For a lot of people who grew up in the 90s, Susan Powter is frozen in time as the buzzcut fitness guru shouting “Stop the insanity!” in high energy infomercials. Back then she was a multimillion dollar wellness brand with bestselling books, a TV talk show, and an image that felt impossible to escape. The new documentary Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter steps into everything that came after that moment, including years of financial collapse, lawsuits, and a life that eventually included delivering food as an Uber Eats driver just to get by.
Directed by Zeberiah Newman and co produced by Jamie Lee Curtis, the film follows Powter from her meteoric rise to the quieter reality of living below the poverty line in Las Vegas. It looks at how mismanaged money and legal battles gutted what had once been a hugely successful fitness empire and forced her completely out of the spotlight. Rather than staging a glossy comeback story, the documentary leans into the uncomfortable parts of that journey and lets Powter talk plainly about what was done to her and what mistakes she owns.
Uber Eats ends up symbolizing a lot more than side income. Powter has talked openly about working gig jobs, saying that nothing is beneath her and describing herself as a “worker bee.” Those details give the film a very current edge, placing a one time television fixture inside the same app based delivery economy that millions of people rely on. The image of someone who once sold VHS workout tapes by the millions now dropping off takeout orders is jarring, but the documentary uses that contrast to question who we celebrate, who we forget, and what work is considered respectable.
There is also a deeply emotional thread tied to Powter’s time on the delivery route. She has described one night when she brought a large food order to comedian Louie Anderson only a few months before his death. He recognized her but said nothing, a moment that left her shaken for days. The film uses stories like that to show how surreal it can be to outlive your own fame, to be recognized as a cultural reference more than as a person, and to process all of that while navigating very ordinary worries about rent, food, and health.
Jamie Lee Curtis has framed the project as a kind of indictment of how society treats older people, especially women who were once very visible. That perspective gives Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter a wider scope than a simple “where are they now” piece. It asks what happens when a woman’s power and visibility are celebrated in one decade, then quietly discarded in the next, and what it takes for that person to reclaim any control over her story.
For Powter herself, the documentary is also about hope. She has said she wants a second chance to do what she did before, only this time with better management and more protection over her work. The film captures someone who is not pretending the past did not happen, but who is trying to build something new from it, even while she keeps working gig jobs and living modestly. That tension gives the project its heart.
For viewers who only remember the catchphrase or the haircut, the documentary becomes a way to reconnect with a familiar figure and see her in a completely different context. For younger audiences who may know her name only as a meme or a throwback reference, it offers a look at how fame, capitalism, and ageism intersect, and how quickly a person can fall through the cracks once the cameras stop rolling. Uber Eats, in that sense, is simply the latest stage on a journey that never really stopped.
As Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter rolls out in theaters and heads to streaming, it lands as both a 90s nostalgia piece and a very modern story about gig work, resilience, and refusing to be defined by a single chapter of your life. The documentary is not about turning Powter back into what she once was. It is about letting her be fully seen now and allowing her to decide, at last, what she hopes comes next.