God Bless Ozzy Osbourne
Documentaries
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1h 33m
Ozzy Osbournes’ four-decade track record as a culturally relevant musical artist is unprecedented, but his personal struggles have been shrouded in myth and secrecy. In some ways, Ozzy’s fame has been predicated on his prodigious drug and alcohol intake, his musical accomplishments overshadowed by his “Madman” persona.
Emerging from a working class family in war-torn England, Osbourne and his neighborhood friends formed Black Sabbath and invented heavy metal. For ten years, Ozzy was happy to feed the myth of the Rock and Roll Wildman, living a life that was extreme even by the most bacchanalian standards of his chosen profession.
The life worked for a while, but then it began to back-fire. He lost his family, his wife, even his livelihood when Black Sabbath fired him. The glamour had been leached away, the fun had faded. What was left was an alcoholic with a death sentence.
Astonishingly, he resuscitated himself back from the brink of extinction, thanks in no small part to his wife and manager Sharon, who engineering a comeback that was as unlikely as it was triumphant. Ozzy became one of the biggest-selling artists of the 80’s, recording the albums BLIZZARD OF OZZ and DIARY OF A MADMAN – records that remain cultural touchstones for three generations of music fans. The opening riff of Osbourne’s song “Crazy Train” is as familiar now as The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or The Beatles’ “Day Tripper.”
The Madman persona was solidified when Ozzy bit the head off of a dove during a record company meeting. Then he bit into a bat onstage. He was Crazy. He loved it, and his fans loved it even more.
But the good times didn’t take. Tragedy befell Osbourne when his musical collaborator Randy Rhoads was killed in a plane crash while on tour in 1982. Rhoad’s passing, along with the death of Osbourne’s father, sent Ozzy into a tailspin that lasted almost 30 years. Even when Osbourne was reborn as a Reality-TV icon with his show “The Osbournes,” he was lost to his addictions, a major success even at the lowest ebb of his life.
God Bless Ozzy Osbourne is the first rock documentary to tell the story of a major icon’s torturous and emotionally fraught journey to sobriety, which Ozzy regards as his greatest accomplishment. Featuring interviews with his brothers and sisters, as well as Jack, Sharon, Aimee and Kelly Osbourne, God Bless Ozzy Osbourne is a film about the intoxicating rush of success and the redemption that comes from pulling away from the very thing that made you successful.
Featuring never-before seen footage uncovered from the archives and interviews with Sir Paul McCartney, Tommy Lee, Henry Rollins and others, God Bless Ozzy Osbourne is the first documentary to take viewers inside the mind and psyche of a legendary and timeless cultural figure.
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