Before Britney: How In Bed With Madonna showed the music industry at its worst

Madonna and Britney Spears had a lot in common even before their staged snog at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, in which Madonna clamped her mouth around Britney’s like a rapacious lamprey.

Both female pop stars were publicly upbraided for celebrating their sexuality, and both then appeared in raw and provocative documentaries which led people to question their clichéd perceptions of celebrities in the glare of the media. In the ensuing controversy, both saw their music was relegated to mere afterthought.

Thirty years before Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times exposé that chronicled the triumphs and tragedies of the …Baby One More Time singer, In Bed With Madonna, the show-all documentary which marks its 30th anniversary on May 10, became an instant global talking point on its 1991 release.

Both singers were also from working class backgrounds off the beaten track – tiny Kentwood, Louisiana for Spears; Bay City Michigan for Madonna. They had to fight for everything they achieved in their careers. And from their very first hits, they were targets of popular derision.

In other ways they were different, however. And to get a sense of that one need only contrast In Bed With Madonna (released as Madonna: Truth or Dare in the US) with Framing Britney Spears.

In Bed With Madonna is entirely Madonna’s creation. She handpicked then 26 year-old Bobby Brown video director Alek Keshishian to follow her through her 1990 Blond Ambition world tour, and fought distributor Harvey Weinstein for final cut.

Framing Britney Spears is, by contrast, a story presented without Spears’s consent (even if it sympathetically depicts her as a victim of institutionalised misogyny). That was pointed out by Spears herself when she took to Instagram to label both Framing Britney Spears and Mobeen Azhar’s subsequent BBC documentary The Battle for Britney “hypocritical”.

The biggest difference, however, is in how unflinchingly In Bed With Madonna explores the contours of a pop star’s ego. The singer famed for her beauty mark allowed Keshishian to make a warts-and-all portrait.

It is difficult to unpick the controversy around In Bed With Madonna from that generated by her book Sex, released in October 1992. A wilful and playful provocation, the tome, which accompanied her fifth album, Erotica, featured softcore porn and simulated sadomasochism – with Madge very much front and centre.

Sex is today often hailed as a post-feminist gesture by an artist ripping up the rules. In the moment, it was seen as pretentious Benny Hill. And eighteen months previously, a similar backlash had attended In Bed With Madonna.

Filmed largely in black and white, In Bed With Madonna’s most instantly notorious scene involved the pop star simulating a sexual act on a bottle of Vichy water during a game of “truth or dare” with her crew (hence the US title). “Oh my god!,” screams one of her team as Madonna busies herself. Three decades on, it’s still a bracing watch.

She also encourages two of her male dancers to kiss – a scandal at the time. The dancers sued, stating the footage had been released without their consent.

And there’s a horribly awkward meet-up with an old school friend who has been pestering Madonna about being godmother to one of her children. The cringe factor goes through the ceiling as the woman presents Madonna with a huge portrait of the Virgin Mary and Child and the singer stiffly brushes her off.

The consensus at the time was that Madonna would do anything for attention. Warren Beatty, her then boyfriend, says as much when objecting to Keshishian following them everywhere.

“Well, why would you want to live if it’s off-camera?’ he huffs sarcastically. Beatty’s lack of enthusiasm will not have been helped by Madonna’s admission that ex-husband Sean Penn was her “true love”.

Madonna’s forceful personality often strays into rudeness. There’s an extraordinary early sequence in which Kevin Costner, brought backstage to meet her, describes the show as “neat”. She rolls her eyes and practically laughs in his face. “Neat,” she says. “No one’s ever described it quite that way.” Years afterwards, she would take a moment on stage to apologise to the actor.

Viewed today the film also captures Madonna as a woman operating in a world dominated by men. She is a mother figure to her dancers (the 2016 documentary Strike A Pose would reveal several later struggled with AIDs, drug use and homelessness).

Yet she is often required to bump heads with the other men round her: the engineer who shrugs off her complaints about patchy sound, the tour manager who advises her to tone down her performance after police in Toronto warn she faces arrest for public indecency.

The threat is an empty gesture, says Madonna. The tour manager disagrees. Madonna ignores him and is proved correct: the cops just melt away. She had by that point already faced down the manager who advised her against the project in the first place.

“I thought she was exposing too much of herself,” Freddy DeMann told Vanity Fair in 1991. “But Madonna didn’t agree, and when she doesn’t agree, she has a doll and she squeezes it in all the right places and I feel pain. But I was wrong about the movie. It works. The makeup is off and all the gloves are off, and it’s the real real.”

And Madonna took on Harvey Weinstein, who wanted to cut the documentary down from its two hour runtime. When he began throwing around his weight after a screening she advised him to take a hike.

“Listen, I put up the money for this movie. I don’t care what your point of view is. I never want to hear it,” Madonna told the Miramax monster. “Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing? This is mine and Alek’s. Shut up and I don’t ever want to hear another one of your ideas about it.”

In Bed With Madonna is a long way off perfect. Weinstein actually was correct about the running time – even if you’re deeply invested in Madonna, it drags. And by splicing up the live concert segments, it kills any musical momentum. The viewer comes away with little sense of the Blond Ambition Tour or why it was regarded as so boundary breaking.

And much like Britney a generation later, Madonna’s confidence and her ease with her sexuality would be weaponised against her. “Nothing is too private for Madonna to flaunt in public,’ said the New York Times, which expressed bafflement regarding her “inexhaustible bravado”.

The Chicago Reader criticised Madonna for her “reprehensible manipulations” of the people around her and of the audience. Rolling Stone likened her to “Salome demanding the head of John the Baptist” when she had the cheek to demand an engineer do something about an eruption of ear-splitting feedback during soundcheck.

Three decades on, it would be hyperbole to describe In Bed With Madonna as timeless. From the haircuts to the trousers, it couldn’t be more Nineties were the cast of Friends to gatecrash.

Yet it captures Madonna at the height of her powers. And it triumphs as an unvarnished portrait of an artist who, years before Framing Britney Spears, saw the music industry for what it was: a vipers’s nest that will rip to pieces the doe-eyed and the unsuspecting without a second thought.