Yahoo News Before Barbie , there was Todd Haynes' infinitely weirder Barbie movie about Karen Carpenter
Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie may be poised to walk way with the summer box office — in an invisible heel, no less — but she's tip-toeing in the footprints of giants.
Back in 1987, when he was an an MFA student at Bard College, Todd Haynes co-wrote (with Cynthia Schneider) and directed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an experimental biographical short about the last 17 years of the iconic singer's life as she struggled with, and was ultimately consumed by, anorexia — using Barbie dolls.
Both Mattel and the Carpenter family had their own disputes with Haynes' film, for different reasons.
Harry Langdon/Getty; Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Karen Carpenter in 1981, left, and Margot Robbie in 'Barbie'
Indie producer Christine Vachon, who received a "Special Thanks" from Haynes for Superstar, told the audience at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, via Deadline, that Mattel paid a visit to their office when the film was released, but Haynes was one Barbie-toed step ahead of them.
"Todd bought all those dolls in garage sales," Vachon said. "They were Barbie rip-offs, so he was able to prove to Mattel that it was an off-brand. That it wasn't Barbie, but it was what you got if your parents couldn't afford Barbie."
With that bullet dodged, Haynes was free to get struck by another from Richard Carpenter, Karen's brother and bandmate, for the use of the Carpenters' music. Haynes didn't bother to seek permission for the songs he used in the film because, according to Vachon, "he didn't expect the film to blow up the way it did."
Richard Carpenter, who was upset at his and his family's portrayal in Superstar, sued Haynes and won for failing to obtain the proper rights to the music, thus blocking any potential theatrical release of the film. Still, that hasn't kept Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story from obtaining cult status.
"It pops up on YouTube all the time. It's kind of like Whac-A-Mole. It pops up and gets taken down. Pops up again and gets taken down, so you can almost certainly find it," Vachon said. "And now it's been restored. There's a wonderful version that keeps popping up and it's the true director's cut."
Haynes spoke with EW last year about Superstar, and seemed confident that its eventual public release is "going to happen — it will happen, yeah."
"There have been some legal opinions written about the film that seem favorable to a way through. But there's a lot more work that I need to do that I haven't had time to, which is annotate the film and provide all of the sources of information and so forth," Haynes told EW.
"It's been shown a couple of times, not announced publicly, and not for any fee, not for any ticket, under the terms of its cease and desist," Haynes continued. "But it has been remastered by UCLA and Sundance a couple years ago, and it looks so beautiful. Every time I see it now, I'm just like, Oh, man, I'm so lucky that we have this version out there."
But until Superstar is made widely available, Margot Robbie and co. will just have to suffice when it hits theaters on July 21.
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