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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you so much for sharing part of your day with us. Time Magazine put Brooke Shields on its cover in February of 1981 and declared her "the face of the '80s". She was one of the most photographed and discussed young women of the decade after a series of controversial career choices, not entirely her own.

The only daughter of a single mom who would go on to be the personification of a stage mom, Brooke began modeling as a baby. People were remarked on her "beauty" even as a toddler, and the cost of being that beautiful at such a young age was steep. She was placed in situations which we now know and, honestly, probably knew back then too, were inappropriate for a child; a movie where she played a prostitute at 12, even though it was an art film, sexualized advertising such as this jean commercial where the camera pans slowly up the 15-year-old's long legs to her face as she whistles Oh, My Darling Clementine and delivers this line straight to the camera:

Brooke Shields: You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.

Ad Voice: Calvin Klein Jeans.

Alison Stewart: She was remarkably poised in the face of unwanted attention and comments, and she developed what she describes as the ability to disassociate and to compartmentalize from situations until she was able to make her own decisions, like secretly reclaiming all of her archives from her mother who was gripped by alcoholism.

A new documentary looks back at Brooke Shields' life and career with a 2023 lens, exploring the entertainment culture that encouraged titillation, but also made her famous and financially stable. It poignantly looks at her fraught relationship with her mom, her first marriage to tennis star Andre Agassi, and her drive to find a lane for herself as a woman and as a performer. It was directed by the Emmy-winning director of After Tiller, Lana Wilson.

Lana, welcome to the studio.

Lana Wilson: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like you to join this conversation. What do you remember about the time when Brooke Shields' image was everywhere? What did you think about the way her beauty was marketed? What did you think about the ad campaign she was in? Maybe you worked with her, maybe you had interaction with her. We welcome you into this conversation. Our phone number is 212-433-WNYC. That is 212-433-9692, or you can reach out @AllOfItWNYC on Twitter or Instagram.

One of the things you do really well in the film, and I think this is probably really helpful for younger viewers, is to put her fame in context, how Brooke Shields was everywhere. Can you share a little bit about just really how famous she was?

Lana Wilson: Yes. She had a scale of global fame that's hard to comprehend today. In the '80s, when she was at the peak of her fame, there were 20 magazines, TV, and that was really it. It wasn't like today. She was one of the most recognizable faces on earth. There was Queen Elizabeth, Jackie Onassis, and Brooke Shields. Whereas today we have a lot of people who are very famous and that they might have millions of Instagram followers, but there are thousands and thousands of those people.

Alison Stewart: When did the idea for the documentary start? What was the original idea?

Lana Wilson: Well, the idea was actually Ali Wentworth's. She's a comedian and a writer, and she's married to George Stephanopoulos. They had this idea to make a documentary about Brooke with ABC, and that's when they approached me about it. I am in my 30s, so I first remember Brooke Shields actually in the '90s. I remember Suddenly Susan, I remember her comedy work, and I remembered the impact that her book on postpartum depression had, although vaguely. I was very young at the time.

When I went to meet Brooke in person, I didn't know what to expect. I was struck by how smart and deep and funny she is, and her commitment, her fearlessness around the idea of making a documentary, but what really made me excited to do it was she handed me a hard drive at this first meeting that was a treasure trove of thousands of pieces of footage, the outtakes of a documentary her mom had started making on her called Look at Brooke, as well as all of these photos.

I took that home, started looking at the material, and was struck in looking at the footage of 12-year-old Brooke on the press tour after Pretty Baby, her first film, the controversial art film you mentioned. I saw this 12-year-old girl sitting in the hot seat with a series of talk show hosts being, on the one hand, praised for her beauty, her sensuality, her maturity, but then also being criticized for being an exhibitionist, for being too sexual, for going too far.

I saw that and just thought, this dynamic has not gone away, this feels very contemporary. I think that girls and women are still often in these situations where you're told that the way you look is the most important thing, and you're praised for being beautiful or told your power comes from there, but if you go too far, if you're too sexual, if you cross some invisible line that's always moving, you're criticized, condemned, punished.

Alison Stewart: Brooke is extremely candid in this film. She's forthcoming. She lets you enter her home with her daughters at one point. I'm curious, what was her involvement in the production, in the editorial process?

Lana Wilson: Well, I had total creative control, I had a final cut, and that was something that was really important to me. Brooke wanted that too. She really wanted a director to come with a vision and a perspective on her life. She'd watched all my work before I met her, and she really responded to that. She didn't want a puff piece or anything like that. She wanted something that took audiences on a real journey.

Brooke didn't see it until the very end when it was done, and showing it to her was a really intense, powerful experience. I think it was pretty overwhelming for Brooke, a whole mix of feelings; awe at the scope of her career and at her grace under pressure as a child, sadness about people who she's lost and so many of the harder parts of the documentary, but she felt really proud of it and I think appreciated that the way I wanted to approach it was not only her personal story, but also this much bigger cultural story of what she as a symbol reflected.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lana Wilson. She's the director and the EP of Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, which is premiering on Hulu on April 3rd. We have a call. Let's talk to Jennifer calling in from Manhattan. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Yes, thanks for taking my call. Brooke and I are essentially the same age, and I had friends who attended Princeton with her. I did have an opportunity to meet her on a few occasions. She was in Lit classes, she was a Lit major humanities, Lit major at Princeton. Everyone who knew her, I think, and I felt the same, she was so gracious, so engaging, so down-to-earth and so humble, considering how she had been in the public eye her entire life. It really didn't seem to go to her head.

I also did want to say how much I respected her openness about her postpartum depression. I think she did an enormous public service by sharing that. I also think that the way she's addressing getting older and again, underscoring the importance of women's visibility of a certain age is also very impressive, given her reputation and visibility. All around, I think she's a very impressive individual.

Alison Stewart: Jennifer, thank you so much for calling in. We'll talk about her time at Princeton and the issue with postpartum. I do want to go back to the beginning for people who don't know about her life story. A story of Brooke Shields really starts with her mother, Teri. Teri seemed to be driven, truly loved her daughter, clearly, but they had tough times at the beginning. Part of Brooke going to work was because she was a single mom.

Tell us a little more about Teri's background and what impact it had on those early days.

Lana Wilson: Teri grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and was a larger-than-life personality: charismatic, hilarious, coloring outside the lines, kind of bohemian. She wanted to make it. She moved to Manhattan as soon as she could and was a hustler. She also had very low feelings of self-worth and self-value, I would say, because of her own nuclear family and her relationship with her mother, so when she had this extraordinarily beautiful daughter, I think she saw this is the ticket out. I think it reflects some of her lower feelings of self-worth that she thought everything is going to be about Brooke, this incredible creature who I have here.

They have a complicated relationship. One of my biggest goals with this film was to not recreate the kind of patriarchal vilification of Teri as I saw it. She was solely blamed for a lot of the things that Brooke went through, and I was surprised that directors of films Brooke was in or the larger industry was not held responsible for anything. There was a real tendency to just blame Teri, she's a bad mom, she's a stage mom, and that was it. Although her relationship with Brooke was incredibly complex, and I would say Brooke growing up with Teri as an alcoholic was by far the biggest challenge of her life, much harder than anything in the entertainment industry; despite all of that, I didn't think it was fair to completely blame Teri for all of this.

Alison Stewart: People are probably wondering, well, what about Brooke's dad? He was a much more conservative person. He went on to have another family, and you show this really sweet footage of Brooke with her half-sister. They seem to have a good relationship. That her dad really wasn't present, although he was really into her going to Princeton.

Lana Wilson: Yes. Her dad was present. She was with him a lot less than with Teri. She and Teri were- it was a totally codependent relationship, but her dad was present. She'd visit him regularly, and they loved each other very much. What's interesting about her dad is that he never talked to Brooke about the movies she was in. Brooke being an actor, being an ultra-famous celebrity was never spoken about in her dad's house, never spoken about, and Brooke and her sister, who's in the film a bit, still don't really know why.

He was very much there, and I know that he was extremely proud of her going to Princeton, and he definitely watched her later comedy work, but didn't say anything or engage with anything about her celebrity or the earlier films.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, if you'd like to get on this conversation, we welcome you. What do you remember about the time when Brooke Shields image was everywhere? What did you think about the way her beauty was marketed or the advertising she was in? Maybe about the industry at the time. Maybe you worked with her or had an interaction with her. We welcome you into the conversation. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Our social media is @AllOfItWNYC. I'm speaking with Lana Wilson, director and EP of the documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields. It will be on Hulu on April 3rd.

One of the things that's so cringey to watch are some of the interviews with some of the talk show hosts. Grown men commenting to a young girl about, you're quite lovely, you're quite a looker, you're really, really beautiful. Aside from your filmmaking brain, when you first saw that footage, I mean as a filmmaker, you're like, "Yes, gold. Great. This is going in," but as a human being, how did you react to those clips?

Lana Wilson: It's incredibly uncomfortable to see, of course. It's very disturbing and it's sad. I think Brooke is an incredible performer now and when she was a little girl, she was an immensely talented actor. I think what's so frustrating about it is that so much of the conversation was about how she looked rather than about her abilities. For me, really my biggest reaction is looking at that, thinking we've come so far, but really we've come nowhere at all. I still think that girls and women are groomed by society to be objects, and taught that their greatest value is in how desirable and how hot they are.

What is remarkable to me about Brooke is that she started out as an object and she became a human being. She insisted on being seen for her intelligence and her abilities and her humanity. That's really hard to do, to fight against those cultural expectations that I think those male talk show hosts represent, to fight against that and to gain agency and to gain ownership over your own voice is hard to do.

Alison Stewart: Your film takes its title from the film she was cast in, Pretty Baby, with Louis Malle, the director. It's based on a true story about a brothel in New Orleans, and she's the child of one of the women in the brothel.

Lana Wilson: Susan Sarandon.

Alison Stewart: Yes. I'm the same age as Brooke Shields, so I sort of remember this.

Lana Wilson: Really?

Alison Stewart: Yes, I know. I have a memory of this, and even as a baby junior feminist, I thought, this is not quite right, and the way that it was being marketed felt icky to 13-year-old, 14-year-old me. This movie really came to define her, rightly or wrongly, at the time. If you could talk a little bit about how she got involved with the film. We see her as a young woman, not defending it, but she's giving very poised answers when she's asked very difficult questions about it. Why do you think this film, you say, "Brooke Shields," then people say, "Pretty Baby," right away?

Lana Wilson: Yes. Well, it's really because the film was so controversial and shocking in having an 11-year-old playing a sex worker. It was a film that was hailed and praised in Europe. It premiered at Cannes, but was actually banned in some places in the US. I think it brings up these big questions and debates that we still have now about, is this exploitative in showing this child sex worker, or is it critiquing the sexualization of young girls? It's a thorny gray area question and the film itself, I think, is fascinating and flawed, but you can look at it from many different ways.

I watch it sometimes thinking, "Of course, this is critiquing the sexualization of young girls." It was also a film written by Polly Platt, a really interesting screenwriter and producer, and that was her goal. On the other hand, I think, "But does this have to be done in this way? Did this have to occur in real life to make this film?" For instance, Brooke did certainly know she was playing a character in the film. She wasn't naive and she never felt uncomfortable on set. She didn't feel exploited. She wanted to do it. She was excited to do it. On the other hand, she was only 11.

Then the moment that I focus on the most in my documentary is a moment where she does a scene where she has to kiss Keith Carradine. Brooke is 11. Keith Carradine is 29. That was the one moment where she felt uncomfortable.

Alison Stewart: We actually have that clip.

Lana Wilson: Oh, great.

Alison Stewart: Let's play this clip in this scene about-- Brooke's voice is what we hear first, then Drew Barrymore, and then a sociologist. This is from Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

Brooke Shields: It's pretend, this is all make-believe.

Drew Barrymore: I've been on those sets. People are having fun. You're filming it. It's art. You don't really think about it until later. There is an aftermath that then cycles in your head of like, "Was that okay?"

Sociologist: I would argue she wasn't conscious of what was wrong, but had a feeling that something was not good, was off.

Talk Show Host: They say that on the set, you felt very uncomfortable during all this. Is that true?

Brooke Shields: Well, I mean I knew it was going to be done in good taste. I mean if you think about the whole thing, it might be a little uncomfortable, but I knew that it was going to be in good taste and it wasn't any porno movie, and so I didn't feel so bad about it.

Alison Stewart: That is such a stunning clip. I remember the first time I heard it, "It's in good taste," and I thought, "Are those her words or are those words she's heard?" Because she's about 12 years old in that clip.

Lana Wilson: Right. Well, it's a word I certainly hear now to describe films by male arthouse auteurs all the time, so it's a continuing question. Yes, I think if you asked her the question you just asked me, were those her words or someone else's? I don't think she'd know, but I know she did feel comfortable on set. However, during this scene, she kept scrunching up her face when she was supposed to kiss Keith Carradine and the director, Louis Malle, was getting really annoyed with her. It was finally the very kind Keith Carradine who told her, what was just in the clip, "It's pretend, it's not real." When I first heard that, I remember thinking, "But it is real. She is really kissing him, and what is the psychological impact of that?"

Alison Stewart: Has she worked through the psychological impact of that?

Lana Wilson: Yes, I think she really has. I think she's an incredibly introspective, self-aware person. I know therapy has been a huge part of her life, and I think she's processed so many things. What's cool about her too is that she is deeply dedicated to learning and to challenging herself in a lot of ways, and so she continues to be challenged even today. The film actually ends with a scene with her daughters where you see in real-time them pushing back and challenging Brooke. You see her both listening to them, saying, "Okay, I see this from your point of view, and I can see that differently now," but also holding on to her truth and experience in a really interesting way.

Alison Stewart: We're talking with Lana Wilson about the film Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, premiering on Hulu, April 3rd. We'll take a quick break. After the break, we'll talk a little bit about Brooke Shields' work around the postpartum issue, we'll talk about her marriages a little bit and again, that final scene with her daughters. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. My guest is Lana Wilson, the director and EP of Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, about the life and career of Brooke Shields. Let's take a few calls from people who remember Brooke from the '80s. Erin is calling in from the Upper West Side. Hi, Erin.

Erin: Hi, thanks for this show. This sounds absolutely fascinating. I remember as a child, I was born in 1980, I guess seeing reruns of Blue Lagoon. I remember knowing as a child that something was wrong, that Brooke was being sexualized, but it also laid the groundwork, I think, in my mind as a young girl of what was to come. Then I remember her Calvin Klein ads in sixth grade, wearing a pair of hand-me-down Calvin Klein jeans. I think the issues with media, and I'm so happy they're taking the focus away from Teri and on to the general public and everyone that supported this, it's laying the ground for pre-teens, this goes into child pornography, and then laid the ground then for Kate Moss to take over with Calvin Klein with thinness.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Erin: I think Brooke Shields is incredible. She's an incredible woman. I look up to her, I admire her, and what she has been through is remarkable. To be so poised throughout everything, it's-- I think we need to do better as a society, and media needs to take care of young girls. It's very important.

Alison Stewart: Erin, thank you for calling in. Lana, your thoughts?

Lana Wilson: I love that. Yes, I think there are so many discussions today around the sexualization of girls, and especially social media and teenage girls. I completely agree with the caller that the adults who are making the dominant visual media, visual culture today, really need to think about what they're representing as beauty standards and in terms of sexualization of very young girls today.

Because I personally think teenagers should dress however they want, express themselves however they want, their sexuality, their personality, their gender identity, whatever. It's exciting in some ways that social media gives teenagers the opportunity to do that and to present a more diverse set of images for us all to see. On the other hand, mostly teenagers, and especially teenage girls, are largely, studies have shown, replicating the images that they see in advertising, and film and television.

That's why I feel the responsibility is really on the adults to think about what they're showing and why. Thinking about the recent Balenciaga ad scandal, to give just one example, there is so much more that we can do here and so much change still to be made.

Alison Stewart: Matt, I think is on board with this as well. Matt is calling in from Hell's Kitchen. Hi, Matt.

Matt: Hi. Oh my God, so I remember that Calvin Klein ad from when I was a kid, and now I'm a dad of a 15-year-old girl, and I cannot believe she was 15. Oh my God. All the people that said yes to that campaign. Wow. You can look at that film with nuance of what were the motivations of the people making that film, but the people making that Calvin Klein ad had one motivation and that was to sell jeans- to sexualize a child to sell jeans and make profits.

I think we tend to generalize, "Oh, this is a problem of the culture." Well, the culture is made by individuals making decisions. As your guest has said and the previous caller, we need to make better decisions regardless of the motivations.

Alison Stewart: Matt, thank you so much for calling in. If you'd like to weigh in on this conversation, our phone is 212-433-WNYC. What do you remember about the time when Brooke Shields' image was everywhere? What did you think about the way her beauty was marketed? Maybe you were affected by her open discussion of her postpartum depression. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Going to Princeton really seemed to be a huge, a huge turning point in her life. It seemed as though that was when Brooke realized, I can make my own choices, I can really have my own opinions. Then she also discovered- well, she knew she was smart, but other people discovered she was smart, that she was funny. That was where she really got into comedy. From going through all these archives and talking to her, what did discovering she was funny open up for her?

Lana Wilson: Well, I think it made her realize she is more than just her face, her value is more than how she looks. There is a connection between Princeton and her discovering her comic voice. Going to Princeton, first of all, was a very big deal for an actress to do at that time. It really hadn't happened before. The only other actress who was known at the time who went to college was Jodie Foster. That happened.

Brooke had a much bigger scale of global fame, and she was seen as a sex symbol. The idea of a sex symbol going to Princeton was shocking, was upsetting to some people, there was a lot of pushback, but Brooke insisted on doing it and stepping entirely away from the industry for four years to do it. When she got there, she did slowly discover, and there's a really moving story in the film about a professor talking to her about this, she discovered that she could have an opinion of her own. She found her own instincts and she realized how smart she is, but then, yes, that her instincts would be a huge part of comedy. Because especially when you're doing stuff live on stage, you're constantly improvising, figuring out things on the spot, trying different ways of doing things.

In her previous work, she'd been treated, sometimes by directors, as a beautiful object, the silent object, and someone who they were not going to talk about character with, their motivation with. Whereas once she discovered her comic voice at Princeton, and then later she would develop that much more, she connected to her own opinions about how to do things and found her voice, really, in a new way.

Alison Stewart: One of the moving parts of the film, and I'm not giving anything away by saying this, is that she at one point realized that she should probably take control of her archives, and she does it sort of secretly. She goes out and she knows where they are and she takes them back. Her mother has had a long bout with alcoholism. You can see her in the film relive whether that was right or wrong, or whether she really hurt her mother by doing that.

Did she really explain to you why she did it? Like what was the point of quietly going out and literally reclaiming her image?

Lana Wilson: Yes. I think she had tried to talk to her mom, who was also her manager, and she was in her 20s at this point, and said, "I want to go in a different direction. I want to do different things in my career. I think we need more of a strategy." She tried to have those conversations with her mom. Her mom's alcoholism was getting worse and worse. None of that was working, and she didn't know any other way to do it, really. She was also then with Andre Agassi. He and his team were saying, "What do you want to do in your career? You've got to just do it." I think they were part of pushing her to really make a clean break in all ways with her mom professionally as her manager.

Because it was so hard to do, and because their relationship was so deep and so codependent, I think this was the only way she knew how to; going in on a weekend, stripping the office bare, not just the archives, but all of the furniture. The people who worked there, they didn't come back in on Monday. Teri, on Monday, literally walked into a completely empty, echoing building, and Brooke and all her stuff was gone.

She does look back at it now and think that was the harshest thing she ever did, and on the one hand, that her mom never forgave her for it, the relationship was never quite the same, but on the other hand, I don't think there was any other way she could have done it. That's how intertwined she and her mom were.

Alison Stewart: In the film, we hear from Ali Wentworth. We hear from Laura Linney, who is a childhood friend of hers. We see her in conversation with them. We hear about her marriage to Andre Agassi. Something that really stuck with me is I read Andre Agassi's autobiography, and they recall their marriage very differently, from his book and versus what she says. No one will ever know what was in the room with two people.

How did you think about that, when you knew that there's somebody else with an entirely different side to this marriage?

Lana Wilson: Yes. Well, I think that in the context of this film, what I was looking for in going through all the major events of Brooke's life was not just retelling every event in a more of a biopic way, but it was looking for what is the fundamental journey and evolution Brooke has gone on. For me, what I saw was her gaining agency and control over her own life. That's the journey. When I was looking at her marriage to Andre Agassi, I was looking at it through that lens.

I think, on the one hand, he was a big step forward for her in that way because he was the first person to ask her, "What do you want to do with your career and your life? Let's do it. I'll support you 100%." On the other hand, one of the stories that is told in the documentary is about Brooke doing a guest appearance on Friends. It's a comic role, where she's playing a very sexual character, and it's kind of hyperbolic sexuality. It's very funny. She plays Joey's stalker, and she starts licking Joey's hands. It's hilarious. Andre knew what the role was. He knew it was a character, obviously, he was at the taping of Friends, but it was so upsetting to him watching Brooke doing this sexual and comic role that he stormed off set, he drove home to Las Vegas, and he smashed all of his tennis trophies.

To me, this was a total echo of the behavior I'd seen earlier in Brooke's life and career, being sexualized and people freaking out. The difference is that now she was no longer a child. She's an adult, a comic actress who wants to do this. It's a character, and it's a role at a fictionalized show she's playing. Yet, the reaction is the same. I found that really interesting. In terms of Andre Agassi's perspective perhaps being different, we did invite him to do an interview, he didn't want to do it, so it's kind of that-- I believe Brooke's experience also and that's why we showed it this way.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Daniel from Brooklyn. Hi, Daniel. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Daniel: Hi, Alison. Thank you for this conversation. I'm really happy I happened to be listening to the show today because I think that a lot of people are not aware of the kind of turn that Brooke Shields has taken in recent years. I'm a '90s kid, so I would say that most of the controversies you've talked about I missed just by not being born around the '80s, but if we're talking about her character in Jane the Virgin, for example, she was absolutely hilarious in that. For someone who is a "'80s and '90s sex icon", she was so willing to shed that image. In one of the scenes, she loses her eyebrows in the show, which was absolutely hilarious, but this is not what you expect to see from somebody who has gone through what she's gone through.

She was really able to reinvent herself, and I couldn't be happier this documentary is coming out. Thank you for making us aware of it.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in, Daniel. Let's talk to Nicole from New Rochelle, who I think knew Brooke when she was a child. Hi, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi. Yes, this is wonderful and I look forward to seeing this documentary. I knew Brooke when she was in fifth grade, sixth grade, I'm not sure if it was '75, '76, '77. I was her art teacher at the Lennox School on the East Side of Manhattan. First of all, she happened to be good at art, but that's not why I'm calling. She clearly was a lovely kid who had a very difficult home life.

One of the things I remember, a few incidents, but one is there had been a tragedy in the school, someone had died. It was a kind of school where most teachers said, "Well, you could write about it if you are upset," but I was the teacher who said, "Well, if you're upset, you could just hug me and cry," [chuckles] and she did. For her, I had this feeling that she doesn't get to do that because she had to be the parent, she had to be the grownup. I worried and worried and worried about what would become of her. I mean I just thought about it a lot.

Alison Stewart: Thank you, Nicole, for calling in. Yes, you do see how mature she is as a young girl.

Lana Wilson: Yes. Wow, I'm so moved by that call, and I can absolutely see Brooke do-- I love this teacher offering hugs to her students, thank you for doing that but, yes, she had this remarkable maturity to her as a kid. I think that does come from being the child of an alcoholic, and learning to take care of her mother in so many ways and learning and having to be responsible for herself, her own-- Brooke kept the schedule. She's like, "We need to get in the cab to go to the airport now." She was managing all of that, and did also have this pressure of being not only the breadwinner financially, but also succeeding to make her mom happy. A really deep emotional need as well as the financial pressure of it.

Alison Stewart: More recently, in the past 10, 15 years, a lot of people know that Brooke Shields was very open and she is very, very open about her postpartum. She goes into great detail about some of the really difficult intrusive thoughts that came to her and how she thought she was going through it alone. I think all of us remember that she talked about it publicly. Then Tom Cruise, who is a Scientologist, went on The Today Show and went after her and went after mental health professionals and people taking medication. Then I believe she wrote the op-ed for The New York Times after.

How did that moment- aside from her getting to speak her truth, how did that moment really help her find her voice?

Lana Wilson: Well, it was interesting because when Brooke became pregnant for the first time, she had previously avoided looking at herself in the mirror, which when I learned that, I was like, "What? You avoided looking at yourself in the mirror for 30 years?" Yes, she didn't want to think about it. She was afraid of looking at herself. She didn't feel comfortable in her own skin in a way, and when she became pregnant, she felt really good. For the first time in her life, she felt good and beautiful, looking at herself in the mirror. It was something that she'd wanted since she was a little kid. She always wanted to be a mother.

Then after she had her first baby, she experienced something that she had no idea what to make of it. It was shocking, it was unsettling, the way it is for so many women who experience postpartum depression. It's just like you're not yourself in any way; horrifying images, things taking over you. In some cases, it's a wide range of experiences, you might not feel the connection to your baby that you always expected you would feel. She talks about it in the documentary with incredible candor, as you say.

Coming out of that, her agent said, "No one talks about this stuff. You should write a book about it," and at the time that the book came out, it really was much more stigmatized than it is now. No one was speaking about it. The idea that someone who was a public figure and an icon and someone who a lot of people looked up to could write a book that was so raw and honest, and speak about this in that way and say, "I came through it and I got help and I'm on the other side of it now, and this can happen to you too," it was a very big deal.

Alison Stewart: The name of the documentary is Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, premieres on Hulu, April 3rd. Stay until the very end with her daughters. It's so worth it. I've been speaking with its director and EP, Lana Wilson. Thanks to everyone who called, and Lana, thank you for coming to the studio.

Lana Wilson: Thank you so much for having me, Alison.

 

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