In 2020, the Academy Award winning documentary maker Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA) asked me to appear in The Supermodels, the four-part AppleTV+ series about Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington (shown with me), debuting on Wednesday night. In the past, two of those supes have expressed ill feelings towards me and my 1995 book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, so I hesitated. But after Kopple promised that she, not the models, who were also touted as producers, would control the film—I was taped by her for hours that October.
Six months later, Kopple emailed to say the project had stalled., but might be revived. I heard no more until two new directors, Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills, reached out to me in April to ask for several images from Model and a release for a sound-bite from my interviews. My contribution, I’m told, is one eight-second sound bite.
Kopple is now credited one of eleven executive producers. Bills has described herself as a gun for hire on the project. Something tells me that Kopple, the director who shot me, was someone else’s gunshot victim.
Will The Supermodels be super-hagiography with its subjects in charge? We’ll see. Naomi, for one, seems unsatisfied. “All I can say about this docuseries is that it was meant to be a celebration,” she told WWD a few weeks ago. “I don’t think it’s the celebration that it started out to be.” Still can’t decide whether to sign up for AppleTV+ to watch it. But if you want to read what the New York Times Book Review described as “the definitive book of the Barbizon School,” it’s been in print and continuously updated in the 28 years since it was first published.