Broomfield, who happens to be on the jury of the documentary competition at Sundance this year, offered to cut the two songs from this film, but the Utah festival still believed there were unresolved legal issues. Enter Slamdunk, one of several underground mini-festivals that have sprung up in the wake of Sundance's success. It agreed to show the film at midnight at the old Elk's Lodge on Park City's Main Street (the original Sundance headquarters in its funkier days). An excited crowd of 150 handpicked filmmakers, distributors, celebrities, critics and reporters hunkered down on folding chairs, and though it was nearly 2 in the morning when the film ended, no one was in danger of dozing.

Disturbing and luridly entertaining, "Kurt And Courtney" is a freakish journey into the sleazier corners of the entertainment world and a devastating act of character assassination. "Stay away!" one of Love's former lovers, a Portland ex-rocker, says to the camera, addressing the absent Courtney. "I don't care if you are Jesus and your lawyers are the 12 disciples." We hear of a death threat writer Lynn Hirschberg received from the star after her unflattering 1992 Vanity Fair article (Love, we are told, tried to attack the journalist at the Academy Awards, brandishing Quentin Tarantino's Oscar as a weapon). Hirschberg, the film says, was too scared to even appear in Broomfield's movie, but there are many other anti-Courtney testifiers, including a burly, tattoed rocker named El Duce, who claims Courtney "offered me 50 grand to whack Kurt Cobain" (he later adds, "but I didn't think she was serious"), and private eye Tom Grant, who is obsessed with proving she was involved in killing Kurt. Oddest of all her enemies is her own father, the author of "Who Killed Kurt Cobain", who seems to revel in waging public war against his daughter. (This is a guy who disciplined her as a little girl by scaring her with pit bulls.) These folks are not the most reliable witnesses, and Broomfield makes it clear he doesn't buy into the conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, we do hear from the nanny who was present in Kurt and Courtney's home shortly before his suicide; she says that Love was obsessed with his will. The film is relentlessly one-sided: Love receives no credit from anyone for her music or her amazing performance in Milos Forman's "The People vs. Larry Flynt."

Broomfield says he didn't set out to attack Love. As in his previous films about Heidi Fleiss and serial killer Aileen Wuornos, he expected he'd be sympathetic to her. The focus of the film shifted when it became clear Love and her powerful allies in Hollywood were trying to keep him from making his film. (Love's publicists, PMK, also represent Sundance founder Robert Redford, who said in a press conference he hoped Broomfield's film would eventually get released.) The pressure exerted on Sundance is a continuation of what we see in the film, which records a phone call from Showtime informing Broomfield it is withdrawing its funding from the film. In a scene that will prove deeply embarassing to the ACLU, we see Broomfield take the stage at an ACLU dinner celebrating the First Amendment and Milos Forman, at which Love had been a speaker. He begins to denounce her hypocrisy, given her attempts to stifle journalists, but he is strong-armed off the stage before he can finish.

As soon as the screening ended, offers to distribute the film came in. Broomfield is certain his movie will ger released, but it will now have a new ending. The Sundance brouhaha will make a perfect coda. If the film is a success, he'll owe a big debt to Courtney. Her campaign to suppress it has given the movie a publicity send-off no money can buy. Newsweek, February 2, 1998