The Price Is Right Models vs Bob Barker: Film in the Works

The story of The Price is Right models and their fight to stand up to Bob Barker, the show’s famous host, is getting the screen treatment.

The Gotham Group, the management and production company run by founder Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, has optioned the film and television rights to “The Unsung Warriors of The Price is Right,” an investigative article written by award-winning journalist David Kushner and published in Business Insider in September 2024.

Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson and Ross Siegel will produce for The Gotham Group, with Kushner also joining as a producer.

Kushner’s piece chronicled the untold story of the women behind Price is Right, America’s longest-running game show, and who, as models, became known as “Barker’s Beauties.” But while life was glamourous on the outside in the show’s heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, behind the scenes the women endured, and battled, years of misogynistic behaviour, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination. And when they turned to CBS executives for help, they were met with a collective silence and a brushing under the carpet.

Led by model Holly Hallstrom, the women, in various ways, took on Barker and the most powerful machinery in daytime television, enduring public shaming, nondisclosure agreements, and financial ruin, long before the term #MeToo entered the public lexicon.

Hallstrom fought Barker and CBS for nearly a decade and was broke and living out of her car when she finally won a multimillion-dollar settlement without signing a non-disclosure agreement, a fate that some of the other Barker Beauties could not achieve. Hallstrom broke decades of silence to tell her story alongside colleagues Kathleen Bradley and Linda Riegert.

“David Kushner’s reporting is exactly the kind of deeply human, culturally resonant story we look for,” said Goldsmith-Vein and Robinson in a statement. “Holly Hallstrom and the women who stood with her are genuine American heroes, and their fight deserves to be told on the largest possible stage.”

Stated Kushner, “I’m thrilled to not only have this story, and these extraordinary women, in such good hands, but to be part of bringing it to the screen myself.”

The option is the latest collaboration between Goldsmith-Vein and Robinson, following 20th Century Studios’ Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere and Last Days, the indie drama directed by Justin Lin and released by Vertical Entertainment in October 2025. Both were character-driven true-life stories, a hallmark of the producers’ screen output. Deliver Me from Nowhere in particular was an ambitious undertaking, and featured Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and Jeremy Strong as manager Jon Landau. The film chronicled the making of Springsteen’s landmark 1982 album Nebraska.

Gotham Group is known for scouring media for dramatic and cinematic source material and earlier this year picked up the adaptation rights to “Tommy Supreme and the Blitz,” an Air Mail article written by George Pendle.