HBO has launched the trailer and key artwork for Bring Me the Beauties: A Mannequin Cult, a weird, way-stranger-than-fiction documentary collection premiering June 1 at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max.
Directed by Chris Smith (Fyre, Wham!), the collection follows Hoyt Richards — one of many first male supermodels of the Nineteen Eighties — who at 16 met a charismatic Manhattan socialite on a Nantucket seaside and was drawn into his non secular group, Everlasting Values.
The guru at its middle, Frederick von Mierers, leveraged the glittering world of ’80s New York to recruit fashions and younger professionals with a seductive New Age cocktail of astrology, Japanese philosophy and self-improvement teachings — whereas entangling them in an internet of fabrication and exploitation.
Because the collection unfolds, Richards recounts dwelling an more and more contradictory double life: a well-paid, jet-setting mannequin by day, sleeping on a mat in von Mierers’ Manhattan house by night time, funding the group and recruiting new followers.
Von Mierers, who claimed to be an alien “walk-in” from the planet Arcturus, satisfied devotees to buy costly “healing” gems to outlive a coming world cataclysm — and drew on public entry tv to unfold his gospel to a wider viewers.
Former members additionally describe how the group’s early emphasis on abstinence steadily gave strategy to sexual coercion, all unfolding within the shadow of the AIDS disaster.
It was fellow mannequin Fabio Lanzoni who finally took Richards in when he lastly broke free.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke with director Chris Smith and Richards forward of the premiere, which is able to run nearer to the airing. Subsequent episodes debut Mondays: Chapter 2, “The Antichrist Tapes,” on June 8, and Chapter 3, “Mind Games,” on June 15.
