The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue was a juggernaut in the late 2000s. Not only was it the best-selling issue in all of Publisher Time Inc.’s magazine each year, but it was also largely responsible for funding the majority of Sports Illustrated’s editorial operations for the rest of the year. No wonder: the annual issue had launched, or promoted, the careers of supermodels Cheryl Tiegs, Kathy Ireland, Elle Macpherson, Paulina Porizkova, Tyra Banks, and Roshumba Williams in the 1970s and ’80s.
They all appear in Jill Campbell’s new documentary “Beyond the Gaze: Jule Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue,” the trailer for which Indiewire is exclusively premiering below.
The same last name is no coincidence. Jill Campbell, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker behind “Mr. Chibbs,” about basketball player Kenny Anderson, is the daughter-in-law of Jule Campbell, the founding editor of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in the 1960s, who then creatively led the annual issue for the next 30 years.
It goes without saying that Time Inc. was a male-dominated place in the 1960s (its headquarters, the Time/Life building, was even where Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s offices were located in later seasons of “Mad Men”). But Jule Campbell, who died in 2022, insisted on creating a vision of female beauty in the annual swimsuit issue that didn’t primarily cater to the male gaze, that was more about women embracing their own sense of beauty. That meant sheltering the models she featured from the company’s male executives, including withholding the most overtly sexual photographs before they were seen by others. “It was a world that didn’t feel safe,” Kathy Ireland says in the trailer. “And I know I wouldn’t have stayed if it weren’t for Jule.”
She also promoted a more inclusive view of beauty: Campbell helped give a start to Roshumba Williams and Tyra Banks, two black models who made a splash in the 1980s, when the modeling scene was still overwhelmingly white.
“I didn’t see myself as the American girl,” Williams said in the trailer. “But Jule did.”
The documentary, which is as much a portrait of Julie Campbell as it is the swimsuit issue, played at Doc NYC in the fall of 2024, as well as regional festivals from Woodstock to Newport Beach to Sarasota, where it was part of the documentary competition.
“Beyond the Gaze” will play June 25 and 26 at the IFC Center in New York City. Tribeca Films will bring the film to major streaming platforms later this year.
