“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.
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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 surprised 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 business 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, which included her complaints about unflattering camera angles. She acknowledged that she felt 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 “Martha” generally good reviews.
“I had given, and probably rightly so, final edit to R.J.,” she said.
For Cutler, the opportunity to work with the famously demanding Stewart was immediately intriguing. When he thought about her place in 20th century American history — as one of a handful of female CEOs of publicly held media companies — Cutler was sold. As he got to know her during the early research period, he was struck by the “courage” it took for Stewart to engage in a documentary that she didn’t control.
“She’s not someone who looks backwards. She’s someone who charges forward, who’s confronting the future always,” he said. “I was always struck with Martha in the early months of getting to know her, that she was on the cutting edge of things that I was just starting to kind of be exposed to. She’d talk about trading crypto, and she’d talk about all sorts of things that made it clear to me this was someone who was always looking forward and never wallowing in the past. And so that person, you would think isn’t necessarily going to be inclined to tell their story. But again, as we saw from the film Martha, was ready to tell it, and there was great story to tell.”
Stewart told the crowd she was impressed by Cutler’s handling of his 2021 documentary on Billie Eilish, “The World’s a Little Blurry,” specifically how he drew out that it was the story of a family reacting to the life-changing success and fame achieved by two musical prodigies, Eilish and her older brother, Finneas O’Connell. Stewart’s granddaughter is a huge fan of Eilish, and Stewart chided Cutler for failing to get her backstage access to one of the singer’s recent Madison Square Garden concerts, as Stewart had requested.
“You did not do it. You did not do it and that is a big ‘X’ on you,” Stewart joked. Cutler then described their telephone conversation on the matter.
“The story goes like this: Ring, ring. Hey, Martha, how are you?
“I need you to do me a favor. I’m taking my granddaughter to see Billie Eilish, and I’d love you to get me backstage.”
“That sounds great, Martha, I’d be happy to ask. You never know, but I’d be happy to ask. But Martha —
you have to be nice to me.”
“Well, never mind. I’ll ask someone else.”
“That is a true tale,” Cutler concluded.
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 autobiography,” Stewart said. “It will not be 936 pages like [Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir], but it is chronological, and it is very interesting. It was an interesting process, and I’m glad I went through it.”
(Pictured: “Martha” director-producer R.J. Cutler and Martha Stewart)
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