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‘Lazy and lousy’: Why Martha Stewart can’t stand her Netflix documentary

Martha trailer

Source: Netflix

America’s original influencer, lifestyle guru and self-made billionaire Martha Stewart has slammed a Netflix documentary about her, criticising its music, unflattering camera angles and subject matter.

Martha, by television producer RJ Cutler, whose documentary films include The War Room, A Perfect Candidate, Thin, The September Issue and The World According to Dick Cheney, interviewed Stewart and her inner circle for Netflix’s latest offering.

But in an interview with the New York Times after watching the Netflix expose, Stewart did not hold back.

She said she loved the first half, but was ruthless in her summation of the second half.

“RJ had total access, and he really used very little,” she said, referring to her archive.

“It was just shocking.

“Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden? Boy, I told him to get rid of those. And he refused. I hate those last scenes. Hate them.

“I had ruptured my Achilles’ tendon. I had to have this hideous operation. And so I was limping a little. But again, he doesn’t even mention why – that I can live through that and still work seven days a week.”

She said Cutler spent “way too much time” on her 2004 trial and prison sentence.

One of the first female stockbrokers (at Perlberg, Monness, Williams and Sidel) on Wall Street (she got her licence in 1968), Stewart was convicted of four felony charges in 2004.

Stewart says this chapter of her life “was not that important”.

“The trial and the actual incarceration was less than two years out of an 83-year life. I considered it a vacation, to tell you the truth.

“The trial itself was extremely boring. Even the judge fell asleep. RJ didn’t even put that in. The judge was asleep at the bench. I wrote it in my diary every day.”

A ‘definitive documentary’

Netflix describes Martha as a definitive documentary by Cutler, using intimate and revealing interviews with the icon and those close to her.

It “traces her rise from teenage model to her reign as the original influencer and America’s first self-made female billionaire”.

NYT approached Cutler for a response to her criticisms of his work without commenting on specific points.

“It’s a movie, not a Wikipedia page …  it’s the story of an incredibly interesting human being who is complicated and visionary and brilliant.

“I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me … I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it”.

martha stewart documentary netflix

Martha Stewart is photographed next to a magazine stand featuring her on the cover of Martha Stewart Living. Photo: Netflix

No mention of grandchildren or holidays

Stewart said Cutler didn’t capture the essence of her Martha Stewart magazine.

“We had avant-garde photography. Nobody ever showed puff pastry the way I showed it. Or the glossaries of the apples and the chrysanthemums. And we prided ourselves so much on all of that modernism.

“And he didn’t get any of that.

“Where the heck are my grandchildren?

“My love of travel wasn’t mentioned. My trip up Kilimanjaro wasn’t mentioned!”

martha stewart documentary netflix

The documentary showed wedding photos from her archive. Photo: Netflix

No colourful anecdotes

Colourful anecdotes were left out, she told NYT, including how the lawyer Alan Dershowitz used to flirt with her in the 1960s, when she was first married.

“He would be dribbling on the table.

“That was the fun part, all of these stories. RJ didn’t get any of that in the movie.

“Can you imagine?”

snoop dogg

Martha Stewart and rapper Snoop Dogg are old friends, most recently working together to bring the Paris Olympics to their American audience. Photo: Instagram/Snoop Dogg

‘Lousy’ music

“I said to RJ, ‘an essential part of the film is that you play rap music’.

“Dr. Dre will probably score it, or Snoop or Fredwreck. I said, ‘I want that music’. And then he gets some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”

NYT points out Cutler added Snoop Dogg’s Beautiful to the end credits after Stewart saw an unfinished cut of the film.

martha stewart netflix documentary

Martha Stewart owns a horse property in Bedford, New York, where she has a particular love of Friesians. Photo: Netflix

Here’s what she liked

On the upside, Stewart says she loved the first half of the documentary, which “gets into things that many people don’t know anything about”.

“So many girls have already told me – young women – that watching it gave them a strength that they didn’t know they had.

“And that’s the thing I like most about the documentary. It really shows a strong woman standing up for herself and living through horror as well as some huge success.”

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