It Happened Here

Richard Pryor was a comedy truth teller, who busted taboos about race, language, and sexuality. But what made Richard so raw and honest was also the source of his troubled and tumultuous personal life - bouts of addiction, domestic abuse, and host of other personal demons, culminating in a very public drug-induced meltdown on Parthenia Street in Los Angeles, where he lit himself on fire and ran down the street in an unhinged suicide attempt. 

John Belushi achieved international fame by expertly playing abrasive, obnoxious, and juvenile characters, both as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and in iconic films like The Blues Brothers and Animal House. Everything about Belushi was larger than life, and his desire to be the life of the party drove him down a dark path of substance abuse, culminating in his untimely death in 1982 at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. 

As an alternative rock legend, Kurt Cobain changes the course of music history with a single song.

In the mid 90's the infamous East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry was in full swing, and two of raps biggest icons - former friends The Notorious B.I.G, and Tupac Shakur - were caught in the middle of it. It was a battle that tragically cost both starts their lives before the end of the decade, in a pair of murders that remain unsolved to this day.

On August 5, 1962, silver screen legend Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her home in Brentwood, California. She was found by her housekeeper, face down on her bed, with an empty pill bottle at her side at the age of 36. Marilyn's life was full of mysteries and contradictions, and we'll visit the locations that tell her life story through that lens.

Soul music legend Marvin Gaye's life was cut short a day before his 45th birthday on April 1, 1984, when he was shot and killed by his own father in their family home in Los Angeles.

Legendary comedian Joan Rivers was a woman ahead of her time – the quintessential New York comic who paved the way for all female stand-ups who came in her wake. But her early life was filled with rejection, insecurity, and failure. And even after she did make it – and was primed to take over The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson – a series of mistakes and misunderstandings lead to the suicide of her husband Edgar in 1987, causing her own despair and depression that she nearly succumbed to. We'll visit the locations that shaped and impacted who Joan became – the street on Crown Heights in Brooklyn where she grew up; The Bitter End club in Greenwich Village, where a chance encounter with Lenny Bruce changed her life; the sprawling Bel Air mansion where she lived in the 1980s with her husband Edgar before his death; and a plastic surgeon's office in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where years after her remarkable comeback, she died after a botched operation. 

A look at John Lennon through some places that shaped his life. In Liverpool they include his childhood home on Menlove Ave, Strawberry Field and St. Peter's Church; and in New York his apartments in Greenwich Village and at The Dakota.

A talented singer, Janis Joplin breaks through rock 'n' roll's glass ceiling in the mid 1960s; a serious alcohol addiction and on-again off-again dalliances with heroin tragically cost Janis her life at the age of 27.

Andy Warhol was the target of a bizarre assassination attempt at the height of his fame.