Dark Roots: The Unauthorized Anna Nicole tells the bigger-than-life tale of Anna Nicole Smith, a small town Texas girl who reaches stardom by transforming herself into a platinum blonde reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe who adorned the pages of Playboy and Guess? billboards around the world.
Dark Roots: The Unauthorized Anna Nicole highlights include:
- Exclusive interview with former lesbian lover, Sandy Powledge.
- Also interviewed for the show: Anna Nicole's family members, including her aunts, cousins and stepfather
- Members of J.Howard Marshall's legal team as well as his personal assistants
- Community leaders and business owners from Anna Nicole's hometown
- Hollywood paparrazzi, writers and producers
- Eric Redding, the Houston photographer who convinced Anna to pose nude for Playboy test pictures
- and Shelby Hodge, Society Editor for the Houston Chronicle.
Some of the shows highlights include:
- As a teenager, Anna Nicole Smith (real name Vickie Lynn Hogan) works as a fry cook, years before she becomes a Playmate of the Month and Guess model.
- At age 26, Anna Nicole is found unconscious at the Beverly Hills Peninsula Hotel with boyfriend Daniel Ross. She is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai for mixing prescription drugs and alcohol.
- Anna Nicole and nanny Maria Cerrato sue each other in May of 1994. The nanny accuses Anna Nicole of sexual assault and harassment. She wins an $830,000 judgment against Anna Nicole Smith
- Anna Nicole Smith weds octogenarian tycoon J. Howard Marshall, II, who dies less then two years letter, leaving Anna Nicole with a controversial half-billion-dollar inheritance.
Interview Highlights:
- SHELLY CLOUD - ANNA'S COUSIN on Anna's hometown: "Small and it sucks. I am not joking"
- MELINDA HUDSON - ANNA'S COUSIN on Anna's hometown: "There's not much to do around here. You have to go to Waco to do practically anything. There's a movie theater and bowling alley and skating rink but there's not really much to do over here".
- DONALD HART, ANNA's STEPFATHER on Anna as a child: "She snuck out of the house with an older man and went off with him and got caught by her mother and then her mother took her to Mexia to live with her aunt Kaye."
- KAYE HEARD - ANNA'S AUNT: "I'm her aunt, and when she was younger she called me momma, and she called her mother mother...I loved her just like she's mine".
- SHELLY CLOUD - ANNA'S COUSIN: "She was fun...I didn't want to leave her side, that's my big sister, that was my role model".
- MELINDA HUDSON - ANNA'S COUSIN: "Vicky wasn't real popular in school, she didn't really like school, she dropped out in the 10th grade".
- KAYE HEARD - ANNA'S AUNT: "She wanted to be a model and actor when she got older, she talked about it".
- SHELLY CLOUD - ANNA'S COUSIN: "Since she was a little girl and I was a little girl we always wanted to model. We'd throw the furry things wrap em around each other and put mom's high heeled shoes on and walk around..."
- FLOYD HARRISON ANNA's UNCLE: "Her dream was to be another Marilyn Monroe, but it didn't quite pan out the way she wanted it to."
- RITCHIE AVANTEZ - FORMER MANAGER, RICK'S CABARET: "When Anna first started, she was very naïve, uh, she caught on fast. She really had a good look, she had a sweet personality, down-home Texas style - Anna was born for the business".
- DONALD HART ANNA's STEP-FATHER on Anna's stripping: "She asked me what I felt about it. And I told her she could be doing a lot worse things. I didn't really approve of it, but as long as she wasn't into drugs and stuff she could be doing a lot worse, and at least she was making a living for herself.
- KAYE HEARD - ANNA'S AUNT "She had little tiny breasts like A's. She didn't have Bs Cs, she didn't have that, she had tiny breasts."
Some of the visual hightlights include:
Select clips from Anna's Hollywood films, To the Limit, Skyscraper and Exposed.
Music video of Anna singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy"
Anna Nicole wild about town in Hollywood
Video of Anna crashing a bar mitzvah in Beverly Hills and dancing with the lucky youngster.
She is at the eye of the storm in the Texas-sized battle between big tits and big oil. At first blush this is a classic Beauty vs. the Beast story bursting with titillating elements: kinky sex, big money, courtroom theater, class warfare and an outrageous family feud.
But at the core of this complex legal entanglement, is really the tragic story of a simple girl from the South caught up in a whirlwind beyond her control. We will show that, in addition to legal prejudice, Anna Nicole is also a victim of popular prejudice, the high price to pay for being blonde, beautiful, busty and a woman. In Anna's case, the cost of being an object of desire is often to be treated as an object by the very people who are supposed to support her: her family, her boyfriends, her attorneys and possibly her dead husband.
If Anne Nicole Smith had not existed, nobody would have dared invent her... In an era of outrageous media stories, the story of Anna Nicole is a rags-to-riches fairytale that should not be read to children. Born in Houston in 1968 and abandoned by her father as an infant, raised in a blue-collar home by a mother with whom she fought constantly, Vickie Lynn Hogan's early years were a blur of trailer-parks, failed relationships and strip bars.
But by 1993 she had transformed herself into a platinum blonde reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. Her statuesque frame was everywhere -- Playboy, Guess Jeans' ads and exploitative thrillers. She was also head over heels in love with an 89-year old oil tycoon named J. Howard Marshall.
When J. Howard Marshall passed away just fourteen months after their marriage, Anna was staring at hundreds of millions of dollars of inheritance and the Marshall heirs were apoplectic with rage.
The ensuing legal sideshow has transfixed the nation: Anna decked out in revealing clothing, slurring her answers on the stand thanks to a slight pain-killer addiction, allegations of attempted murder, evidence tampering, lesbian relationships and sexual abuse. And what's at stake? Just a half a billion dollars.
The Anna Nicole Smith story has a cast of characters that would make Tennesse Williams proud: A tragic central figure, Lone-Star money, Hollywood sleaze and big business barons.
In the end, we take a stab at the 500 million-dollar question: Who is Anna Nicole Smith? Is she a cold-hearted gold digger? Or is she a simple girl with big appetites for whom too much happened too fast?
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