[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Bring Me the Beauties.”]
Nearly five years and one hundred hours of interviews went into the latest HBO docuseries, “Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult.” While the fervor around cult and true-crime documentaries is practically in the water these days, director Chris Smith‘s three-episode series stands out for its sensitive portrait of the individuals swayed by the ’80s and early-’90s Eternal Values cult, one of the strangest on television’s offer. Led by the heavily plastic-surgered Frederick von Mierers, the son of a Brooklyn dry cleaner who posed as a descendant of European nobility, the New Age wellness group preyed upon male and female models while claiming to be walk-ins — or people whose souls have been replaced by those of extraterrestrials.
At the center of the documentary is Hoyt Richards, one of the early male models of the 1980s, who has been processing his hard-won escape from the cult since around the time of the closeted Mierers’ death of AIDS-related complications in 1990. Richards attained fame as a pioneering male supermodel in major ad campaigns by the likes of Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon, and Helmut Newton, but all along he was being extorted and exploited by Mierers and his followers to bolster (and bankroll) their shaky, pseudoscientific philosophy.
The heartbreaking third episode, which just aired Monday night, details Richards’ escape from the cult and the Eternal Values acolytes who assumed power after Mierers died — those who kidnapped Richards after one escape attempt, kept him brainwashed and subservient, and even forced him to break up with his girlfriend because she wasn’t part of the cult.
But that story, among others, has a happy ending, as Episode 3 revealed. IndieWire spoke to director Smith ahead of the finale to break down key moments, including a housefire that burned down the Eternal Values’ compound near Lake Lure, North Carolina — the house Richards eventually escaped from. To include the fire, which was unrelated to Eternal Values, would have been too conspiratorial, according to Smith.
Richards and his girlfriend are also set to be married in the fall.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.
IndieWire: You met Hoyt Richards around the time you were making the documentary “Bad Vegan,” but his story had largely remained unknown until your series. Now it feels like his story is everywhere. Already, Nicholas Galitzine is set to play him in a Gus Van Sant movie.
Chris Smith: I was surprised I’d never heard anything about this story. There are so many people in the documentary space, looking at any and every story out there. This is such an incredible intersection between this world of male models and cult, the idea that Hoyt was living this double life between these two worlds seemed really fascinating to me.
It took years of relationship-building to get some of the former Eternal Values members to even talk, as Hoyt advised. Who were the ones you had to convince?
Dar [Dixon] was another former member who ended up reconnecting with Hoyt after they both had left the group and ended up becoming roommates, processing this experience together. We ended up doing 18 hours of interviews with Dar alone… The fact that [the cult] went on for 20 years meant there was so much ground to cover. A lot of documentaries, it’s like, can we get to a feature-length? Do we have a series? For us, it was the opposite problem, where [we were] trying to contain the story within three episodes… The caliber of people who engaged with Frederick, they were all incredibly smart, caring people who wanted to become the best versions of themselves and help mankind, or help the planet in some degree. It felt like, in reconnecting with these people later, that none of that had changed.
Toward the end of the series, what I found really devastating was the breakup forced on Hoyt’s relationship with Donna, who came from outside Eternal Values. In the end credits, it’s revealed that they reconnected and are together today. Did you try to bring her into the series at all?
That was fairly recent that they reconnected and are now engaged to be married. They had an engagement party the other night [they’re set to get married in September]. That was something that happened at the very end of the process. Hoyt addressed it in his interview, and we put a title credit there. Obviously, they still had a really strong connection that endured all these years later, and we found there to be something beautiful about that as a coda to his story.
It’s at the end of the darkest episode in the series. The series begins in this woo-woo, New Age-y, pseudoscience register, especially when you’re talking about Ruth Montgomery, the psychic whose lore Frederick borrowed to form the Eternal Values philosophy.
We originally cut this as four parts, and eventually moved it into three. The first episode is called “The Promise,” and it’s about the promise of what this group could be. The second episode… [is about] the fall of the group, precipitating [John Pearson’s] leaving, the downfall. Then it felt like Episode 3 was the aftermath… One of the things we found really interesting about Hoyt’s story was the fact that he came from what appeared to be the most idyllic, almost a Norman Rockwell version of an American family, with six kids and summers in Nantucket, and his dad had documented everything, and Ivy League schools. That juxtaposition with his trajectory and how things unfolded felt very unique in that way.
In the last episode, there’s a phone call with Frederick’s mother, who’s either in total denial or oblivion toward the situation. Was that a call you made or archival?
She’s passed away, but our producer had tracked her down and was able to get her on the phone, and she obviously felt like a lot of what had been reported on her son was not accurate. A lot of the people we had talked to that had been in the group were shocked when they learned we were able to learn to talk to his mother. As far as they had known, she was no longer with us.
She wanted to get on the record to set it straight, to say, “You’re the crazy ones.” Speaking of Frederick, the documentary allows the viewer to interpret for themselves the source of his need for control. Did you and the subjects reach a conclusion by the end? A lot of it came from internalized homophobia and his own repression.
One of the questions I asked throughout the process was how much of Frederick’s evolution was premeditated. That’s something we still don’t know, but was he someone who wanted to be a leader of a group of people, or was that something that organically evolved, and he just sort of understood how to communicate in a way that allowed that to happen? I still don’t know the answer. In today’s age, you could study how to become a cult leader, but at the time, it was hard to understand if that was something Frederick was trying to do or not.
There were some senior people in the organization who weren’t going to comment. Is this cult still surreptitiously operating or has it mostly dissolved?
I think everybody has moved on from what we can tell. It doesn’t seem like there’s a group per se anymore.
John Lennon’s very apropos song “Mind Games” plays over the end credits. It’s famously hard to get Beatles songs in film and TV. How did you do it?
It was one of those things we put in and loved and assumed we wouldn’t be able to afford. We have an amazing music supervisor [Linda Cohen] who wrote a letter and explained why it was meaningful for us creatively, and we were surprised, they came back and supported us creatively. There are still artists out there who want to help other artists do great work.
What’s the status of the house in Lake Lure, where the cult spent its final years?
The house burned down. We had it in [the doc] at one point, but it seemed like it was inferring something. As far as we can tell, we don’t know exactly why it burned down, but it did not appear to be nefarious, or anything other than accident. That was after it was sold. That’s why it wasn’t included, but the house is no longer there, and there was another house rebuilt on the property.
All episodes of “Bring Me the Beauties” are now streaming on HBO Max.
