Years beforeGreta Gerwigbrought “Barbie” to the screen, there was another movie in which the Mattel doll played a central role. But it’s not a film you’re likely to see in theaters soon, although you can usually find a bootleg of it on YouTube. Due to a copyright lawsuit it was unavailable for years and existed mostly as cinematic legend.

“Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” the 45-minute 1987 film by Todd Haynes where Barbie(和类似娃娃)are used in place of actors, is still every bit as compelling and unsettling as its premise suggests. In light of Gerwig’s equally existential “Barbie,” I hope it is finally seen by larger audiences.

Using dolls as actors with a mix of documentary and stock footage, “Superstar” follows Karen Carpenter as she shoots to fame as a teenage singer with her brother, Richard. Karen’s sweet voice was perfect for the easy listening tastes of the 1970s, and soon the Carpenters became symbols of wholesome Americana amid the decade’s shifting ethos.

But with success came family pressures and a devastating eating disorder, depicted in “Superstar” by Barbies whose bodies are whittled down through the course of the film. It ends with Karen’s death in 1983 from a heart attack, but the story of “Superstar” was just beginning.

After the film was shown at the Toronto Film Festival in 1988, Richard Carpenter sued to block the theatrical release due to Haynes’ failure to obtain the rights to the Carpenters songs used in the film. “Superstar” was pulled from distribution in 1990. (Some fans said they remembered the film screening as a midnight movie at the Castro Theatre in the ’90s.)

But by 1991, Haynes had broken through as an indie filmmaker with “Poison,” the trilogy of homoerotic stories based on the novels of Jean Genet, and established himself as one of the bright lights in what writer B. Ruby Rich, editor at large of Film Quarterly, famously termed “new queer cinema.”

“It was brilliant of Todd to connect Barbie with Karen Carpenter,” said Rich, who is based part-time in San Francisco. “Today we hear about all the girls whose bodies and lives are being ruined by Instagram and TikTok filters, but that’s what Barbie did back then. Todd found Barbie to be the perfect embodiment of what was celebrated and what was fatal, whether it was the Nixon presidency that loved the Carpenters’ music or the American childhood culture that took up Barbie.”

Haynes, whose latest project “May December” comes to Netflix this December, would later be nominated for Academy Awards for his films “Far From Heaven” (2002) and “Carol” (2015), which deal with some of the same themes of womanhood and repression as “Superstar.” In many ways “Superstar” was an audacious preview of Haynes’ artistic themes. You see his interest in the underside of pop culture, music and the destructive nature of celebrity that he later explores in the glam-rock roman a clef “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), his Bob Dylan experimental feature “I’m Not There” (2007) and his 2021 documentary “的Velvet Underground,” about the New York rock band.

Also developing in Haynes’ debut film was his deep distrust of suburbia, an elevation of melodramatic style and careful attention to production design. I’ve never seen a good copy of “Superstar,” so it’s hard to assess its full visual quality, but the dolls are employed smoothly enough that you can almost forget the Barbies’ use as a cinematic device. But there’s also a deep, subversive queerness to the overall concept that feels like a defiant plastic fist in the face of conformity.

Among the artists who helped transform the dolls into Karen Carpenter wasDavid Glamamore, known for decades as San Francisco’s premiere drag couturier Mr. David and also as the drag artist Glamamore.

Glamamoregrew up playing with Barbiesand sewing clothes for them as early as at age 3, a formative experience he joked prepared him for designing for the exaggerated proportions of drag fashion. He met Haynes in the 1980s while living in New York and remembers that the filmmaker knew about his history with dolls and specifically invited him to be part of the production with that expertise in mind.

Glamamore说,他是我们几个人之一rked with the dolls, specifically employing a technique he had perfected in childhood for reshaping the dolls’ bodies through shaving away layers of the plastic then bandaging the dolls, something that became a central part of showing Karen’s eating disorder in “Superstar.”

Some of his childhood dolls from the 1950s and ’60s — as well as furniture and fashion he created — were used in the film, he said, pointing out “a white lace granny gown” he made specifically for the movie.

“The film is beyond cult,” said Glamamore. “It’s sub-cult because you had to happen upon it for a long time. But it never lost its potency. People still say, ‘What the f—?’ when they see it.”

Gina Garan, author of the “Blythe” doll fashion and story photobooks, loaned many of her dolls to Haynes for “Superstar.” Like Glamamore, she said Haynes has yet to return them, but as a huge fan of the Carpenters, she was happy to help the project. She calls her involvement in “Superstar” a “very interesting footnote in my career.”

In a2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Haynes confirmed that a UCLA and Sundance Institute restoration of “Superstar” had been screened a few times recently, for free and without being publicized per the terms of Richard Carpenter’s lawsuit. He added that some legal opinions written about the film’s copyright issues make him optimistic it may be shown more broadly in the future.

While the illicit nature of the film has been long part of what has made it so legendary to cinephiles, Rich said “it deserves that mythical status anyway because it’s so original, it’s so outrageous and it says so much about the cultural history of those times.”

Maybe one day, instead of “Barbenheimer” weekend, we’ll get Gerwig’s film on a double bill with “Superstar” at a local theater. Both movies touch on such similar human themes that you almost forget about the dolls at the center.

Reach Tony Bravo: tbravo@sfchronicle.com