Whitewashing or reclaiming? A new Whitney Houston biopic spotlights musical highs over personal lows
The new Whitney Houston biopic climaxes with a detailed reenactment of the pop superstar's show-stopping performance at the 1994 American Music Awards.
Stretched across 10 minutes, Houston's act that night combined three songs from three distinct eras — "I Loves You, Porgy," from George and Ira Gershwin's 1935 opera "Porgy and Bess"; "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," from the early-'80s Broadway musical "Dreamgirls"; and "I Have Nothing," from the singer's then-recent "The Bodyguard" — into a knockout medley that displayed not only her vocal power but also her intelligence as a storyteller.
"To me, it's the greatest television performance of all time," says Clive Davis, the 90-year-old Arista Records founder who signed Houston to his label when she was 19 and went on to shepherd her career until her shocking death at age 48 in 2012. "The emotion, the bravura singing, the ability to strike every moment for the camera — there's nobody else that could've done that."
In the narrative arc of the movie, called "Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody" after Houston's ebullient 1987 hit, the AMAs sequence — meant to leave audiences with a final reminder that despite her flaws and setbacks the singer was a transformative artist — serves almost exactly the same dramatic purpose as the detailed reenactment of Queen's
