Before Todd Haynes was catapulted into the spotlight by his more mainstream works, he directed a short film called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which chronicled the last 17 years of singer Karen Carpenter‘s life and her death from anorexia.
The 1988 movie, written and produced by Haynes and his longtime collaborator Cynthia Schneider, quickly became a cult classic before being pulled from distribution in 1990 after Haynes lost a copyright lawsuit to Carpenter’s brother, Richard Carpenter, who was the other half of the popular band The Carpenters.
Since then, the movie’s legacy has lived on with bootlegged copies littering the internet and outlets, like Entertainment Weekly, recognizing it as one of the best cult movies and issuing a plea for a rerelease.
Haynes — who went on to direct I’m Not There, Carol, and Dark Waters — revisited Superstar after receiving a Queer Visionary Award from NewFest ahead of the screening of his latest movie May December, starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.
“A Carpenters song came on the radio, on a speaker, and I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I hadn’t thought about Karen Carpenter since she died from anorexia,” Haynes said during a Q&A. “The subject matter deepened and got layered in the retrospective look back at her life and hearing that voice that carried such suffering in it — but that we all made fun of it, at the time, and how superficial we thought that music was — deeply penetrated me when I heard it.”
The director recalled, at that moment, thinking “That is what we should make a movie about.”
In addition to music by The Carpenters and documentary footage, Superstar famously uses Barbie dolls as actors, which was Haynes’s initial idea because he wanted to “do a movie without actors” that still followed a narrative form and genre closely.
The Carpenters, who were active from 1965 to 1983, sung the hit songs “Close to You,” “Superstar,” and “Top of the World.” Karen Carpenter tragically died on February 4, 1983 at age 32 after suffering from heart complications as a result of her struggling with anorexia.
Haynes’s latest work May December is a boundary-pushing, dark comedy-drama about an actor studying the life of a woman who caused a scandal with her inappropriate relationship with an underage boy, which has carried into their adulthood. The actor spends ample time with the couple and their children, and members of the community, to try and make sense of her impending role. The movie releases November 17, 2023 in theaters before streaming on Netflix on December 1, 2023.
NewFest runs through October 24, 2023 in New York City with Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers screening as the closing night film.