Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields — now streaming on Hulu — may never have had the scene where Shields discusses being sexually assaulted by an unnamed film producer when she was in her early twenties. Despite its significance to the story, director Lana Wilson wanted to be sure about including the interview in the final cut, by taking Shield’s approval one last time.
The documentary takes viewers through Brooke’s life in the public glare, from her beginnings as an infant model to being the most widely photographed woman in the world as people became obsessed with her looks.
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Wilson — who was hesitant about doing another documentary about a celebrity after delivering a roaring success in the form of the Miss Americana film about Taylor Swift — shared in an interview that, although she had complete creative control over the project, she sought Shields’ approval before including the sexual assault bit in the final cut. According to the director, she was in two minds about using the traumatic experience in the film even though the actor had brought the incident up in their very first meeting about the doc.
Wilson’s take on the matter was: “I did think it was a really powerful story right away because Brooke speaks about her experience in a way that’s looking very much inside the experience of what it felt like then, how she’s processed it since and inside this space of not knowing what to call it at the time, blaming herself, feeling culpable, not just when it was happening, but for many, many decades afterward, beating herself up for not fighting back more. And I think that a lot of her experiences are really common ones to have and that a lot of what happens when you experience a sexual assault is you think: I’m to blame for that. I should have handled that differently…”
“I want you to feel completely comfortable with it if it goes out into the world,” Wilson told Shields. According to the director, Shields thought the issue was “sensitively handled” when she saw the film.
In retrospect, the director firmly believed that the assault should not be put in the film just to give viewers something more to chew on: “I also told her, I don’t think we should make any decision now on whether it’s in the film or not, because it depends on what the movie is. I don’t think we should include this just because it’s new. I don’t want to include your experience of sexual assault as a news item. I only think it should be in there if it’s an integral part of the focus and the story of this film. So let’s talk about it in an interview and let me bring it into the edit and see.”
Later on, as the project developed, Wilson said that she believed talking about the assault really drove home the point about how things were for Shields: “I saw it as the ultimate violation of Brooke’s autonomy — physically, mentally, emotionally.”
She admitted: “It’s hard for me to imagine the film without it. Although, just so you know, I also don’t see it as the most important sequence or moment.”
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Talking about the first meeting with Shields, Wilson said: “When I met her in person, she was kind of what I expected, even more so — even more smart and funny and deep than I had anticipated. And I was really struck by her thoughtfulness, her level of introspection, of self-awareness.”
The fact that Shields, 57, provided Wilson with a hard drive with extensive archival material for her to look at and consider was the determining element in her agreeing to shoot the film.
Wilson said: “It was material her mom had collected for almost 50 years. Hundreds and hundreds of pieces of video, photographs of Brooke— over 1,000 items in total, including outtakes from a never completed documentary Teri commissioned called Look at Brooke. I got home and I started opening random files and was just astonished by what I saw. So that made me think: I’ve got to make this.”
Wilson said she combed through this material which showed Brooke and her controversial mother being chastised for her role in Pretty Baby, with analogies being made to child pornography — and then Shields being commended for her beauty and elegance, often in the same breath.
“I remember watching that thinking: This is a dynamic that hasn’t gone away at all,” Wilson said, talking about the similar expectations that exist for girls and women today.
Wilson said her vision for the doc was to “look at this through the lens of 2023.” She believes that while the documentary is “Brooke’s personal story, it’s also the story of Brooke Shields the symbol and how that was like holding a mirror up to American society in terms of what we thought about women and girls at different points in time.”
