More than twenty years has passed since Kurt Cobain's death and two documentaries on the Nirvana front man's life and death have recently been released. Responses are pouring in from those close to him.
The first film, by director Brett Morgen, is the HBO documentary "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck." The project received cooperation from two key women in Cobain's life: his ex-wife Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean Cobain. Frances is credited on "Montage of Heck" as an executive producer and told Rolling Stone why she wanted to be involved with this particular documentary.
"It's the closest thing to having Kurt tell his own story in his own words - by his own aesthetic, his own perception of the world," Frances told Rolling Stone. "It paints a portrait of a man attempting to cope with being a human. When Brett and I first met, I was very specific about what I wanted to see, how I wanted Kurt to be represented."
Her mother, Courtney Love, gave a candid on-screen interview that's featured in the doc. During the Q&A session at the film's screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, Love said she got emotional watching the documentary for the fourth time, which forces her to see her short-lived romance with Cobain play out on the big screen.
"I experienced some shame this time," Love said, according to the New York Post's Page Six. "Mostly I got really sad when I watched it before. But, you know, guilt, and what I could have done . . . I got to spend a little more time with Kurt and Frances."
But the film also had some negative responses from those close to Cobain. Buzz Osborne, of the Washington-based grunge band the Melvins, wrote an op-ed in the Talkhouse and said "Montage of Heck" missed the mark on accuracy.
"First off, people need to understand that 90 percent of 'Montage of Heck' is bullshit. Total bullshit," he wrote in the op-ed. "That's the one thing no one gets about Cobain - he was a master of jerking your chain."
Another documentary on Cobain focuses more on the controversy surrounding his 1994 death, which was ruled as a suicide. Benjamin Statler's film "Soaked In Bleach" delves into the long-running theory that Courtney Love had something to do with her husband's death. Love quickly hired a legal team, which sent a cease and desist order to Statler.
"The film falsely presents a widely and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that accuses Ms. Cobain of orchestrating the death of her husband Kurt Cobain," the order reads in a document obtained by Deadline Hollywood. "A false accusation of criminal behavior is defamatory ... which entitles Ms. Cobain to both actual and presumed damages."
The film's producers wrote a letter to Deadline in response to the cease and desist order from Love's attorneys. They said she tried to discredit "Soaked In Bleach" and attempted to prevent theaters from screening it.
"Courtney Love and her lawyers clearly don't like that the film presents a compelling case for reopening the investigation into Kurt's death," the producers wrote in the statement. "They should respect the First Amendment and let people decide for themselves."
The film features interviews with Norm Stamper, the Seattle Police chief who worked during the 1994 investigation. He said he if were still chief of Seattle Police, he would reopen the investigation.
"We should in fact have taken steps to study patterns involved in the behavior of key individuals who had a motive to see Kurt Cobain dead," Stamper said, according to Spin. "If in fact Kurt Cobain was murdered, as opposed to having committed suicide, and it was possible to learn that, shame on us for not doing that. That was in fact our responsibility."
The case was reexamined in March 2014, according to the music site Consequence of Sound. A cold case detective reportedly discovered unseen photographs from the original crime scene, but the Seattle police concluded that the photos did not add new evidence and the case was closed once again. No reports of reopening the case have been made since Stamper's statements were made public.
See the trailer for "Soaked In Bleach," posted below.
