Rudi Dolezal Searches for the Real Whitney Houston in New Doc

By the time "Whitney. Can I Be Me" played to a packed Castro Theatre in San Francisco as part of the city's LGBTQ film Fest Frameline this past June, the highly anticipated documentary had already sparked controversy at New York's Tribeca Film Festival and at some overseas markets and film festivals.

The two filmmakers behind the doc, which airs on Showtime starting tonight, have extensive resumes in which they worked with popular artists. Nick Broomfield had made documentaries on Lily Tomlin, Curt Cobain and Courtney Love, while collaborator Rudi Dolezal directed music videos by such varied talents as the Rolling Stones, Queen and Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Jose Carreras and Sarah Brightman.

What they invariably faced at post-screening Q&As were the questions from over-protective fans. Some questioned the exclusion of certain aspects and characters of Whitney Houston's career. Other questioned the amount of new revelations revealed in the documentary. Nonetheless, one thing remains clear, there has yet to be a more intimate look into the off stage life of the Pop/R&B icon and one that lays out the facts that may point to her bisexuality.

Meeting Whitney

Much of the documentary is taken from never-before-seen footage that Dolezal filmed of Houston's 1999 world tour. Meeting Dolezal recently for an interview about the project, it is apparent that he is a colorful character: he wore a classy casual navy blue shirt and vest, accentuated by a bright orange scarf and matching shoes. He sported a confidently trimmed goatee with his hair tied into a rock-friendly ponytail and a pair of straight-framed spectacles.

He recalls how when Houston died in 2012 at the age of 48, his phone never stopped ringing with offers for his footage. Houston's mentor Clive Davis, Oprah Winfrey's production company Harpo, and the networks all clamored for Dolezal's footage, but he refuses to sell. "I said, I'm not an agency. I'm not selling the footage. I'm a filmmaker. If I wanted to sell the footage, I'd have done it a long time ago. I wanted to do the film that Whitney and I had in mind. I said no. I don't know how many people there are in the music business who would say no to Clive Davis and still survive."

What makes Dolezal's footage unique is that it had come from his complete access to Houston behind the scenes, personally sanctioned by the superstar herself. Before that time, Dolezal was already hired to conduct interviews with Houston for television use. He remembers one rainy Sunday afternoon like it was yesterday: Houston came to his studio in Vienna, Austria to approve a video that was to be played in an awards show that she could not attend. Upon finishing the filming, she asked to see Dolezal's other work. He showed her recently finished doc "Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story" (which went onto a Grammy nomination). She was hooked; then Dolezal showed her the Rolling Stones documentary that he did in Argentina. Halfway through, she stopped and told him that she wants a film like that about her.

The next day Dolezal stated his terms without oversight from Houston's record company or management. "'Nippy (as Whitney was affectionately called by those in her inner circle), I always film things when they happen. I don't want to stage you walking from left to right. I'm a documentary maker. I want to see your nervousness in your eyes before you go on stage. The reason why the Freddie (Mercury) and the Stones documentary are okay because they gave me all access." Right there and then, Houston drew a backstage pass that read: 'To Rudi, Anywhere he wants to go.'

In the vault

Dolezal's approach was to focus on Houston's raw energy and vulnerability. "I wanted certain things," he remembers, "like this interview right after the show when she's talking about her daughter. I said I wanted one thing: when the camera follows you from the stage into the dressing room, right away we do an interview, exhausted as you are." Why he took this approach was to capture her with her guard down, capturing all aspects of her personality. "She would talk differently three hours after a concert than before, or on her day off, or at home, or at a party. That's all different sides of one person like a mosaic that I want to put together."

But upon filming the four-month tour, Dolezal's documentary went into the vault. The reason came at the 2000 Academy Awards at which Houston was sent home because she was high. She was using drugs. He had never asked about drugs in all of his interviews because it was never obvious up to then. "I called her up and told her, 'Nippy, this is not possible. You have a name. I have a name. If we now release a tour documentary that doesn't even touch the topic, it's ridiculous. Everybody knows. It's all in the press. Whitney Houston with a big drug problem. Here's a clean concert documentary.' So I said no."

Dolezal proposed to her that they did one more interview in her house in New Jersey where she would admit that she has a problem she's working on it and the fans would love it. "But she was in complete denial, 'No, no, no! I don't have a problem. It's not possible.' So I said, the footage is not going to be released. That's why this 1999 footage stayed in the vault."

Her drug use

That is until Nick Broomfield (the British filmmaker known for appearing in his own documentaries) approached him to work on a Houston documentary. By then, Broomfield had conducted a series of interviews with Houston's bodyguards, backup singers, hairdressers and promoters; and those in her inner circle. Dolezal agreed to the project, noting it was a perfect conjunction of material. "It was two filmmakers getting together and I think it was the best of both worlds because he was doing some investigative research like finding this bodyguard David Roberts, who tells this phenomenal and outrageous story. He wrote everything down for years and was fired. And I had the intimacy and the different Whitney that nobody has seen before. I also did the interviews with her mother, and Mary who found her (Whitney) in the bathtub. I think it's a good film and we don't have to be ashamed of it."

Dolezal insists that when he was traveling with Houston during those four months, he was not aware that she was using drugs. "Believe me. I was on tour with the Rolling Stones. I was on tour with punk bands. I'm not a naive stranger to the topic." What his footage shows is Houston with a life-loving spirit that embraces success, and the love from her husband Bobby Brown and daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown. But Dolezal notes that after Houston's drug use was out in the open the public perception of her changed. People began to say, "Whitney looked so funny in the hotel today, she's probably high." He doesn't believe that this is something that they would say a year before.

He also believes he never captured her being high in his footage, or that she would be able to perform if she were. "I've witnessed thousands of concerts where she was singing three hours and longer, singing her heart out. I don't think you can do that when you're high.

"The great reason why I was so privileged to film is because in '99, whatever (drugs) she's has been doing to this point did not ruin her voice. It was not visible from the outside," says Dolezal. "If you see the later Oprah Winfrey interview, she couldn't even speak. She was whispering. Her voice was gone. This has two reasons. One was the cigarette smoking -- she never stopped smoking cigarettes. The other was all the other substances that she did. She was ruining her own instrument."

Pushing her boundaries

It is hard to dispute that Whitney Houston was one of the most beautiful women in the world with one of the greatest voices in pop music. She was rich and everything was within her reach. So why the drug use? Dolezal has his own personal theory. "I've met many people in my career: Keith Richards, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Whitney Houston... one of their common characteristics is that they always go for the impossible. When Freddie Mercury wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody," he was told this couldn't be a single because it's seven minutes long and he had to cut it down to three. He said, 'Fuck you.' And it was one of the biggest hits ever.

"Those people constantly go over barriers that other people are giving them. That's fine in the artistic world, but there's one area where it is very dangerous and is not okay, and that is health. When they're doing something to their health, they always think they can get away with it. They think they know and have it under control but they will not from a certain point on. That is, I think, the danger when many artists go into when it comes to drugs. I just ask anybody: try to be at this time when she was a superstar. Try to be Whitney Houston for a day. Then decide if smoking, drinking alcohol, using substances, is something that would come into your mind. There was an enormous pressure."

In the later years, news of Houston's drug use overshadows her vocal and artistic achievements, which left Dolezal heartbroken. He was approached by Houston's family to chronicle her last tour, but they ultimately decided not to film it because it was not good enough. "Her voice was gone. It would have been a document of disaster. It broke my heart. I was supposed to be in the very building the day she died because I was invited to Clive Davis' party. I would have had to come in a wheelchair. I stayed home. Then I heard what happened. It was a catastrophe. The music world not only lost one of the greatest top five female voices ever, top three maybe. In the film 'Whitney. Can I Be Me,' we're trying to give some answers to why it happened and how it could have maybe been prevented."

The Crawford connection

Dolezal couldn't tell Houston's story without including Robyn Crawford, who had been the singer's rock from their teenage years to the peak of her career. They was inseparable. She became Houston's artistic director. Along with Bobby Brown, she's one of the most important players in the documentary.

An out lesbian who is now married with children, Crawford has only given one interview to the press since Houston's death, choosing to stay silent about the past. Dolezal is grateful that Crawford made Houston aware of his work, so without her, this '99 footage wouldn't have existed. "You just have to accept the fact that Robyn left the Whitney Houston history at a certain stage... It's her way of dealing with everything. You have to respect that. She has a new life. She has two children with her partner, one-and-a-half hours outside of New York City.

"Robyn and Whitney's was the closest friendship that I've ever seen. It started when they were very young. It transferred to after Whitney became a superstar," says Dolezal. "Everybody always thought Robyn was the manager. She was the one in charge, but she's also a creative person. She was also the backbone of Whitney during difficult times. She was the only person I know who is still in the camp who constantly told her that the drugs had to stop. She was not supporting the substance abuse."

The documentary quotes from Bobby Brown, who suggests that if Crawford had been accepted into the family and allowed into Houston's life, things might have gone differently and Houston would still be alive. Brown and Crawford had very intense arguments as they rivaled for Houston's attention. One was the husband, one was an important friend, and they saw things differently.

Cold mom

Crawford's role in Houston's inner circle was complicated by Houston's mother, Cissy Houston, who had a pop career in the late 1970s before being eclipsed by her famous daughter. In the documentary there's a clip of an interview that Oprah Winfrey did with Cissy Houston in which she outright rejected the notion of having Crawford as part of the family. Cissy was the music director of the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, where Houston began singing. Similarly, Dolezal's interview with Cissy Houston left him in chills.

"I've never seen a mother so cold while talking about her daughter," he shares. "I was shivering not because it was cold in the church but from the coldness in her words. If you read her book which came out a few years ago, this was the mother writing about the daughter but half of the book is about her."

Rumors flew of an intimate relationship between Houston and Crawford, something that Dolezal feels her mother would never allow go public. "Cissy Houston wouldn't have allowed Whitney coming out in any way. Whitney was never ready for that and it was never discussed. In one way, she (Cissy) was happy when Whitney married Bobby Brown. On the other hand, nobody in the family liked Bobby Brown because he was the bad boy." However, Dolezal has no doubt that the two were in love. "Whitney and Bobby Brown, and they love each other. Bobby Brown up to this day loves her and he was not the one who introduced drugs to her."

Dolezal also suggests that fame might have caused a rift between the couple. "Bobby Brown was a big shot when they first got together, and seeing that your woman becomes more successful, for an African American man, it's not easy for his ego. He managed that for a very long time." The result of the combination of the two of them together, however, is a very different story. "He was an expert in alcohol I would say, and Whitney had other experiences."

Beyond controversies

The mission for the film is to go beyond the controversial media reports. "You see how great she's singing," Dolezal says. "It's not a crime story. It's not about that she's bisexual. It's not about that she took drugs. So what? There are so many media reports or films or articles that are unjust because they're only focused on that. What 'Can I Be Me' wants, and what my work in general wants, and co-Director Nick Broomfield agrees, is that, yes, the truth, but we're not destroying the artist, we're not pissing on her legs. We're just telling what has to be told and then still showing how great she was too."

It is unlikely that mega fans of Whitney Houston will have their devotion diminished from this documentary. From the Q and A sessions that had followed screenings, there is no lack of fans who seem to hold on to their pristine image of the diva. It's not that they do not accept their idol's substance abuse problems, but they would nitpick on what is in and what is not in the documentary.

"I'm used to that," says Dolezal, citing from previous experience in making documentaries about megastars. "Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal are not fans of Whitney Houston. We respect her and we thought there is a story to be told. As I did "Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story" in 2001 that was nominated for a Grammy, it was absolutely clear that I've to tell the truth. Freddie, in every party, was bringing a girl so that the tabloid photographs (could see he) was not with his boyfriend, whom he had lived together for seven years like a marriage at that time when it was not possible for two men to get married in the United Kingdom...

"I'm used to sometimes saying things that maybe at the first moment, hurt some fans but after some time, and watching it again, if you watch the careful way in which we transport that message. It was very decent, sensitive but truthful. I don't think we have to be ashamed of that. Nick Broomfield and myself."

A giver

If it was any consolation, Dolezal confirms that there were interventions and Houston herself wanted to get away from the drugs. In fact, Dolezal did a six-hour interview with her drug counselor. This is the guy Houston actually called on the day she died. "He could hear in her voice that something was wrong," Dolezal reveals, "that she was using and she was clean for months before that. So she always tried, but with everything, it's an addiction. We're talking about cocaine, maybe even smoking cocaine sometimes, so we're not talking about something for the kindergarten. The substance itself has power over you unfortunately."

One thought that Dolezal shares is that he feels Houston's drug use may also be a result from the combined pressure in her personal and professional life. "Whitney was very religious. Her marriage failed," Whitney and Bobby Brown divorced in 2007 after 15 years. "For her, she's a loser in that respect because marriage is forever and she wanted it to be forever but it didn't work out."

Ultimately, Dolezal remembers Houston's generosity to the people around her and this is a quality that he shall miss most from her. "Whitney was a giver. Whitney was helping so many people, financing so many people around her, her entourage, her family," he concludes with an infectious emotional sentiment. "Nobody gave anything to her, or not enough. She was giving, giving, giving, but she didn't receive enough back. So her self-esteem was astonishingly not where it should be. When she was the diva, she played the diva but as a person, she's one of the sweetest persons in the world. I will not say anything bad about her and I love her dearly until this day. The day that she left us, we lost one of the greatest people, persons, singers, artists in the world forever."

"Whitney. Can I Be Me" plays on Showtime August 25 and will be available on demand from August 26.