ReMastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke

Bertha Franklin said she fired the shot. The film is not sure that is the whole death.

On 11 December 1964, Sam Cooke was 33 and half-dressed at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles. The manager, Bertha Franklin, told police she shot him after a fight. Netflix dropped ReMastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke on 8 February 2019, 74 minutes, directed by Kelly Duane de la Vega, written with Jeff and Michael Zimbalist. The tag for the series is "The music you know, the stories you don't." The brothers created ReMastered with Irving Azoff and Stu Schreiberg as fellow executive producers. latestnetflix.com's read is that Michael told Billboard this is not Behind the Music.They wanted questions in music history they could still report.,,

The second killing is the one the title cares about.

Jeff Zimbalist put it in print. The physical killing is one thing. The other is the killing of Cooke's potential as a civil rights leader. Duane said she took the job because the LAPD did not run a real investigation of a Black man shot in a motel, even a star who could move through Black and white rooms. That still sounds like the conversations around Black Lives Matter, she said. Billboard also notes the FBI watched Cooke's meeting with Jim Brown, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali after Ali took the heavyweight belt. Quincy Jones, Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick, Lou Adler, and Brown sit for the camera. Jones talks about sleeping in mortuaries on the chitlin circuit, cots next to caskets. Warwick remembers him facing racist cops. The week before he died, the Guardian writes, he planned to confront manager Allen Klein over paperwork.,

Aretha said yes. Then her health did not.

Duane's two heartbreaks were Aretha Franklin and Mavis Staples. Franklin granted an interview, then declined as she got sicker. Staples had been married to Spencer Leak, who talks about the Chicago funeral. Jody Klein, Allen's son, never sat down. The Zimbalists talked to ABKCO early and used Adler, who is close with Jody. They told the label the film was not another motel-room gore reel. They still did not get Jody on camera.

Decider's Benjamin H. Smith liked the first 45 minutes, the publishing company, the young Black artists Cooke signed, the control almost no Black act had in that era. He called the last quarter faulty conspiracy. Ellen E Jones at the Guardian wanted the opposite. The film makes the thin LAPD file clear, she wrote, then stops. She asked who would finally dig the death. Common Sense Media logs the motel talk, the womanizer line, the cocaine-as-pay stories from 1950s promoters, and the Emmett Till still. The argument inside the 74 minutes is the gossip. One camp wants the gun. The other wants the leader who never got older.,,

The official trailer sells both. Cooke still sounds like the smoothest man in the room. The motel still looks like a cover story someone never had to finish.