New biography focuses largely on the music of Joni Mitchell

The two-part biography that airs tonight and next Tuesday at 7 p.m. on CBC's Life and Times is called Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind. It should not be confused with another two-part biography from the same production company which CBC almost aired last year at this time.

The earlier film was titled Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now and Then, but it might also be called The Documentary Joni Mitchell Didn't Want You to See. The history behind the two films reveals almost as much about the Canadian musical icon as what you'll see on screen tonight.

Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind is a handsome, lyrical piece of film-making which focuses largely on Mitchell's music, partly on her painting, and almost incidentally on her life. We see how her life is reflected in her music, and how her music affects her life, sometimes with penetrating clarity. But we skip over a lot of personal detail. This is an art film, not a celebrity biopic.

Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now and Then, on the other hand, was more personal, chattier, and a lot more Canadian. Mitchell hated it. And since she had demanded editorial control up front, she vetoed it days before it was to broadcast in Canada, and well after review copies had been sent out to critics.

At the time, nothing was said of Mitchell's dismay. CBC played the cancellation as a simple schedule change; the film was being held for the following season. But when it reappeared this spring, the film had a new name, a new director and a new co-producer, PBS's Emmy-winning arts-biography series, American Masters. Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind will air later as a 90-minute special on the U.S. public broadcaster.

The film began as the second half of a two-part deal between Mitchell and Eagle Vision Entertainment, a U.S.-based, British owned production company, says Life and Times senior producer Michael Claydon. In 1998, Mitchell and Eagle Vision collaborated on an intimate concert video called Joni Mitchell: Painting with Words and Music, which the CBC aired. The biography was a follow-up, and CBC came on board as a minor player.

Eagle Vision approached Susan Lacy, the Peabody-award-winning film-maker and founder of American Masters, about co-producing the film. She was very interested, she said in an interview from New York, and even accompanied the film's crew to Canada to interview Mitchell's parents. "But that was before I had seen the contract," says Lacy.

American Masters, which has profiled Bruce Springsteen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Avedon, among others, doesn't make "official" biographies, and never lets its subjects have control over the finished product. Lacy backed away from the film. "I remember telling [Eagle Vision], 'You're going to regret this,' " she says.

Lacy doesn't know specifically why Mitchell balked at the film, but she has her suspicions.

"I thought it was a gossipy show, but I didn't think it had anything to do with her art or her music. It wasn't lyrical, it wasn't poetic, it wasn't all the things that I would have wanted it to be if I were making the film."

And it spent a great deal of time detailing the singer's early life at the expense of her later musical career, when Mitchell's constant musical experiments often took her out of the spotlight.

When Eagle approached her with its dilemma, Lacy agreed to take over as director and make a new film -- if Mitchell agreed to give up editorial control.

The singer/songwriter acquiesced.

"I think she sensed that our interests in what we wanted to do with the film were more compatible with her interests," says Lacy.

By the time Lacy was finished with her reworking, Mitchell's Canadian childhood was reduced to the barest essentials; it is portrayed in the film as little more than a time when the fledgling artist was more interested in painting than music. The original film featured reminiscences with Mitchell's parents, anecdotes about a favourite teacher, Mitchell's own memories of her bout with polio and her keen sense of alienation from her classmates. All of this, along with the yearbook photos and family snaps, are missing from the new film.

Gone as well is much of her time on the Canadian folk scene, and the way in which singers like Leonard Cohen influenced her.

Lacy says she was "eliminating things I didn't thing were germane if you have only 90 minutes as opposed to a book [to fill]."

Not all the cuts pleased Mitchell, Lacy admits. "She has a perspective on her own history that not necessarily always can be borne out."

In the original film, for instance, there is an extensive section dealing with Mitchell's relationship with her first husband, singer Chuck Mitchell. They had met at a Toronto club shortly after the teenage singer had quietly given birth to her daughter, the product of a brief relationship in art college. With her child in foster care, Mitchell went on the road with her future husband and, she says in the film, agreed to marry him as a way of providing for her daughter, though he subsequently refused to raise her. She paints Mitchell, and his role in her life, in far darker shades than Lacy lets her get away with in tonight's film.

Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind is ultimately a more polished and thoughtful treatment than the earlier work. It includes an enlightening segment on her relationship with Graham Nash and how her decision to leave him preceded a new era of soul-searing self-reflection in her work. There is also a detailed look at her collaboration with Charlie Mingus on his swan song album, and unprecedented footage of Mitchell with her daughter, with whom she was reunited in recent years, and her grandchildren.

Over all, the film makes clear Mitchell's frustration with the general lack of recognition for her later career.

"We're all human; we like people to like what we do," says Lacy. "I think she's had her ups and downs and disappointments, but I think she's in a very clear and strong place today."