

“I showed her a rough cut, which was around three hours long,” Keshishian said, “and then the rest of the time was me cutting it down further and her going, ‘Why are you cutting it?’ She wanted it to be three hours.

“I was like, ‘It’s not “Gone with the Wind,” honey.’ ”

“Madonna: Truth or Dare” screens 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the ArcLight Cinemas arclightcinemas.com/movie/arclight-presentsmadonna-truth-or-dare.

nmetz@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @Nina_Metz

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-ent-madonna-truth-or-dare-curated-celebrity-0831-story.html

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"When the tour stops in Madonna’s hometown of Detroit, her visit to her mother’s grave feels stagey as well; her brother Christopher — credited as the tour’s artistic director — stands watch by a tree while she lies down next to her mother’s headstone. The moment is striking in the way it frames this loss of a parent as Madonna’s experience only, rather than something these two siblings share."

 

This is something I noticed watching the film recently. As a kid it flew over my head, as I probably didn't realize that was her brother. But watching Truth or Dare as a "grown up" I saw many things differently and as possibly staged. We discussed it somewhere on the forum. I remember someone saying that they did in fact shoot some scenes over as they didn't get the right shot. 

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In his book Christopher says that he as really disappointed when Madonna chose to film a scene at the cemetary and he decided he didn't want to get involved in this specific shoot and stayed apart. I know many of us don't like the book, but he may be right in this case.

As for myself, I remember too being so touched by the scene when I was young. I saw the movie in a cinema. Seems like yesterday. So ahead of its time! But at the time, before reality shows, it was hard to realize that editing could really make things look different. But the title, with its expressive double meaning, says it all: it is up to you to believe it (truth) or not (just dare).

Christopher also says that the only scene where Madonna is really Madonna is the one with Sandra.

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In his book Christopher says that he as really disappointed when Madonna chose to film a scene at the cemetary and he decided he didn't want to get involved in this specific shoot and stayed apart. I know many of us don't like the book, but he may be right in this case.
As for myself, I remember too being so touched by the scene when I was young. I saw the movie in a cinema. Seems like yesterday. So ahead of its time! But at the time, before reality shows, it was hard to realize that editing could really make things look different. But the title, with its expressive double meaning, says it all: it is up to you to believe it (truth) or not (just dare).
Christopher also says that the only scene where Madonna is really Madonna is the one with Sandra.


I would say also when she sticks her finger in her throat and says "anybody who says my show is neat has to go"


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