Harsh Words for HBO’s Phil Spector Biopic

The new HBO biopic “Phil Spector” doesn’t make it debut until March 24, but it has already been panned both by Mr. Spector’s wife and the family of Lana Clarkson, an actress for whose 2003 murder he is currently serving 19 years to life in prison.

Rachelle Spector, in an interview with “Entertainment Tonight,” denounced the movie, which is directed by David Mamet and stars an extravagantly bewigged Al Pacino, for depicting her husband as “a foul-mouthed megalomaniac” and “a Minotaur, like he draws people into his labyrinth and he locks them in and won’t let them out.â

Meanwhile, Edward Lozzi, a representative for Ms. Clarkson, and two others stood outside a screening in Los Angeles on Thursday with signs reading “HBO’s ‘Phil Spector” Murders the Truth. No Emmy for the film that hurts people alive today,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Mr. Lozzi told the Reporter the movie focused too strongly on Mr. Spector’s defense, which argued that Ms. Clarkson had in fact killed herself.

HBO defended the film in a statement as mainly an “exploration of the client-attorney relationship” between Mr. Spector and his defense attorney, Linda Kenney Baden, played by Helen Mirren. “Mamet approaches the story of Phil Spector as a mythological one, not as a news story, and the film is not an attempt to comment upon the trial or its outcome,” the statement said.

In a 2011 interview with The Financial Times, the Reporter noted, Mr. Mamet suggested that Mr. Spector might be innocent. “They should never have sent him away,” Mr. Mamet was quoted as saying. “Whether he did it or not, we’ll never know, but if he’d just been a regular citizen, they never would have indicted him.”