“I didn’t want some namby-pamby, Ralph Lauren documentary,” Martha Stewart declared Monday night in Beverly Hills as she and filmmaker R.J. Cutler sat for an FYC event on the outdoor deck of the Maybourne Hotel to tout the Netflix docu “Martha.”
Stewart was responding to a question from moderator Dave Karger, a host of TCM, as to why she chose Cutler as the person to tell her life story in a feature documentary. Stewart added quickly that fashion mogul Lauren is a friend who lives “next door to me” in Connecticut. But she referred to the 2019 docu “Very Ralph” as something that Lauren “masterminded.” Cutler, on the other hand, had final cut on “Martha,” which premiered Oct. 30 on the streamer.
Stewart’s initial reaction to the film included some sharp criticisms of Cutler and the final product. That tension seems to have largely melted away as the two sat collegially together for a half-hour, followed by a schmooze-a-thon reception with Emmy Awards voters. Stewart cut quite a figure in a lemon-yellow pant suit and gold lame wedge heels.
In the view of many critics, “Martha” excelled because it placed Stewart and her legacy as a pioneering female entrepreneur and CEO. But Stewart suprised the packed crowd several times with comments about working with women. Once Stewart made up her mind to participate in a full-fledged documentary on her life, she interviewed at least four filmmakers. And she came to the conclusion that she wanted a man to tell her story.
“I had interviewed two women who were very accomplished documentarians, and I just wanted to work with a man,” Stewart said. Back in her business heyday, her Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia entity “was 70% women. So it was kind of fun to not work with yet another woman.”
Stewart obliquely addressed her earlier swipes at the film, including her complaints about unflattering camera angles. She acknowledged that there were aspects of her life that should have been amplified more — including the scale of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia at its early 2000s peak — but she also conceded to Cutler’s authority as the filmmaker. And she noted that her daughter and grandchildren gave it generally good reviews.
“I had given, and probably rightly so, final edit to R.J.,” she said.
Among other subjects, Stewart mentioned that she is experimenting with an A.I. program “for everyone who owns a home or homes,” and that she is at work on writing the autobiography for Random House that she unveiled last year.
Whatever R.J. didn’t discover, going through my my archives, I will be able to use in the in the autobiography,” she said. “It will not be 936 pages like Barbara’s, but it is chronological, and it is very interesting. It was an interesting process, and I’m glad I went through it.”
More to come
#Didnt #NambyPamby #Docu
