Apparently, director Todd Haynes, of Far From Heaven and I’m Not There fame, made a reenactment documentary of the life of Karen Carpenter shortly after his graduation from Brown University with a degree in art and semiotics (not surprising). Called “Superstar,” the movie reenacts Carpenter’s life using a mix of found footage, found and staged audio and a heck of a lot of Barbie dolls. Yep. Karen Carpenter’s tragic story told through the acting of plastic dolls.
I only found this out last month, thanks to a lecture by film scholar Bill Nichols at Ryerson University (you can watch the whole thing here) on documentary and reenactment. Haynes never got to release the film theatrically because he couldn’t get the rights to any of the Carpenters’ songs for the film, which makes it sort of hard to do a biopic about a brother-sister singing sensation, but luckily most of it is still living large on youtube. Here’s part 2 of 5:
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