It's time to relive the gloss — and dark side — of New York City's early-2000s socialite lifestyle.
Hulu released the teaser for the documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl with HotGossipNewz exclusively on Thursday, delivering a first look at the film from filmmaker and former Transparent producer Zackary Drucker.
The documentary includes interviews with celebrities such as Olivia Palermo and Tinsley Mortimer, as well as publicists, photographers, and gossip bloggers who recount how pop culture became obsessed with, and subsequently tore apart, famous figures such as Paris Hilton, among others.
The trailer teases interviews with a then-anonymous gossip writer who now regrets the irresponsibility of celebrity culture in the early internet age. According to the film's official summary, audiences will "learn the truth behind Park Avenue Peerage's authorship," as well as other disclosures about internet publications from the time period.
Drucker, who won a special jury award for her HBO documentary The Stroll at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, tells HotGossipNewz that her new film "takes place at the intersection of salacious fun and juicy pop culture during the rise of the often-vicious early-aughts blog culture, offering a candid insider perspective on the toll this seemingly glittering lifestyle took on the women who lived it."
"Through the prism of firsthand stories from women like Tinsley Mortimer and Olivia Palermo, told with some time and distance, the era's ruthlessness comes fully into view," adds Drucker. "The film provides a platform for us to celebrate complex, powerful women who have maintained a confident sense of self in the face of adversity."
"Queenmaker shows how many of these women created an original roadmap on crafting one's own narrative unmarred by any corrosive outside influences," Drucker says, adding that her latest project "unpacks the legacy of women creating mythologies for themselves and their challenges around not being in control of the narrative."
"Ultimately, I wanted to celebrate the women of Queenmaker — and all women — taking back their own stories, with their own voices, loudly, clearly, and without fear," she continues.
According to the film's official summary, "interviews with the publicists, journalists, and, of course, socialites who ruled the city in the early aughts immerse us in the gilded world of heiress-era New York City."
"Beyond the glitz and glam, Queenmaker is, at its core, a story about a young outsider grappling with an identity shaped largely by the powerful forces of mainstream white American culture that have shaped young women for generations," according to the synopsis.
Park Avenue Peerage blogger James Kurisunkal was previously covered by the New York Times in 2007, while he was a college student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl will premiere on Hulu on May 17.
