‘Pretty Baby’ Producers George Stephanopoulos, Ali Wentworth on Tackling Icon Brooke Shields and Why the 1978 Louis Malle Film Is ‘Revolting’
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For most of their 21-year marriage, George Stephanopoulos and Ali Wentworth have operated on separate career tracks. He is an Emmy-winning ABC News host and political commentator and she is the “Jerry Maguire” actress-turned-New York Times best-selling author-turned host of the hit iHeardRadio podcast “Go Ask Ali.” But those boundaries crumbled while they were stuck at home together during the COVID pandemic, with the couple deciding to team up on a shared endeavor: the production company BedBy8.
“Let’s not deny that being empty-nesters kind of played a part,” says Wentworth, who is the mother of two adult daughters with Stephanopoulos. “We thought, ‘Wow, we have so many stories to tell.’ And we can sort of stay in our lanes within the company.”
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Founded in 2021 with their partner Alyssa Mastromonaco, BedBy8 focuses on scripted TV projects, limited series and documentaries. Two years in, Stephanopoulos and Wentworth have their first BedBy8 credit under their belt, the critically acclaimed docuseries “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.” ABC News Studio in collaboration with Bedby8 and Madator Content launched the two-hour series in January at the Sundance Film Festival and began streaming it on Hulu on April 3, with “Pretty Baby” sparking a needed conversation about the sexualization and objectification of young girls as told through the lens of Shields’ experience as a world-famous child star.
Wentworth counts Shields among her closest friends (ironically, she frequently played Shields during the comedian’s two-year stint on “In Living Color” in the early ’90s). But with the Lana Wilson-helmed “Pretty Baby,” Shields relinquished the reins on her life story and had no say in the final cut.
“She put a lot of trust in Ali,” Stephanopoulos explains.
Wentworth, 58, and Stephanopoulos, 62, invited Variety to their two-story home office in Manhattan’s Upper East Side to discuss tackling an icon like Shields and doing justice to her remarkable life story, while avoiding sensationalism.
What was the mindset behind getting involved with ‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’’?
Wentworth: So I have been very good friends with Brooke for a number of years. And she would tell me these stories. And I would say, ‘I can’t believe you’re alive.’ She’s been pretty open about some of the things in her life, and I said, ‘You should really do a documentary about your life.’ And we had talked about it over the years. And basically, when George and I started our production company, it was one of the first things that we thought would be a good project. Just kismet. She felt safe with us. We’re not going to turn this into some salacious thing.
Stephanopoulos: And she also did this knowing that she had to give up control.
Did she have any input?
Wentworth: She did interviews. And there are areas in the doc that George and I protected her or certainly looked at certain moments where we thought, ‘You know, let’s edit. Let’s be careful with this.’ Even though her words, her life — she owns it.
Why did you decide to start a company together?
Stephanopoulos: At the beginning [of the pandemic], I reached a new deal with Disney, and this was something Ali and I always talked about. And I was able to make this [company] an element of the deal. We wanted to do a bunch of different things – documentaries and scripted projects –to kind of merge our different worlds. And ‘Pretty Baby’ was one of the first that really took off. Right.
Wentworth: I think that George and I are both storytellers in different ways. I’m fascinated by some of the stuff he does under George Stephanopoulos Productions banner, like [the Hulu documentary about a homegrown extremist group] ‘The Informant,’ as I am about some of the comedic stuff that we’re developing.
As producing partners, how do you divide and conquer?
Wentworth: It’s like we are synchronized swimmers in this. When you marry somebody, you don’t know what kind of husband they’re gonna be, what kind of father they’re gonna be. So, I’ve never worked with George before. For a lot of us that’s a worst nightmare. But when we started working together, we just naturally knew our lane. I love seeing a cut of something that he’s doing with ABC for George Stephanopoulos Productions. But we share ideas, we share books.
Stephanopoulos: And Ali is this powerhouse in generating stuff.
Is Hulu the natural fit for anything you do at ABC that you want to expand or amplify?
Stephanopoulos: The Alec Baldwin interview went immediately to Hulu. I think that was actually one of the reasons that Alec wanted to do that interview was because we’d have that that wide reach on streaming.
How do you differentiate a George Stephanopoulos Productions project and a BedBy8 production?
Stephanopoulos: Brooke was a very special case because Ali brought it in. At GSP, we have another one coming out in [April], our first collaboration with the AP, which goes inside another informant kind of story where a guy uncovered a murder plot by KKK prison guards in Florida.
Wentworth: Brooke certainly fell under a much more BedBy8 production.
Stephanopoulos: I don’t think GSP would do a documentary on Brooke Shields. It’s not exactly right. New documentaries are supposed to be inside [ABC], but they made an exception because of the relationship.
What do you think people will be most surprised to learn about Brooke Shields after ‘Pretty Baby’?
Wentworth: Our generation is going to be reminded of things people forgot — that she had this fight with Tom Cruise about antidepressants, [her marriage to] Andre Agassi, Michael Jackson! When you see the kind of breadth of her experiences, you go, ‘Wow. This woman’s life has been one huge thing after another.’ And there’s the bigger umbrella of this. This woman was sexualized at a young age. And [that trend] continues and continues and continues. That’s happening now with social media. We’re just all going like, ‘She’s posted a cute bikini shot, and she’s 12 years old.’ We’re in it now, and we’re not realizing the ramifications of how this whole young generation is sexualizing themselves, right? Back then, obviously, people went and saw ‘Pretty Baby’ [in 1978] and were like, ‘Oh yeah, what a great Louis Malle film.’ You could never make that film now. It’s actually disgusting and revolting to watch it. (By contrast, Shields has mixed feelings about the film, but says she remains proud of the film).
Stephanopoulos: And those interviews when you see that the male interviewers even leering at her.
What else did you find compelling about Brooke?
Stephanopoulos: The scale of her fame is something you almost can’t even imagine today.
Wentworth: In the doc, I say to Brooke, ‘You should either be in rehab or dead.’ I mean, not only the sexualization. Everything that was stacked against her — an alcoholic mother that wasn’t there on set when people were asking her to do all kinds of stuff. And when you meet Brooke and get to know her, she’s she’s not ‘Brooke Shields’ to me. She’s a regular mom, like, ‘Oh my God, where are you going for spring break?’ That kind of stuff.
Stephanopoulos: In ‘Pretty Baby,’ you kind of see how she did it. She never stopped working. She had an incredible work ethic. She’s kind of fearless in the choices she makes in her career. She’s willing to try just about anything in order to keep the work going. And she came out on the other side about as normal as you could possibly be.
What’s next for BedBy8?
Stephanopoulos: We’re working on a great scripted project with Jenni Konner from ‘Girls.’ I found this novel by Grant Ginder called ‘Let’s Not Do That Again.’ It’s a New York story about a woman who’s running for Senate, but it’s really a family story. And Jenni was incredibly attracted to it immediately. She’s now developing that.
Wentworth: It’s a series that will have kind of a ‘Big Little Lies’ vibe to it.
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