Cooper film is ‘Super Duper’
PITTSBURGH — The producers call their work a “doc opera.”
“Super Duper Alice Cooper” is also a heady trip, and a fun and enlightening look at the original shock-rocker.
Mixing classic concert clips, fresh interviews, stock footage and black-and-white fright film sequences, “Super Duper Alice Cooper” debuts Wednesday in 250 theaters, the nearest a 7:30 p.m. one-time-only screening at South Side Works Cinema in Pittsburgh. Tickets are $10.
The definitive account of the rise, fall, temporary rebound, bigger crash and ultimate triumph of one of rock’s most influential showmen eventually will end up on TV music channels like VH1 or Palladia.
“But we hope you see it now on the big screen, because it sounds great, and this will be a good way to get people out and make them feel like they’re at a concert,” said Scot McFadyen, who along with co-producer Sam Dunn helmed previous rockumentaries “Iron Maiden: Flight 666” and “Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage”.
Aided by award-winning indie director Reginald Harkema and a deft post-production team, the filmmakers found a way to zoom in on static photographs, making those images move and leap off the screen in a trippy and immersing fashion.
“We just wanted that sense of putting people in the moment,” McFadyen said.
Stock footage of late ’50s Detroit and late ’60s Los Angeles — touchstones in Cooper’s career — help set the mood, while scenes from “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” serve as “chapter” markers for the film while offering an undercurrent to Cooper’s harrowing tale of alcoholism and cocaine addiction.
The early ’70s concert footage, news accounts and interviews remind us that Cooper’s band was like nothing anyone had ever seen.
, and parents feared the frontman’s on-stage antics with snakes, guillotines, straight-jackets and beheaded baby dolls.
“In 1970 and ’71 he was a freakish part of pop-culture,” McFadyen said. “Now those things seem to be tame, but it was pretty shocking at the time.”
There’s terrific footage from a Hollywood Bowl show, where emcee Wolfman Jack arrived on camel back, and Cooper arranged for a helicopter to drop hundreds of panties on excited concertgoers, including Elton John.
“For me, it was the perfect rock show,” John recalls.
Cooper’s stage theatrics blazed a trail for John and glam-rockers like David Bowie.
Cooper became buddies with Frank Sinatra and George Burns; and appeared in a far-ahead-of-its-time hologram created by his idol, artist Salvador Dali. Though friction arose with his bandmates, who felt overshadowed by Cooper’s growing fame.
The man born Vincent Furnier — a son and a grandson of preachers — began blurring the line between his on- and off-stage selves, ultimately leaning on the archetypical rock star crutches of booze and drugs.
“I got lost in the character,” Cooper tells the filmmakers. “Why would I want to go back to being Vince when this Alice character was so successful?”
But his hedonism got out of control.
“I was raising our daughter and watching my husband die before our eyes,” Cooper’s wife, a former dancer in his stage show, said.
Interventions, a stint in a New York sanitarium and counseling ensued. The preacher’s kid did some praying of his own, and kicked his drug and alcohol addictions.
“Super Duper Alice Cooper” shows a bit of his 1986 comeback show Halloween night in Detroit aired live on MTV. Cooper was nervous about getting back into character again.
“What if Alice never shows up? I had never played him straight,” he said.
But the MTV concert was a success, and Cooper soon realized a new wave of glam-metal bands like Twisted Sister and WASP, inspired directly by him, had made theatrical hard-rock popular again.
A new generation of fans now recognized Cooper as the icon he remains today. He’s stayed clean and sober for 30 years thanks to the realization that the Alice Cooper character on stage isn’t the same golfing-loving, family man off of it.
“I finally figured out this character didn’t live in my world, he only wanted to be on stage,” Cooper said.
It’s a happy ending to a story worthy of an opera, which is what “Super Duper Alice Cooper” producers believe they’ve captured in documentary form.
“The way he hits bottom and comes back out on top again,” McFadyen said.