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Over the last several years, the documentary space has increasingly explored a topic that director Ursula Macfarlane and producer Alexandra Lacey say it never would have even just 10 years ago: wronged women.
“This film wouldn’t have been made in this way even five years ago — certainly, not 10 years ago,” doc director Ursula Macfarlane tells The Hollywood Reporter.
But for the new Netflix documentary, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, she and producer Alexandra Lacey weren’t necessarily aiming to redeem a woman who had been wronged by the media and society. “It was important for us to show that it wasn’t a redemption story. It’s much more complicated than that,” the director explains. “She had agency, but it wasn’t straightforward.”
Instead, the film — which dropped May 16 on the streamer — interrogates Smith and her journey from Houston to the arms of billionaire J. Howard Marshall through the rise of her own empire amid a tabloid circus and her dark end.
Between that, the film asks what role multiple industries — the obvious reality TV and tabloid media, as well as others like diet and weight loss companies — played in her public perception (and at times, humiliation).
But, through a series of interviews with those who knew her, archival photos and video, and more — including never before seen material — it also asks whether that frenzy that surrounded her was merely the result of a vicious culture repeatedly victimizing one woman. It also asks, whether Smith was a street smart single mother who wielded the tools of entertainment to achieve the “American dream.”
Macfarlane and Lacey sat down with THR ahead of the documentary’s release to talk about why they wanted to rehash Smith’s saga now; how she framed her rags-to-riches story (and how those who knew her are now reframing it); and how they handled some of the doc’s more shocking revelations.
In recent years, there have been quite a few documentaries that examine the way women were treated in the 2000s. Anna Nicole Smith fits into this trend, but why did you want to do this now?
URSULA MACFARLANE We are in a, hopefully, post-#MeToo phase of our conversation with society, and I think it is a time when we’re beginning to look at those iconic women in a different way. She was exploited, definitely. She was scrutinized constantly. People loved her, people hated her. But I think we just wanted to really get below that and find out who she was as a human being. As it turns out, as you can see in the film, she’s extremely complex and complicated and flawed and wonderful.
We are looking at these kinds of women differently now, through a different kind of lens, perhaps with different teams looking at these women. We’ve had other documentaries about women who were also equally idolized and criticized, and I think many of them have been portrayed almost like cartoonish characters and caricatures and never really got under their skin, so to speak. When Alex and I really started looking at this, we knew a lot of it — the public stuff — and then we started really doing a deep dive. We were so surprised to find out some of the things we found about her. That there was empowerment in her life as well as her being exploited. So we feel it was the right time, and perhaps this film wouldn’t have been made in this way even five years ago — certainly, not 10 years ago.
ALEXANDRA LACEY Also, she was famous at a time when the tabloids fully dominated public perception, the narrative. So even though she was way ahead of the game at harnessing the power of the media, she couldn’t control her narrative. Still someone else was deciding what they were going to put out there about her. It feels exciting as filmmakers to make this film at a time when it feels like the audience actually really wants to learn the truth of who she was, wants to empathize more and wants to hear and listen. Female-lead narrative stories were not really among people’s interest even a few years ago. It’s only now, so we’re pleased to get that opportunity.
This doesn’t seem like you are trying to reclaim her narrative. It doesn’t feel like a redemption arc or vindication. You illuminate the ways that she’s treated, but also zero in on how she had agency in that. Was that a conscious thing you wanted to explore coming into this?
MACFARLANE No, I think that was something surprising that we learned, and we learned it both from the media, who talked about, for example, the symbiotic relationship that she had that was also mediated by people like Howard Stern. Her bodyguard Mo talks about when she was doing the American Music Awards thing, and it wasn’t quite as simple as people thought — that she was just drugged out. She was actually putting on a show. She said in an interview, “I didn’t even have to do a sex tape to get here, and the phone is now ringing off the hook.” To a certain extent, she was controlling it, but I also think it was important for us to show that it wasn’t a redemption story. It’s much more complicated than that. She was trying to harness it but at the same time, I think she was a victim of it. Particularly in terms of body image. I mean, it’s horrendous.
If you look at the Howard Stern interview, for example, and the way they tried to bet on what her weight is. I don’t want to be idealistic about today and say that because of social media that women, or people in general, have total control over the narrative, because I think that kind of judgment is still very much there. We’re in a transformational stage where there’s more awareness, but there is still judgment. Like Alex was saying, she’s coming into her own and in the sort of white heat of the tabloid media. You’ve got the 24-hour news cycle, you’ve got entertainment TV, you’ve got reality — all of these new things putting a spotlight on her. She’s sort of flailing; being slightly overtaken by it; slightly drowning in it; trying to turn it to her own advantage. It’s not simple, but I do think we were quite surprised by the way she was able to forge her own narrative to a certain extent and, particularly with the kind of rags-to-riches story, which then turns out to be quite true.
LACEY What I sort of meant was the gold digger storyline. She desperately did not want to be known as a gold digger. She delayed marrying [J. Howard Marshall] for a long time. She said to her closest friends, “I don’t want to be known this way. I want to have my own success.” And yet, the memory that I had of her when I first got this job was that headline. So that’s sort of her lasting legacy in a lot of ways, which is a shame for her because she just didn’t want that.
The first half of the doc explores that work ethic you mentioned, and the second unpacks her desire for money. But because of the first half, audiences can see that interest in money is being driven by a desire to build something for herself. She just went about it in a non-traditional way. How did you think about her work ethic versus that drive for money?
MACFARLANE That’s a really good question because there’s so many things going on there. [Melissa] Missy [Byrum], her best friend, is obviously very much the heartbeat of the film and, we feel, very authentic. A lot of people around Anna were drifting in and out. But we hope and believe that the people in our film truly knew her. Missy knew her better than anybody, and she did say she had an incredible work ethic. She was incredibly determined. “Yes, the rich guy wants to marry me, but I’m going to make my own career first.” There’s also wanting to provide a home for her son, Daniel. And she wanted money. She wanted the American dream, and I think she was very, very clear about that.
The relationship with J. Howard Marshall, we definitely came to the conclusion that love comes in different ways, but there was a true mutual love there for sure. That doesn’t mean to say that she didn’t abuse that, and Missy talks about her just using him a bit like an ATM. With all interesting people, there’s so much duality there. Yes, she was after the money in terms of what she did to her mom — throwing her under the bus. She was prepared to go to great lengths to get the money, which one can look at in a critical way. And yet, you also see a woman with incredible drive, who’s just basically using what she’s got, which starts off being beauty and then becomes notoriety. I don’t know what you think, Alex, but I think it’s really complex.
LACEY I think it’s good to Zoom our minds back to the ’90s when she was working in the strip club. To start off, you’re a single mom living check-to-check. Then she realizes that she can turn herself into this commodity in the strip club and she can hustle, and she can make a good living for her son. I think it’s in the strip club that she realizes that she can do this and gets that sort of work ethic. I think throughout she just wanted to set up a good life for Daniel and then for Dannielynn and for herself. We can all relate to that, but I think it really did stem from those early days in the ’90s in Houston.
MACFARLANE Definitely. She knew what she had, she worked it. She felt that she had to get new, bigger breasts in order to also become a model, but the particular kind of model that was going to get her fame and fortune. I think she was quite analytical and not clinical, but forensic about it. She was smart. She had street smarts, for sure.
LACEY It was a very different time for women and in Houston, I’m sure there wasn’t a huge amount of opportunities where you could go from working at Walmart to getting enough money where you could set up a whole different life instantly. The strip club gave her that — just having drive and wanting to have a better life and do better for ourselves.
MACFARLANE She was also very aware of snobbery. Regardless of the economic situation of her childhood, which is obviously debatable, she did feel like people looked down on her because she was a glamour model. When I remember Missy saying that when she got together with J. Howard Marshall she would go to the country club and meet his kind of society who were obviously much older than her, she really felt that they looked down on her, and she would say, “I’m going to show those snobby women.” She said that J. Howard Marshall was the only person in her life who never looked down on her. I think she was conscious of her upbringing, the fact that she wasn’t educated and all of that. So she used what she had, but she was very clear-headed until the very end, where she was making not very good decisions. She definitely had a plan. The American dream was what she wanted.
LACEY We were really impressed and both happy to discover that she was really smart. Because sometimes, you see these kinds of caricatures of people in the public eye and you assume certain different things about them.
MACFARLANE She had agency, but it wasn’t straightforward.
We keep talking about Smith in the past tense, which points to a specific reality of doing this doc: She wasn’t around to talk to you. That means most of the viewers’ understanding of her is coming from other voices. How did you approach doing this without having her input?
MACFARLANE It’s the most difficult thing about making a person’s story, and obviously, we’d have loved her to be alive — like Pamela said, that she could have told her own story — the arc and the development and perhaps things would have gone differently. But there’s quite a lot of voice in there. We found a lot of old audio archival of her being interviewed and through the ages. There’s a fantastic interview with a Swedish woman that you hear a few times. We wanted to make sure that as best we could, without actually having her alive in the film, that there was a sense of her voice. But you are mainly relying on other people to tell the story. One of our main aims was to really make sure of the credibility of the people that we were talking to.
There have been so many docs — some good, some not so good — and you’ll see a lot of people in those films who perhaps went to a party with her or reported on her or were in her reality show. I’m not saying they didn’t feel they knew her, but we really tried to keep it to people who had a genuine connection with her, short or long. We did a lot of work on checking that out in terms of timelines, photographs and making sure people were in her life. That’s the only way that we felt that we could give as accurate of a picture as possible. You can never know fully a person’s life, so we wouldn’t ever claim that we’ve made the definitive film. Hopefully, somebody will make another film in 10 or 20 years time and there will be more revelations or perceptions, but I think for this moment in time with those people, we’ve got something to add.
LACEY The first thing that we did was to reach out to every single person that’s ever been named in any kind of reporting, and start a long, long research process. But when we spoke to people who knew her, we asked each one of them, “Do you think we’ll ever get a sense of whom the true Anna Nicole was?” They said, “Actually, I don’t even think she knew who she truly was because she changed quite a bit in her lifetime.” She was almost like a different person to different people because she was trying to be what she thought others wanted her to be. Even those closest to her said that to us.
Another great discovery was trying to find friends who were less known and had never spoken before. For instance, Ashley Wells Lewis, who started filming a documentary about her as well, so we had that amazing footage of Anna Nicole sitting there and talking about her hopes, dreams and all of that. But also to have a friend that she could have kept secret that was like her refuge from the tabloids and the paparazzi, and having her speak about her friend and having Missy who hadn’t really spoken about it before. The starting point for the conversation was always, “Is there some way that you feel that she’s been misunderstood in the reporting so far? If so, let us know.” It was about finding friends that could give us something new.
Was there anybody who said “No, we don’t want to do this”?
LACEY Oh, yeah. (Laughs)
MACFARLANE People who had relationships with her or friendships with her that were very private people. We were sad they wouldn’t take part ultimately, but they were incredibly valuable to ask because Alex had long, long conversations with them. They gave us a lot of rich detail about her life, which suffused the film. Some of them gave us some wonderful never-seen-before stills and footage that had that intimacy. So even though they weren’t on camera, that relationship really informed what we were able to do, and again, as Alex said, get you inside, seeing pictures and footage that no one has ever seen before. We’re really grateful to them, but we also understand. There’s a lot of people who felt very burned by what had happened in the past, particularly after she died, and there was so much rapacious tabloid interest. A lot of her family members are dead. There’s a lot of tragedy in that family. Her biological father died quite young, so obviously, we couldn’t interview him about the allegations. Aunt Kay is dead, George Beall’s wife, the cousins that she spent time with, they’re all dead. They’re not there now to tell their story, but at least we had Uncle George who knew her in Mexia, Texas.
The conversation about someone being able to respond to accusations is one that’s been had in both journalism and documentary. In terms of the allegations, did you feel more comfortable addressing them because there was someone who could speak or respond, even if it wasn’t the person who was being accused?
MACFARLANE It’s a very tricky one. I did a film about Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women over decades. We spent a lot of time trying to collaborate, but of course, it’s very difficult because no one else is in the room usually. So it’s all about, did they tell someone at the time? Can we place them in that period, in that location? And so [Alex] did a lot of work on trying to establish when the dad was there In terms of Missy reporting it; she was on a plane, where Anna told her. That’s how we found out about it. Missy was the person who revealed this, and we were really shocked and upset by that revelation and clearly, it was very upsetting for her as well. You can’t completely 100 percent dot the i’s and cross the t’s on something like that. But that’s why we told Donnie Hogan, her half brother, in the middle of the interview.
Getting these things right is difficult, but we felt he ought to know because we wanted to know his take on it. You see it going through his mind, and then you see, of course, he realizes: No, I wasn’t there all the time. Missy had written a book, which is quite detailed, and we looked at that and worked out who was where at what time and Missy had gone off back to Texas and left the dad and the brother in L.A. with Anna. That’s how we were able to put it together. Also, when we got into the edit and we really started examining the timeline, I truly believe that that is one of quite a few turning points, but also a major turning point. You look at what starts to happen after that, and there’s definitely a disintegration. Around that time she’s overdosing, she’s falling out of favor with the media. She’s kind of slightly unraveling. She’s doing more drugs. Missy talks about that. So it felt too important to not include.
The talking head choices for documentaries are always interesting. For this doc, most of your talking heads are men. Was that a byproduct of who Smith tended to keep around her the most, or was that just a result of who would speak with you?
LACEY It was not a conscious decision, actually. We did try to find as many women as we could, but they’d either passed away, or in some cases, declined because of privacy.
MACFARLANE We would have had them if we could. A few women that we spoke to tended to be professional women who’d worked with her in various capacities when she was becoming famous, and she became quite difficult as a friend, as a client, as a colleague. People moved on. I think that’s fair to say, of the people that we interviewed for research. She definitely had female friends that were there all the way through. But if you think of Missy — Missy dropped away because she couldn’t bear to see what was happening. Ashley — these people always loved her, of course, but I think as the circus got worse towards the end, they withdrew. She did have a lot of very close male friends who adored her in a different kind of way and, perhaps, enjoyed the perceived glamour and the craziness of all of that. They loved it. Thank God, because those guys that we interviewed in the film, they were really there for her. Patrik [Simpson] and Pol [Atteu], the designers, were really there in the Bahamas looking after her when Daniel died. Again, loads of photographic evidence of that.
One of the most memorable elements of Smith’s public saga was the pill misuse narrative, and you were able to get her doctor, Sandeep Kapoor, who went on trial over what he prescribed her. How did you end up getting him to agree to talk?
LACEY It took a while. We had to build a relationship and build trust, get him to understand that we are documentary filmmakers. That we’re coming to this with no angle. That we wanted to do something that was researched properly and to really hear what he had to say. I think in the end, the reason he decided to take part was, although he’d been fully vilified by the tabloids, and he’d gone through such a horrible time, he felt like he had something new to say now through the lens of having grown up a few years. Also, there are lots of misunderstandings relating to Anna’s pain. She genuinely lived with pain every day. I think he wanted people to know that actually she did struggle with pain, that that was legitimate.
MACFARLANE Absolutely, and psychological pain. He’s very much a holistic doctor. His practice now is about the holistic approach. It’s not just what’s going on your body. I think he’s a big believer that the psychological pain from all sorts of things from youth onwards was contributing. I would say the other big reason why he wanted to take part was to clear up the mystery of the methadone, because methadone does have this reputation as the heroin substitute. Therefore, it’s “a junkies drug.” I think that’s partly what happened in her case. As he explained, methadone is a very good pain drug for certain people. When she unilaterally announced her pregnancy and told him she’d gone off, she’d stopped taking the methadone, and he was like: You can’t do that. That’s going to damage your baby.
He wanted to step it down, but got her back on it. When that fact was picked up by the press, it was like, “Oh my God, this is a doctor who gave a pregnant woman methadone.” We did speak to the pathologist and then pathologist on the case said, “No, there were nine other prescription drugs in her bloodstream, but there wasn’t any methadone. It has nothing to do with a methadone.” He wasn’t one of those kinds of Michael Jackson type doctors, where you’re just going to give people whatever they need. I truly believe that he was a responsible guy who got caught up in this maelstrom nightmare. He was acquitted and got his practice back, but it could have destroyed him.
Let’s talk about that ending twist: video proof that her rags-to-riches story wasn’t true. You could have put that in the beginning of the doc or in at another point. Did you ever consider it? And if so, why didn’t you?
MACFARLANE There was a lot of talk about that in the edits. The editor and I disagreed, we agreed; we worked it out with Netflix. It was a real journey. But, in a way, having it towards the end echoed the journey that we went on as filmmakers, because it was something we discovered very late in the day. We wanted the film to be her version of events, so that the audience would get seduced by her. And not seduced in a negative way. They just had to love her. We wanted the audience to love her. It’s not like through that reveal we wanted them to hate her. But we wanted the audience to really get the complexity — that things weren’t quite what they seemed. The rags-to-riches narrative, which is very popular in Hollywood, informed her rise. You see right at the beginning of the film, she’s doing a Playboy video, and she said, “This is my hometown. This is the house I grew up in.” She’s really spinning that and, of course, like all of these things, there are partial truths. She did spend a bit of time in Mexia, she just didn’t grow up there. She did have a not wealthy life, but her mom was in law enforcement. She was a single mom some of the time, but they lived OK.
We were sitting with Missy quite late in the day in a fast food restaurant. She told us this story, and she was talking so fast, and we were going, “What? What?” Then I remember sitting in the car on the way back and thinking, well, this does change everything. We couldn’t not tell that story. But in terms of the placement of it, obviously that interview was not long before she died. She’s just gone through the birth of a baby, the death of her son — this terrible, tragic death. We want to keep the audience completely with her and completely empathetic to her, and not drop a bombshell that might change your feelings towards her as you’re on this emotional path with her. But perhaps with a bit of clarity later on, the audience can look back at the whole story and see it in a slightly different way. If we’d had it much earlier on, it would have changed things perhaps in a way that was not helpful to our perception of her and the storytelling. Plus, it’s quite a good sort of coda, isn’t it? You think you knew it, now here’s a little twist for you. These are the editing decisions that you think about for a long time.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me is streaming now on Netflix.
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