DOUBLE PLATINUM (ABC - Airing at 9 p.m. May 16, 1999)
There's a scene in that great trashy movie "Indecent Proposal" in which lawyer Oliver Platt is approached by two screenwriters who need his help in selling their big idea to a studio.
"It's a comeback vehicle for Diana Ross!" one beams. "With Billy Ray Cyrus!" his partner notes.
That proposed picture could scarcely have turned out to any goofier than "Double Platinum" (airing Sunday at 9 p.m. on ABC), in which Miss Ross attempts to hitch her long-idle wagon to Brandy's star. This is the kind of mesmerizingly bad melodrama in which someone bursts into tears, then rushes to the nearest mirror so she can watch herself weep.
A number of things make "Platinum" an inexhaustible source of cheap laughs, but Ross' transcendentally bizarre performance is certainly the foremost factor. The effortless elegance that was once her trademark has since been replaced by edgy self-consciousness and a penchant for wallowing in the hollow, ersatz sincerity Michael Jackson usually traffics in. Clad in gowns that look like the frilly monstrosities unlucky girls get stuck wearing to the prom and crooning half a dozen of the tepid ballads that have kept her far outside the Top 40 for the past 15 years, Ross is often a sorry sight.
Though she won justifiable acclaim for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in "Lady Sings the Blues," Ross quickly lost whatever bearings she had as an actress; witness her stilted star turns in "Mahogany" and "The Wiz" for evidence of that. Playing a performer shouldn't be too much of a stretch for her, but Ross invests many of her lines in "Platinum" with the same level of emotionalism most people use when reading from the phone book.
Nina Shengold's unintentionally uproarious teleplay takes two hours to lay out what '80s R&B group Klymaxx once said in four funky minutes: Divas need love, too. In a prologue set in 1981 Atlanta, we're introduced to aspiring songstress Olivia Harris (Ross, shot in such soft focus she looks like a five-foot stack of cotton candy in a bad wig) who's approached by a silver-tongued devil of an agent after one of her allegedly knockout sets.
He wants her to run away to New York; being a mother and a wife, Olivia hesitates. "Don't throw away a dream like this, kid -- life's too short," he tells her, sounding like someone who O.D.'d on Busby Berkeley musicals.
So Olivia does what any mom would. She goes home, wrings her lovely hands over another one of her wild-eyed husband Adam's (Brian Stokes Mitchell) poker games ("Don't worry about that mess -- you can clean it up in the morning," hubby cheerfully tells her) and then turns to her infant daughter Kayla for advice. "Tell me what to do," Olivia whispers to the baby and although it's unlikely the child replied "hit the road," that's Olivia's next move.
Fast-forward 18 years, and Kayla, still clueless about her mom's true identity, has turned into an exotic beauty who wins dinner with the now-successful Olivia in a radio contest. Yes, the mother and child reunion is only a filet mignon away, but when Olivia drops her little love bomb, Kayla crabs she wants nothing to do with "America's crown princess, who does everything for needy children, but left one of her own behind."
Can the promise of superstardom override the heartache of abandonment? Olivia thinks so, and uses her clout and connections to turn Kayla into a sensation. This is one of those stories in which the wide-eyed ingenue comes to New York one day, lands an agent and a record deal before unpacking her bags and has the Number Two song in America before week's end. But even though mom goes to extremes to please, there are still trials aplenty before the big finale in which Kayla struts her stuff in front of a sold-out audience of the best-behaved teens in history. It's easily the least credible concert scene since Barbra Streisand sang "Woman in the Moon" to silence an arena full of rowdy rockers in "A Star Is Born."
At least the producers of "Platinum" allowed Brandy to throw a couple of her hits ("Have You Ever?" and "Almost Doesn't Count") on the soundtrack, although the woefully staged production number that accompanies "Happy" is embarassingly silly with some of the worst choreography since the last Lynda Carter variety special.
As evidenced by her work in her UPN series "Moesha" and last year's "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer," Brandy the actress has a certain quiet charm. When she tries to convey rage or grief however, she's well outside her range and the results are amateurish. In her defense, the character of Kayla as written seems almost schizoid, going from cherub to shrew and back at the drop of a hat.
Like any piece of classic cheese, "Platinum" gives both its stars several memorably overwrought lines: "I was a real person once," "You don't get any prizes for abandoning your baby," and "Let me mend your heart, even though I'm the one who broke it" are some choice examples. Yes, this is a terrible movie, gracelessly directed by Robert Allan Ackerman and crowned by a would-be showstopping disco romp by Ross that shouldn't give Cher any sleepless nights. But for fans of high-gloss nonsense, there hasn't been anything to equal this since Whitney Houston was cast as an Oscar-nominated actress in "The Bodyguard." Fiascos of this magnitude don't come along every day and deserve to be savored. James Sanford
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