By Laurence Lerman / New York City
The engaging new documentary Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby, directed by Lana Wilson, follows a relatively straight path in the chronology of Shields’ life and career, beginning with her start as an Ivory Snow baby at the age of 11 months, through her wild success and superstardom as a young model and actress, and then onto the subsequent three decades of her adult life.
A two-part, two-hour-plus, archival clips-filled ABC News Studios production currently streaming on Hulu (a single, two-hour feature would have been more suitable, I think), it’s the first half of the doc that’s most intriguing. It presents Shields as a kind of poster girl for the sexualization of teenage and preteen girls, something that is still a regular practice in the entertainment and advertising industries where she thrived. In its straight-ahead approach, the film reveals how Shields lived and worked during those years, both benefitting from it and occasionally being derailed by it.
The second part looks at Shields’ adult years and how she appears to have come through it all essentially unscathed. The now 57-year-old Shields is on-hand for the journey to remind us that, yes, she’s doing just fine.
As per the documentary’s insightful first hour, Brooke Shields became a kind of phenomenon at a time when popular celebrities and the more titillating or even salacious aspects of their lives were the focus of entertainment magazines, tabloid newspapers, and TV talk shows.
One is immediately reminded that though they were plentiful, there wasn’t an endless trove of mags and shows covering that kind of material—not like what can be found today on the Internet, social media and streaming platforms. And unlike today’s diffuse entertainment landscape, with various outlets taking aim at a wide-range of niche markets, the relatively limited players at work during Shields’ peak in the late ’70s through the ’90s cast a substantially wider net than they currently do.
Today, it’s very easy not to have heard of, say, 19-year-old actress Millie Bobby Brown, who rose to fame on Netflix’s Stranger Things and via red carpet exposure and ceaseless coverage of her fashions and “romances,” all of which have been covered regularly by media outlets specializing in such content. But you would have heard of her back then because the coverage would have been ubiquitous.
Such is the case with Brooke Shields, whose beauty and blooming sexuality fueled her early career just as the debate over the undeniably creepy use of that sexuality provided material for magazine features and covers, columns, tabloids and talk shows.
Not long after her success as a top child model, the movies beckoned, beginning with the young Shields starring in a handful of vehicles that prominently showcased her budding sexuality, led by the films Pretty Baby (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981). With more than 30 movies to her credit over the decades following those early projects, they still remain the ones for which she is best known. And all were produced before she was even 18.
Shields was 12 when she shot the drama Pretty Baby, which was directed by Louis Malle and was the most notorious film of the lot. Set in early 20th century New Orleans’ red-light district, she portrays a 12-year-old girl who is being raised in a brothel by her prostitute mother (a lively Susan Sarandon). Featuring Shields in the nude in several scenes and engaging in a kissing scene with her 29-year-old costar Keith Carradine, the movie was critically well-received (“good-hearted, good-looking, quietly elegiac,” said critic Roger Ebert) despite its scandalous nature.
It was accused of being sexually exploitative and, in some quarters, of being child pornography. This sparked a deluge of commentary in the tabloids and on talk shows, all of which faded pretty quickly (particularly when the film didn’t perform well at the American box office). But even as the chatter died down, Shields’ film career began to blossom.
There was soon more to talk about with the release of the tropically-situated shipwrecked teen saga The Blue Lagoon (where a body double was used to shoot her nude scenes), followed by the impassioned teen romance Endless Love (which initially received an X rating but was later graded down to an R).
In the midst of making movies, 14-year-old Shields began appearing in a series of print and television ads for Calvin Klein Jeans, including one TV commercial that featured her uttering the tagline, “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
The ads were controversial in that, like Shields’ film work, they inspired a lot of debate, but not much else, save for the jeans tripling in sales within a year and Klein’s career as a designer and provocative advertiser launching into orbit. As for Brooke Shields, between the alluring films and suggestive ad campaigns, she was considered to be one of the most recognizable faces (and bodies) in America, and then the world.
A good deal of the public opinion on Shields’ work in the ads and films and their “let’s talk about it—but that’s all” attitude was stirred up by Shields’ appearances on those aforementioned talk shows, frequently accompanied by her mother and manager Teri Shields. It was while chatting with the likes of Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin and film critic Gene Shalit that Teri scoffed at the very notion that her million-dollar daughter’s sexuality was being exploited. Brooke is uncommonly mature for her age and understands that she’s doing what is necessary for career and image, we hear Teri say in archival clips.
Of course, any appearance by the seemingly co-dependent Shields women and Teri’s denials would be reported in the tabloids, People magazine and such, all generally accompanied by the photos and screen grabs from movies that were at the center of the debate. Just as Hollywood and the advertising industry trafficked in the creation and distribution of suggestive material centered on teenage girls’ sexuality, so did the media outlets that covered it.
The impression Teri Shields gives in the documentary is that of an aggressive stage mother with an idiosyncratic view on how to manage her daughter’s career as it grew beyond modeling as an infant and child. It doesn’t appear that Teri ever consulted anyone in guiding Brooke’s career as a teenager or young adult and it’s not surprising that by the time she turned 20 in 1995, Brooke was forced to drop Teri as her manager. As per the documentary, Brooke acknowledges that her mother’s alcoholism was a major problem and didn’t help in making professional decisions.
“I needed to grab the reins and make my own mistakes,” Shields says at one point.
The second part of the film focuses on Shields’ adult life, which overall appears to be a rewarding and positive one despite its blemishes. Much of what went down has been covered extensively over the years, including Brooke’s years as a Princeton student, her friendship with Michael Jackson, and her image as a Hollywood starlet who remained a virgin until her 20s.
Ditto for her later television and Broadway career and her battle with post-partum depression following the birth of her first child in 2003 (which found her involved a high-profile and ridiculous public feud with Tom Cruise, who made it his business to let everyone know he was unhappy that Brooke was using Paxil to combat her depression). More revelatory is a disturbing tale of her being sexually assaulted in a hotel by a Hollywood executive and how her guest spot on TV’s Friends played a role in the ending of her first marriage to tennis champ Andre Agassi in the late’90s.
The film’s later portions aren’t as reflective as the earlier ones, though all are expounded upon by at least a dozen talking head contributors, the most insightful being Shields’ longtime actor friends Laura Linney and Ali Wentworth and Canadian culture writer Scaachi Koul.
The most notable sequence in Part II keeps it in the family as Brooke, her longtime TV writer/producer husband Chris Henchy and their two daughters Rowan and Grier have dinner in their townhouse in New York City’s West Village. At one point, they talk about Brooke’s early film career, Pretty Baby in particular, and how a project like that would be regarded if it were pitched today—or if it would even make it to the pitch phase. (It wouldn’t.)
The girls, 19-year-old Rowan and 16-year-old Grier, are curious and comfortable when talking about mom’s early movies and her relationship with her own late mother. And Brooke appears to be quite at ease when discussing it.
Of Pretty Baby, Grier declares, "The movie itself is about something that's not okay now."
"I'm not disagreeing with you," responds her mom.
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.
Thank you for this great view of this documentary! I have been looking forward to seeing it and your review ensures that I will.