A Candid Documentary About The Queen Of Disco

When Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams met with actress Brooklyn Sudano, the daughter of the legendary Donna Summer, about making a documentary on the late singer’s life, he wanted to find out what type of approach the film would take. “She didn’t want to make an authorized sort of documentary about her mom,” Williams recalls of his conversation with Sudano. “She wanted to go to really difficult places. That was my first question: ‘Is this going to be an authorized documentary by Donna’s daughter, or is it going to be a truly deep exploration of an artist and warts and all?’”

Love to Love You, Donna Summer, which airs Saturday on HBO, went the latter route. It is a very candid portrait of the singer who was raised in a deeply religious household in Boston, went to Germany in the late 1960s to pursue her music career, and became an international star with the sultry and orgasmic 1975 hit song “Love to Love You Baby.” Through the late 1970s, Summer ruled the pop chart with such major hits as “I Feel Love,” “Last Dance,” “MacArthur Park,” “Heaven Knows,” “Bad Girls,” “Hot Stuff” and “Dim All the Lights—all of which cemented her title as the Queen of Disco. But the film also documents her personal struggles that included the pressures of fame, a suicide attempt, and a controversial episode that drew backlash from the gay community.

“For me, there was no other way to do it,” adds Sudano, who also co-directed the film with Williams, about the in-depth portrayal of her mother. “I think that to understand somebody’s triumphs, you have to also know their defeats and their trials. And so it was really important for us to approach it head-on and show something that was honest and truthful.”

One of two daughters born to Summer and her second husband, musician Bruce Sudano, Brooklyn Sudano was processing her mother’s 2012 passing, which provided the impetus for the film. “I had so many people come up to me talking about their personal histories and how they were connected to my mother’s music or an interaction with her,” she says. “I just felt like there was so much still left to say and to explore about her life and her story.”

“I had always wanted to make a documentary about Donna Summer,” says Williams, “because she was hugely influential in my life, probably one of the first artists that I listened to and loved. It was just like a dream of mine.”

In addition to archival interviews and performance footage of Summer, the documentary features commentary from the singer’s relatives, acquaintances and musical collaborators, including Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. Both co-directors acknowledged that they discovered new things about Summer while working on the project.

Says Sudano: “Any time I reached out to any single person, there was such a deep love for my mother, even if they had rough roads at the time, The love that she was able to engender from people ran so deep. It just really touched me that her life really had deep meaning…understanding the depth and the intensity of her stardom and her fame and getting a real sense of what that must have felt like.”

“To be honest, I only knew Donna as the disco queen,” says Williams. “And I learned she was so much more than that. There’s nothing wrong with disco, but I learned that she was a writer and a true artist, and all these different layers to her that I didn’t know about. And that’s why you set out to make a documentary to learn those layers.”

The archival audio and film footage are quite revealing—among them a black-and-white clip of a pre-disco-era Summer performing in the German production of Hair. “Our archivist found this footage and I took it over to Brooklyn’s house,” says Williams. “I showed her that for the first time.”

“I got really emotional,” Sudano adds. “To see that footage in Hair was really just her unadulterated and her at the start of this journey that she didn’t know anything. She had no idea what was to come, but just the pureness of her voice and her talent were just so clear and crisp. It was just really moving to be able to really experience it because I had never seen it before.”

Love to Love You, Donna Summer also includes excerpts from home movies shot by the singer, who aspired to be a filmmaker in her own right. “That footage was a gold mine for me,” adds Williams. “The first thing I saw was the home movies, and I think Brooklyn texted me the footage of “She Works Hard the Money,” and she [as a child] and Donna at the pool singing “Hard for the Money.” I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is incredible.’ It should feel deeply personal, like stuff you really haven’t seen or haven’t experienced that side of her.”

One of the themes of the film was Summer grappling with her image as a glamorous and sexy pop star and being a private person off stage (she eventually became a born-again Christian). “She spent her life trying to reconcile all of those things,” Sudano says. “I think that was her journey. She understood that she had a God-given gift and felt a very deep responsibility to use it well. The way that she got famous for something that was very provocative and sexually forward and very secular [with “Love to Love You Baby”], that I didn’t think she anticipated that being her way to fame. It was finding this balance of knowing that ‘I’m called to this big platform,’ but then reconciling how that’s being perceived, how that flows down into your everyday life, and how people approach you about that kind of thing.”

Another theme in the doc is Summer raising her eldest daughter Mimi (from her former marriage to Helmuth Sommer) during the whirlwind period of hit singles and touring. “It’s relatable,” Sudano says. “I’m a working mother, and so it’s something when you feel like you have your own dream and you want to see your kids live out your dream but also know that there’s a sacrifice with that. I think Mimi really bore the brunt of my mother’s success in that way. We wanted to be honest about that–that to do something great, you have to sacrifice. And that’s not always an easy choice.”

One of the most chilling aspects from the film is when Summer, at the peak of her fame in 1976, contemplated suicide. As she was about to jump out the window of a New York City hotel room, her foot got caught in a curtain at the same time a maid walked through the door. “It was important for Roger and me to include that because it just spoke to how much she felt that she was in a box that she couldn’t break out of,” says Sudano. “For somebody who is a real artist and a creative to feel boxed in and that you’re not given the space to grow and don’t have the freedom to roam around and daydream and do the things that you’re used to being able to do when you feel trapped like that—that’s like death. And I think that’s why it took her to that point.”

The documentary also addresses a controversial moment in Summer’s career that took place in the mid-1980s, when the singer allegedly make a remark at a show that offended her LGBTQ+ fanbase; Summer defended herself against the accusation.

“Roger and I had a lot of discussions about this,” says Sudano, “and it was something we were going to tackle, because it was really important for my family to acknowledge that that caused hurt and pain and to understand that my mom would never want to do that. And so we had to acknowledge that that caused hurt and pain, but also show that it was something that was really traumatic for her as well because she really did love all of her fans, particularly her gay fans. They were so supportive of her, and so it was a really unfortunate thing that I think she carried with her for a really long time. But I feel very grateful that there are so many from the gay community that have always shown us love and have understood who she really was and don’t count that one moment against her.”

Summer continued to have hits into the 1980s after disco faded, with “Love Is In Control,” “She Works Hard for the Money,” and “This Time I Know It’s for Real.” Yet Summer was more than the Queen of Disco – she also wrote her own material and oversaw the direction of her music and career that definitely didn’t make her a one-dimensional artist.

“My aunt said it best in the film,” says Sudano. “’Hey, it’s nice to be the queen of something, right?’ When you’re an artist and you’re a creative person, you don’t like being boxed in just because, not that you don’t like the title, you just don’t like the limitations that that title may bring. So she understood just how nice it is to have been the forebearer for a genre of music and to be able to be considered an icon of a time. I don’t think anybody is going to discount or challenge that. I think she really made her peace with that and claimed it.”

For Sudano, making Love to Love You, Donna Summer with Williams has been a gift to her family. “This documentary is really just one of the foundational points of establishing her legacy from our perspective. And so in some ways, people are really going to see her for who she was for the first time. I feel like it’s just the beginning for us in terms of what we hope to do to establish her legacy.”

‘Love to Love You, Donna Summer,’ directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano, airs on HBO, May 20 at 8 pm, and streams on HBO Max.