Emmy-nominated filmmaker Susan Stern was once a hard-nosed investigative reporter who had no intention of buying her young daughter a Barbie doll or indulging in myopic materialist preoccupations of “Who’s got the prettiest pink ball gown?”

Her own daughter Nora was the one who set her straight. One day, when Nora was 8, Stern found her in the living room playing a game where one of her Barbies was jealous of another Barbie. Stern interrupted, in what she thought was a critical maternal intervention: “Nora, women don’thaveto be jealous of other women.”

“She gave me a look,” Stern recalled, “and said, ‘Mom, how about we first play what I want to play, and then we can play what you want to play?’ ”

When Stern repeated the parable to her friends, everyone started telling her their own Barbie stories — and she knew she had her first film.

In 1998, she debuted “Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour,” along with her associate producer and assistant director Trish Harrington. It’s the story of Mattel’s “teenage fashion doll” who revolutionized the toy business, and unleashed a psychological free-for-all fan mania that blew the wig off Barbie’s superficial facade.

“Barbie Nation” was a tough sell when Stern first tried to distribute her sexually and politically frank documentary to cable TV in the ’90s, but it’s finally available on major streaming services this summer to mark its 25th anniversary. Today it’s hard to imagine Mattel’s big-budget feature directed by Oscar-nominated filmmakerGreta Gerwig,starringMargot Robbieas the popular doll, without a nod to “Barbie Nation’s” outlaw legacy.

Stern, who went on to make “The Self-Made Man,” and “Bad Attitude: The Art of Spain Rodriguez,” was the first to show our love-hate relationship with the world’s most indestructible babe, from Barbie Jesus prayer conventions to Barbie fetish kink, to Barbie body dysphoria counterprotests. The documentary revealed, for the first time, the tumultuous Mattel saga about the doll with controversial breasts and high-heeled toes that was the brainchild of one defiant woman, Ruth Handler.

Stern spoke to The Chronicle by phone from her home in Bernal Heights.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What was your introduction to Barbie?

A:I was 6 years old when Barbie came out in 1959 — the “No.1 Barbie,” as collectors call her.

I learned there’s two types of people in the world: Barbie glorifiers and Barbie destroyers. I was a destroyer. I immediately cut the ponytail off my No. 1 and discovered that she didn’t have “rooted hair.” After that trauma, I remember nothing.

Q: What was the initial response to your documentary?

A:The reviews were mixed. “TV Guide” called it “sickening,” and “Entertainment Weekly” said, “Sordid, disturbing, and, ultimately, irresistible.” I was flattered.

There was no such thing as streaming in 1997. The film was a festival hit, but I couldn’t get a wider distribution deal.

“Barbie Nation” debuted on PBS. One cable company offered to buy it, but only if I censored it: They said I could have one gay man, but not two. Ha!

Once streaming began, I offered it to Netflix and they passed. Why? Fear of Mattel? Too much kink? Who knows. It’s never streamed before this summer. Then, and now, I had to “blur” the aftermarket penises shown on the dolls in two fan scenes. I’m just glad I got it online at all — with minimal censorship.

Q: What were Ruth Handler and her daughter, Barbara, really like?

A:Ruth Handler headed a Fortune 500 company in 1969. One of Mattel’s ad men told me that they quaked before their meetings with her: “The Moment of Ruth.”

But she was also very generous. I think Ruth and I connected because we were both quiet about being Jews. As theJewish News of Northern Californiarecently reported, Ruth had experienced antisemitism growing up in Denver and convinced her husband to use his middle name Elliot instead of his first name, Izzy, when they moved from Denver to Los Angeles in the late 1930s. When my family moved from Chicago to Southern California in the 1960s, we were prohibited from buying the house we wanted due to anti-Jewish covenants in the subdivision.

In 1997, I never asked Ruth anything about being Jewish, or explored the obvious ironies of her Jewishness in “Barbie Nation,” because I thought that might limit the film’s audience. Sad, isn’t it?

But Ruth and I recognized each other without a word. She invited me back to her Los Angeles penthouse to interview Elliot and film a difficult scene with her daughter, Barbara, about their mother-daughter relationship.

Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized TourfromBernal Beach FilmsonVimeo.

Q: Was Handler a champion of the Black Barbie before diversity was accepted in the toy business?

A:The first Black Barbie was created by Mattel in 1980 by designer Kitty Black Perkins. In the new film “Black Barbie,” filmmaker Lagueria Davis features her aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, who was one of the first Black employees at Mattel. It’s excellent. The documentary also tells how Mattel, under Handler, gave funding and technical support to Shindana Toys, the Black doll company created after the Black uprising in 1965 in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Q: What was the original Barbie doll like in 1959?

A:1959年芭比非常不同于今天的pink princess. My 1959 Barbie was a brunette with serious side-eye.

In the beginning, Barbie had sophisticated and stylish clothing, with metal zippers and snaps. She was more Mrs. Maisel than Margot Robbie. As I point out in “Barbie Nation,” as Mattel responded to the feminist movement by giving Barbie careers in male-dominated fields — doctor, astronaut — they also made her steadily pinker.

Q: Why did the Ken doll get released? Ken’s vacuousness seems to be an object of satire in the new Mattel feature.

A:Ken was introduced in 1961, because some people at Mattel felt Barbie had to have a boyfriend. But Ruth insisted that Barbie never get married — she had to be free to do anything she pleased.

I don’t think Ken is “vacuous,” I think he’s closeted! He came out once, as “Earring Magic Ken,” in 1993, wearing a lavender mesh shirt, purple pleather vest, earring and, apparently, a cock ring around his neck. Although he was very popular with what Mattel, at the time, called “other people,” he was soon back in the closet.

Q: Gerwig’s “Barbie” is inspired by the 1994 bestseller “Reviving Ophelia,” a book about a shift that happens to American girls once they hit puberty. What’s your take?

A:Gerwig gives Barbie a “coming of age story,” and through that, a personality, even a soul.

When I first contacted Mattel in 1994, they told me that they never wanted to make a live-action Barbie movie because theyneverwanted to make Barbie as just one persona. Ruth told me they always wanted to keep Barbie somewhat indistinct, so that kids could project their own dreams on her.

美泰做激进的允许要to make Barbie real. And what did Gerwig do? Hooray! She didn’t make a stupid movie about a “Barbie girl.” Instead, she has given us a glimpse of her own ideal self: an earnest, sensitive white girl who makes a journey to self-acceptance.

I wonder if by finally giving Barbie a personality, it will weaken her power as a tabula rasa. That’s what Barbie critics have never understood. She wasn’t created as a role model. She was intended as a blank slate.

Susie Brightis a freelance writer.