Jamie Lee Curtis' Susan Powter doc shows '90s fitness icon 'standing up' amid 'incredible cruelty' and lost fortune
Director Zeberiah Newman tells EW he searched for Powter for a year, while producer Curtis calls their film an "indictment" of society's treatment of older people.
Though his documentary subject was once a defining pop culture fixture whose face, fitness guides, and Stop the Insanity! infomercial were inescapable in the 1990s, filmmaker Zeberiah Newman spent a whole year trying to track down wellness guru Susan Powter. When he found her, he discovered the 66-year-old was living in poverty, surviving on delivering meals for Uber Eats. Soon, Newman and producer-friend Jamie Lee Curtis began working her story into a feature documentary to serve as an "indictment" of the "incredible cruelty" society inflicts upon older Americans.
"[Newman] then became obsessed with that idea of, how does someone [get here] from being the first influencer?" Curtis tells Entertainment Weekly of the film. "How you go from that kind of that kind of mega career and that kind of a success story to basically being discarded and living on the fringes of society in this incredibly harsh environment of Las Vegas, driving Uber Eats in a broken-down car?"
Newman's film will seemingly explore that topic among many others, after Powter previously opened up about losing her former company's reported $300 million empire thanks to bad business deals, alleged lawsuits, and assembling a team of people who, she revealed to PEOPLE, led her down a "mortifying" path of producing her image to the point of inauthenticity, largely at the center of her short-lived Susan Powter Show talk series.
Still, Newman says that Powter hasn't changed much since her time in the spotlight and that her hardships haven't dimmed the shine that Americans fell in love with over 30 years ago, whether it was via her Stop the Insanity! infomercial (which was spoofed on Saturday Night Live) or her popular Shopping With Susan VHS guide, which has since gone viral on TikTok.
"Being with Susan for two minutes, you know this is a very rare human being and one that is the most perfectly made for cinema. Everything about her: she speaks in soundbites, she’s got an unstoppable energy, and she’s super original. She’s undeniable," he explains. "She is still as adamant about her beliefs and still as joyous and over-the-top as she was when we first saw her in 1993. She’s just a 66-year-old version of that now. All of her circumstances have not changed her. This isn’t an act: Susan Powter is exactly who you think she is. It’s not a performance."
That raw energy also lends itself to the very real themes the film touches on, with Curtis — who funded the helmer's initial round of filming in Vegas with money from her own pocket — stressing that the project isn't meant to exploit Powter's perceived downfall but to highlight her as an example of the cultural system working against people of a certain age.
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
"It was an indictment of how we discard human beings as they get older in this country. It's an exploration of the incredible cruelty that we inflict on older people and the lack of resources, and the lack of dignity offered to these human beings who've lived before us and have been in service to us and have given us the lives we all are now living. It's an indictment to every family who has shuttered away the elderly in that forgotten, awful way that they do. It is an indictment of how we treat older people in our work lives," the 65-year-old says.
Continues Curtis: "That's what we do to old people: We walk by them. For me, as much as this is a fun, nostalgic look back to a time that was mindless.... it's an indictment, exploration, and a challenge for all of us to look at how complicit we are as individuals in that story, and that's what the movie is about."
Newman, known for his short docs like Relighting Candles: The Tim Sullivan Story and Unexpected, agrees, speculating that, in the same way that Powter "caught fire because she lost weight and women trusted her" thanks to her personal experience with getting in shape, her influence will translate again when audiences see her dealing with new struggles.
"She found this power," he says of her success story after losing a significant amount of weight as a 260-pound single mother raising two sons. "Now in her 60s, living in this life of poverty and surviving it and getting out of it, she has a very similar story to bring to the masses and to women because she’s lived it."
The film shows her after being "slammed to the ground and standing up again," Newman finishes, careful not to spoil too much of what happens in the project as he and his team work to finish it ahead of a potential rollout next year. "And who doesn’t want to watch someone stand up again after they’ve been slammed that hard?"