HBO has released the trailer and key art for Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult, a bizarre, way-stranger-than-fiction documentary series premiering June 1 at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max.
Directed by Chris Smith (Fyre, Wham!), the series follows Hoyt Richards — one of the first male supermodels of the 1980s — who at 16 met a charismatic Manhattan socialite on a Nantucket beach and was drawn into his spiritual group, Eternal Values.
The guru at its center, Frederick von Mierers, leveraged the glittering world of ’80s New York to recruit models and young professionals with a seductive New Age cocktail of astrology, Eastern philosophy and self-improvement teachings — while entangling them in a web of fabrication and exploitation.
As the series unfolds, Richards recounts living an increasingly contradictory double life: a well-paid, jet-setting model by day, sleeping on a mat in von Mierers’ Manhattan apartment by night, funding the group and recruiting new followers.
Von Mierers, who claimed to be an alien “walk-in” from the planet Arcturus, convinced devotees to purchase expensive “healing” gemstones to survive a coming global cataclysm — and drew on public access television to spread his gospel to a wider audience.
Former members also describe how the group’s early emphasis on abstinence gradually gave way to sexual coercion, all unfolding in the shadow of the AIDS crisis.
It was fellow model Fabio Lanzoni who eventually took Richards in when he finally broke free.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke with director Chris Smith and Richards ahead of the premiere, which will run closer to the airing. Subsequent episodes debut Mondays: Chapter 2, “The Antichrist Tapes,” on June 8, and Chapter 3, “Mind Games,” on June 15.
