WATCH - 'Sid and Judy'.

I love this documentary. Quite well done and so interestingly put together.

Yeah, watched it this afternoon. Really great archive. Jon Hamm does a great job with the Sid Luft narration. I liked that the focus was on her 1950s career - the post-MGM period is always told in brief.

[quote] What emerges is a complex portrait of a woman whose vulnerabilities were exploited by an industry she helped to build but whose resilience and extraordinary talent made her the quintessential icon.

Mary!

Darn.....it's blocked.

It was blocked for me too :(

It's good. It's really good and chilling. Glad I saw it after I saw the Judy movie.

One of the best insights into Judy I’ve ever seen. He was such a mensch. She was lucky to have him.

Is it on Netflix or another provider? Would love to see this. I've heard of it.

Does it talk about Lorna Luft being molested?

Lorna was molested by Topo Gigio backstage on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964.

You can watch it at Amazon with the 7-day free Showtime trial.

It is on Showtime

Has anyone watched?

Thish ish shtraight garbagesh!

It's a bore

I will watch it tonight.

I'm prepared for it to be "good and chilling" or a "bore."

Will report back.

It’s good. Chilling is a bit dramatic

OP, quit looking back at the outdated and outmoded, look forward --->

^ No.

I thought it was very good as well

I watched it. Meh.

Sid Luft downplaying his role in screwing up her finances.

And who was narrating Judy's voice? It reminded me of Jennifer Jason Leigh when she played Dorothy Parker in The Viscious Circle.

R21 Indeed it was JJL

OP here, watched it, after watching Judy I was glad to see a positive story told, but it did seem very sunny shit only. I like pill popping vomity Judy

I think it might have been her.

It was, and Jon Hamm was Sid

I find it hard to believe that he was ever in the Sex Pistols.

Absolutely nothing new, except maybe for those born yesterday.

R26 Still does not diminish it is a nice documentary

Sid Lyft also took advantage of her and stole her money.

[quote] Sid Lyft also took advantage of her and stole her money.

But he got her to her destination on time and safely.

Who exactly did molest Lorna?

I don't think Luft technically STOLE money from Judy, but he did like to spend it. He always bought them the best of everything and he also liked to gamble on race horses. All told, they lived a comparatively stable life while he was managing her in the 50's and she was performing regularly.

R30 Everyone

Judy's death untimely?

Sid was Judy's ONLY straight husband. He deserves credit for that. And don't lecture me about "straight" David Rose.

Merry Christmas, Judy.

Actually death was a great career move for her.

Sid's big problem is that he never could get their taxes right. In the 50s, taxes on high-earners like Judy were close to 90%, if you can believe it. Lots of other wealthy people made use of clever tax shelters to keep more of their income, but Sid was apparently more interested in gambling on the ponies than working out how to keep more of the piles of money Judy earned giving concerts in the 50s. Of course, the fact that Judy needed a huge staff of servants and handlers to keep her going didn't help. Neither did her habit of canceling concerts on a whim, which often left her tours in the red.

Judy lived very well for someone who was broke much of her life. She was in financial trouble in her twenties; she liked to say that her mother Ethel had squandered her money but Ethel Gumm managed her money conservatively and responsibly. It wasn't until Judy was in control of her money that things started to go wrong. She knew nothing about handling money; she'd let other people do it for her, and the people she chose were usually incompetent or unscrupulous men. Towards the end of her life she lost her house and was homeless, staying in hotels and skipping out on paying the bill buy by piling on layers of clothes (she would instruct poor Lorna and Joey to do the same) and sneaking out of the place. Eventually Lorna and Joey escaped this insane life by going to live with their father, leaving Judy on her own. She'd go from here to there, at one point sleeping on the floor in an apartment belonging to friends of LIza. Here was this huge Hollywood stars, reduced to that. And it was all due to her own bad decisions.

Judy was typical of female stars of her era in that she was never hands-on with her finances and let it be taken care of by others. Usually the current man in her life. This was a common story of female stars back then, they let their husband of the moment (who had absolutely no background in finance) take care of the money and then got royally screwed because the husband pissed everything away. Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and a host of others fell victim to this. The only ones who didn't fall into this trap were the frugal lesbians - Garbo, Hepburn and Stanwyck.

Later generations of female celebrities learned a valuable lesson from the mistakes of their elders and left their finances in the care of reputable professionals.

"And it was all due to her own bad decisions"

Mental illness played a part too.

I wonder if Judy was born bipolar as fuck, or if her unstable family life and early exposure to uppers and downers unbalanced her brain chemistry to the point she went nuts.

I think a lot of things contributed to Judy Garland's destruction; being an overworked child star, having an unusually consuming appetite for drugs, bad relationships with men. But she was never the pitiful victim she liked to pass herself off as. She was quite a formidable individual; willful, self-absorbed, determined to have her way. She was TOUGH. She wouldn't have lasted as long as she did if she wasn't. When she died people were amazed that she'd lived as long as she did, considering her health problems and drinking and drugging.

THINK, R41

"I think a lot of things contributed to Judy Garland's destruction; being an overworked child star, having an unusually consuming appetite for drugs"

Then what was her sister Suzy's excuse? There was no MGM, there was no overwork, there was no Louis B Mayer. Yes she was alcoholic suicide.

Then what was her sister Suzy's excuse? There was no MGM, there was no overwork, there was no Louis B Mayer. Yes she was alcoholic suicide.

Maybe because Judy got all the attention?

Yeah, people commit SUICIDE because they didn't get attention.

Suzy had a drinking problem and had recently been left by her husband of 25 years for a younger woman who could give him children. Unlike her sisters, Suzy couldn't have kids, and that apparently wounded her deeply. Her childhood was as unstable as Judy's, with no stardom to counterbalance the years of dreary performances in third-rate theaters.

What's amazing is that the other sister, Jimmy, married a nice man, moved to Dallas, and stayed away from showbiz. Sometime late in her life, her niece Lorna met her and was amazed at how much Jimmy reminded her of Judy (they did look rather alike as you can see below), but without Judy's demons. It occurred to her that if her mother had never been a star, this is the woman she might have been. It's a very poignant moment in Lorna's memoir. Sadly, Jimmy also died rather young, at age 59, of heart disease.

Suzy may have had personal problems galore, but she also carried the same genes as Judy - even Lorna speculated that she was mentally ill.

The Gumm genes were not good ones. That's probably one reason why Judy Garland became such a hard core drug addict. She had a system that couldn't get enough of drugs; I think she was born that way.

Liza must've inherited the Minnelli genes. She's still chain-smoking in her 70s.

If she hadn't died when she did she would have ended up like Betty Hutton: forgotten and alone.

Even if Judy had somehow gotten clean in the 60s, most of the physical damage was already done. She still would never have seen 50, probably, but her final years would have been less chaotic.

Isn't much of the info in this from an unfinished, or at least unpublished, book Sid wrote about his years with Judy?

Judy had some medical emergency where she could have died. Her body was swelled up with fluid; her liver was shot. I think it was said four quarts of fluid were removed from her body. In the hospital recovering, she was told by doctors that to avoid another such incident she would have to stop drinking and stop working. She did neither.

Sid Luft's book was published after his death. I have it. And yes this doc is based on it.