LOS ANGELES — The face sold Versace, Valentino and Ralph Lauren to the world through the late 1980s and early 1990s, photographed by Richard Avedon and Bruce Weber, booked alongside Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. What the clients did not know was that Hoyt Richards, the man widely credited as the first modern male supermodel, was handing millions of those earnings to a cult called Eternal Values. Hollywood has now decided that contradiction is a movie.
Nicholas Galitzine will play Richards in an untitled feature, with Gus Van Sant in talks to direct, Deadline reported on Tuesday. Plot details are being kept under wraps, and the project is eyeing a production start next year.
The timing explains the bet. Richards’ story is back in circulation through Bring Me the Beauties, the HBO docuseries examining his years inside Eternal Values, the group led by Frederick von Mierers that drew young models and Manhattan money in the late 1980s. A biopic that might have read as a curiosity two years ago now arrives with its audience pre-warmed by streaming, which is precisely the sequence studios have learned to chase: let the documentary prove the appetite, then sell the scripted version to the same viewers with a star attached.
For Galitzine the role is a calculated swerve. The British actor built his profile on Amazon’s romantic comedies The Idea of You and Red, White and Royal Blue, then graduated to franchise scale as He-Man in Amazon MGM’s Masters of the Universe, a tentpole that stumbled out of the gate against Scary Movie 6 earlier this month. A Van Sant character study about beauty, faith and exploitation is the kind of pivot representatives engineer when the franchise math wobbles, a chance to prove the client can carry something darker than a crown or a cape.
His dance card is already crowded. Galitzine has the Red, White & Royal Wedding sequel ahead at Amazon, Peter Berg’s World War II drama The Mosquito Bowl at Netflix and The Sheep Detectives with Hugh Jackman headed for theaters. He is repped by WME, Curtis Brown, Brillstein and Gang Tyre. Van Sant is also a WME client, which is how packages like this tend to assemble before a studio ever signs a check.
Van Sant has spent four decades on roughly this terrain, young people inside systems that consume them, from My Own Private Idaho through To Die For, his satire of fame built on a true crime. The Richards story hands him both halves of his filmography at once: the gorgeous surface American commerce rewards, and the private machinery of belief and control underneath it.
Richards was, by the accounting of The Hollywood Reporter, the highest-paid male model of his era, the rare men’s face that commanded campaigns for Versace, Valentino, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Cartier and Donna Karan in a business that ran almost entirely on women. The trade noted that throughout that run he was funneling money to Eternal Values while keeping the affiliation hidden from the industry that employed him.
That double life is the engine of the HBO series and presumably of the film. The docuseries lays out how von Mierers’ group recruited from the beautiful and the moneyed corners of New York, and how Richards spent years donating his earnings before eventually breaking away. He has spent the decades since speaking publicly about cult recovery, which gives the project a living subject with a point of view, a complication and an asset in equal measure.
What the project does not yet have, at least publicly, is a studio, a writer, financing or a closed deal with its director. Van Sant remains in talks, not attached. Deadline’s report named no producers, and whether Richards himself is participating, selling life rights or simply watching from a distance is something neither trade has established. No one involved has commented on the record.
The male-model corner of fashion history has rarely supported a serious film. Zoolander is the comparison every development executive will hear first and the one this project has to outrun. The likelier model is the recent pipeline of cult stories that converted documentary heat into scripted prestige, where the question is less whether audiences care than whether the feature can add anything the nonfiction version did not already deliver. That is the same bar the awards circuit applies, and the prestige calendar that started taking shape at Cannes this spring shows how little room there is for a character study that arrives without one.
Eternal Values promised its members they were chosen. Fashion promised Richards the same thing for a while, at considerably better rates. Somewhere between those two promises is the film Van Sant would have to find, and as of this week it exists only as a piece of casting and a conversation.
