Dueling Spears docs examine conservatorship
For the past 13 years, Britney Spears has been under a conservatorship that limits any kind of meaningful agency over her life or her finances. A pair of new documentaries investigate how that has played out — and why — as court hearings determine the future of the conservatorship itself.
At a recent hearing, the judge granted a petition suspending her father, Jamie Spears, from his position as overseer of her $60 million estate.
Both films paint a deeply unsettling portrait of a person whose intimate relations and day-to-day experiences are micromanaged. It’s hard to wrap your head around the extent of it, and what it’s been like for her to exist in that kind of environment. Even so, there have been prominent voices publicly denouncing any concerns that Britney’s attempts to advocate for herself have been thwarted time and again.
In the Netflix documentary “Britney vs. Spears,” Mark Vincent Kaplan, who is the attorney for Britney’s ex-husband Kevin Federline, has this to say to filmmaker Erin Lee Carr:
“I’ve heard from many different quarters that Britney is being held as a prisoner. In effect, against her will. And when I’ve been asked, do I think that’s accurate, I think you have to say to yourself: It’s not as if Los Angeles is some type of fascist gulag where, in order to get a message to the outside world, you have to write it down on a piece of birchbark, in code, and then throw it over an electrified fence to an unsuspecting gardener.”
“Controlling Britney Spears” (available on FX and Hulu and produced by the New York Times), offers a blunt rebuttal. Director Samantha Stark and New York Times reporter Liz Day uncover allegations that Spears’ phone was secretly monitored — including her text messages, notes and browser history — and that a recording device was hidden in her bedroom without her knowledge, capturing 180 hours of what she presumably believed were private moments with her boyfriend and her children.
Of the two projects, “Controlling Britney Spears” (a follow-up to “Framing Brit
ney Spears” from earlier in the year) is considerably stronger. The surveillance allegations are substantial, and the film itself is simply more cohesive and better organized.
Conservatorships are not meant for “just anyone with a mental health issue or substance abuse issue,” Day says in the film. And in California, she explains, the standard “is that you are unable to feed, clothe or shelter yourself.” But Spears started working almost immediately after the conservatorship began. That includes a guest appearance on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” just weeks later.
If she’s able to show up and memorize her lines and perform as needed — like any other person on set — why did she need to be in a conservatorship? For the last decade, even as she worked a grueling schedule, including tours and a Vegas residency, she remained under rigid control of the conservatorship, and therefore her father, Jamie Spears. Why didn’t the court see this contradiction as worthy of scrutiny? That’s one of the main questions driving each film.
“Controlling Britney Spears” began shooting after the singer gave testimony at a hearing this past June, and audio excerpts from that transcript are included. A lawyer for a member of the conservatorship team asks that “we please seal the transcript and clear the courtroom so we can preserve those medical rights. I think it’s really important.”
Spears cuts her off. “You’ve done a good job exploiting my life,” she says.
“So I feel like it should be an open court hearing, and they should listen and hear what I have to say.”
Then she elaborates: “It is embarrassing and demoralizing what I’ve been through, and that’s the main reason I’ve never said it openly. I honestly didn’t think anyone would believe me. I thought people would make fun of me or laugh at me and say, ‘She’s lying, she’s got everything, she’s Britney Spears.’ I’m not lying. I also would like to be able to share my story with the world and what they did to me, instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them.”
Those mocking words of Federline’s attorney sound especially curdled in light of her June testimony.
But there’s more. “Controlling Britney Spears’’ obtained a transcript from a 2014 hearing when her then-attorney (who was court appointed and not of her choosing) tells the court of her desire to marry, have more children and retire — and she is worried the conservatorship precludes her from doing that. The judge replies: “I don’t recall that we made any orders about the right to marry, but you may not want to tell her that.”
In the same hearing, it is communicated that Spears believes her father has a drinking problem and wants him to undergo random testing. The judge: “Who is she to be demanding that of anybody?” (That judge has since retired and another judge is hearing Britney’s case.)
“Controlling Britney Spears” also features interviews with Alex Vlasov, who worked for the company hired to provide security for Spears.
He left his job recently, after nine years, and he comes across mostly as stunned: “When I took a step back and I looked at everything, it really reminded me of somebody that was in prison, and security was put in a position to be the prison guards, essentially.” But he’s not introspective — not yet, not on camera anyway — about why he was able to work there for nearly a decade without fully absorbing what he just described.
The filmmakers also talk to Tish
Yates, Spears’ former head of wardrobe. She is nervous and visibly saddened.
“I’ve never spoken about what we witnessed,” she says. “We signed those NDAs, and it has been hard to come forward knowing there are people in her management that could stop me from making a living. But this is important. This is a human life that’s been tortured.”
You sense from both Yates and Vlasov despair at the powerlessness of their situations.
But both films also underscore
Spears’ own fear — especially of running afoul of her father and losing visitation with her two children — as well as the financial implications and motivations for the conservatorship. Or, as Carr puts it in “Britney vs. Spears”: “The one thing we know for sure is that Britney worked nonstop and made other people a lot of money.”
Carr made her long-gestating Netflix documentary with journalist Jenny Eliscu, and the pair never comes across as anything less than serious-minded. But their efforts feel limp and plodding by comparison, and sometimes confusing. Information and interviews are often presented without context.
Carr was working on her film for over two years when she was more or less scooped by “Framing Britney Spears,” which came out in February and does examine the horrors of the celebrity industrial complex and the ways in which Spears was treated like a piñata to be whacked.
Carr has acknowledged that film prompted her to rework her own project. But once again she was scooped, because “Controlling Britney Spears” simply has more specifics. If you’re only going to watch one, head on over to Hulu.
But Eliscu drives home an important point about the ways in which a conservatorship is fundamentally a trap: “They could go into court a million times,” she says, “and keep doing hearing after hearing and filing after filing and analysis after analysis, and never change anything, and she’s still in this situation.
“How do you get out?”
Where to watch: