Every work of art comes from a sort of controlled megalomania. When a painter faces his canvas, or a writer his page, he shuts out the rest of the world and becomes a master of the universe whose every whim must be obeyed. This sense of omnipotence is intoxicating, and it explains why so many radical, game-changing artists have been people who began with badly damaged egos. It also explains why they can be such miserable people to live with: once the creative spell is broken, and they’re thrust back into the real world of leaky faucets and unpaid bills, their anger can be blinding. Other human beings are even harder to control than finances or faucets, though that never stopped a man like Pablo Picasso or Marlon Brando from trying to impose his will on everyone in his personal orbit.
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Produced for the BBC, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is hardly a great documentary, but it does show how the megalomaniacal impulse can impel the same man to create majestic works of art and to kill another person in cold blood. Documentary maker Vikram Jayanti scored an enviable media “get” when the famously reclusive record producer Phil Spector granted him an extended interview in March 2007, a month before he was scheduled to stand trial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Spector never talks about the events of February 3, 2003, when he picked Clarkson up at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, brought her home for a drink, pulled a gun on her as she tried to leave, and shot her in the mouth. But he does complain about the bias of the judge and jury, theorize that the media are out to get him, and compare himself artistically to Bach, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Jayanti was handed two legs of his stool when Spector sat for the interview and licensed his songs for use on the soundtrack, and the third when Judge Larry Paul Fidler, who presided over Spector’s first trial in 2007, allowed TV cameras into the courtroom. The Agony and the Ecstasy combines the talking head segments, Spector tracks, and trial footage in ways that are sometimes haunting and other times downright tasteless. The very first thing on the soundtrack is the opening verse of the Crystals’ notorious 1962 single “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” which Spector probably didn’t realize he was echoing when he told an Esquire writer that a suicidal Clarkson had “kissed the gun.” (Spector had no hand in writing the song—that honor is still being lived down by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.) You might think this would be one of the tasteless moments, but it gives a pretty good sense of the personal darkness lurking beneath many of Spector’s “little symphonies for the kids.”
