Sharon Stone is sharing details about a failed 1990s pitch for a “Barbie” movie decades before Greta Gerwig’s box office hit.
Stone appeared on the “Fly on the Wall” podcast hosted by “Saturday Night Live” alums Dana Carvey and David Spade on March 20, where she was asked if the 2023 “Barbie” movie would’ve been up her alley.
She revealed that she had tried to pitch her own movie based on the iconic doll, but was ultimately unsuccessful after the studio dismissed the plot.
“I went to the studio to try to make ‘Barbie’ in the 90s with a producer friend of mine and I had the then-CEO of Mattel on our side,” she explained. “We got thrown out of the studio.”
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She added, “They were like, ‘Why would you take this American icon and want to destroy it? What is wrong with you?’ I got a lecture and an escort to the door.”
Gerwig’s version of “Barbie” ultimately became the highest grossing film of 2023 globally according to Variety.
The film followed Margot Robbie as a “stereotypical” Barbie who questions her reality in Barbieland and experiences an existential crisis — does she continue life as a doll in Barbieland, or take on life in the real world?
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Stone's pitch took a different approach.
“We had it so that the opening scene would be Barbie pulling up to Mattel in her Barbie car, and then the secret service come out and their feet are as big as the car,” she told Carvey and Spade. “And they escort her into Mattel, and everybody just falls aside because she’s the most important member of Mattel.”
She added, “And how all the big people are chasing her around and kissing her a-- because she’s the queen of Mattel, and about the power of being Barbie and what Barbie could do in the world because she was so powerful.”
However, Stone noted the the studio executives “didn’t think Barbie should be powerful.”
But in the matter of a few decades, a “Barbie” movie was finally made after Robbie and Warner Bros bought the rights to the film, with the actor serving as producer, according to The Guardian.
Robbie asked Gerwig to write the film and the director enlisted the help of her husband, Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote the script with her.
When Gerwig pitched the movie to execs, she told the outlet she had written a “surreal” poem that she refused to reread, but noted it included “the lament of Job.”
“Shockingly, it does actually communicate some vibe of the movie,” she added.
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