There were always reports of accidents from European cities. Because drivers would rather look at Anna Nicole Smith in her underwear than at the road. Swedish fashion group H&M graced the billboards with America’s favorite blonde. It was 1993. The German presenter Johannes B. Kerner was jailed for a night – he had stolen one of the posters for his part in the flat.
Everyone knew Anna Nicole Smith. She was a model, actress, celebrity and above all “the bombshell”. The bomb. Some things about her resembled Marilyn Monroe, only taller. When she died in 2007 from an overdose of a cocktail of nine prescription drugs, no one was surprised, it was more surprising that she had even managed to live to be 39 years old. Basically, the public had watched her endanger her life for years.
The icons of the 80s and 90s are currently being rehabilitated in documentaries showing just how brutal it could have been to be a public woman back then. Someone who is defined by her body and sexualized all the time. They prefer to tell their own story: Pamela Anderson in “Pamela, a Love Story”, Brooke Shields in “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields”, it’s about power over your own story that others have been telling for too long.
What they have in common is that they want to free themselves from their victim role. Therefore, the suspicion arose that the main character from “Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me” would also be freed in this way by director Ursula Macfarlane. But documentaries that don’t follow a strict agenda are investigative journeys into the unknown. And sometimes the end result is more dazzling and double-edged than you might have thought at first.
When Ursula Macfarlane set out five years ago to capture Harvey Weinstein in her movie “Untouchable,” despite all the revelations, she was unprepared for how monstrous, manipulative, and power-drunk the movie producer had actually behaved. Her film became a moving testimony to how brutally Weinstein had shattered hopeful biographies.
That is different with Macfarlen’s new film about Anna Nicole Smith. Especially since his protagonist can no longer express himself. She would certainly tell her story more clearly in her favor. However, it is more interesting as it is told now.
It picks up where it all began, in a godly (and filmed insanely depressed) small Texas town. Vickie Lynn, as Anna Nicole was once called, loves two things, glamor and men. Married for the first time at age 17, marriage frees her from waitressing at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken, but she gets too bored. Having a child, she later says in an interview, seemed like the solution to everything, to the boredom and loneliness she soon felt.
When her son Daniel was six months old, she left her husband with him and made ends meet. At the age of 19, she first worked in a strip club in Houston. She’s beautiful, she’s a professional, she earns well, but she only knows one mission: finally a breast augmentation. No sooner said than done, she suffers from chronic pain afterwards and is addicted to opiates for the rest of her life.
In 1991, she met newly widowed oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall. He is 62 years older than her. He buys her a car and a house and wants to make her his wife. She says no, she doesn’t want to marry him until she has made a name for herself.
In 1992 she was discovered by “Playboy”. In 1992, she became a “Guess” model. As of now, she calls herself Anna Nicole Smith. In 1992, she was hired by the Coen Brothers for their movie The Hudsucker Proxy. Your symbiosis with the American paparazzi begins. She strikes Marilyn poses, Monroe is her idol, the paparazzi earn between $2,500 and $7,000 with Anna Nicole Smith video clips that last a few seconds. And she learns how to sell stories from her life to the press.
In 1992 she finally wants to get to know her biological father. She blames her mother for the loss of her father. A detective tracks him down, she orders her father and half-brother to go to California, her father is overjoyed because thanks to her he met his idol, the ‘Playboy’ boss Hugh Hefner. Hefner, who not only made the Monroe famous, but now the Smith as well. The role models in this family are clear.
Anna Nicole Smith does not know what her half-brother Ursula Macfarlane is telling today: that the father raped his sister-in-law when she was a child. The father happily described the rape to his son. After a trip with her father and half-brother, Anna Nicole is distraught. Her old best friend and lover now tells Macfarlane that her father has become abusive. “That would be him,” says the half-brother, “but is that true? It can’t be, I was always there. Although… maybe I wasn’t always there, so it may be true.”
The search for a father was her attempt to gain a foothold. After that, her drug use increases, she is hospitalized, marries Marshall, the two look heartbroken in the wedding video. He calls her « my precious package », after 14 months of marriage he dies, his son made sure that she does not inherit anything, many say it was real love between the two.
During performances she seems increasingly high and deranged. And the more broken she seems, the more assignments for speeches and announcements she gets. Once she was beautiful, now she is a spectacle. And she becomes the spokesperson for diet pills – which she almost kills herself with because she doesn’t want to eat anything but the pills.
Her mother asks her why she keeps telling the press lies about the family. Why she says her mother raped her as a child. The answer is simple: “I make more money by telling sad stories.” Up to 50 times more than with happy stories.
Their business becomes miserable. After all, she needs money, a lot of money, the “sad stories” are her greedy crime. Her best friend and sometime lover watches in horror as Anna Nicole Smith passes off her friend’s harsh childhood as her own. Anna Nicole Smith sees no problem, this is her life and her story says she is free to do what she does with it as long as the story is good. She is the gossip journalist about her own life.
Your behavior is that of a junkie. She has no duty of care, despite all the claimed love for her son Daniel, who uses his mother’s methadone and is addicted himself, long gone.
On September 7, 2006, she became a mother for the second time. On September 9, Daniel visits his sister in the hospital. He passed away on September 10, taking two antidepressants and methadone. 300 paparazzi wait in front of Anna Nicole Smith’s house to record her self-destruction.
Three men claim paternity for their daughter: her lawyer, an ex-lover and Prince Frederik von Anhalt, the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Anna Nicole Smith died on February 8, 2007. She was three years older than Marilyn Monroe. After a positive paternity test, her daughter grows up with her ex-lover.
Ursula Macfarlane uses numerous original Anna Nicole Smith film and sound documents as she searches for clues and talks to her best friend, mother, half-brother, lawyers, the doctor who put her on all the drugs, the paparazzi who followed her, the The Playboy photo editor she discovered speaks a lot of those she loved and those she hurt. They are intimate, personal statements, behind which, as with «Untouchable», lies a lot of trust from Macfarlane.
The result is a mosaic of a personality who was American in every pore – in his naive belief in the attainability of the big dream, in his uncritical cooperation with all the mechanisms of the celebrity industry, in his relentless self-styling and his opioid-driven decline .
Once upon a time there was a girl who sold her life for fame. There was once.
Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me is now streaming on Netflix.
source: watson
I’m Maxine Reitz, a journalist and news writer at 24 Instant News. I specialize in health-related topics and have written hundreds of articles on the subject. My work has been featured in leading publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and Healthline. As an experienced professional in the industry, I have consistently demonstrated an ability to develop compelling stories that engage readers.
