Lifetime’s made-on-a-shoestring Brittany Murphy biopic The Brittany Murphy Story airs September 6, and it does not look promising. As our own Margaret Lyons wrote: “There are amateur pornos made at a higher quality. There are Chihuahuas wearing better, more believable wigs.†Well, turns out Brittany Murphy’s father, Angelo Bertolotti, agrees with that assessment, giving a scathing reaction to preview clips in an interview with the Examiner. “I am disgusted and outraged that Lifetime decided to produce such a trashy project, defiling the memory of my beautiful, talented daughter, Brittany Murphy,†said Bertolotti.
“Frankly, I am amazed at their audacity of calling it ‘a true story,’ without conducting any research or consulting with any members of the family,†he continued. “The Brittany Murphy Story is an affront to everything my daughter was in real life. It’s hideous, unauthorized and completely untrue.†He also complained about the actress portraying his daughter, and the way he’s depicted in the film:
Lifetime’s casting was atrocious. Amanda Fuller, the girl playing Brittany, looks absolutely nothing like her. Everyone looks ridiculous in their bad wigs and the dialogue is nauseating. To suggest that I was never in Brittany’s life since the age of two is absolutely despicable. I was always a part of Brittany’s life and supported both her and her mother. Anyone who thinks that Sharon and Brittany could afford to move from New Jersey to California by selling Tupperware should have their heads examined. The media loves to throw ‘mob ties’ into the equation, but that lifestyle is exactly what attracted Sharon in the first place. She worked in one of my clubs, until we got married. From that point on, she was well taken care of, along with Brittany and never had to work another day in her life.
Bertolotti, who has been a controversial figure in the long saga surrounding his daughter’s death, continued his mudslinging on Twitter over the weekend, writing and retweeting a series of hateful comments about Fuller:
Fuller responded to the cyberbullying in an interview with the TV Page, saying she’s blocked Bertolotti on Twitter. “I just think it is interesting that the minute she is back in the press he is all about, ‘I am going to sue’ and all that stuff,†she said. “If he really respected his daughter’s memory then I don’t know if he would be trying to make all this controversy about it. Let her rest in peace.â€
The actress explained that she had only two days to prepare for the project, which was shot on a very small budget over sixteen days. “I would have loved to have months of preparation and time to get down to a really skinny [body] so I could portray her physically better,†she said. “And we would have loved to have had more money and more time for vocal lessons and stuff like that. But in the end, I think it became less of it being a look-alike piece and more about just trying to capture the essence of who she was.â€