![]() It is the job of a documentary to inform and enlighten, and do so in ways that make clear why its subject matter is relevant. To be clear, it is not a documentarian’s role to aid its subject or alter the trajectory of a court case, although sometimes they do have that effect. Already, its content has arguably been helpful to Spears Mathew Rosengart, her attorney, filed a third request in court earlier this week to remove Jamie Spears from the conservatorship, citing the revelations in the documentary about the recording and monitoring of Spears’s communications. Like everything in Controlling Britney Spears, this information is presented in a cogent, journalistic fashion that is more interested in uncovering what Britney Spears has been facing away from the shiny filters of her Instagram feed rather than exploiting her. (Not a legal expert, but this certainly seems like a violation of attorney-client privilege!) Having observed how her medications and movements were tracked as a result of the conservatorship, Vaslov provides the most damning information in the short film, including how Jamie Spears, Robin Greenhill at Tri Star, and Edan Yemini, Black Box’s head of security and Vlasov’s former boss, used a secret iPad to mirror all communications that came from Spears’s cell phone, including text messages between her and her lawyer. “It reminded me of prison,” says Alex Vlasov, a former executive assistant of operations and cybersecurity at Black Box, the company that provided security for Spears at the behest of Jamie Spears and representatives from Britney’s management company, TriStar Sports and Entertainment Group. When considered in conjunction with Framing Britney Spears, it offers a more insightful, definitive consideration of not just Spears and her situation but how structures in our culture, from the media to the legal system, can be so easily manipulated to marginalize women. As eyebrow-raising as the pop star’s words were, Controlling Britney Spears manages to raise eyebrows again with revelations about the extreme lengths her father and others have gone to keep Spears under their thumbs while still putting her money in their pockets. Made following Spears’s lengthy and long-overdue testimony during a Zoom court hearing in June, the film, spearheaded by director Samantha Stark and supervising producer Liz Day, features interviews with sources who were willing to speak openly about the conservatorship after they heard Britney’s blunt testimony. In the case of Controlling Britney Spears, the answer is yes. But knowing how much of her private life has been exposed for public consumption and the sake of entertainment, something that Framing Britney Spears interrogates in detail, is it appropriate at such a fraught turning point to once again dig for more dirt? The point of the #FreeBritney movement was to finally acknowledge that this woman genuinely needs help. Their timing, so close to each other as well as to today’s hearing, suggests a desire to capitalize on the boundless attention on Spears’s case. Given the previous Fyre Fest documentary rivalry between Hulu and Netflix - in 2019, Hulu surprise-dropped Fyre Fraud a few days ahead of Netflix’s Fyre - those two Britney histories are attracting the most notice. Spears, a 90-minute-plus look at her rise to fame and the factors that led to her conservatorship, directed by documentarian Erin Lee Carr, who shares reporting duties with Rolling Stone contributor Jenny Eliscu. And on Tuesday, Netflix started streaming Britney vs. ![]() Sunday night, CNN aired Toxic: Britney Spears’ Battle for Freedom, a straightforward, nonrevelatory basic-cable rundown of Spears’s career and the controversies surrounding her conservatorship. ![]() ![]() ![]() Last Friday, the New York Times documentary Controlling Britney Spears, a follow-up to Framing Britney Spears, surprise-dropped on FX and Hulu, promising new details about the oppressive living conditions Spears has endured since 2008 under the control of her father and her managers. With another hearing in the Britney Spears conservatorship case unfolding today (and raising the possibility that Spears’s father, Jamie, could finally be removed as the pop star’s longtime conservator), there has been a race to release multiple Spears-focused documentaries to feed the #FreeBritney interest. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos: Netflix FX ![]()
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