Miami Living Magazine features the best Miami has to offer. Click on any magazine below and enjoy. You can download our free app on iTunes. Ideal for iPad and iPhone users.
Issue link: https://digital.miamilivingmagazine.com/i/1501676
I had a chance to sit down with Brooklyn Sudano to discuss her mother, Donna Summer. Sudano and co-director, Roger Ross Williams do a brilliant job throughout the film of portraying who Donna Summer was as an artist, and mother, wife and human being. Throughout the film and in this interview, audiences catch a glimpse of a woman many loved, but few truly knew. This is the complex and storied life, and iconic music career of Donna Summer that continues to live on. Allison Kugel: What was your intention in creating this documentary about your mom? Brooklyn Sudano: I became a mom, and I didn’t have my mom, and so it brought up a lot of feelings and questions. I was a working mother, and so I thought, “I wonder what she would have done in this situation?” or “what did she do?” And I couldn’t ask her. Also, people and fans would come up to me and they would share their personal stories and their own memories with my mother or a particular song or album. I felt there was so much that people didn’t really know about her or fully understand. Even for the fans who loved her so deeply, I felt maybe they needed their own sense of closure to her life and her story. Allison: The title of the film, Love to Love You: Donna Summer, is based on her breakout song, Love to Love You Baby, which really launched her as an artist. I had never heard the original cut of that song until I watched this film. I’ve heard the radio edit of the song and then I watched the documentary and thought, “Ooooh, okay.” It’s very sexual. Brooklyn: I’ll say… provocative (laugh). Allison: Very Provocative. As her daughter, how does that hit? Brooklyn: I think it depends at what age you asked me that question. When I first discovered that song in the film, there was that moment of me going to my younger sister Amanda and saying, “Oh my gosh, do I have a crazy song for you!” We would go to my mom’s shows when we were younger, and she didn’t perform that song on stage anymore. So, it was really a whole revelation in terms of who she was to us in our own minds at that point. I think as we have gotten older, I think we understand the door that it opened for her, and she understood that this was going to be her entrée onto the world stage, and so she owned it. I think in so many ways it was very empowering to so many people to see and witness a woman, particularly a Black woman, be on stage and just own her own power. It was groundbreaking for the time. In terms of using that song as the title, obviously there is that Love To Love You [song] connection, but we also wanted it to feel like a love letter in a sense; Love to Love You: Donna Summer. Allison: The video clip of your mother singing, If There is Music There, later on in her career, I cried like a baby watching that. Your mother, Donna Summer, is one of the few singers who really embodied the character and the story of the song she was singing. She didn’t just sing the song. She became the song. Brooklyn: That is a perfect way to put it. She became the songs. I think that was really what set her apart. That’s why her music transcends decades and generations; it’s because of that very fact. I think that was one of her real gifts, was to really take each song individually and come from that emotional place to connect with her audiences. I think that is why her music transcends. Allison: What did you learn from your