‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’ Director Lisa Cortés on Bringing the Rock & Roll Icon to Life in New Documentary

When Richard Wayne Penniman died on May 9, 2020 of bone cancer, he had long retired from the public eye. COVID was gripping the nation and the world was in various stages of lockdown. At the age of 87, the pandemic gave the man better known as Little Richard a chance to once again grab the spotlight. 

With everyone at home and online, the news of his death introduced younger generations to the grandfather of rock and roll. His death also sparked interest in his life by producer, director and former label executive Lisa Cortés. She looked for films or documentaries on him and found… nothing. Shocked that such an iconic figure didn’t have one, she decided to make one.

The Academy Award nominee and Emmy Award-winning producer and director of documentaries such as All In: The Fight for Democracy (2020) and The Remix: Hip Hop Fashion (2019) is not new to filmmaking. Still, she questioned how to approach telling the story of a person who was larger than life.

“My process was to start with the source, which was Richard,” Cortés says, calling Billboard from a hotel room in Chicago. “I read his biography [The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock by Charles White] which was a lot of fun and very colorful. One of the things that became very apparent as I was doing research was this idea that Richard put forth of not feeling that he received his due, his recognition for his contributions. I knew then that I wanted Richard to narrate his story. I wanted to give the microphone to Mr. Penniman. Specifically, to give him agency that he felt had been denied to him at times.”

Cortés’ film, Little Richard: I Am Everything, was acquired by Magnolia Pictures after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and begins streaming on Prime Video, Apple TV and several other platforms Friday (April 21). Its story is told through archival footage of Little Richard performances and interviews, as well as by those who knew and worked with him. The film follows him from his childhood in Macon, Georgia, through the many ups and downs of a long and storied career. It adeptly reveals the layers that influenced the person who became the performer no one could ignore. It is also the story of rock and roll’s birth, queer culture, and being a Black gay man in America. 

“In making documentaries there’s always twist and turns, things that you find out — like being introduced to [pioneering transgender rights activist and performer] Sir Lady Java,” Cortés says. “In telling this story I did go into it with a desire to center his amazing contribution. Through research and our interviews and archival footage we show people that when he arrived on the scene in 1955, there was really no one like him. He might have been influenced by artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Brother Joe May, or [Little Richard co-writer and piano player] Esquerita, but he brings innovation on multiple levels through his musicality, lyrics, through the way he dresses and presents himself, through the way he messes with gender fluidity.”

When she began her two-year journey of making the documentary, Cortés had the music and the visual of the man Little Richard presented. “But I didn’t know all of the things that made up Richard, and all of the people who he was generous with and helped,” she explains. These people included a young Jimi Hendrix, who played guitar in Richard’s band, as well as Richard introducing Billy Preston to the Beatles when they were in search of a keyboardist for their debut album, and in 1955, sending an unknown singer named James Brown to perform as Little Richard when he couldn’t. The latter stunt worked because people didn’t know yet what Little Richard looked like.

Cortés interviewed over two dozen people, including Mick Jagger, Billy Porter, John Waters and Tom Jones, as well as a number of scholars. “They’re there, as you can see in the film — oftentimes to be in conversation with him to question what he presents as fact — but we as an audience might have a different perspective on,” she says.

In allowing Little Richard to tell his story in the film, there was a theme that permeated throughout: Appropriation and obliteration.

“Why is it that we know Elvis and Pat Boone’s covers of ‘Tutti Frutti,’ and see Elvis as the King of Rock and Roll, and we don’t put Richard on that same platform?” Cortés wonders. “I’m interested in this idea of, ‘Why do we elevate an Elvis as a culture and not elevate a Little Richard?’ By not elevating a Little Richard, by the erasure of the tremendous scope of his innovation and cultural impact … it’s a discredit [to him].

“This film is like my testimony of, ‘This is why Little Richard is the bomb’ — because you might not know, but way back when, he started so many things that affect music and culture now,” she continues. “You do not have a Prince if you don’t have a Little Richard, and I would dare say you don’t have a Lil’ Nas X. These artists are incredible in their own right, but they are part of the progeny, the imagining of, ‘I’m going to be the prettiest person out there in my presentation.’ This intersectional… this interSEXional… conversation that he brings is still happening now. He is not in the past tense, and even though his physical being is no longer with us, he is still with us creatively and socially.”

Little Richard: I Am Everything – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack will be released on Varèse Sarabande Records digitally on June 16, with CD & LP releases to follow.