Off Screen - Turner Up!

IF YOU could believe the advertising campaign (ah, if only we could have faith in advertising, what a different world this would be), What's Love Got To Do With It is a movie that has it all: music, action, sex, violence, big wigs. But you don't even have to make it past the title to notice what is missing from this heady cinematic cocktail: a question mark.

Have film-makers become so illiterate that they have no comprehension of the difference between a statement and a question? (Please note beautifully positioned question mark at the end of that sentence). Or is it simply that the budget did not stretch to punctuation? (There's another one).

To compound the confusion, in some territories the film is being released as Tina What's Love Got To Do With It, without even a comma or a colon to separate poor Tina from the rest of the sentence. One is left wondering why didn't they just abandon punctuation altogether and leave out the lonely apostrophe in What's?

Are some forms of punctuation more acceptable than others? And if so, what should we make of the forthcoming Addams Family Values, where the film-makers have assembled the same cast and director, but have so far failed to come up with an appropriate apostrophe. Surely that should be Addams' Family Values? (The question mark is mine, and should not be confused with the title).

Whatever the merits, or lack of them, of What's Love Got To Do With It, the film of Tina Turner's life and stormy times with husband Ike, there are two people who you are not likely to catch checking the movie out in your local multiplex, or indeed any other cinema. That's Ike and Tina themselves.

Although the film is based on Tina's modestly titled autobiography, I, Tina, and she gave full co-operation to the film-makers, working closely with star Angela Bassett and re-recording many of her hits for the soundtrack, she has let it be known that she has no interest in seeing the finished product. It is not because she is upset over the film-makers' failure to punctuate the title correctly. She has told journalists that she has been through an abusive relationship with Ike once already in her life, and she has no interest in sitting through it again.

Ike, meanwhile, has been complaining that the movie does not paint an accurate picture of their life together. His antipathy to the film is understandable: he is portrayed as a vicious, manipulative, coke-snorting, money-grabbing, wife-beating, ego-maniacal rapist. He won't be suing however. Ike sold Buena Vista (the Disney off-shoot who produced the film) the rights to his story as they were relayed in Tina's book before the film was begun. And, as the director Brian Gibson has pointed out, he is even worse in the book than in the movie.

"If you read the autobiography, Tina was truly humiliated and ground into the dust by living with Ike," said Gibson. "If we had shown many of the things that Ike did, it would have been a relentless clinical case-history of humiliation. He threw hot coffee in her face, he made love to other women virtually in her presence. There was no point after a certain place in the film to show episode after episode of that."

Ike was banned from the set, presumably out of a fear that he would behave much as his character in the film does, but one day, while the crew were in the midst of shooting another savagely abusive incident in the actual house where Ike and Tina had lived, a rumour spread that the man himself was somewhere around. Gibson went out to confront him, expecting to have to deal with the vicious, near madman his film was portraying. Instead he found Ike all charm, signing photographs for the crew.

To his surprise, Ike did not seem to be particularly embarrassed about his portrayal. "Ike has always identified with the sort of demonic lifestyle in a kind of a way," Gibson observed. "A certain part of him likes the infamy." Ike has, however, denied the extent of the violence. "I only hit her when she looked sad," he recently told reporters.

What a gentleman!