'Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter' Obscured Releasing Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text Zeberiah Newman's Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter is not your typical exercise in rise-and-fall '90s celebrity nostalgia. Then again, Susan Powter was never your typical '90s celebrity. From a distance of over three decades and coming personally from a demographic that was probably her least lucrative, I find it hard to explain exactly what kind of celebrity she was. There was surely a period of several years in which Powter's spiky, platinum hair and almost cartoonishly assertive energy were ubiquitous. She was an infomercial juggernaut, a bestselling author, a regular talk show guest and a personality so aggressive she almost couldn't be parodied, but she was visible enough that she was parodied anyway. Her message involved healthier eating and a physically fit lifestyle, but I couldn't quite explain it in more depth. Related Stories TV Jennifer Aniston Recalls Being Shut Down When She Wanted to Produce Projects After 'Friends': "I Got That Look of 'How Cute You Are'" Business Broadway Box Office: Tom Felton Gives $1 Million Boost to 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter The Bottom Line Captures a complicated life with empathy. Release Date: Wednesday, November 19 (Los Angeles); Friday, November 21 (New York)Director: Zeberiah NewmanProducers: Zeberiah Newman, Michiel Thomas, Leah Turner 1 hour 27 minutes Powter was everywhere and then she was gone, but in contrast to so many of her fin de siècle peers who have received documentary treatment in recent years, there was no controversy, no disgrace, no run of late-night punchlines left in her wake. She wasn't a joke or a pariah; she was simply gone, as if she had agency in her own recusal from a world in which she had appeared to be so comfortable. What's fascinating and often successful about Newman's documentary is how proudly uninformative it is, and I'm really intrigued by the idea of how it might play to viewers who have no clue who Susan Powter was. Newman sketches out the basic details of her emergence as a self-care guru. There are a few talking heads providing context or explanation, and those talking heads - Ross Matthews, mostly - are easily the worst part of the documentary, or at least the most superfluous part. Where Finding Susan Powter works best is as a near-vérité glimpse into the life of somebody who seemingly had everything, seemingly lost everything and is now living in a limbo that would be sad except that the doc treats it as matter-of-fact, rather than tragic - a distinction I certainly appreciated. There's no condescension, no treatment of Powter as a cautionary tale. We see her exist, and it's an existence that makes her relatable in a way I definitely never found her in the '90s. Where is Susan Powter in the documentary's present? Las Vegas, and if you told your average Gen X-er or millennial that Susan Powter was working there now, the response would probably be "Sure, that makes sense," with the assumption that she had a nightly empowerment show at, like, the Excalibur or something. One can imagine Powter prowling a stage, shouting catchphrases into a tiny microphone, bringing up tourists from the audience for tough love and then hugs. Except that, as the documentary begins (Newman plays very loose with time), Powter is actually delivering for UberEats. Hair grown out, aged naturally, she's unrecognizable - except that when she starts to talk and she locks onto Newman and cinematographer Michiel Thomas (a former colleague of mine, in the interest of full disclosure), it's with the same intensity you might imagine the pre-fame Powter brought to an aerobics class and mid-fame Powter brought to her talk show. She treats her living situation - which reached its nadir at a crime-ridden welfare hotel on the edge of The Strip - with candor, not shying from the ironies of a workout guru whose regular workout became daily multi-mile marches in the Vegas heat or a healthy-eating guru shopping for meals at the 99 Cent Store. She explains the bad business decisions that put her in this position but doesn't dwell, nor does the documentary dwell, on her absolute low point. Most of the documentary is spent with Powter in a very slightly improved condition. She somehow got enough money to live in a grungy but acceptable apartment and she's able to afford some fresh vegetables. But she also knows she's one dental emergency or car repair away from disaster. She is, in this respect, no different from most Americans - though unlike most Americans, she's able to start writing a memoir knowing she can get it into the hands of her former Simon & Schuster editor, in the hopes that she's one or two breaks from som