David Hast: Scott, have you seen Superstar, the Karen Carpenter Story?
Scott Vander Werf: I saw Superstar, the Karen Carpenter story back in the late 1980s, 1988. It was brought to UICA, Ray Street Gallery at the time, and Todd Haynes, the director, did speak there and presented the movie.
DH: I also saw it in 1988, in March 1988, at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago. And Todd Haynes was there and spoke. I was also on a jury of the Onion City Film Festival in 1987. Somehow I got picked for that and we were selecting movies for this festival and it's a long story, but the supervising juror rejected it. It was not shown. Although some of us loved it, but it was not shown in this festival. And then the next year Todd Haynes was able to come to Chicago and show the movie.
SVW: And what people, if people don't know the thing that really resonates about this movie is that it's a student film for when Todd Haynes was at Bard College. That's when he made the film and he used Barbie dolls, Barbie and Ken dolls for the different characters, including Karen and Richard Carpenter.
DH: Yeah, Todd Haynes is a well-known independent filmmaker now. He's made movies like Carol, Far From Heaven, The Velvet Gold Mine, others, but like the thing that made him famous and that he's first and foremost in many people's minds for is this movie, Superstar the Karen Carpenter Story, which is now essentially banned. It can't be shown because of various legal reasons.
SVW: I mean, was Richard Carpenter sued and actually the final decision was in 1990 and it really resolved. It resolved around the portrayal of the family, as more than anything, it was using the Carpenter's music without having licensing or paying for it.
DH: Yeah. What happened there was he made this movie. It's about really about Karen Carpenter, not just as a singer, also her private life and her tragedy. Karen Carpenter died from the effects of anorexia at 32 years old. But Todd Haynes loved Karen Carpenter's voice and he made this movie about her life, controversially using Barbie dolls and all that, and he used the Carpenter's real music. So when Richard Carpenter sued and said, you can't use the music, Todd Haynes could have just gotten a cover band and someone's voice copying her. But what he has said clearly was, I couldn't do that. It's about Karen Carpenter and it's a serious movie and I can't just have somebody else singing her songs. So he just elected, he lost the case. He wasn't going to be able to get permission. And so the movie has never been shown. It's essentially, that's part of its notoriety. It's become this like cult film. It's basically, you can see like bad fourth generation VHS dubs of it. You can find it on places like YouTube, but it's never going to be shown in its original form because it's forever violating copyright.
SVW: It was bootlegged on VHS and available from places like Film Threat and other sort of underground distributors of things that were not licensed at the time during the 90s, I think. And that's probably where if you look online and search online, you can probably find it. And you'll see that essentially it's an old VHS copy that's online.
DH: Right. And what you'll see is just the audacity of this movie. I mean, this movie, compared to a movie like Barbie, which people thought was so controversial, it makes Barbie look like the lightest of fair by comparison, if you're talking about Barbie dolls. But his point, why did he use Barbie dolls, well, it was a brilliant choice on Todd Haynes' part. Barbie dolls can only smile, no matter what's going on. They exist to be controlled and moved around by other people. And his point was, this mirrored what Karen Carpenter's life was like. She was an incredible success. She had a voice that I read one critic that said, she sounded like an emissary from a private world. She was, there was no voice like hers. She was incredibly beautiful, but she had this completely troubled and ultimately tragic life. And his commentary using Barbie dolls is his commentary on what in society creates this kind of eating disorder in women who are essentially victims of society's demands, and also her family’s. And he shows the family being really like part of it, which is also part of why Richard Carpenter probably didn't want the movie shown.
SVW: And if you actually look at a...either articles or there's a Little Girl Blue as a biography, a written biography of Karen Carpenter. And in those, he was very accurate in a lot of ways in terms of portraying the family, the parents being very controlling, particularly the mother, the fact that they lived at home into their twenties and Karen died in the home at the age of 32. After she had gotten divorced, she moved back in with her parents. My own personal experience in terms of watching the movie, remember hearing about it leading up to the screening and thinking and hearing about how this is going to be this kitschy campy, it's going to be hilarious. And it really, it took me back that how serious it is, as you say, it's, it's, it's, it's a very sincere movie in terms of portraying Karen Carpenter. And also it was, it was my first exposure to anorexia.
DH: Yeah, that's an interesting thing. It turns out it was one of the first movies to honestly portray anorexia, this little independent student film that was impossible to see. But when it first came out, like you said, there are parts you're laughing. I mean, he is using Barbie dolls. And when it first came out, people thought it was going to be kitschy. Also, people thought he was mocking Karen Carpenter, making fun of things she did to be thin. And maybe because of the irony created by the Barbie dolls, people had this expectation, but you know, when I watched it again recently, for the first time in decades, I found it to be quite powerful. I recalled that it seemed funny, but this time it didn't really, that seemed funny at all. The humor is dark humor. We're not laughing at Karen Carpenter. She's definitely portrayed sympathetically. And Todd Haynes has been very clear that unlike many of us back in the 70s who were like, we're listening to Led Zeppelin, we're too cool for the Carpenters. You know, they're too old fashioned, clean cut. Haynes loved Karen Carpenter and the Carpenter's music.
SVW: Well, it's funny you say that because I grew up on Led Zeppelin was my favorite rock band in the 70s for about a six-year period. I was into everything from Aerosmith and Kiss. I was in the Kiss Army in 1976 and I also I grew up in the Detroit area. So I listened to CKLW, which was the top 40 station out of Windsor that was also the number one top 40 station in the greater Detroit area and the Carpenters were all over that station. I loved the Carpenters music at the time. My parents, when I was around 11 years old, my parents took my little brother and I to Pine Knob and I saw the Carpenters in concert. It was either the first or second year that Pine Knob existed in Pontiac. So the Carpenters music was a part of my life, even as I was listening to hard rock.
DH: Yeah, you know, for me, I have to say, looking back, it was like a guilty secret because, of course, if you'd brought up something like the Carpenters, I would have made fun of them when I was a kid in the 70s right but when I think back to those songs I loved them all and they had so many top 10 hits it's amazing.
SVW: Now it's interesting in terms of the fact that I could not find anything online when looking at documentation on this movie that Mattel had anything to do with stopping this movie from being shown I don't remember Todd Haynes saying anything about it but I think it was the people at UICA were talking about the Mattel who are the manufacturers of the Barbie dolls were stamping out this movie as well. But maybe that maybe it didn't get that far.
DH: That was an incorrect thing that I remember hearing that at the time too, but it actually wasn't because it turns out they used some of the dolls in it aren't even Mattel Barbie dolls. They used a lot of dolls. They found it like flea markets and things. And so, it was a mix. And so, I think Mattel just sort of let it go. And ultimately the real lawsuit was from the Carpenter family.
SVW: Now, I don't remember, the one thing that I don't remember was anything really that Todd Haynes said in speaking about the film other than the sort of the things that we've already talked about. Do you remember him talking more about this film?
DH: Yeah, I do. And it was interesting because the screening I was at might have been like how a lot of them went. Because I can remember there a couple of women in the audience were very upset that they both identified themselves as people who had anorexia and the audience had been laughing a lot, right? Maybe the audience has laughed more than they now than then than they would now, but Haynes was you know trying to explain all these things that we've talked about right now a guy in the audience stood up He was really interesting this guy with it. I remember it so clearly this was so long-ago gentleman with an Eastern European accent, He said, the thing about “art is it can be both tragic and funny at the same time.” That really stuck with me to this day
SVW: And you can really see it in this film in terms of it's not just showing the rising star for this brother and sister team. There's a lot of montages about what was going on in 1969, 1970, 71, 72, the Vietnam War, what was going on with student protests and civil rights movement and also the presidency of Richard Nixon. In fact, there's a moment in the film where the people of the president for the president call up the Carpenter home and have invited the carpenters to perform at the White House. And it happens to be right around the time that Watergate is heating up.
DH: Well, yeah, that's one of the things they were actually, they did play in the White House and they point out, know, and they talk about how Nixon wanted something clean and an alternative to these protesters and all that. But yeah, that's a big part of the movie because...he's drawing an analogy there. It's pretty intellectual movie. Some of the titles that they have there are pretty academic sounding almost. But he's making a point. He's showing, like you said, you remember correctly, we're seeing bombs dropping on Vietnam. There's a couple of quick shots that look like they might be from the Holocaust. He's showing this incredible suffering of humanity that’s what's going on in the world and drawing an analogy or a metaphor with Karen Carpenter's tragic secret life.
SVW: And that's really goes to the heart of it that the fact that they are their music is very clean and their image is very squeaky clean. But there was behind the scenes a woman who was essentially killing herself.
DH: Yes, killing herself and not in control. Just as a Barbie doll is not in control of itself. She was not in control of her professional career to a great extent and she was not in control of her life.
SVW: And you know the other thing to think about that I think about in terms of this film is that it was made in 1987 and she died in 1983. So there's a funny 93 1993 must be. DH: She's right sorry 1983 is when she died he made the movie right after the movie in 1987 so that was just a four year period which is four years but that's really in the span of time that's really not that long. And the fact that he was able to get a lot of, now that we know, now that we’ve, with the biographies, with the documentaries that have been made, we know that he got a lot of the facts around the family circumstances correct.
DH: Yeah, yeah. And oh, and we should point out too, he did have a co-writer and really co-producer of this movie as well, named Cynthia Schneider. So this movie did have a woman's voice in it. He was the director, but she was...just as much behind the conception and making of the movie.
SVW: David, we both went to film school and one of the things in terms of rewatching it now all these years later that I really focused in on was some of there is there is some live action portrayal from people and you can kind of tell they're all students. They're all that age.
DH: Yeah, there's a voiceover narration that's done I think kind of poorly and that's one of the things I think people were laughing at. It seemed like parody almost. But if you got a professional narrator to do it instead, you'd be taking it more seriously.
SVW: And in terms of how the film sort of caught without giving any spoilers, I suppose, the avant-garde aspects of the film really sort of ramp up in the final 10 minutes of the film.
DH: Yeah, I agree.
SVW: So you were a program juror in 1987. Tell us more about that experience.
DH: It was just weird. Well, what I remember about this movie was there were several of us, there were about five of us, I think. A program juror, in this case, meant someone who gets to watch the movies that are submitted to the festival and then vote on whether they get played in the festival. So this is in late 1987. And what was odd about it was, I mean, this was not organized in a great way. The guy who supervised the program, jurors, made it clear to us that he had veto power, which we thought was really weird, and on this particular film, he exercised it. There were like, we as a majority thought, there were several of us that just thought it was great. We gave it like five out of five. And this guy was, whoever he was, was like, this is the biggest piece of trash I've ever seen. This will never be shown in the festival. And it wasn't. But then Todd Haynes, you know, he was invited back to Chicago five months later.
SVW: All right, well thanks for joining us.
DH: Thanks, Scott.
