Brooke Shields and Michael J Fox: Two Child Stars Reclaim Their Stories

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields 

Documentary directed by Lara Wilson

“I didn’t fight that much… I just absolutely froze… I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out,'” Brooke Shields says somewhere in the middle of Pretty Baby, breaking down as she recalls an evening when a Hollywood man raped her.

She was in her 20s then, trying to find work.

We have watched Shields’ life unravel in scandals and tragedies on TV screens and gossip magazines, and there’s little we think we don’t know about her. We have opinions about her, her work, especially erotic films like The Blue Lagoon, her marriage with Andre Agassi, and friendship with Michael Jackson. Mostly, we know her as a stunning model who grew into an actress but couldn’t really act.  

And yet there are so many moments in director Lana Wilson’s two-part documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, that shocked me, made me pause and root for the funny, gorgeous, smart, articulate, fiercely honest and spirited woman who is trying to reclaim her story and herself. 

“I don’t know what it would be like to have lived a life without this beauty… [that] I was born with,” Shields, now 57, says very early on in Pretty Baby that’s playing at the Sundance Film Festival, the world’s biggest indie film festival, in Utah, the U.S.

The documentary’s format is not original. Pretty Baby traces Shields’ life chronologically to introduce us to who this young woman, often described as one of the most beautiful creatures on earth, really was. But its intent is significant and exciting.

Wilson’s film takes a sharply feminist look at who really profited from turning Shields into a male fantasy and it frames Shields’ story in how the women’s liberation movement in the sixties and seventies turned the entertainment industry away from women and towards younger girls. It also takes the scorn often thrown at Shields’ single, ambitious mother and turns the spotlight onto the white, male directors and designers who used her.

Beginning with the beautiful baby model who became a sexy model at the age of nine and was being made to pout and pose in bathtubs, we see Shields being cast by French director Louis Malle in the 1978 period drama, Pretty Baby, as a girl in a New Orleans brothel. She was 12-13 years old then and was made to do nude scenes. 

Two years later, she appeared in a Calvin Klein jeans ad. The camera sexualized her and jeans flew off the counters. That was followed by The Blue Lagoon phenomena the same year, and young men and women across the world fantasized about their own sexual awakening on sunny beaches in the tropics.

“I was young, but not clueless,” says Shields whose career was charted by her powerhouse mother who loved her, but was determined to turn her daughter into a star. She was also an alcoholic. 

Learning from early childhood to please the adults around her, Shields says that she would often deal with unpleasant situations by dissociation, separating her mind from her body. That helped her survive the rape, and some films. 

She recalls how on the sets of 1981 film, Endless Love, director Franco Zeffirelli kept twisting her toe while shooting a lovemaking scene because he wasn’t getting the exact expression of ecstasy he wanted. 

She was 16 then and recalls “becoming a vapor.”

Pretty Baby chronicles several lows in Shields’ life, from suing a photographer friend who had taken nude photos of her when she was just nine, and losing that battle, to moving from a controlling mother to a controlling husband, Andre Agassi, who, after watching her play Joey’s perennially aroused stalker in the TV show F.R.I.EN.D.S, smashed all his tennis trophies.

But the film celebrates her highs more, from enrolling at Princeton University to study literature, to becoming a mother, talking about postpartum depression and taking on scientologist Tom Cruise for his rant against mothers who take antidepressants.

In all of this, what stands out is a woman at peace with herself who sometimes struggles to come to terms with the life she has lived, but is still able to laugh when she is reduced to being just a male fantasy, a pretty face.  

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, a documentary on the life of the Hollywood star, is moving.

Michael J. Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in his late 20s, would laugh at the “moving” joke had he not cracked it already. Fox does that often, in the film and in life, perhaps to put people at ease about his tremors, or perhaps to take the sting away from the pity he often encounters in faces that stare at him.

“If you pity me, it’s not going to get to me… I’ve got shit going on,” says Michael, now 61.  

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, directed by Davis Guggenheim, is about the tremor, but not just the one in Michael’s hands that won’t stop shaking, or his wobbly walk that keeps tripping him, making him fall face-first on the floor, sidewalk, onto the wardrobe door. It’s also about the counter tremor of his indomitable spirit that won’t stop shaking its head at Parkinson’s and saying, “I’m not done. Not yet, not today”.

Still is in the official selection of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and opens with a scene in Florida in the 1990s, when Michael woke up to find that his pinkie finger won’t stop shaking. As he raises it to stare at it, his voiceover comes on, talking directly to us. His words move slowly sometimes, sometimes they sprint, but he is always funny, witty and makes sure the joke is on him – like the film’s title. Still is a disturbing title for a documentary about a man, an actor suffering from the Skaking Palsy. But it’s one that Michael J. Fox probably picked.  

The film moves back and forth, to what life was, and what it is now.

It traces Fox’s life in Canada, where he was born. We meet his family, watch the shortest boy in class drop out of school and moving to Hollywood to audition for small parts in TV shows.

We see Fox’s struggle and then rise in Hollywood, going from sitcoms like Family Ties to star in blockbuster films like Teen Wolf and Back To the Future. 

He had Mercedes and Jaguar cars, a woman he loved; his cute face was, at one time, on every magazine cover at a news stand. And now, the actor whose signature move was run-and-slide, has to train to walk, speak without mumbling. 

Fox calls Parkinson’s “the cosmic price” he has to pay for his success. But he remains determined to fight it.

On screen, he starred in The Good Wife, as the cunning attorney Louis Canning who weaponizes his disease in court, plays to the jury to win cases, and in real life he joined hands with Muhammad Ali, appeared before the Congress to campaign for more funds to research Parkinson’s disease. 

We see a lot in Still which cleverly uses clips from Fox’s movies and TV shows to tell the story of a man who, despite being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, carried on acting for over seven years, even shooting the sitcom Spin City with a live audience.  

We watch Fox falling on the sidewalk, struggling to drink, hold a pen, do the voiceover, and get a brief glimpse of what Parkinson’s actually feels like.

“The tremors are exhausting, tiring,” Fox says, and each intense episode, he adds, feels like a “seismic jolt.”

Still is an uncomfortable film. It’s also funny, inspiring and overwhelming, not because the disease is so debilitating, but because Michael J. Fox’s mind won’t stay still.