By Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
“I’m going to start by acknowledging how odd an endeavor this is,” Jonah Hill (Superbad) begins. “A patient making a movie about his therapist. But my life has gotten immeasurably better working with you.” He means Phil Stutz, trained at City College of New York with an MD from New York University. “If it has gotten better for me, maybe it will work for other people.”
But Phil Stutz, who is he?
Besides being the guy whose name is baked into the shrink documentary STUTZ from Netflix available on Nov. 14 from new-and-improved Jonah Hill, Stutz is a former Rikers Island prison psychiatrist.
By the late 1970’s, Phil was sick of feeling helpless with hardshell patients who didn’t care how they got that way, but wanted a way out, meaning a tangible set of “tools” to help them get better. Having lived with an emotionally challenged father who suffered from steep depression, as the lore goes, New Yorker Phil Stutz had literally grown up as a boy-wonder in charge of keeping his own family functional.
In adulthood, the newly minted psychiatrist honed his theories in practice to help his Rikers outcasts. Imagine breaking-and-entering your skull, to use Phil’s past in the prison system as an analogy. Stutz created and field-tested a custom set of emotional “tools” to get a psychological breakthrough without scaling the high wall of anyone’s past traumas first.
While STUTZ the movie is more about Jonah Hill’s journey from young actor off the rails to finding himself, his shrink’s journey is enmeshed in this story. To recap, Phil Stutz moved to Los Angeles 40 years ago in 1982, switched to his own private practice, and by May of 2012, published a codified form of his applied theory on changing your life with what would become a New York Times best-seller, “The Tools” with Barry Michels, a Harvard-trained attorney turned psychologist. “The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity” has been seen, read, and listened to in the audiobook form now for a decade. Drew Barrymore, Gwyneth Paltrow, and many other writers, actors, executives, directors, and just about everybody from every walk of life, have benefited from The Tools as proven by the book’s enduring appeal.
But back to the movie made by actor, now filmmaker, Jonah Hill.
“Your friends who are idiots just give you advice,” Jonah jokes. “I was this wildly insecure kid – the work is accepting that it is great to be this person.”
Stutz nails the point with “you have to give somebody the feeling they can change right now… you’re giving out the signal to the world ‘I need you because I can’t do this by myself.’ Take action, no matter how frightened you are… this is such a great moment right now.”
“I still wish you would stop dumping so much shit on me,” Phil punchlines Jonah in the trailer.
“This is probably either the greatest documentary ever made, or the worst, and it is probably both.”
STUTZ has its fumbling moments, and yet it is endearing and hopefully life-adjusting, if not life-changing, plus it has a sense of humor.
Find “The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity” on Spotify, Audible, Amazon, and here.
See it Nov. 14 on Netflix.
# # #