'Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes' review: In HBO doc, star tells her own story without much filter

For some 70 years, Elizabeth Taylor had a level of celebrity few people in the history of this planet have matched, and Taylor was at the height of her fame in 1964 when she sat down for a series of interviews with Richard Meryman. The pioneering celebrity journalist culled material from those tapes for the ghostwritten 1965 autobiography “Elizabeth Taylor by Elizabeth Taylor.”

The 40 hours of audio from those sessions have been cleared for release by the Taylor and Meryman estates and serve as the foundation for the HBO documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” providing an illuminating glimpse into Taylor’s relatively unfiltered mindset at the time while also reminding us of the insane level of fascination the press and the public held for the two-time Academy Award winner and tabloid sensation. (And by her own admission in the interviews, Taylor gave the world something to talk about, again and again and again.)

Nanette Burstein (co-director of “On the Ropes” and “The Kid Stays in the Picture” and director of “Hillary”) provides steady, no-frills direction that includes snippets of Taylor’s movies, a myriad of behind-the-scenes photos and newsreel footage; there’s a nearly endless supply of material, given Taylor starred in some 80 films and offscreen was one of the most photographed and filmed people ever.

At times, when an audio clip is particularly poignant, we see simple but effective visuals, e.g., a reel-to-reel tape recording, a hand holding a lit cigarette, champagne bubbling in a glass, giving us the feeling we’re in the room with Meryman and Taylor as he gently prods her and she occasionally gets exasperated, at one point chiding Meryman for “putting so much bloody emphasis” on her status as what we used to call a sex symbol.

We move rather quickly through the early stages of Taylor’s career, as she recalls juggling on-set schoolwork with acting in films such as “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet,” as well as her friendship with James Dean and his shocking death ("I’d just been with him that day, driving around the studio in his Porsche...") and the challenges of being an untrained actor working with Method devotees such as Dean and Montgomery Clift.

We’re also reminded me of the disturbing sexualization of Taylor when she was just a teenager, as when the male narrator of a promotional film says, “Have you ever seen a dream walking? Well, I have. A dream with peaches-and-cream complexion, flowing raven locks and big blue eyes. ... She’s 5-foot-5 and 110 pounds of glorious 16-year-old cover girl beauty. You’ll see her soon in ... ’A Date With Judy’ ”

Good Lord.

Taylor speaks with candor about her numerous marriages, starting with an ill-fated union with Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr., and continuing through Michael Wilding, the producer Mike Todd (who died in a plane crash), Eddie Fisher (“It was an awful mistake. I knew it before we were married and didn’t know how to get out of it”) and Richard Burton. At times we hear recordings of Elizabeth's closest friends, including Roddy McDowall and George Hamilton, the latter saying of the tabloids' omnipresent and suffocating press coverage of Taylor and Burton, “They were not going for glamour anymore. They were going for the destruction of glamour.”

While filming “Cleopatra,” at the time the most expensive movie ever made, Taylor found herself condemned by the Vatican newspaper for her love life, and she fell seriously ill on set, which caused a long delay in production. At one point, Taylor underwent a tracheotomy to help her breathe; of her Oscar for “Butterfield 8,” a film she loathed, Taylor says, “I won because I had a tracheotomy.”

Even all these decades later, it’s startling to witness the crush of humanity and the swarms of paparazzi that surrounded Taylor everywhere, especially during her rollercoaster romance with Burton, which included two marriages. Taylor was just 32 when these recordings were made, but rather than end there, the film continues through a rather rapid summation of her life and times in the decades to follow, concluding with a few audio excerpts from an interview with Dominick Dunne in 1985. We’re reminded of how Taylor used her great fame for good, most notably in her very public and devoted activism for AIDS research at a time when most celebrities were reluctant to step forward.

At the outset of the film, Taylor is heard on the tape asking Meryman, “Do you have your friggin’ machine on?” It’s to the benefit of the viewer, and to the historical record of cinema, that Meryman kept that friggin’ machine running for so many hours so we could hear from one of the most memorable icons Hollywood has ever known, in her own voice.