Ashley Lewis, who is a good friend of mine and was a very good friend of Anna Nicole, is featured in Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me. She and I served as Consulting Producers on the project. I watched the Netflix premiere of Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me directed by Ursula Macfarlane and produced by Alexander Lacey at my friend and collaborator Ashely Lewis’s house. It was a pleasure getting to know these lovely two women during the course of the making of this film. Years back, Ashley and I and our crew went to Houston, Texas to interview Anna’s mother, cousin, best friend, first strip joint boss, etc. Her mother was so articulate and funny. She had been a cop at a time when policewomen were rare. She seemed truly puzzled as to why her daughter Vicky was so determined to vilify her. Ashley and I were going to make a non-exploitive documentary that showed Anna’s bright side, but as it turns out, it was impossible to do. Her’s is a story of a dream-turned-nightmare. There is no getting around it. And she was both a victim and a perpetrator of her own sad destiny and even more tragic of her son’s death. It’s a tough story to tell and I congratulate Ursula, Alex, and their whole team for grappling with it and bringing it to the screen.
