Marilyn Monroe is one of the most iconic movie stars of all time, and her death, like her life, has been shrouded in mystery, secrets, lies and conspiracies. In a new documentary, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, filmmaker Emma Cooper peels back the layers of Monroe’s glamorous but troubled life leading up to the days and hours before her death.
Utilizing Anthony Summers, a Monroe expert and author of Goddess, the Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, as a guide into her world, the documentary is packed with archival footage and interviews that Summers collected during his 1982 reinvestigation into what happened to the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes star. As Monroe says in the film, “The true things rarely get into circulation, it’s usually the false things.”
With Summers unpacking everything he learned through his investigation some 20 years after Monroe was found dead in her Brentwood home on Aug. 4, 1962 at age 36. Since the starlet’s death was so sudden, the media has debated for decades whether it was an accident, suicide or murder.
“You push it until the door opens,” Summers tells Tudum about his decades-long quest for the truth. “That applied to many interviews in the Monroe case. Remember, [in 1982] it was only 20 years since she died. And people who were friends or intimates still felt uneasy talking about her, particularly when so many rags and flashing magazines had exploited her when she was alive. But by the ’80s, most of them were beginning to open up because they were older and could begin to see it in perspective. I think that in the end, very few doors remain closed to me. By the time I finished, I had interviewed 650 people.”
Here’s what viewers will learn in the documentary and when it launches on Netflix:
Anthony Summers
Cooper places Monroe at the center of this story. The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe uses notable moments, photographs, performances and videos of the actor from her childhood through the end of her life. Images and videos also include the bombshell’s famous husbands, Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio, as well as one lone photograph of the starlet with John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. Summers is also a central figure in the film, acting as narrator and conducting interviews with Hollywood legends like Billy Wilder, George Cukor, John Huston and Jane Russell.
While the real voices of the interview subjects are heard, Cooper chooses to use stylishly rendered reenactments to ground the audience in the secrecy surrounding Monroe’s shocking and sudden death.
Fans won’t have to wait long to see the captivating pop-cultural icon come to life in a way we’ve never seen before. The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes will premiere April 27 on Netflix.
Later this fall, a fictionalized portrayal of Monroe’s life, told through the lens of modern celebrity culture, will be released. Ana de Armas (Knives Out, No Time to Die) will portray Marilyn in Blonde.
