THE
SERIES
Spectacular Bodies offers an intimate view of the life and community of women in bodybuilding; training to crush gender norms and shatter body boundaries.
Each Episode in this 6-part series will:
Smash Myths of Bodybuilding
Female bodybuilding is a marginal sub-culture that’s docu-soap ready. Is it even a sport? Is it a glorified beauty pageant? What kind of woman pursues the grueling tasks for building themselves up? Are they tough ‘butches’ or is there room for sensuality? And who is the cheering audience? The series will bust open the viewers preconceived notions of this very real competitive SPORT!
Create Emotional Arcs and Resolutions
Audiences follow Lanie coaching our cast through personal, professional and physical challenges, moving from the ‘spectacular’ beyond what we think we know. As the women chase goals, and endure emotional breakthroughs, the audience grows attached to these otherworldly characters… winning and losing competitions, advancing both in life and sport!
Introduce Diverse Characters
We meet a diverse character in different phases of their bodybuilding journeys, offering a self-driven portrait (see social media section to learn how auto biographical content authenticates story) of a dynamic BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Fluid community of women in bodybuilding today, revealing how they train to push themselves beyond the imaginable, crush gender norms and shatter body boundaries. Episodes will allow for inter-story overlaps between characters, allowing characters to develop as we move through the series.
Explore Dark Themes and Subject matter
Bodybuilding presents a challenge not only to one’s body but one’s psyche. As a coach, Lanie understands the deep forces that drive women through the sport. She guides athletes through formidable confrontations, presenting personal and shocking intersectionality with issues of diversity and race, sexual harassment and assault, body image/dysmorphia and eating disorders, gender fluidity, ageism, substance abuse and more.
Verite Moments that Surprise and Engage
The series takes a deep dive into intimate aspects of all our characters lives where the personal, emotional, and professional collide creating a collage of hot topics and competitive tension. Cameras will candidly take audiences behind the scenes, from the bedrooms to the locker rooms, providing a level of access new to the screen in the strange but wonderful arena of female bodybuilding.
“This is about what’s happening now with women. It’s about being honest and finding your truth, this is a series about moving beyond the spectacular.”
Lanie Hart
THE
SPORT
Spectacular Bodies explores how female bodybuilders navigate confrontational uncertainties of the feminine as they evolve, transform, and conquer challenges to compete and succeed in this supremely extreme sport.
"When I’m onstage I just want every woman in the world to want to look like me."
Rachel McLish
1982 World Champion
Lanie Breaks it Down
Wellness
Vanessa Hernandez competes in Wellness, she’s super strong but likes a feminine look. It’s a more recent reaction to a bigger cultural change. It’s like Bikini but more muscular. The poses are sexualized, like bikini; women wear high heels but maintain a bigger muscular build. Wellness appeals to the mainstream but breaks with Vanessa’s military norms that pressure her to hide femininity, combining muscle and hyper-sexuality.
– Lanie
Bikini
Bailey Lanay competes in this category, she’s got that classic toned model look. It’s highly sexualized, not too muscular and winners often have background in pageants. I can have a bikini competitor ready for competition in 8 weeks. The training can be rigorous but often the women are beginners at the gym, the demands of the competition are new for them.
– Lanie
Figure
Michelle MaNamee is a Figure Competitor, which compliments her firefighting career! They should display overall balance of development of musculature (more than Bikini and less than Women’s Physique) – which includes rounded delts, quad sweep and broad back that shows overall what we call an ‘X frame.’ Similar to what you would see in comic books that portray muscular female physiques. Figure athletes should maintain a smoother look not displaying the level of muscular striations or graininess associated with Physique.
– Lanie
Fitness
Jacklyn Baker is perfect for Fitness with her stage career of background dancing for major rock stars! Women’s fitness is about strength, flexibility and performance. The physique is similar to Figure but they will need to be able to perform a 2-minute routine to music, a demonstration of strength and overall fitness. Backgrounds in dance, gymnastics, and cheerleading can be helpful, so stamina is vital. They will wear one and two piece suits rather than the two piece suits in other categories. Routine criteria must include moves like One armed pushups and splits. Style, movement and routine quality are big.
– Lanie
Physique
When I retired, I was a Women’s Physique IFBB Pro. They’re looking for the ‘X frame’ – it’s almost cartoonish, with big shoulders, big lats, big legs, a tiny waist with a beautiful face on top. The winners of women’s physique are becoming more extreme every year. It’s becoming increasingly hard to meet the judges’ requirements and maintain ‘femininity.’
– Lanie
Bodybuilding
Brittany Parish is also an IFBB Pro on the other end of the spectrum. She would describe herself as “more of a Bodybuilder’s physique”, and it’s making a massive comeback. Judges look at size, symmetry, as well as body fat, vascularity, hardness, and the flow of the musculature across the body. People who commit to Competitive Bodybuilding must make personal choices to navigate the extreme in every way. They need to take supplements, AKA steroids. Often, they can be unaware of or ignore the side effects because the goal is to win. I’ve seen the consequences become life altering in some cases: the inability to bear children, heart and liver failure, serious hormonal imbalances, mental and emotional instability, impaired judgment, hair loss and much more. Everything comes at a price.
– Lanie
“Bodybuilding has changed a lot over the past few decades. It’s still fringe, but it’s a massive growing global industry and more popular than ever. Bodybuilders compete in divisions based on their size. I train competitors across them all.”
Lanie Hart
LANIE'S
ORBIT
The Host
Get ready for the binge-worthy Spectacular Bodies, with charismatic host and competitive coach Lanie Hart! She’s a dynamo, charging through a life that blurs lines between personal and professional passions. This smart, sassy-Texan powerhouse is a straight-shooter who exudes a rock-star attitude while being a lipstick-lesbian redefining expectations as she strikes muscle-bound poses with fierce confidence.
She was at the top of her game – competing in Ms. Olympia when a tumor quashed her dreams. Reinventing herself as a professional coach and trainer – Season 1 sees Lanie get front and center into the lives of her clients – guiding them to chase their own dreams while working through the hardships of this grueling sport.
Key story points include – confronting an online troll stalking one of her clients, organizing a food disorder intervention and coming through for a client who nearly overdoses… Meanwhile, on the personal front, Lanie proves to her personal assistant (& daughter) that being a kick-ass professional can sometimes mean knowing when to let clients go … and on the domestic front, she juggles a blossoming love-relationship while dreaming of doing a FULL 180 and opening a studio in Mexico …
Lanie Hart’s a compelling, FUN-TO-WATCH momma bear, who definitely wears her heart on her sleeve, living life with an open-book approach that’s incredibly relatable and wildly entertaining.
Featured Cast
Lanie’s clientele is a tapestry of diversity, encompassing all ages, body types, aspirations, obstacles, and personal stories. Whether it’s through in-person or remote training, Lanie’s service is an unrelenting, 24/7 commitment, allowing us to get intimately acquainted with these incredible women.
Alexa Snyder, a warrior in her own right, finds her strength after a harrowing experience with sexual assault. She’s now on a mission to supercharge her self-confidence, all while grappling with online stalkers who bizarrely vacillate between idolizing and tormenting her.
Morgan Maxi, a recent mom, is glowing with newfound empowerment. She’s poised to embark on a fresh transformation, transitioning from a svelte bikini body to the robust Wellness division.
Brittani Parish, with her pumped-up physique, defies convention as she shifts from physique to bodybuilder division. Her body’s journey ventures into realms even Lanie finds daring, and her Instagram handle, @therealwonderwoman27, certainly echoes an unyielding dedication her OnlyFans members cheer and we might question.
Michelle McNamee, a firefighter, shares the adrenaline rush of Lanie’s high-octane lifestyle clients, who, when not undercover on special ops missions, sweat it out in an underground gym under Lanie’s expert guidance.
These are just a few of the remarkable characters who take center stage as we delve deep into the lives of women who flourish in places that defy mental, physical, and emotional boundaries, blurring the lines between extreme sport and extraordinary life.
Family
Lanie’s daughter, Zoe once struggled with an eating disorder – she now embraces personal self-worth and her own body type through supporting her mother’s bodybuilding.
Lanie’s son, Bryn, is shy, and introspective, he’s also a singer-songwriter musician – cut from the same mold of his Christian rock star grandfather and from his mother’s extraordinary performative nature.
Romance
Lanie was brought up in a conservative Southern community, but having been married to a man and expanded her horizons to a bi-sexual lifestyle, she has recently come out with her family embracing an openly gay romantic life. Lanie has been on again and off again in a serious relationship for over a year, “We’d have a fight like all couples and my girlfriend would be like – ‘You come home with all this masculine energy!’- but that’s me!”
VISUAL
TREATMENT
Series 1: 6 episodes of 30 min. each
Format: Docu-soap
Visual Style: Verité, hand-held with social media aesthetics
The Style of the Series will be Raw, Gritty, Authentic and Interactive
As Audience members watch, like, comment, post, repost and follow while watching through the season story arc they experience a group of women who set goals, face setbacks and celebrate benchmarks while training for their competition which will culminate in the series hour long finale.
Interactions will be dynamic and action-oriented – scenes will be both character and visually driven. A and B through lines will inter-weave the traumatic home career life stories with the training and competition life of these extraordinary individuals. This approach will be complemented by performative scenes stylized by slow-motion and artful lighting, showcasing sculptural bodybuilding poses, in training, open event design and choreography prep. Tension will build with fast paced editing drawing from the inertia of successive competitions.
“Everyone documents their journey on social media”
Lanie Hart
SOCIAL
MEDIA
As Storytelling
Previz Aesthetics w/images from ‘Emily in Paris’
We’ll capture the self-generative momentum of ‘social media’ among competitors and spectators as a verité-integrated conduit for the storytelling. Social media plays a vital role in the whole of modern bodybuilding. Our characters obsessively document their self-branded journey and transformation and share it with the world – providing a unique self-directed perspective, akin to ‘autoethnography’ practices.
Consequently, the regular, qualitative, and extensive detail posted by competitors everywhere can be sutured and integral to our storytelling approach. Social media posts will visually map the world of the sport – a fascinating digital thread that breaks with gimmicks but plays with trends in visual language as it weaves our characters’ personal predilections within this world. Successful uses of this can be seen in the graphical overlays in the popular fiction series, Emily in Paris. Graphics will be true to the way social media is constructed, produced and proliferated as seen in the riveting series The Social Dilemma.
Starting with their thousands of social media followers, we work from the women’s self generated fandom. Viewers watch as the women regularly address the camera in real time by replying to a fan’s post on social media and then constructing a responsive post by making a demonstration in the gym, sharing a recipe during meal prep, or an intimate story and actually reply to posts and comments just as Emily does at parties and in the streets of Paris.
Women in bodybuilding are transparent about feelings on social media. The transparency rings true! It’s verite! We’re packing the power of their online feed – right on the screen!
Verité scenes with integrated Social media aesthetics open up our storylines!
