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Park City, Utah – Brooke Shields revealed she was a victim of sexual assault in a new documentary about her life that premiered Friday afternoon sundance film festivalShe did not name the man who raped her, but she described the circumstances: It happened shortly after she graduated from college, and she was having dinner with someone she knew professionally to discuss work. The attack happened when she went to his hotel room to hail a taxi.
“I didn’t fight that much. I was totally flabbergasted,” she says in the video. “I thought one ‘no’ from me should have been enough.” Later, when she told her friend, security expert Gavin de Becker, what had happened, he said, “That was Rape.” At the time she wasn’t ready to believe it.
It’s just one of many revelations in “Pretty Baby,” a nuanced look at Shields’ life so far, including her rise to fame, her complicated relationship with alcoholic mother Teri Shields, and How the media, from showbiz to reporters who interviewed her, commodified her youthful sexuality while shaming her. The film will be available on Hulu later this year.
Directed by Lana Wilson, this documentary is named after Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby, which follows an 11-year-old The story of a young sex worker played by Shields. Polly Platt, who kissed Keith Carradine, 29, and appeared nude.
This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that she’s been sexualized by the media. At 15, she shot “Blue Lagoon” and then “Endless Love.” Both have sex and nudity. Then there were those Calvin Klein denim ads. When she became a global star at 16, a family friend and photographer tried to sell nude photos he had taken of her when she was 9 years old. Her mother sued. They went to court. The photographer won.
Shields, who has written two memoirs, has approached her about documentaries but always declined. But now at 57, with a kid off to college, encouragement from friend Ali Wentworth and a generally good feeling about his situation after years of therapy, Shields feels the time is right.
As Wilson puts it, “she’s ready to go there,” including talking about her time at Princeton, her friendship with Michael Jackson, her tumultuous relationship with Andre Agassi, and her role in “Endless Love.” Longtime co-star Tom Cruise continues on the publicity circuit criticizing her use of antidepressants for postpartum depression. He will apologize later.
Wilson just came off the set of Taylor Swift documentary ” miss america ’ when she got a call from her agent asking if she wanted to meet with Shields about a potential project.
“At first I wasn’t sure because I had just finished another project on celebrities,” Wilson said. “But I’m also curious.”
After the meeting, Shields handed her a hard drive. It’s her mother’s archive of clips and interviews she’s done over the decades. There are over 1,000 hours of material, organized by year. Wilson began opening files at random: Shields in the Reagan White House, dancing with 12 poodles in “Circus of the Stars,” or singing about a man’s love in a prairie dress. Then she attended a press conference for “Pretty Baby.”
“She’s joined by a string of male talk show hosts who have been praised for her beauty, her body and her sex appeal, but have also been criticized for being exhibitionist, going too far, and appearing in what some say is child pornography said Wilson. “In that situation, I started thinking about Brooke at 12 and how all girls start to form their identities. How do you form your identity in a society that defines you entirely by who you are as a sex object? It’s something a lot of women and girls do in private, and Brooke had to do it in public.”
The AP typically does not name victims of sexual assault unless they come forward publicly.
It’s a story that’s neither new nor ancient in Hollywood. Wilson noted that Shirley Temple, Jodie Foster, Penelope Cruz, Natalie Portman, and Kirsten Dunst were all sexualized to varying degrees in their early roles. Many examples of actors.
One of Shields’ biggest fears when she began the project was that her late mother would be vilified again. But Wilson saw something new in looking back, something she thought was worth exploring.
“It’s a way of distracting people from these larger issues that involve the people who are actually in charge of the movies, the advertising and the entertainment system,” Wilson said. Terry became the scapegoat when the bigger issues were raised by people and everyone who paid attention to it.”
It took Wilson four long days, plus some pick-ups, to interview Shields’ “pretty baby.”
“I’m lucky that she’s up to it,” Wilson said.
“Pretty baby,” she says, is not comprehensive by any means. There are things in the memoir that are not in the film. But she helps forge a cultural context in the film that doesn’t exist in the memoir. And, that through-line is Brooke’s journey to gain agency, beyond her mind, her profession, and her identity.
Choosing to talk about sexual assault is only part of it.
“She’s been very honest and candid about what she’s been trying to do about herself, what she’s been through, and how she’s blamed herself in so many ways, and I think it sounds heartbreaking but also very relatable,” Wilson said. “It’s something she’s been grappling with for a long time and is still grappling with. Knowing about an experience that hasn’t been fully resolved is very powerful.”
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Follow Associated Press film writer Lindsay Barr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. all rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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