Fantasia Barrino stars in film on her tough life
Right this very minute there are tens of thousands of hopeful young singers auditioning in front of bedroom mirrors who believe they could be the next "American Idol."
They are believers because they've seen other people come from nowhere to win fame and fortune on that TV show. One of the big reasons they think they can make it is Fantasia Barrino, a young woman who was down and out until she climbed "Idol's" ladder to stardom in 2004 to become Season Three's winner.
She has sold millions of CDs, has a mantel full of awards and has an autobiography in bookstores. Tomorrow night she adds "actress" to her resume when she stars as herself in "The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life Is Not a Fairy Tale" at 9 p.m. on Lifetime, with repeats Sunday at 8 p.m. and Monday night at 9.
The movie is based on her memoir, which she hopes will inspire others.
Of course, like teenage boys who dream of playing in the NFL or the NBA, most dreamers who watch won't go as far or as fast as she did. She has another message for them in the film when she says the biggest mistake she ever made was dropping out of school.
The movie opens after she's well on her way to becoming a finalist on "American Idol" and gets a visit from two of the show's staffers in her dressing room. It's a key scene in the film, and in her life story, and it touched off a controversy.
A producer and a PR agent ask Barrino if she has heard the Internet chatter about her not being a role model because she was a school dropout and a single mother. They say they have gotten a lot of calls and e-mails about it.
"We wanted to bring it to your attention and see what you wanted to do," one of them says. "Are you feeling pressure?" the other one asks. "The choice is up to you. You can quit -- no shame," she is told.
Never happened, say "American Idol" executives.
"Under no circumstances was she ever approached to be talked out of taking part in the show," executive producer Ken Warwick told the New York Post. "We knew she had a baby right from day one, and she was strongly tipped to win the competition because she was so good."
Warwick went on to emphasize that nothing about quitting "was even remotely suggested to her … it's a complete fabrication."
Barrino and Lifetime declined to comment, according to several media sources.
Several shows have been embarrassed in the past few years when it was disclosed that contestants had skeletons in their closets. Entrants are now carefully screened, but in this case, Barrino had not done anything illegal or dishonest, and her life was literally an open book, as we see in this biography.
In the film, she doesn't immediately answer the producers' suggestion that she quietly drop out but turns instead and looks into her dressing room mirror. She doesn't like the image from the past she sees there. It's flashback time.
We start with an account of a 5-year-old High Point, N.C., girl who sang with her musically inclined family at her grandmother's church and was a big hit.
As she grows up, the last thing her mother (Viola Davis) and her grandmother (Loretta Devine) want for her is for her to become a single teenage mom, as they did. But that's just what happens after she's conned by a boyfriend who tells her she's pretty.
It's her Achilles' heel. She's always wanted to be pretty and has been teased by girls in school who say she isn't.
When she calls her boyfriend to tell him she's pregnant, he claims he's not the father -- and says he's watching a game and can't be bothered.
Her life pretty much goes downhill from there. She quits school despite a teacher's insistence that she can learn. She winds up stealing milk and diapers for the baby and tries to make ends meet with odd jobs.
Then a friend shows her an ad for "American Idol" auditions in Atlanta and urges her to try out. For a moment she's that 5-year-old girl who believes in herself again, and she decides to go for it.
Back in the dressing room, she rejects the producer's suggestion to quit, saying she's given up on herself too many times in life and won't do it again.
In the end she beats out 70,000 others and gets the winning share of a record 65 million votes on the show.
It's hard to know what the truth is about the alleged suggestion that she withdraw -- but it's a good thing for "American Idol" that she didn't.
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