Hot Picks: Uptown Girl: The Christie Brinkley Story

“Everybody thinks they know Christie Brinkley, but what they really know are the images. This series takes you beyond those to meet the woman who built an incredible career, weathered the scrutiny, and is still reinventing herself on her own terms,” says Prentiss Fraser, president of Fox Entertainment Global, of this extraordinary portrait of the 72-year-old model, actress and entrepreneur.

Uptown Girl: The Christie Brinkley Story is a premium docuseries that features intimate access to one of the world’s first supermodels, in which she opens up her personal archives to the cameras. Combining this material with her present-day journey, the documentary reveals the woman who inspired the famous Billy Joel song and how her decades in the spotlight have affected her.

Jonathan Towers, vice-president of development at Fox Nation, explains his team was immediately interested in the project when first approached by Lionsgate Alternative Television ahead of the release of Brinkley’s book, Uptown Girl: A Memoir.

That interest was due to the success of the doc about Brinkley’s ex-husband, Billy Joel: So It Goes, and the connection between the pair, which formed an “incredibly recognisable” chapter in pop culture.

“But we also knew that couldn’t be the whole story,” says Towers. “Christie has been famous for more than 50 years, and people feel like they know her. So before moving forward, we needed to understand what we could show audiences that they hadn’t seen before, and what Christie was willing to open up about in a way she hadn’t previously.”

One of the things that the model revealed was her expansive collection of material that spanned her career. Towers recalls director Larissa Bills calling Brinkley a filmmaker in her own right because “she wasn’t just living these moments, she was documenting them”, which allows for the rare opportunity to experience her life through her own eyes, rather than having people reflecting on it.

While the scale of her archive was a boon for the team, it also had one major drawback: its shape and size.

“Christie has been documenting her life for decades, which meant we were dealing with an enormous amount of material in dozens of different formats, some of which are now obsolete and required equipment that isn’t readily available any more. And none of it was organised and labelled for a documentary production. So at times, it could be a little overwhelming,” admits Towers.

Through this material, viewers will get a sense of the model’s extraordinary success, but also the relentless public scrutiny, the loves and the heartbreaks, near tragedy and her resilience in the face of it all.

Brinkley’s enduring profile and her aspirational but also relatable story connects across generations, which makes the doc a “strong fit” for buyers around the world, says Fraser.

“It’s her story, told in her own words: fame, heartbreak, resilience and building a business from the ground up. That combination gives the project broad appeal, whether it’s an established broadcaster or a platform looking for premium, character-driven documentaries.”