Super Duper Alice Cooper co-director Reginald Harkema on his unconventional doc about the legendary shock rocker

Super Duper Alice Cooper is far from your standard rock doc. Billed as a “doc opera,” the film takes us through Alice Cooper’s rise, fall, and eventual sober return, and is entirely made up of vintage footage and animation, with nary a single conventional talking head interview.

The film was co-directed by Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen, the duo responsible for a slew of recent metal documentaries including Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey and Rush: Behind the Lighted Stage, as well as Reginald Harkema, who previously worked with the duo as an editor on the VHI Metal Evolution TV series.

We caught up with Reginald Harkema by phone to discuss the unorthodox visual style of the film, how he finally came around to Alice Cooper’s music, and we get some surprising early details on the trio’s upcoming Soundgarden documentary.

Super Duper Alice Cooper is out on Blu-Ray and DVD May 27. To check out clips from the film, and  for any additional info, head over to superdperalicecooper.com.

Bad Feeling: What was your background with Alice Cooper before starting this movie?

Reginald Harkema: Well, I’ve got a story for you. My experience with Alice Cooper is, I never really took him seriously, I didn’t know what it was all about. I’d see his records at garage sales and I’d just kind of like, shake my head. In fact, I actually got one of his records at a yard sale, after it was just like, laying there in the grass. So I just grabbed it and took it home. It was the Alice Cooper show 1977 live album, it was terrible. And Alice hates that record anyway, because it was at the end of a tour, and he was burnt out, but it was this Vegas date that his manager made him do. So he hates that record and I hate that record, and I just ignored Alice Cooper for years and years and years. And then my wife and I were at a party and this song came on, “Ballad of Dwight Fry,” and she ran up to the host of the party and was like, “Hey, who’s doing this Melvins cover?” And the host of the party was like, “Well, the Melvins may very well do an Alice Cooper cover but this is Alice Cooper.” And so we saw the record, it was Love it to Death, and within a week I bought the record, and my wife and I listened to it and we were like, “Holy fuck, this is amazing! This is like as good as Sticky Fingers or one of those other early 70’s Rolling Stones albums.” And then it was like a month later that Scott (McFadyen) from Banger Films approached me about getting involved with the Alice Cooper doc, so I bought 16 more records and was like, “Holy shit man, why did I ignore this guy for all those years? Rock history has lost a major icon here! Those early Alice Cooper band albums are great.”

BF: What was the process of putting this film together like? When did Banger Films first approach you?

RH: I was approached by Scott. I was working for them, editing episodes of Metal Evolution, the TV series they did. But they knew I was also a director, so Scott was like, “ We want to do something a bit different then we did on the Rush doc, and Iron Maiden. We want to work a lot with graphics. Go take a look at Kid Stays in the Picture, American: The Bill Hicks Story.” So I watched those things, and it was going to be super graphically intensive, and started diving into the research. And it was Alice Cooper, possibly the most visual rock star in history, so he seemed to lend himself very well to a treatment like that.

BF: Was there any hesitation at all using that style, because he is so theatrical, but you don’t see any new footage of him in the film? Was that something you had to sell as an idea?

RH: I mean, I didn’t have to sell Sam and Scott on it, they got it right away. I had watched the Harry Nilsson doc, which I really like, but I did notice in the Harry Nilsson doc, it was more kind of analytical, and every time you cut to a talking head, many of whom were people we were going to talk to as well, it really felt like someone reminiscing about the past. That lends itself well to someone examining someone’s music, whereas Sam, Scott and I wanted to create something that was very immersive, that was experiential. We didn’t want to get pulled out of like something happening in ’72, by seeing someone in 2013.

BF: You have a wide range of interview subjects in the film, how did you go about choosing who to speak to? The film makes the point that he ran in so many diverse circles, so what was it like narrowing down the process of who you were going to go after for the film?

RH: We cast a pretty wide net to see who we could come up with. There’s a number of interviews that got cut out of the movie, major people in Alice’s life, most of those interviews are going to show up on the DVD extras. You cast a wide net, and you end up interviewing say, 5 people, who can talk about the same incident, same occurrence, and you end up getting 5 different stories. So it became a thing of like, particularly when it’s like, from a difference of 40 years back at a time when whoever’s telling the story, their brain had been pickled with Budweiser or acid, right? It ends up becoming a thing of, who tells the better story? If you tell the best story, you’re in the movie.

BF: What surprised you the most in the filming process? Either about Alice himself or that era in general?

RH: Well, I mean, of course Alice was raised in a Christian household, and he came back to Christ after all his tribulations. Because of that Christianity, I think he had always been comfortable with being known as an alcoholic. He had never been comfortable with dealing with his drug addictions, and making them public. So that was something new that we learned. On a lighter note, I was very pleasantly surprised, in a one hour afternoon I got to hang out with his mom, who is like 90 years old. Sharp as a fucking tack. After an interview with Alice, we were looking through some slides, family slides and so on, and I thought it’d just be looking at this stuff with an assistant, but then his mom came in and plunked herself down. And first I was like, “Oh man, I’ve gotta hang out with Alice’s 90 year-old mom for an hour?” But she was hilarious, she knew every detail of every person in every photo, every context of the photo, and always had something witty and funny to say. And you were really like, “Oh man, now I know where Alice gets it from!”

BF: Has Alice had a chance to see the final film yet? What were his thoughts on it?

RH: Yeah, he’s seen it in various phases. We showed him a cut of the film when we were still working on it, before we had a lot of the graphics and animation and so on in. And he was really into it. His only objection was, there was this shot of him with like a naked stripper, and I don’t know if it’s because his wife was in the room watching it, or I think it might be because of the Christianity thing, where it’s like, “Oh, naked girls and swearing are bad.” So he asked for that to be taken out. To his credit, apparently, I just found out that he didn’t even watch the final version until he could sit down and watch it with an audience, at the premiere last week. And he was watching it with like, Dennis Dunaway, his high-school friend and bass player, and Neil Smith, the drummer of the original band, sitting right nearby. We had an after party, and I got pictures taken with Alice, Dennis and Neil, and everyone seemed happy, so I guess that’s the reaction.

BF: That’s great, and that speaks to the trust he must’ve felt with you guys.

RH: I mean, Alice is pretty easy going right? He basically trusts what his manager Shep (Gordon) says. And it speaks to his trust, but it speaks a lot to Shep’s trust in what we did as well.

BF: The film covers the period until the mid-80’s comeback, is there a reason you didn’t want to take it up to the present?

RH: Well for us, coming up with this concept was, you know, the visuals and this concept of the doc-opera, which is like creating this rock opera, with documentary materials, the story that lended itself to the rock opera treatment and the mythology, was the story of the internal struggle of the man. The internal struggle of the man was, this guy who created this character, this like Frankenstein’s monster, and the monster took over the Dr. Frankenstein, and ran his life. And you know, creating a spiral into alcohol and drug addiction. And we were more interested in the story of when Dr. Frankenstein is finally able to get control of the monster. And when he steps onstage sober in 1986, that is that moment. And after that, it’s like, “Where is the internal struggle of the man?” “Oh, I think I might lease a new Mustang, what color should it be? There’s a convertible, or should I get the 289?”

BF: Where can people keep up to date on where they can see the film?

RH: There is a website, superdperalicecooper.com, and that thing is like updating with new and exciting information all the time. Bangerfilms.com I think will probably be on top of it as well.

BF: What do you have coming up next? 

RH: Well, Sam and Scott and I, we haven’t hammered out all the negotiations yet, but it looks like we’re coming together to do a Soundgarden documentary. To me, Alice Copper was a voyage of discovery, from someone who could kind of like journey into the past and see what it was like, where Soundgarden is much closer to my own sort of experience of being a music fan and kind of reconciling you know, these punk rock ideals. For them it was much more exaggerated, having these punk rock ideals and then dealing with becoming “metal rock stars.” I get that kind of internal struggle, much more than I do wrestling with free-base cocaine addiction.

BF: Are you going to be interviewing them on this summer tour they’re doing?

RH: It’s a little bit difficult because they’re touring, but Matt Cameron is not touring with them this summer, because he’s got Pearl Jam commitments. So there’s some key shows that Matt Cameron is going to be playing, so we’re going to be trying to send cameras out for that. But I think when they’re coming through Toronto, we’ve definitely got it scheduled in to get some interviews in with them, but I’m not sure we’re actually going to shoot that gig. We’re trying to shoot some select special gigs that Matt’s going to be at to feature in the documentary. We’re going to concentrate on [the 90’s] era mostly. It’ll probably be like 70-75% mid-80’s to the breakup, and then catch up on the reunion and the present day. We’d like to shoot some big special concert, and maybe use that as a structural spine. We’re going to shoot all the interviews so they’re more on-camera, so you can kind of get the emotion in the faces. There’s a lot of stuff that they went through, and a lot of stuff that they “poo poo” that I think we can dig deep underneath and get back to how they felt emotionally at the time about it.

Super Duper Alice Cooper is out on Blu-Ray and DVD May 27. Visit superdperalicecooper.com for more info.