Hold you he is, folks, it should tie. People pay good money
to see this movie. When they go out to a theater. They want
cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone
for ten podcasting isn't boring, but as four thousand, forty ten, board
and forty two. If you look while we're doing from four thousand and forty
ten forty two, if you everry drag Queen's dream, I'd say we're making
this public stagument about the connection between Barbie. There is no annex. The
decision to get implanted and they turn into a horrible nightmare. What I've got,
barbiere I found a hole in the market. There was no a dol
doll with which a child could truly dream her dreams of her future. You
are very clumsy, Fritz. You know I'm not wearing you. I am
absolutely positive that there are a ton of people out there doing kinkier things with
their Barbies than we do. This is Francy. She was the first official
black Dale put out as a cousin of Barbie. She did not go over
bed. I have dolls that her kame, have dolls that her straight.
I have dolls that it never had relationships that I have some that are falling
in loud. Nobody's divorced yet they I'll switch around all the time. It's
very open, you know. There aren't a lot of rules. I've had
one since I was a kid. She's a wonderful thing. I love her.
I think I'll take her. Hey, folks, welcome to a special
episode of the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this
episode, I'm talking with Susan Stern. She's the director of Barbie Nation.
It is the unauthorized story of Barbie. Though the film is having its twenty
fifth anniversary, it is still a very fresh look at the Barbie phenomenon and
a great primer for any films that might be coming out this summer that have
anything to do with Barbie. It's now streaming. Hope you enjoy the movie,
and I hope you enjoy the interview. Before we even talk about Barbie
NASA, can you tell me your background. I was a journalist. I
was an investigative reporter. My last newspaper was the Oakland Tribune, and my
last television station was the CBS affiliate in San Francisco, and that led me
to start making documentaries. My late husband was an underground cartoonist. I have
another film out called Bad Attitude, the art of Spain Rodriguez, and he
was part of that scene. And so a good friend of ours was terry's
Wigoff, who made the film Crumb. And my late husband, Spain was
in the Crumb movie. So I was around that and I thought, gee,
Terry, who had been working at the Welfare office, if he can
make a documentary, I bet I can make a documentary. And Barbie Nation
was just being rereleased in the new director's cut, was my first film.
What brought about Barbie Nation that I have to blame on my daughter? She
was four and a half years old. Somebody gave her a barbied out,
wasn't me. And then you put barbies in a dark place, and they
begin to breed in the dark, and you open up the cupboard and suddenly
you have twenty. You thought you had one. You have no idea how
they got there. But she had one Barbie doll, and it was being
jealous of a different Barbie doll. And I said to her in my best
feminist voice, Norah, women don't have to be jealous of other women,
and she just looked at me and said, how about her? First we
play what I want to play, and then we can play what you want
to play. And I thought that was so funny, and I told her
to other people, and then they told me they're Barbie stories, and then
I had to just get a camera and get them all down. What is
your Barbie story, Mike? There's really only two types of people in the
world. There's the Barbie glorifiers and the Barbie defilers. And apparently I was
just hearing about some European politician who got into trouble because she revealed that she
was a Barbie defiler. And I was a Barbie defiler, which meant that
as a little girl I was six, I get the very first Barbie doll.
I first ended was cut off her ponytail, and then her hair was
only rooted around the edges of her scalp, and so her head was completely
bald. So it just fell down and she was bald, and that it
was a traumatizing event for me. Was that your only Barbie? Or did
you get more? That was more? Only Barbie? Then they got with
some other doll and I dislocated her hip. I don't know what it wasn't
I didn't mean it. But again, in Barbie Nation, we've got all
these people who did things to their Barbie dolls. Boys they would talk about
throwing the barbie doll up in the tree and shooting it. Another boy blew
it up with cherry bombs. I think there's something very powerful about this doll
that brings out all sorts of things in us. So tell me about the
making of the original version. You told me a little bit about how it
came about. Now you pick up the camera, you start recording these stories.
But you go all over the place with somebody. You've got the whole
conventions, all of these things. How did you even approach this huge subject.
Yeah, I'm an investigative reporter. So I got hold of it and
I started meeting barbie dealers. Sandy Holder is a Baria San Francisco Barrea dealer.
She's in the film. She's still dealing barbies. She introduced me to
people. I got involved with the San Francisco Barbie Doll Club. They introduced
me to people. The next day, it just bill and then and then
I had this with this film, this incredible reporter's karma where I went to
Mattel when I was first making the film, and they said, first of
all, we're not making a film about Barbie. Back in the day,
they didn't want to do that, and you're not either. But I consulted
lawyers and they said I could do it. And then I ran into Mattel
people at one of these Barbie conventions and we hit it off and they gave
me access. They gave me access to the old Barbie doll commercials. They
let me come to their own Barbie Doll festival, where I met Ruth Handler,
the inventor of Barbie and the founder of Mattel. She had hit it
off, and one thing just led to another. One of the incredible things
in the film is the notorious Barbie Doll X ray. And that was one
of my favorite Karma stories because I was at some bus stuff and I just
tend to talk to people I've maken a film about Barbie, and someone said,
have you seen the Barbie X ray? And I said no, And
it turned out that there was this X ray that was in a file in
a healthcare facility that I obviously won't name, and they said, everybody knows
about it that works there. And they smuggled my camera person into the hospital
and would put the X ray on a light table and got an image of
it. Sometimes the universe whispers to you, this is what you're supposed to
be doing. Ruth just herself is such a fascinating figure outside of what she
did with Arby, but all of the work. I'm a towel and all
the toys. What a fascinating person. Ruce Handler, she was amazing.
I love the fact that in Barbie Nation you get the love story between Ruth
and her husband Elliott, because she was the business person behind Mattel and she
came up with the idea of Barbie based on a German sex style. The
family saw a vacation in Europe. But her husband, Elliott, he was
really the artist and he invented hot wheels, which was the toy for boys,
and he did these sculptures in loose sight, and he's in the film
as well. And they even invited their daughter, Barbara Siegel, who Barbarie
is inspired by, and she's in the film as well, which is amazing.
So what happens after the original version as complete. One of the big
regrets of my life was that in nineteen ninety seven. When we made the
original version, I did quite an extensive interview in two different places with a
woman named Marcella who collected Black Barbie dolls, and I got really into the
story of Black Barbie and black dolls, and it got so big we couldn't
fit it into the film, and so we didn't put it in the film.
And I always regretted that there's a new film out right now just coming
out called Black Barbie, which really does tell the whole story that I wanted
to tell. And with that film out, I went back myself personally and
cut our Black Barbie section back into the film. So the twenty fifth anniversary
director's cut is different because it has this section in it, and whereas it
doesn't tell the whole story of Black Barbie, it tells some of it,
and so I'm very happy with that. Was it the Greta Gerwig film coming
out that made you decide to do this? Were you like, Oh,
I've always wanted to do this, and this is just a good opportunity.
I've always wanted to do it because Barbie Nation was created in nineteen ninety eight
pre streaming, so it wasn't streaming. It had a big life in colleges
and universities. I'll run it into people now it says, wait a minute,
I studied that film in women's studies or DBT studies or gender studies because
the film speaks to all those things so much. They saw it in college.
But it never had any popular viewing. It wasn't streaming. And so
when I heard the Greta Gerwig film was coming out, I thought, Okay,
this is my chance. Let me see if I can get this out,
because it's such a great companion to the Gretty girwingg film. Because I
think the Gretta Gerwig film seems amazing, but they have to wink at everything.
They're really on this tightrope of making a PG thirteen film for kids,
and yet it's wink, wink, what are Barbie can doing at night?
Where's Barbie Nations? It's like we go there, we you know where the
growing film winks. Barbie Nation doesn't blink. It goes into all of the
things people do with Barbie other than cutting in the black Barbie stuff. What
else did you do with the twenty fifth anniversary? We tried to clean it
up a little bit. It is an SD format boy, that seemed great
at the time, and of course it's different. It's a different it's the
four by four aspect ratio. But we tried to clean up the titles and
other things a little bit too compensate for the fact that it is a classic
film. The format is quaint to go back and look at something like from
ninety eight, But then the subject matter does feel like it's so fresh.
It feels like that, but it's also it feels like an island of sanity.
It just occurred to me the other day rewatching Barbie Nation, that there's
a fashion show in it, and people were into Barbie. Do these elaborate
fashion shows where people make Barbie costumes for themselves and then wear these costumes and
do a fashion show. There's a very beautiful one. It's filmed at a
Barbie convention in Birmingham, Alabama, and people wear these clothes and in this
fashion show there's people of all shapes and sizes. There's a child modeling and
the fashion show and there's a stressing couple modeling in the fashion show. And
it's okay, how about that. Nobody die, no ulcer nerve harm.
People can just get along. And these days it just feels, you know,
these haters, we're coming out and just making it hearts. Where all
did you go to make the documentary? You just looked about Alabama now shot
stuff from the Bay area. Where else did you go? We went to
Birmingham, Alabama for this Barbie convention. We went to Orlando, Florida for
the big Mattel Barbie down convention that was there. We went all over the
San Francisco Bay area, and we went to Los Angeles, of course,
to shoot at Mattel headquarters. Mattel invited us in and we filmed their publicity
people. We filmed in their headquarters in Los Angeles. We also filmed Ruth
and Elliott Handler in their Los Angeles penthouse. We had a wonderful former marking
person for Mattel and he was in Los Angeles. And this is again before
Kickstarter or any go Go or any of these platforms. How are you funding
this? We made it for very little. I made it with I was
a student. I had been as I said, a newspaper reporter. I
had worked for the CBS affiliate at San Francisco, and I went back to
school at San Francisco City College to learn video production because newspapers were dying.
I was at the beginning of it was at the beginning of that time when
my newspaper that I worked for, the Oakland Tribune, went bankrupt, and
so we just did it as students. That's how we began Barbarnation, just
trician I. We borrowed equipment from the Film and Television department at San Francisco
City College and we just went out and did it so it didn't cost anything.
After that, we got some grants from Women in Film, the Pacific
Pioneer Foundation, but we made it really a shoestring. I tend to think
of newspapers dying later than when you were making this movie. But then I
remember, even here in Detroit, we had the Detroit operating an agreement where
it was the Free Press and the Detroit News operating as one that couldn't afford
to run into newspapers. So I guess it was the Internet really was the
nail in the coffin, and not necessarily the whole cause of the decline of
newspapers, right. What was Craigslist that began the decline because took away all
the advertising from newspapers and so it began, So that decline began in the
eighties after Barbie Nation came out. Obviously, you talked about how people did
see it, watch it in school. Where else did it play? It
premiered on PBS's POV series, the Point of View Series, which was amazing
that they put that on. They had me pixelate the penises. I had
to do that again for its stream. So nothing has changed changed in that
twenty five years. People can't see plastic genitals, and it in broadcasting was
still going then. So it played around the world on television and it did
many festivals. It won the Golden Spire for Documentary at the San Francisco International
Film Festival. It premiered the south By Southwest Film Festival. It was sold
out in all of these places. I feel very lucky that I got to
see an unpixelated version. Oh yes, I'm glad. I'm sure it's damaged
you and I'm sorry about that. Yeah, I don't know. Between seeing
people cross dressing and that plastic penises, I'm probably going to go shoot up
the office. I don't know what I said to the person at PBS when
they said to me. Man called me and he said, I'm sorry Susan,
we're going to have to pixelate the penises. I said, that's probably
a good idea, because we don't want little girls to grow up to think
that they're all really that big. He did a laugh. But yeah,
so you get that. You are now going to be able to stream this
where all is it going to be playing? What? Starting today? It
starts today? It is? It is live now. It is. Barbie
Nation is live now on Amazon, it's the Apple TV app, and it's
on Google Play, and it's on Roco's YouTube channel. So if people just
go to Barbaration dot com, all those links are up on our website and
that's easy to find. That's fantastic. How about the rest of your work?
Where's that at? My other new film, Bad Attitude The Art of
Spain Rodriguez is also on Amazon. It's on two B. That's about to
play in Sweden actually at a comic at festival there. Bad Attitude is fun
because I had to deeply censor that because my late husband's work was very explicit,
and with that I put fig leaves on everything. So I have these
thirty eight beautiful fig leaves over everything. Add Attitude The Art of Spain Rodriguez.
I don't know, I just like getting into trouble. What else are
you working on these days? I'm actually thinking about ways because you may have
noticed stuff gotten older. I'm actually more interested in amplifying other people's voices now,
So I'm looking at some ways to work with younger people on their creative
expression and help other people get what they have to say out there. Is
there a good place for people to keep up with you and your work online?
Yeah, Barbie Nation dot com. Barbye Nation. That's where I'm going
to be. We're also Barbie Nation doc or Susan Edith Stern. I'm on
social media all over the place, but yeah, Barbie Nation Doc. It's
a place to go. Mister, And thank you so much for your time.
This is so great talking with you. Yeah, it was really fun,
Mike, Thank you for having me on. Hi you, Bobby,
you want to go for a ride John down in the Bobby World blacking planting.
It's fantastic. You can brush their hair and rust me everywhere. Imaginations
that is your creation. Come for me. Let's go party in the body
world at Santa You will rust my head. I don't see everywhere imaginations that
is your creations. I'm a flashing fan that you work with me up,
make time. I'm not Doly, You're my tall rock and roll feel the
climb or thanks be here, trust, be there, hack banking, you
can utch, you can say be saved. I'm a bobbing in the body
world, landing and nation a barb Let's go party. Come on forbul Let's
go party. Come on be Let's go party. Come on, Rbu,
Let's go party. Make me walk, make me ain't got you being my
friend? Then I do again in the sounds old around and to party.
You can you come on, Morbu, Let's go party. Come on Forbula
go party. Come on the Barby, Let's go party. Come on Barby,
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the Bobby everywhere ninety days and your free Asian. Come on Barby, let's
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Let's go party. Come on Harby, Let's go party. Having so
much time? Well bowen, we're just getting started. However, all you can