The rapper and his devotees will provide the jumping off point for a larger film about the “relationship between fanbase and artist”
Eminem is fittingly set to co-produce, and be the partial focus of, a new documentary about obsessive superfans, tentatively (and obviously) titled Stans.
As Variety reports, the new project was directed by Steven Leckart, and uses Eminem and “the fans that worship him” as a launching point for what’s described as a “revealing, edgy, and disarmingly personal journey into the world of superfandom.” Stans is apparently just the working title — named, of course, for Eminem and Dido’s 2000 hit “Stan” about an obsessive, delusional fan — but it’s hard to imagine the film being called anything else.
In a statement, Eminem’s longtime manager Paul Rosenberg and Stuart Parr of Shady Films said, “Stans will be the opportunity for us to to turn the camera around and ask the audience about being fans — and in some cases, fanatics. This is a study of the relationship between fanbase and artist through the lens of one of Eminem’s most fascinating songs and one of the world’s most important entertainers.”
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“Stan” is one of those rare terms to jump from music into the popular lexicon. While the origins obviously go back to Eminem’s song, it was Nas who helped turn a fictional character’s name into more of catch-all descriptor. In his infamous 2001 Jay-Z diss track, “Ether,” Nas rapped, “You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pussy, a Stan.” (The Outline published an excellent in-depth look at the word’s evolution, as both a noun and a verb, back in 2017.)
Cementing the popularity of “stan,” the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, while two years later it was added to Merriam-Webster.