The reporter asks Britney Spears if he can see what she’s wearing. “See what I’m wearing right now?” a 20-year-old Spears slowly repeats, a look of distress washing over her face. Sitting on stage behind a table for a press conference in Mexico City in 2002, she stands up and warily gives a curtsy. He instructs her to turn around. Everyone laughs and cheers. Spears smiles and sits back down in front of the giant image of her face alongside the logos for Pepsi, Jive, and Virgin Records. “You can see when I leave,” she says. When she later announces it’s time to wrap up, the crowd boos.
The deeply uncomfortable video resembles many others that have gone viral in recent years, as the #FreeBritney campaign and the recent documentary Framing Britney Spears have inspired an ongoing reckoning over how Spears was treated by the media, and her fans, at the height of her fame. But this video lingers in YouTube obscurity, the opening scene of a film that is even more extraordinary—a vérité documentary called Stages: Three Days in Mexico, filmed during the final stop of Spears’s Dream Within a Dream world tour in 2002.
A concert documentary that contains very little concert footage, Stages is comprised of unconventional close-ups, abrupt fade-outs, and excruciatingly long shots, lingering on the lonely, mundane moments before and after Spears performs for more than 50,000 people each night. There are press conferences and photo shoots, sure, but there are also long, sleepy shuttle rides to and from the venue, solitary meals in nondescript hotel rooms, goofy backstage hangouts with backup dancers, exhausted sing-alongs in the hair-and-makeup chair, and a lot of bleary-eyed phone calls to her mother. The result is an intensely melancholy portrait of the world’s biggest pop star in the apparent throes of homesickness (the tour had dragged on at that point for several months) and heartache (Spears had reportedly split from Justin Timberlake earlier that year).
So how did this movie get made at the height of Spears’s fame—and how did it get forgotten? Director Judy Hoffman, an early member of the nonprofit documentary collective Kartemquin Films, had some answers.
“It’s a weird story of how I got involved,” Hoffman, who is better known for her short films about labor struggles, told me by phone from her home in Chicago. She’d been teaching a documentary class for adults and one of her students, James Forni, happened to produce Spears’s website. He told her that someday he was going to produce a documentary about the pop star and that he wanted Hoffman to direct it. Hoffman was intrigued, but what were the chances it would actually happen?
A few years later Forni really did convince Spears’s management to green-light the documentary, which he agreed to finance and distribute through his own production company. He came back to Hoffman with a budget (neither of them can remember what it was, but Forni suspects it was in the low six figures) and the option to hire who she wanted. Which is how Albert Maysles, the co-director of Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens who died in 2015, ended up a cinematographer on the film. “We really had this idea that possibly we could get to know her and explore what she thought, what life was like, do a real behind-the-scenes, more intimate look at Britney,” says Hoffman. “We just wanted it to be direct cinema, observational cinema, where whatever happens in front of the camera happens and hopefully it reveals itself…which is really something that Albert Maysles helped to develop.”
But once the crew arrived in Mexico City, production hardly went according to plan. First, Hoffman says, she had to spend two out of five shoot days in meetings negotiating with Jive Records, which somehow “didn’t know anything about” the film. In the meantime, her cinematographers snuck off to shoot footage of long hotel corridors and other nondescript interiors that contributed to the film’s bleak commentary on touring—or what Hoffman calls “being somewhere but really nowhere.”
The record label eventually agreed to the documentary, but with several concessions: “We couldn’t show her smoking or drinking,” says Hoffman. “I’d have to get the Marlboros off the table.” It wasn’t the only brand she had to block from the frame: Any beverages, including water bottles, that were considered competitors of Pepsi—for whom Spears was a spokesperson at the time—had to be removed, along with the non-Pepsi vending machines in the hotel where she was staying, according to Hoffman. Even Spears’s cell phone had to be erased from scenes because it contradicted one of her sponsorship deals, according to Hoffman, who says Spears was “owned” by the label. (Jive Records was absorbed into RCA Records in 2011. RCA Records did not respond to a request for comment.)
By the time the filmmaker was finally granted access, she realized Spears’s schedule was packed with media engagements that left little time for a one-on-one interview. But it wasn’t just scheduling that prevented her from firing questions at her subject. After witnessing the intense pressures Spears had to navigate on a daily basis—from cringe-worthy press conferences and screaming fans to paparazzi so aggressive that, according to Forni, she employed a body double to mislead them whenever she left the hotel—Hoffman began to question her own complicity in that media machine. Spears was “an easy target” for a lot of people, Hoffman says, because they saw her as “white trash, working class, Southern, you know? And the way I looked at her, it was that she was made into a commodity fetish.”
Hoffman’s sympathy for Spears only reinforced her tendencies toward observational, rather than confrontational, filmmaking. “You just felt her loneliness and sadness, and it was hard to talk to her,” Hoffman says. “I just wanted to leave her alone. I felt so sad, I didn’t want to be another press person torturing her. I just didn’t want to be like the people I saw that she had to encounter all the time.”
At one point, Hoffman said she gave Spears a camera so she could shoot her own footage—a technique she had previously employed with subjects as a way to gain trust and democratize the filmmaking process. “That’s kind of how I went into it, really feeling that, here’s a kid who never had a chance to be anything other than how she was marketed. So I thought, Okay, I wanted to give her a camera so she could shoot footage herself,” says Hoffman. “But she ended up never using it, unfortunately. It would’ve been really interesting.”
Weeks after the whirlwind shoot wrapped, Hoffman did end up getting her sit-down interview with Spears at her brother’s loft on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The movie Crossroads had been released earlier that year, and Hoffman wanted to know what kind of roles Spears wanted to play in the future. “She said she was interested in playing a crazy young girl, which is kind of prescient. Someone who has issues,” Hoffman recalls. The singer’s other goals, per Hoffman’s recollection? Taking belly dancing lessons—Shakira had recently emerged in the American music scene—and enrolling at New York University “studying she wasn’t sure what.” But in the rush to release a DVD of the documentary ahead of Christmas, several months after the film was shot, the interview never made it into the final cut.
It’s probably just as well. With its fly-on-the-wall footage rather than formal on-camera interviews, Stages: Three Days in Mexico is in many ways a more intimate portrait of Spears than any number of the current projects attempting to reassess her legacy. (Spears, who has been under the control of a legal conservatorship for more than a decade, did not appear in Framing Britney Spears; a title card at the end of the film says it’s unclear whether she even received the requests to participate.) And for all the ways it depicts a pop star under intense pressure, Stages: Three Days in Mexico doesn’t set out to paint Spears as a victim. When a torrential thunderstorm creates dangerous conditions for her and her dancers during their final outdoor performance of the tour, cameras capture Spears making split-second decisions on how to adjust their choreography—and ultimately cut the concert short.
The truncated concert garnered outrage among fans and blowback in the press. “Oops, she did it again. Alienated the entire country of Mexico, for the second time in a week, that is,” read the opening line of an Entertainment Weekly report that noted she first angered fans by flipping the bird to the paparazzi. (After viewing Framing Britney Spears, it’s not hard to imagine why she may have done so.)
As for its obscurity, Stages’ packaging as a DVD insert in the back of a photo book (also called Stages), is likely the culprit. (“That was a common way to release content” in the days when dial-up connections were slow and social media didn’t exist, says Forni, who also produced a photo book for Jessica Simpson.) And while Spears’s management signed off on the film, they didn’t exactly embrace it. “My perception is that, had the management and the record company wanted it to be a more well-received documentary and tour book, there would’ve been more effort put behind it,” says Forni. “It didn’t fit, necessarily, the marketing and brand plan and maybe what they wanted, I don’t know.”
In the years since, bootleg versions of Stages have made their way to YouTube, where the comments sections are peppered with the #FreeBritney hashtag. Given the attention around the movement, the documentary may be on the verge of rediscovery, starting with Hoffman’s own students. The University of Chicago is planning to screen it on campus next month, potentially converting a younger generation to the #FreeBritney movement. “It certainly is prescient,” Hoffman says. “It’s sort of like a harbinger of what was to come.”
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