‘Her demons were probably worse’: does Back to Black reveal the real Amy Winehouse?
From the moment it was announced, in July 2022, the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black has been plagued by controversy, with fans criticising everything from the casting choices (Industry star Marisa Abela plays the singer) to the timing, with some people claiming not enough years have passed since Winehouse’s death from alcohol poisoning in 2011.
Biopics of famous musicians can be hugely lucrative but they’re also a minefield. Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic, was widely criticised for downplaying the singer’s gay partners in favour of his relationship with Mary Austin, but ended up grossing $910m (£718m). Like Bohemian Rhapsody, Back to Black is authorised by and made with the involvement of the lead character’s estate.
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, who made the 2009 John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy as well as the 2015 Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation, Back to Black is the second film about Winehouse’s life and legacy, after the Asif Kapadia documentary Amy. Although that film won an Oscar, it was publicly condemned by Winehouse’s family. “They are trying to portray me in the worst possible light,” Amy’s father Mitch told the Guardian shortly before it debuted in Cannes. The film-makers responded that they had embarked on the project with the backing of the Winehouse family, and that their film was a reflection of their findings in the course of over 100 interviews with people who knew Amy.
Clearly, Winehouse’s story is highly contentious: the different players have their own – sometimes contradictory – opinions about what really happened. Then there’s the fact that so much of it took place behind closed doors, for instance the nine interventions Amy was recently reported to have had to try to get her off drugs and alcohol. So how does the new film’s treatment of her story compare with previous accounts?
Drugs v adultery: the reason for the divorce
Winehouse had a few romantic relationships but Back to Black focuses on the most consequential one: her short marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, in the course of which he introduced her to heroin. The film depicts the pair meeting at the Good Mixer pub in
Camden – noting the fact that FielderCivil (played by Jack O’Connell) had a girlfriend at the time – and their subsequent turbulent relationship, including their hasty wedding in Miami. In one scene, in which Fielder-Civil does cocaine the morning after their first night together, Winehouse tells him: “Class-A drugs are for mugs.” Mitch has said this was something Winehouse was fond of chanting at shows in the years before she started doing hard drugs herself.
In the film, Fielder-Civil continually worries that Winehouse will leave him for someone more famous, a narrative that seems to have been drawn from his 2009 divorce filing, which cited her adultery as his reason for leaving her. However, we see Fielder-Civil telling Winehouse he is divorcing her due to the self-destructive nature of their relationship, and the fact that he has detoxed in prison. Fielder-Civil struggled to stay drug-free; he returned to prison in 2011 after burgling a house to fund his habit.
Little songwriting, no audience booing
Despite production company StudioCanal initially saying Back to Black would “focus on Amy’s extraordinary genius, creativity and honesty that infused everything she did”, the film only rarely depicts her writing or recording. In fact, until fame overwhelmed her, Winehouse was known as a talented songwriter and a hard worker. In It Ain’t Retro, Jessica Lipsky’s 2021 book about Daptone Records, Binky Griptite, who played guitar on Back to Black, recalled Winehouse being “a real, 100% bonafide musician. There were hints of her issues, but there was also a lot of getting down to business.”
In a 2019 interview with Howard Stern, Back to Black producer Mark
Ronson, who is not depicted in the film, recalled the speed with which she wrote Rehab: “She was always so fast. She had the whole song on guitar. All I had to do was come up with a nice beat.”
Equally, the film doesn’t go into Winehouse’s tendency to appear drunk and disoriented on stage. Her 2007 tour is shown to be a success; it was however often an erratic affair, with Winehouse sometimes walking off stage and swearing at the audience. The film also doesn’t depict Winehouse’s catastrophic final performance in Belgrade when she took to the stage almost catatonically drunk, forgot her lyrics and the names of her bandmates, and got booed by the audience.
‘If my daddy thinks I’m fine…’: what Mitch said about rehab
Back to Black depicts a pivotal moment: the 2005 attempt by her then manager Nick Shymansky to get Amy to go to rehab. Kapadia’s film has Mitch Winehouse saying “She doesn’t need to go to rehab”. That’s basically how it goes down in Back to Black too – yet this is a version of events Mitch himself has contested many times. “What I said was, ‘She didn’t need to go to rehab at that time,’” Mitch claimed in 2015. “[Kapadia] edited me out saying ‘at that time’.”
For the most part, Mitch (played by Eddie Marsan) is depicted as a doting father in Back to Black. The film leaves out an incident from 2010, detailed in Kapadia’s documentary, in which he trailed Amy to St Lucia in the Caribbean with a camera crew in order to make a programme called My Daughter Amy, in which she appeared uneasy about being filmed.
Heavy on the alcohol, hazy on the bulimia
Back to Black doesn’t shy away from
Winehouse’s addiction to alcohol. It features several scenes of the singer stumbling through London swigging spirits – but her demons were probably worse than the film depicts. Winehouse used many drugs besides alcohol and crack cocaine. In 2007, she overdosed on a combination of heroin, ecstasy, ketamine, cocaine and alcohol. And the singer’s bulimia, which she had from her teenage years, is only lightly touched on.
In Kapadia’s documentary, Winehouse’s A&R man Darcus Beese notes that her team became aware of the extent of her eating disorder during the recording of Back to Black. Alex Winehouse, Amy’s brother, told the Observer in 2013 that “what really killed her was the bulimia”. He said her body might have been “physically stronger” and more able to handle her eventual relapse, had she not been severely underweight.
Winehouse was also known to selfharm, telling Q Magazine in 2007 that she first cut herself when she was nine out of “morbid curiosity”. In Rolling Stone, writer Jenny Eliscu noted that “the scars that cover her left forearm … look considerably fresher” than she claimed.
Quitting music to embrace motherhood
Back to Black keeps returning to Winehouse’s desire to be a mother. At the height of her fame, she tells Fielder-Civil: “I don’t think I was put on this earth just to sing … I want to be a wife. I want to be a mum.” We see the chaotic couple disappointed when a pregnancy test is negative.
The record does seem to back this up. Shortly after her marriage, Winehouse told Rolling Stone she would be content to stop making music after Back to Black, to focus on homemaking: “I’m a caretaker and I want to enjoy myself and spend time with my husband,” she said. “I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mum and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.”
A sterile home and a tragic ending
Back to Black concludes with Winehouse moving to a new home in Camden, hoping to make a fresh start. But in the final scene, a sober Winehouse is distraught when a spiteful paparazzo tells her Fielder-Civil has had a baby with his new girlfriend. After Winehouse ascends the stairs and contemplates a sterile room of furniture with its wrapping still intact, the screen turns black as some text says Winehouse died in her home after a long period of sobriety – implying a link between her death and her disappointment at not having a child with Fielder-Civil. There was actually more of a gap between Amy finding out about his baby, who was born in May 2011, and the singer’s death two months later.
Ultimately, Back to Black is not the damning indictment of the music industry (and Mitch Winehouse) that Kapadia’s Amy was. Given that Winehouse was one of the first stars whose downfall was chronicled on social media as well as in the tabloids, everyone has their own version of events. It doesn’t make her fate seem any less grim.
• Back to Black is in UK cinemas on 12 April
• In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186
• In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope
suddenly can run five miles, that’s a huge confidence builder.
“Keep in mind, these are people who are deemed as society’s failures, who have not accomplished much in life. Less than 1% of the population ever completes a marathon, so completing it means that they not only gain entrée into an elite group of athletes that are on the outside as well but, for that day they are runners, they are not criminals.”
Six years in the making, Yoo’s film combines the photogenic glory of athletics with the quotidian details – inmates working odd jobs, writing letters – of the daily life at San Quentin, a maximum security facility whose past brushes with fame include country singer Johnny Cash performing live. 26.2 to Life also paints portraits of the inmates, many of whom are serving life sentences with little prospect of parole.
They speak about their motives for putting themselves through the punishing 26.2-mile race with all its mental and physical demands. One explains: “It allows you to feel like you’re doing something normal. Like you’re doing something that’s not prison.”
Fighting back tears on camera, John Levin says: “I do think about my crime so in a sense it’s like kind of penance for my crime. I kind of feel like, OK, I caused so much suffering and pain in my victim and my victim’s family that some of that pain is – that I deserve some suffering as well, so that’s part of it.”
Yoo, 55, felt a personal connection with the subject. More than 20 years ago she befriended Hyun Kang, a Korean-American man from a similar background who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to 271 years in California state prison. After 26 years behind bars, he was finally released last year.
Hyun Kang’s experience made Yoo think about the impact of incarceration on the individual, family and community. “Back when he was sentenced, that was the ‘tough on crime’ era when there was no hope of getting out,” she says via video chat from Los Angeles.
“The idea of the fact that he may be spending the rest of his living days inside a prison got me thinking, how does one actually do that? If you have to carry out the rest of your living days in prison, what does that look like and how would I go about doing that?”
Then, in 2016, Yoo read an article in GQ magazine about the San Quentin prison marathon, which has been taking place annually since 2008, and realised that she had the perfect narrative device to explore such questions.“It immediately captured my attention,” she recalls. “I’ve done running – I’m not a marathoner; the longest distance I’ve run is 15 miles – but I certainly have experienced a sense of freedom that comes from running and of course running is one of the most cinematic things to capture.”
Yoo kept thinking about Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Prisoners Exercising. It took her about nine months for her to gain multiple-entry access to San Quentin. She met Frank Ruona, coach of the 1000 Mile Club, founded in 2005 as a long-distance running club for incarcerated men. She watched a halfmarathon and was taken by surprise.
“It was festive. You don’t expect festivities inside of prison. I thought it was very strange. I was trying to reconcile this joyous, buoyant atmosphere with being inside San Quentin prison. After talking with the guys and everything, I just felt like I need to get out of the way and let these guys tell their story. I felt that the story would be better told as a non-fiction piece.”
Yoo was moved by the way in which Ruona took a personal passion and created a community that changed lives, not just incarcerated people but also volunteers who used to support the death penalty.“We all can do something to help change the system that we’re in,” she says.
She visited the prison often when the cameras were not rolling, getting to know the staff, becoming part of the community and even running on the track herself. She volunteered at the prison’s media centre and, by the end of the process, was working with a totally incarcerated crew for pick-up shots and the film’s music soundtrack.
San Quentin’s prison cells, shared between two people, are tiny. “It’s basically like two people living in your bathroom.” What else did she observe about day-to-day existence there? “Life goes on and people have choices, just like they do out here.
“It’s a hidden world but at the same time you have choices to make inside. You can either do bad or do good. You can do drugs and all of that stuff is available to you or the guys who are concerned about getting out take it upon themselves to undertake the difficult internal work.
“Many of them have a very high emotional intelligence that I also felt that could serve the public. They have the answers to all ills that we have out here and could provide a lot of assistance. Many of these guys, with the punitive sentencing laws that came out of the super predator era, are looking at decades long sentences.
“Data shows that people age out of crime. People commit crimes when they’re young; I did a bunch of stupid stuff when I was young too; we all did. Obviously there are there are degrees of that but the punitive sentencing laws are just not helping our situation here.”
Last year Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, announced that San Quentin State Prison would be renamed San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, focused on improving public safety through rehabilitation and education. Based on what she witnessed, Yoo is convinced that rehabilitation works.
“I had no idea what rehabiliation was before I started this whole process, In fact, I all have always felt it’s an empty word and I do still kind of feel it’s an empty word. I feel like transformation is a much better word.
“People in prison generally don’t have access to family. A lot of them come from broken families. A lot of them didn’t have access to education and they’re generally poor and disproportionately Black and brown and many of them were addicted to drugs. There is a phrase that you hear inside the walls of a lot: hurt people hurt people.”
There is no better example of transformation than Tommy Wickerd, incarcerated for several violent crimes, who works with deaf people inside the prison and ran its inaugural American sign language class. He has 30 years left on his sentence; the film’s official website invites people to petition Newsom to commute it so Wickerd can reunite with his wife and family.
Yoo says: “Here was a guy who basically didn’t get past the fourth grade, was a case of failing up. The classic case of getting arrested over something stupid and getting into the prison system. His early adulthood was then shaped by the prison system. He was already on his path of transformation but it blossomed with the 1000 Mile Club and what he is doing now inside San Quentin is absolutely amazing in terms of the deaf community there. It’s a real damn shame that this guy cannot get out.”
San Quentin’s location in the Bay Area, a progressive stronghold, means that its inmates benefit from more local volunteers and community engagement than a typical prison in a remote rural area. But Yoo is working with the coaches on developing a handbook advising incarcerated people on how to self-start a prison running club that will be distributed free around the country.
“Since the movie has been out, we have received a ton of inbound emails from different prisons that want more information about how to start a prison running club.Apparently there have been a few clubs that have started after people saw the film. There’s a very small barrier for entry for a running programme. You basically need a space. These guys don’t even necessarily need running shoes; when the club first started, some of these guys were running in boots.”
For Ruona, it is not about the worst thing a person did in their past. At the end of the film, he says simply: “I just feel like I am my brother’s keeper. If he needs help, I’m gonna try and help him and I feel like these guys over there, they need help and they appreciate whatever help they get.”
26.2 to Life is now available on ESPN + in the US with a UK date to be announced
almost no internet presence and precisely two Google image results. “How do you run this business that’s all around the world – there are over a hundred stores – that is all over the internet, all over social media, and this guy has never done an interview? He doesn’t exist. And that’s very purposeful and crafted,” said Orner. Marsan, unsurprisingly, declined to participate in the film.
According to former store managers and several employees, almost all of whom were recruited in-store for their outfits and almost all of whom struggled with an eating disorder while representing the brand, Marsan was a suspicious, vindictive presence. Shop employees, usually girls around the age of 16, had to pose for their “daily photograph” every morning – photos of their outfits, for “brand research”, texted to and kept by Marsan. (Brand research, as several note, usually constituted blatantly ripping off their clothing, as cheaply and as quickly as possible, resulting in several lawsuits.) Marsan reportedly preferred skinny redheads, liked Asian girls and “didn’t want a lot of Black people”, said an anonymous former assistant.
A former employee, who has sued the company for wrongful termination, says he was instructed to fire girls if they were too heavy or Black. “If you’re white, you had to be in sight,” recalls one Black employee relegated, as most people of color were, to the stock room. Another former employee in the New York flagship store recalls how Marsan installed a button at the register, which he would flash if he spotted a “Brandy girl” checking out whom he wanted hired and photographed.
It gets worse – as in, Hitler jokes and anti-Black racist memes worse, sent by Marsan in a text thread with other managers. An alleged sexual assault of a young girl living in the Brandy Melvillerented Manhattan apartment. Marsan, a Trump supporter and self-described libertarian, using his personal copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as store props. The brand’s doubling down on its not-so-subtle eating disorder messaging (“one size fits most”, it rebranded when customers complained about the lack of sizing options), especially in its very profitable expansion into China.
Worse, too, in the company’s dogged pursuit of a business model that, like other fast fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M, prioritizes churn and zeitgeist over quality, clogging landfills and exploiting cheap human labor. Orner and her team visit Prato, Italy, where Brandy Melville is one of several companies to produce quick garments in sweatshops using immigrant labor under the “made in Italy” label, and to Accra, Ghana, a country whose trade deals with western countries strong-arm it into accepting loads of western clothing waste. To drive the point home: a Brandy-typical “made in Italy” tag buried in the sand of a Ghanaian beach, literally kneedeep in tangles of discarded clothes. “Not a lot shocks me,” said Orner, but the sheer amount of western clothing waste dumped in Accra – one worker there suspects the sea floor around the city is now completely covered in clothes – was among the “worst” things she’s ever seen. “We are sending them our trash and destroying their country,” she said. “It’s things they do not want or need.”
Though nominally about a certain buzzy brand, Orner hopes the film offers a larger call to rethink one’s relationship to fashion. The film offers the standard small prescriptions to sustainable fashion: buy natural fibers and secondhand, avoid polyester, recycle and reuse, keep your clothes out of a landfill as long as possible. But also, that “none of that’s going to fix anything”, said Orner. “There are too many clothes on the planet. We overproduce. We make 100bn garments that are produced annually globally. And most of those are in landfill within the first year.”
Brandy Hellville is resolute on keeping the vision trained on the bigger picture, if not particularly optimistic on either the brand’s possibility for change nor turning the tide of fashion waste. Since the Business Insider article triggered social media backlash against the company three years ago, Brandy Melville has soldiered on. Management, from Marsan on down, said nothing. Unlike the case with Abercrombie, the subject of its own 2022 Netflix documentary and backlash to discriminatory practices, there was no acknowledgement, no apology, no brand shift. No admission, just more clothes. Annual sales for Brandy Melville totaled $212.5m in 2023, up from $169.6m in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a very Trumpian thing to do,” said Orner. “What we need to do is stand up and keep, keep the story going, and not let them get away with it by outsmarting us.
“The power’s in the consumers who don’t buy the product,” she added. “And if we don’t let them get away with it, we have all the power. They’re just making stupid clothing.”
Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion premieres on 9 April on HBO and will be available on Max with a UK date to be announced