What Martha Stewart Thinks About the 'Martha' Documentary

By Emily Leibert, a morning blogger for the Cut  who specializes in coverage at the intersection of gender and sports, the arts, and our relationship to our bodies

After giving celebrity documentarian R.J. Cutler full access for Netflix’s Martha, Martha Stewart would like to relay some feedback. In an interview with the New York Times, the chef and thirst-trap connoisseur spent “roughly 30 almost uninterrupted minutes” airing her qualms with the way she was portrayed in the documentary, which dropped this week. Chief among her concerns were: the choice to use classical music over rap (“lousy”); the entire second half (“a bit lazy”); how little of the footage made the final cut (“just shocking”); the emphasis on her trial and time in prison (“extremely boring” and “not that important”); and the film’s final scenes (“hate them”).

To be clear, Stewart didn’t hate the entire documentary. In fact, she admitted that she loved the first half — particularly one frisky scene in which she ditches her then-husband, Andy Stewart, during their Florence honeymoon to kiss a stranger at the Duomo. However, she seemed equally miffed by unflattering camera angles and the film’s closing shots, which she said makes her look “like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden.” Cutler, she said, used the “ugliest angle. And I told him, ‘Don’t use that angle! That’s not the nicest angle. You had three cameras. Use the other angle,’” she recalled. “He would not change that.”

Cutler, meanwhile, stands by his artistic vision, with or without Stewart’s seal of approval: “I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it,” he told the Times. “I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”

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

Sure, Stewart wishes Dr. Dre, Snoop, or Fredwreck had scored the film. She wishes Cutler had included the anecdote about lawyer Alan Dershowitz flirting with her in the ’60s while she was married (“He would be dribbling on the table”). She is left wondering why some of her kin didn’t make the cut — “Where the heck are my grandchildren?” But she is, at least, pleased with young girls’ reactions to the documentary.

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