Before social media even existed, Christie Brinkley was documenting her life through letters, journals and home movies. The star has opened up this trove for Uptown Girl: The Christie Brinkley Story, the upcoming doc series about her life.
Brinkley has previously let some of the material be used in HBO doc Billy Joel: And So It Goes about her ex-husband Joel, but held plenty back for her own film. She asked the HBO filmmakers to send thumbnails of the footage they wanted and when she wanted to keep it back, the message to the producers was, ‘Nope, that’s for me.”
“These are films never before seen,” Brinkley told Deadline about the archive used in the new series, which is produced by Lionsgate Alternative Television. The doc was greenlit by streamer Fox Nation and will bow in 2027. Over three parts it will take in Brinkley’s early years as an artist before fame, life on the road with Billy Joel, and marriage, motherhood and private heartbreak, as well as the helicopter crash that nearly claimed her life.
In addition to the intimate personal records and archive, there will be present-day vérité footage in the doc series, which Larissa Bills directs.
Brinkley started out as an artist before becoming a supermodel, actor and author. Along the way she wrote and illustrated letters and journals, and when she got together with Joel, started capturing moving images too.
“I started doing a lot of video when I hooked up with Billy,” she said. “There’s so many joyous videos there. We are on the road, there’s honeymoon footage. We used to love to just get in the car and drive. In the car we’d become a million different personalities playing around, and you know, singing songs and having fun.”
The three-part doc will take in Brinkley’s time as an artist in Paris and Europe. Sitting down with Deadline in the Majestic Hotel in Cannes while in town to talk about her doc and leave her handprint on the City’s walk of fame, she remembered writing home as her modelling career started to take shape after being spotted by a photographer. “I have the letter where I say, ‘breaking news, I was discovered today,’ and I put ‘a man came up to me and asked me if I was a model.’”
“Looking back, these are little capsules of time and so incredible. We all live such fast-paced lives, and we cram so much in. When we take time to actually read the way we were, we see that, ‘Oh, there’s certain parts of me that have always been the same.’ I’ve always had a certain enthusiasm, a joie de vivre.”
Digging into the letters and videos from years gone by was illuminating, she added. “Some of the things I can’t even believe that I did. I was like, ‘Whoa!’ And some of the parts of my life, I’m like, ‘What was I thinking?’ And you get to see this perspective from where you are now.”
Fox Entertainment Global is distributing. Uptown Girl: The Christie Brinkley Story was a key title on its MIPCOM slate in Cannes.
Brinkley, meanwhile, made a mark on Cannes, literally, with the handprint on the city’s Chemin des Étoiles, its walk of fame. As the ceremony took place, ‘Uptown Girl’ was the soundtrack. The star’s appearance in the video for the 1983 hit is firmly part of pop history. “I always say to Billy, you know, ‘Thank you for my theme song,’” she said.
“It was everything that I dreamt of and it was like I had manifested this,’ she said of the Cannes ceremony. “It was incredible, and to think that the decisions that I made, and I made some good ones and I made some bad ones, but it all led me here, where I’m standing on the [Cannes] steps.
“I hope that it gives other people chasing their dreams the desire to stay with it. I was told I’d be chewed up and spat out by the time I was 30 by this business, this industry. But I’m 72 and I feel like I’m peaking.”