Watching “Super Duper Alice Cooper” is like having a magician you’ve seen for years finally explaining his tricks to you.
The “doc opera,” which plays in more than 250 theaters nationwide starting Wednesday, follows the shock rocker from his childhood in Detroit through his rise to fame and addictions to alcohol and cocaine. It tells the stories behind ’70s hits such as “School’s Out,” “Eighteen” and “Welcome to My Nightmare” and sets straight the urban legends about onstage hangings and beheadings, chopping up baby dolls and throwing a chicken into a crowd to meet a bloody death.
Filmmakers Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn frame Cooper’s tale as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde saga.
“I love the Jekyll-and-Hyde approach,” says Cooper, who came into the world as a preacher’s kid named Vincent Furnier. “Because that really is the story – there’s me, and then there’s Alice.”
Viewed from one perspective, Banger Films’ “Super Duper Alice Cooper,” which premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, is a tale of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll with a subtext about God pursuing an errant child. Seen from a different angle, it’s a Christian film filled with so much cursing that no church could actually screen it.
Cooper says his one rule about making the documentary was that the filmmakers couldn’t whitewash his story, even when that meant talking about his addictions, his marital troubles and his bandmates’ opinions about his most loutish behavior. He insisted that unflattering comments from original Alice Cooper bandmates Neal Smith and Dennis Dunaway stay in the film’s final cut.
Over the years, Cooper has discussed his alcoholism at length, but he has avoided talking about a near-fatal battle with cocaine during the early ’80s. That’s the part of the film, he says, that made him uncomfortable.
“I never copped to that – ever,” Cooper says. “I was living in L.A. during the Great Blizzard of the late ’70s, early ’80s. I didn’t know anybody that didn’t do it. It was so common, it was ridiculous. Having the addictive personality that I have, I fell right into that. It was creative. It kept you going. Honestly, it was not a long period of my career, about six months.”
After kicking the cocaine habit, Cooper knew he needed to get some personal distance from his antihero alter ego. The film ultimately shows Cooper re-emerging triumphant during the glam-metal ’80s, having re-created the Alice persona in a way that relegated it to the stage.
“There were two Alices,” Cooper says. “There was the whipping boy who represented all the disenfranchised kids. So he was the one that got hung. He was the one that had his head chopped off. He was the one put in a straitjacket. He was the outcast. All those kids really got that. They went, ‘He’s our guy.’
“I decided, I can’t be that Alice anymore, so there’s the Alice that happens when I’m sober. This new Alice needs to be an arrogant villain, a guy that’s really over-the-top in charge. Never says ‘thank you’ to the audience, is very condescending. And the audience got that joke, that he might slit your throat but he also might slip on a banana peel.”
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