Paris Hilton is smarter than she looks. There, we said it. By allowing herself to serve as a pop-cultural punching bag—and then moving into branded merchandising when the paparazzi’s attention turned to a new, more voluptuous brand of fame-hungry socialite—Hilton has managed to add to her already considerable inherited wealth to the tune of $1.5 billion in fragrance sales alone. And while she might not get paid tens of thousands of dollars just to show up at parties anymore, she’s still making millions for showing up at parties and twiddling some knobs as a DJ.
In other words, Paris’ bank account is having the last laugh. And now that the wheel of nostalgia is starting to turn in her direction—early ‘00s nostalgia is coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it—Hilton is smartly trying to get ahead of her critics once again by producing an “unflinching, authorized documentary” about herself. The doc was announced today at the Cannes market, the crassly commercial sibling to the high-class Cannes Film Festival where hucksters like Cannon Films’ Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus once peddled their wares.
There’s just one complicating factor, though: Namely, that this “unflinching” look at Hilton’s life actually sounds pretty timid. “Paris Hilton is a modern day-Marilyn Monroe — beautiful, iconized, world famous, shaped by mass media, and misunderstood,” directors Don Argott and Sheena Joyce tell The Hollywood Reporter, implying that this might be more like the equivalent of a feature-length selfie than an actual exposé. Although, considering Hilton also has a sex tape on the market, maybe there’s just not that much left to expose.