Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over’ on HBO Max, An Interesting, Career-Spanning Survey Of A Veteran Performer With A Singular Voice And Style

Written and co-directed by Dave Wooley, Don’t Make Me Over premiered on CNN last January before migrating to its new home at HBO Max. And it’s a pretty conventional music doc, as format goes, tracing Dionne Warwick’s early life and career, her popular breakthrough and groundbreaking crossover to the pop music charts, and later work as a staunch advocate for AIDS research and even a host on the Psychic Friends Network.  

DIONNE WARWICK: DON’T MAKE ME OVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: A singer with an unmistakable voice and ease of performance, who has charted numerous hit singles, sold hundreds of millions of albums, and won six Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award, Dionne Warwick was once just a little girl in East Orange, New Jersey, where her talent was recognized and nurtured in the church of her minister grandfather. “Gospel will never be very far from what I do,” Warwick, now a regal 82, says in Don’t Make Me Over; “it’s just an innate part of me.” But while her faith and upbringing always guided her, it was Warwick’s professional seasoning in the recording studios of New York City that prepared her for a career as a performer. As Burt Bacharach puts it, she seemed to arrive fully formed, the ideal interpreter of the complex, artful pop songs he was writing with Hal David, and she made singles like “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Walk On By,” and “Say a Little Prayer” hits across R&B and pop radio. “They were just perfect works of art,” Elton John says of the material. “They were a bit like Picassos.”

In addition to John and Bacharach, Don’t Make Me Over includes testimonials from Alicia Keys, Gladys Knight, Gloria Estefan, Quincy Jones, Clive Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Carlos Santana. There’s a ton of vintage footage here, too, from Warwick’s earliest days in the studio of Savoy Records, to songwriting sessions for “Say a Little Prayer” around Bacharach’s piano, and TV appearances in both the US and Europe. Warwick herself fills in the narrative with voiceover and on-camera interviews, occasionally alongside Davis or her aunt and collaborator, Cissy Houston, and the spirit of Whitney Houston seems to drift peacefully through the entire production. Bill Clinton even drops by to sing a few bars of the Bacharach/David composition “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” which won Dionne Warwick her first Grammy Award in 1968. 

Warwick was the first African–American woman to win a Grammy in the pop music category, and even today she’s proud of her ability to bridge the limiting racial structures of the music industry, and flout what was expected of Black women. (A defiant Warwick had more than a few words for proponents of segregation in the American South of the 1960s.) And by the 1980s and ’90s, as Warwick became a vocal advocate for AIDS research as well as a spokesperson for the Psychic Friends Network, she proved she wasn’t going to slow down or back off. Just ask Snoop Dogg, who as a young man drew her ire for his misogynistic gangsta rap lyrics, and got a respectful but forceful earful about it straight from the woman herself.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? HBO Max also features Tina, the deeply told 2021 doc about the life and career of Tina Turner, as well as Amazing Grace, the 2018 film that explores the writing and recording of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album of the same name at Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. 

Performance Worth Watching: It’s an unexpected and incredible moment of game recognizing game when Marlene Dietrich appears in the career arc of Dionne Warwick. As Warwick prepared for some of her first performances in Paris at the Olympia Theater, the icon of stage, song, and sartorial splendor personally tossed most of the gowns she’d brought from the US right out of the dressing room. Dietrich proceeded to take her shopping for exclusive couture stagewear, Warwick says, “much to the chagrin of my accountants.”  

Memorable Dialogue: “Dionne was always the picture of elegance,” Smokey Robinson says. “In her dress, in her demeanor, in her delivery. She’s always been elegant.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing like that here. Rather, Don’t Make Me Over is an often sumptuous celebration of exactly what Smokey says, with Dionne Warwick appearing in a blur of colorful gowns and elegantly draped ensembles that track her eye for a sharp fit across six decades of professional life. 

Our Take: “I’m like, ‘Why is Dionne Warwick talking to me?’ This is like when your auntie who’s got all the wisdom and the money and the power come by Grandma’s house and be like, ‘Man, bring Snoop back here. I need to talk to him for a minute.’ Like, ‘What’d I do, Auntie?’ ‘Shut up, and just listen. Here’s what you gonna do. You gonna A, B, and C and if you gonna get to X, Y and Z, and I’m gonna leave it at that.’” Snoop Dogg’s recollection of the time Dionne Warwick called him and his Death Row Records crew to her home for a tough but fair talking to is one of the more memorable moments from Don’t Make Me Over, and another example of a time in the singer and performer’s life when she didn’t cower from personhood or confrontation. When Sam Cooke encouraged her to placate segregationists during a tour of the 1960s South, she did nothing of the sort. And when her early hits were marketed in Europe with a white woman on the cover art, Warwick didn’t shy from revealing and reveling in who she truly was. “Yeah, I ain’t white,” she remembers expressing to German and French and Spanish audiences when she arrived to perform. “I am a tempting, teasing brown, OK?”

There’s a lot to enjoy in Don’t Make Me Over, and Snoop isn’t wrong – Warwick’s demeanor really is like that of the wise and more than a little bit formidable older auntie that you respect, admire, kind of fear, and always long to be able to dress like.     

Our Call: STREAM IT. If anything, Don’t Make Me Over should feature more of today’s Dionne Warwick just riffing on stuff, but that’s what her lively Twitter feed is for. There’s plenty to like in this traditionally formatted music doc, from her classic material and beautiful voice to all of those timeless fits.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges