Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Milli Vanilli’ on Paramount+, A Doc About The ‘80s Pop Duo And The Lip-Synching Lie That Destroyed Them

Milli Vanilli (now streaming on Paramount+) follows the Behind the Music/E! True Hollywood Story documentary format as it recounts the meteoric rise and wholesale cancellation of Robert Pilatus and Fabrizio Morvan, who debuted in 1988 as Milli Vanilii, became an international sensation with their 1989 single “Girl You Know It’s True,” and won the 1990 Grammy for Best New Artist, but were soon revealed to have lip-synched the entire thing. Morvan is interviewed extensively for Milli Vanilli, with background and context provided by music industry execs, MTV vets like Downtown Julie Brown, cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib, and music journalists Rob Sheffield and Gil Kaufman.        

MILLI VANILLI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: By 1988 and ‘89, as their single “Girl You Know It’s True” rocketed to the top five in 23 countries, the members of Milli Vanilli had begun to believe that the fame they’d always dreamed of was finally theirs. Robert “Rob” Pilatus and Fabrizio “Fab” Morvan had both been raised in tough backgrounds, Pilatus in Munich and Morvan in Paris, and found each other in the Munich dance scene as kids in their early twenties. It had felt like an opportunity when they came to the attention of successful German producer Frank Farian, were asked to sign a recording contract, and began to promote Milli Vanilli with dancing and appearances on European pop music shows. Success in America via MTV and radio was right around the corner. But the central fact of their career was still a blank. Pilatus and Morvan, with their Black faces and bodies, had become the stars of Milli Vanilli. But all along, Farian had arranged for different musicians to actually sing and perform the music. 

“I was nervous of being caught,” Morvan says in the contemporary interviews that frame Milli Vanilli. “That was something of which I was always, always very aware.” But with the single’s rapid rise and thousands of records being sold, Rob and Fab rode the lightning, and soon America was calling. The media coverage took a breathless turn, and created a spectacle around these two handsome men in spandex, brightly-colored shoulder pad jackets, and long braided hairstyles. In July ‘89, on an MTV-sponsored tour, the hard drive with the vocal track skipped, but execs from the duo’s US record label, the Clive Davis-founded Arista, decided they weren’t going to address it. (Milli Vanilli plays this recording anonymously.) And at the 1990 Grammy Awards, where they were nominated for Best New Artist alongside true legends like Soul II Soul, Neneh Cherry, and Indigo Girls, Milli Vanilli performed to prerecorded voice tracks in front of the music industry’s highest echelon. Of that climate, Hanif Abdurraqib observes, “People seemed to know what was up.” And in an archival recording, Pilatus concurs. “I knew at some point the truth would rise.” 

The truth did rise. In rival 1990 press conferences, Farian blamed Pilatus and Morvan while the duo blamed their former producer, plus the record companies and other music industry entities that had knowingly propagated the lie. “Rob and Fab deserved to be called out,” Gil Kaufman says. “But it was weird that people didn’t come down on Frank, and Arista and Clive [Davis] in the way that you would think.” Weird? Or another example of big money and power foisting blame onto the little guy? The Music biz churned on, Farian avoided accountability, deception became Milli Vanilli’s legacy, and by 1998, Rob Pilatus was dead of a suspected overdose on drugs and alcohol. The core lie always ate at him, Morvan says of his late friend. But performance and adulation – fame – was the real drug that had fueled both of them throughout. “That performance feeling allowed us to forget everything.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The recent documentary film Wham! explored the rise and demise of a different duo from the 1980s, a duo who overnight went from having nothing to being everywhere and who rode that pop stardom wave right into the history books. And a Milli Vanilli biopic, Girl You Know It’s True, has been produced with the cooperation of Morvan and includes Matthias Schweighöfer as Frank Farian, though its release date is still pending.   

Performance Worth Watching: There are a few deliciously squirmy moments in Milli Vanilli as the doc lets Arista Records personnel stew over direct questions about what and when and how much they knew about Rob and Fab’s lip-synching. A&R guy Mitchell Cohen says the label had to “take it on faith” as the truth, that what Frank Farian listed as having happened in the studio actually happened. “There was no reason to think not.” Except, of course, for the printed liner notes to All or Nothing, Milli Vanilli’s European debut, where its supposed lead singers received no official credit. 

Memorable Dialogue: “Do Rob and Fab deserve the Grammy?” Fab Morvan pauses for a beat. “We didn’t sing on the record, so…no. But for the pain and everything that we suffered, and the hard work that we put into it, did we deserve it? A very small part of me…says yes.”

Sex and Skin: None. Lots of footage of Rob and Fab in skintight Body Glove unitards, however, or with their shirts off, or both, as they dance their way across the flashy landscape of European and American television at the end of the 1980s. 

Our Take: Frank Farian refused to be interviewed for Milli Vanilli, and the film doesn’t push Farian associate Ingrid Segieth on her assertion that the duo’s US management and Arista Records conspired to pay off the producers of the Grammys in order to facilitate Milli Vanilli’s lip-synching on the show. But the doc’s larger point holds true, made by Fabrizio Morvan and critics and observers alike: the duo’s personal legacy does not deserve permanent tarnishment. They weren’t the first pop sensation to be crafted from artifice, to be built from music industry components and sold as a commodity. That they were two Black men who had to face the backlash personally, with no support from the moneyed interests who carried them into it, is what resonates from the Milli Vanilli story. While Farian was fine with exploiting Rob and Fab for their faces and bodies, Hanif Abdurraqib says, “he also seemed to think them foolish, and beneath him. He chose to get what he needed and dispose of them.” 

It’s that larger sense of exploitation, of toil and personhood being strip mined for external profit, that sticks out in Milli Vanilli. For all of his experience, the Fab Morvan who’s interviewed in his Amsterdam home is a man of serenity. Tears are shed for Rob Pilatus, who was consumed by the circumstances of their derailed career and his personal demons. But the story Morvan tells is one that bears similarities. Pop music mechanics were present before, during, and after Milli Vanilli.     

Our Call: STREAM IT. A lot of well-known 1980s names and faces pass through Milli Vanilli, as the lie central to the duo’s success surges and tears them apart. But ultimately it’s not a story simply about lip-synching and how not to get caught doing it. Rather, this doc wonders where a pop star really exists, on the spectrum between perception and truth.  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) 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.