When Ryan White’s phone jolted to life the morning of July 12, buzzing with texts and calls, the filmmaker wasn’t expecting it. Yes, it was Emmy nomination day, but no, he hadn’t counted on recognition for his Netflix documentary about Pamela Anderson.
Yet there it was, in black and white on the Emmys.com website: For Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special, Pamela, A Love Story, about the actress and former Playboy Playmate who swept from Canada onto television screens, magazine covers and scandal sheets in the 1990s.
“I think if you went back two and a half years or three years, whenever I first met Pamela, I think we would’ve both burst into laughter if you had told us that we were going make an Emmy-nominated film,” White says. “That was not the goal at all. And I don’t think either of us thought that was a possibility.”
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White’s surprise owes something to the perception of documentaries about pop culture icons — surefire audience magnets, but not necessarily awards fodder. That script got tossed this year, as celebrity-driven films dominated the Documentary or Nonfiction Special category: in addition to Pamela, A Love Story, nominations went to HBO’s Being Mary Tyler Moore, Amazon Prime’s Judy Blume Forever, and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie from Apple TV+. The only non-celebrity themed film to make it in was My Transparent Life, from Elysium Media, about the journey of two transgender people.
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“Not every celebrity story is interesting,” White observes. “I think it takes a great film and all those other films in our category — and there are many other celebrity docs that didn’t get nominated this year — are great too… I do wonder if we’ll see more of that over the coming years.”
Streaming platforms and cable channels, which used to produce a diverse array of documentary content, increasingly favor celebrity bios in the greenlighting process.
“I think it’s probably the most popular genre of documentary,” says White, who has also directed films on Dr. Ruth and tennis legend Serena Williams. “Maybe true crime competes with celebrity docs, but I know that there’s a real interest in it from distributors, because of the built-in audience.”
Imagine Documentaries, a thriving unit of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s company, has produced films recently on Julia Child, celebrity chef and humanitarian José Andrés; its documentary about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, directed by Amy Poehler, earned two Emmys last year. Imagine also produced Judy Blume Forever, directed by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok.
The surge of celebrity-driven docs represents “a trend that we’ve seen really building over the last couple of years,” says Imagine Entertainment President Justin Wilkes. “I think audiences love discovering people who they might know or think they know, but then really getting to do that deep dive and learning something more about them. And as evidenced very much in the Judy Blume film and some of our past celebrity documentaries, there’s other issues and themes that can really get pulled out of their story. I think that’s where an audience can have a real emotional connection and a real sense of why this story is important today.”
The Judy Blume documentary could hardly be timelier, landing in a political environment that has seen conservative states ramp up efforts to ban books branded by some as objectionable. Forever, Blume’s YA novel published in 1975, is among dozens of books yanked from school library shelves in Florida’s Martin County earlier this year. Last year, Utah passed the Sensitive Materials in School Act, which also prompted the banning of Forever.
“We thought book banning was a relic of the ’80s culture wars. It felt like it was going to be a segment of the film about something that happened in the past,” says Wolchok, co-director of the documentary. “And then all of a sudden, the world sort of fell apart. Everything devolved. The way Judy describes it now, it’s worse than it was in the ’80s. Because back then it was a group of parents challenging books they didn’t want their kids to read, or they didn’t want in the classroom. And now it’s politicians, it’s leaders of government.”
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields — a double Emmy nominee, for picture editing and Lana Wilson’s direction — gains heft by situating the actress’s story within a societal re-examination of the sexualization of girls. In her first major movie role, Shields played a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 drama Pretty Baby. When she shot the film, she was 11.
“Before Shields even hit puberty, the media had taken to framing her as either a Lolita or a demure darling,” The New York Times wrote in its review of the Hulu documentary, “a Catch-22 that Wilson, through interviews with journalists and other actresses, positions within a history of Hollywood exploitation.”
Pamela, A Love Story redefines a woman long treated as a “caricature”, as White puts it, most famous for a grainy videotape — stolen from the home she shared with her then husband, rocker Tommy Lee — that showed the couple having sex. The purloined footage wound up on computer screens across the globe.
“I think she’s a person that’s been dismissed over and over… In a lot of ways, Pamela has been reduced to that stolen tape,” White says. “At least her public persona, it defined that.”
His documentary gives space for the private Pamela to emerge, revealing a free-spirited personality, self-aware and intelligent. “I still have trouble keeping up with Pamela. Her brain, her synapses fire in a really interesting way. She’s hilarious,” White says. “The massive response [to the film] is she is so likable. More than likable, she’s so lovable.”
The filmmaker says a celebrity documentary can’t plumb new depths unless the subject is willing to drop the protective carapace of image.
“My recipe when I’m making any celebrity documentary is finding a celebrity that is completely raw and open and wants to give me that type of access. So, I’m very honest from the beginning, and I was with Pamela, saying, ‘I don’t want to make an arm’s length film. I don’t want to make a one-or two-interview film. I want to be all up in your business,’” he says. “There’s huge celebrities that deserve great documentaries, but I don’t know if they would give access the way a Pamela does or the way a Michael J. Fox does.”
Fox, who rose to superstardom in the ’80s on TV with Family Ties and on the big screen with the Back to the Future franchise, allowed director Davis Guggenheim to film him at his most vulnerable, struggling with the effects of advancing Parkinson’s disease. The film shows Fox tumbling on sidewalks, and his hand shaking violently as he tries to hold a toothbrush. Throughout, he maintains a sharp sense of humor and refuses offers of pity.
“People are starting to really understand who Michael J. Fox is as a human being,” Guggenheim says with admiration. “He was so open in the movie, so emotional, so unafraid, so candid and so real — and that’s a big risk for someone to take to put himself in a documentary, and the world embraced him.”
Mary Tyler Moore, the subject of the Emmy-nominated documentary directed by James Adolphus and produced by a cadre including Adolphus, Lena Waithe and Debra Martin Chase, died in 2017 at the age of 80. In the absence of fresh interviews with a living protagonist, the revelations in the film emerge from the star’s personal archives. The filmmakers were granted access to those by Moore’s widower, Dr. Robert Levine, who had turned down other pitches for documentaries about his late wife.
“In the April 2018 cover story of Vanity Fair that featured Lena Waithe, she mentioned as part of the interview that she’d really love to do something about Mary,” Levine explains about his decision to give Waithe and team the go-ahead for an MTM documentary. “That moved me because here is someone who’s coming up in the business who’s completely different than Mary and yet is influenced by her. And I wanted a new voice to tell Mary’s story.”
Waithe, the Emmy-winning writer, actor, and executive producer of The Chi and co-EP of Master of None, says her initial plan was to create a fictionalized biopic about the star of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
“But then after meeting Robert and going to the house, I was like, no, this is actually a documentary,” Waithe says. “I found myself really fascinated by the fact that she was in two very important television shows and really occupied two very different spaces for women.”
Between Being Mary Tyler Moore, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, Judy Blume Forever, and Pamela, A Love Story, this year’s Emmy-nominated celebrity documentaries cover a period ranging from the 1960s to the present. The amber light of our collective memory suffuses them with a certain glow, offering comfort especially valued, perhaps, by audiences desiring a measure of escapism in turbulent political times and in the lingering wake of the pandemic.
“All of them harken back to something that meant a lot to people in the past,” White says. “Pamela and Michael are legends from television from the ’80s and ’90s and Mary Tyler Moore is a legend for many, many decades. I think Judy Blume, for a lot of people my age and a little bit older, is such a defining part of our childhoods. Maybe that is escapism. Maybe the nostalgia is a way of escaping our present day lives to return to the past.
“A lot of the great celebrity documentaries we’re seeing now,” White continues, “sort of re-examine that celebrity’s experience or their impact on culture in a way that perhaps we weren’t aware of whenever we were going through that juncture.”