Q is for The Queen of Versailles

...in the A-Z of my favourite documentary films

I’m creating a library of posts on the documentary films that have meant the most to me - you can read more about the whole project, the criteria for inclusion and see the master list here:

My favourite documentary films - an A-Z

One of the things I love about documentaries is the inherent potential for the unplanned or unexpected to occur. Of course, even in completely observational vérité films, the director will usually have at least some idea of what they anticipate capturing on camera. But they don't know for sure what will happen. Real people – and perhaps even more crucially – real events, can and do intervene to turn plans on their head. And when they do, it can lead to documentary gold. That's certainly what happened in The Queen of Versailles.

‘Filthy rich’

Back in 2007, when director Lauren Greenfield first started filming self-described 'timeshare king', David Siegel and his wife Jackie, a former 'Mrs Florida' some 30 years his junior- alongside their 8 children and many, many pets - she had a clear story arc in mind. The film would be focused around documenting the couple’s efforts to build a mind-bogglingly vast and extravagant new mansion, styled after the palace at Versailles, with a few floors of their favourite Vegas hotel plonked on top.

At 90,000 square feet, it was, they proudly proclaimed, going to be the biggest and most expensive single-family private house in America - with 13 bedrooms, 22 bathrooms, 9 kitchens, a fitness centre and spa, a bowling alley, video arcade, full-size ballroom, roller-skate rink, aquarium, three indoor pools, two outdoor pools, tennis courts and a baseball diamond.

Everyone wants to be rich. If they can’t be rich the next best thing is to feel rich. And if they don’t wanna feel rich then they’re probably… dead - David Siegel

Greenfield's lens was firmly turned on the extremities and absurdities of unbridled wealth in America, or as the Siegels' adopted daughter Jonquil at one point calls it, the life of 'the filthy rich'.

But then the financial crisis of 2008 hit – and everything changed.

Suddenly Greenfield had a completely different film on her hands. If you've not seen it, here's the trailer:

‘Riches-to-rags’

The film reveals that Siegel's business empire has been built on debt – and when the banks turn off the money taps, things come to a crashing halt. We see him forced to lay off thousands of staff and drastically cut wages for those who remain and the couple's household staff is cut from 19 down to just 4 (three nannies and a housekeeper.)

The kids are moved to public schools and to liquidate cash, they start trying to sell off everything from private jets and limos to antiques purchased to furnish 'Versailles'. Construction on the mansion is stopped, before the half-finished shell is itself also put up for sale.

Meanwhile, we see David at work, defiantly refusing to sell his flagship timeshare resort in Vegas, which at a stroke would make all his financial problems go away. And we meet his adult son, who works for him but describes their relationship as 'not close'. And we see Jackie starting up a giant thrift store, many of whose customers are laid off employees of her husband's.

We also spend a lot of time with the family in their current home – which at 26,000 square feet is still a lavish property, albeit dwarfed by what Jackie had planned for her new home.

“This is what $5 million worth of marble looks like” - Jackie Siegel

There are some extraordinary domestic scenes including the moment Jackie finds one of the kid's pet lizards dead from dehydration and a mad search around the house for some puppies before they fall victim to another kid's pet snake. Plus there's an excruciating Christmas party scene showing their reduced circumstances: where once they might have had a full orchestra providing the entertainment, now it's just their maid dressed up in a low-rent reindeer costume.

The camera is there to watch as the maid wriggles into the costume before stepping out to play her part as festive entertainer for the assembled guests. This is one of many moments when Greenfield widens her gaze beyond the Siegels themselves to look more closely at those in their orbit - a feature of the film I really appreciated. In so doing she very effectively both illustrates, and comments on, the deeply uncomfortable disparity between the Siegels' lifestyle, even when they are financially 'challenged', and that of the people close to them.

We see one of the nannies talking movingly about how much she loves the Siegel children whilst also acknowledging the pain of being separated from her own children for so many years. A maid proudly shows us around the home she's created for herself, with Jackie's blessing, in one of the children's discarded outdoor playhouses . And we see Jackie visiting her small home town back in New York state and meeting up with an old school friend whose life took a very different trajectory from hers and is now in foreclosure on her own, very modest, home.

Photo by Lauren Greenfield/Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

And yet somehow, through it all, we never completely lose sympathy for the Siegels, especially Jackie who seems genuinely kind-hearted, despite being coddled, at times ludicrously so, by the luxury life she's become accustomed to.

Even David, who could all too easily have come across as a kind of pantomime villain, is painted as a more complex figure, unwilling or unable to comprehend how he is as much an architect of the ‘riches-to-rags story’ (his words) he now finds himself in, as he is a victim.¹

His comedown - from billionaire bragging about helping George W. Bush take the White House to cranky father carping at his family for not turning the lights off - is palpable. And it can’t have been any easier for happening under the glare of Greenfield’s camera.

The documentary won the US Director Award at Sundance in 2012 and deservedly so. It's a thoughtful and at times biting critique of the excesses of the American Dream and at the same time simply a hugely entertaining watch, with an incredibly compelling titular character (well over a decade since I last watched the film I still had vivid images of Jackie in my mind which I was delighted to revisit when I rewatched it for this post).

Beyond the end credits

Reading about the film again, I was reminded that the Siegels actually sued Greenfield for defamation before it was released, though it seems the bad blood was mainly on David’s side as Jackie attended the Sundance premiere and several other screenings, and the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed. But I wondered what had become of them in the years since.

A quick internet search revealed tragedy - the death of their daughter Victoria to a prescription drug overdose aged just 18 - but also staying power. Since the original documentary, they’ve appeared in several reality shows and in 2022, Discovery+ launched a 6 part reboot series, Queen of Versailles Reigns Again which sees Jackie, a by-now-nearly-90-year-old David and their grown up kids still trying to get their ill-fated, (allegedly) $100million, mega-mansion finished. The reviews I’ve seen don’t compare especially favourably with the 2012 original…

And perhaps most surprisingly, this summer saw the stage debut, in Boston, of The Queen of Versailles the musical, which is apparently set to move to Broadway in 2025.

It seems to this day people still can’t get enough of the indefatigable Siegels. But for the real deal, don’t miss the original documentary. At the time of writing, it’s streaming for free on the BBC iPlayer for those in the UK or you can watch in on Hulu in the US, or on various free streamers like The Roku Channel & Tubi TV. Or it’s widely available for rent in most of the usual places.

I’d love to know if you watched this film and if you did - what did you think of it? Comments are open below or just hit REPLY if you’re reading over email.

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1. Many of the working class customers who bought timeshares from his company Westgate would have fallen into the category of subprime borrowers, while Westgate itself bundled up all of its mortgages and sold them off into a securitisation, personally guaranteed by Siegel to the tune of more than 1 billion dollars.