Cracked Actor
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For the song in which the documentary is named after, see Cracked Actor (song)
Cracked Actor is a 53 minute long documentary filmed by the BBC in 1974 about David Bowie during his drug using days. It was made by Alan Yentob for the Omnibus strand, and was shown on BBC2 in the UK on January 26, 1975. The documentary shows Bowie being driven around in a limousine in between live concert footage. The footage is from one show but the documentary is made in such a way as to make you believe you are on tour with him.
The title of the documentary was originally to be "The Collector", after a comment that Bowie had made to Russell Harty the previous year, where he described himself as "a collector of accents". Yentob and his team were given the task of documenting Bowie's famous Diamond Dogs tour, which was already underway when they started filming. Locations for the documentary mainly centred around Hollywood and Los Angeles, but there was also concert footage taken from Philadelphia. A number of performances from the tour were shown including Space Oddity, Cracked Actor, Sweet things/Candidate, Moonage Daydream, The Width Of A Circle, Aladdin Sane, Time, Diamond Dogs and John, I'm Only Dancing (Again).
The documentary has become notorious for showing footage of Bowie suffering from the ill-effects of cocaine (which he had become addicted to by this point) and also includes video of his manager Tony Defries and his new personal assistant Corinne (Coco) Schwab.
