When “The Blue Lagoon” director Randal Kleiser reached out to Brooke Shields after the release of her explosive new documentary, she sent his call to voicemail.
In her new documentary, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” the model and actor looks back at her childhood spent in the spotlight, exposing the harsh reality of a young Hollywood star who’s sexualized and exploited. The doc examines the controversial films “Pretty Baby” and “The Blue Lagoon,” which both feature an underage Shields in a sexual light.
Shields revealed during an appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show” on Tuesday that she got a call from Kleiser after “Pretty Baby” debuted on Hulu.
“I saw his name on my phone and I was like ‘Oh, oh, what do I do?’” she said anxiously. “I let it go to voicemail because I want to see what the tone is.”
According to Shields, Kleiser asked for a “chat,” but she’s not interested in bringing it all up again.
“It’s not about that,” she continued. “It’s about these males needing me to be in a certain category to serve their story. And it never was about me. It was never protective of me. It was fun and loving at times, but I was just there. I was a pawn.”
Shields said being sexualized so early in life left her not knowing how to interpret her experiences. “I was made to feel culpable,” she told Barrymore. “At the same time, you victim-shame yourself.”
Shields was only 14 when she arrived on Fiji’s Turtle Island to shoot the 1980 movie “The Blue Lagoon.” She turned 15 over the course of the four months she spent filming the coming-of-age story that follows two cousins marooned on an island as children.
As they grow and go through puberty, with no one to guide them as they evolve, they discover their sexuality and fall in love.
Shields and her co-star Christopher Atkins, who was 18 at the time the film was shot, were both featured nearly nude throughout the film. During select scenes, Shields’ hair covered her breasts and Atkins was naked during a lovemaking scene.
Atkins told “Studio 10” in a 2015 interview that Kleiser had put a poster of Shields over his bunk on the island so he would genuinely fall in love with his co-star.
“They wanted to make it a reality show,” Shields says in the new documentary. “They wanted to sell my actual sexual awakening.”
The documentary suggests that Randal used the public’s fascination with Shields after she starred as an 11–year-old prostitute in “Pretty Baby” to the film’s advantage. He’s quoted in the documentary describing the film’s premise to a newspaper: “It’s real, she’s going from a child to a woman during the filming.”
“The irony was I wasn’t in touch with any of my own sexuality,” Shields said. “I was raised Catholic, with sex they sort of taught me ‘wait till you’re married, wait till you’re married’ and it was put into my brain. I had a lot of shame around all of it. My dad always tried to pretend that I didn’t do any of the things I had done. He just buried his head. I don’t know if he ever saw one of my movies.”
