Revisiting 'Wham!': A director's dive into 1980s pop culture
That, in a nutshell, is the story of Wham!, the British pop duo, and its two stars, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. It's a story that director Chris Smith tells in a Netflix documentary, which is nominated in Sunday's EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.
Other contenders in the documentary category include «Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,» about the actor's battle with Parkinson's disease; and «American Symphony,» a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste.
Smith previously directed the Emmy-nominated 2019 documentary «Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,» about a fraudulent music festival that landed its organizer in jail.
Two years earlier, he directed «Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond,» on the making of the 1999 movie «Man on the Moon,» in which Jim Carrey played the entertainer Andy Kaufman.
Smith said that he was approached to shoot «Wham!» by its producers. There is no narrator: The tale is told using documentary footage of the duo during their career, paired with audio excerpts from interviews with the two pop stars themselves, which are voiced over — Michael died in 2016 at 53.
Structuring the documentary are pages from a scrapbook that Ridgeley's mother diligently put together during the band's heyday, recording every little event in the Wham! trajectory. That scrapbook, with its glued lettering and newspaper cutouts, punctuates the different segments in the 92-minute documentary.
In a recent video conversation, Smith discussed the making of «Wham!» and his feelings about the
