709 replies to this topic

[max.bravo]

I bet there's some tradies showing up to the job with a big ole smile on their face everyday. What a client! 

[max.bravo]

I always thought I'd have a chance with her, if only I could meet her. Too bad (for her) I'm already married. I think I'm gonna send her an instagram message and offer her some free renovation stuff. 

 

If I post a selfie of us in the VV Posters thread, then i've been successful.

[Mike K.]

You might be sleeping in the van tonight.

[max.bravo]

worth it

[Victoria Watcher]

Bill Maher took some time during his “New Rules” segment on Real Time Friday to offer his takeaways from the Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV docuseries.

“As one of the few people in the public eye who’s gone through life and never had kids, someone’s got to tell me why I’m always having to defend them,” the host said. “I don’t even like them, but I do think it’s every adult’s job to protect them.”

His initial reaction to Investigation Discovery’s five-part docuseries, which details allegations of abuse, sexism, racism and inappropriate behavior involving underage actors on Nickelodeon TV show sets, was, “OMG!”

https://www.hollywoo...1235878259/amp/

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 20 April 2024 - 07:22 AM.

[Mike K.]

It’s amazing it has taken this long. So how genuine is all of this new concern?

[max.bravo]

Genuine concern about kids in general, or child stars?

Didn’t Corey Feldman try to make it public with Barbara Waltera, and she roasted him for it?

I don’t think kids are very capable of protecting themselves, and Hollywood could be more corrupt than we think.

[Victoria Watcher]

Zanuck worked his way through actresses on the sofa in his office faster than the credits rolled on his flicks, according to the tome “The Zanucks of Hollywood: The Dark Legacy of a American Dynasty’’ by Marlys Harris.

 

His daily bedding of budding starlets operated like clockwork. At 4 p.m. every day, his Fox Century City studio would shut down while Zanuck shuttled a young woman through a subterranean passage to his green-paneled office, according to Harris and Deadline Hollywood.

 

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Years later, in 1975, Newsweek would do a story titled “The Casting Couch” in which it quoted the words on a plaque above the couch in the office of a Tinseltown producer in the 1950s: “Don’t forget, darling, tomorrow you’re going to be a star.”

 

The mag wrote, “Contemporary starlets no longer take sex-on-demand lying down.”

 

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Marilyn Monroe once famously wrote in a memoir about the sexual predators in her industry. “I met them all,” she said. “Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes — an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”

 

Movie moguls have preyed on the ambition of young hopefuls seemingly since the beginning of celluloid.

 

Actress Joan Crawford, who got her start in the 1920s by dancing naked in arcade peep shows, only advanced her career by sleeping “with every male star at MGM — except Lassie,” quipped fierce rival Bette Davis.

 

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Studio head Louis B. Mayer “terrorized Hollywood’s women long before Harvey Weinstein,” according to a recent headline in the UK’s Telegraph.

 

Mayer would direct a 16-year-old Judy Garland to sit on his lap, whereupon he’d palm her left breast while telling her, “You sing from the heart” — a creepy anecdote Garland recalled in a memoir.

 

And an 11-year-old Shirley Temple got her first — and, she thought, hilarious — peek at the male anatomy courtesy of MGM producer Arthur Freed, who once dropped his pants during a meeting. Temple burst into laughter at the sight and was promptly ordered out of the room.

 

Monroe was among those who allegedly suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her MGM handlers.

 

In the 1950s, there was a valiant attempt to bring casting-couch incidents out of the shadows and expose them for what they were — sex abuse.

 

 

 

 

https://nypost.com/2...fore-weinstein/

 

 

 

Actress Joan Collins, warned by Monroe about the “wolves” in Hollywood, also wrote in her memoir that she missed out on the title role in 1963’s “Cleopatra,” which went to Elizabeth Taylor, because she wouldn’t sleep with Buddy Adler, the head of 20th Century Fox.

 

“I had tested for ‘Cleopatra’ twice and was the front-runner,” she said. “He took me into his office and said, ‘You really want this part?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I really do.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘then all you have to do is be nice to me.’ It was a wonderful euphemism in the ’60s for you know what.

 

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“Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski initially had sympathy when pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered in 1969.

 

But then details emerged of how he gave a 13-year-old aspiring actress champagne and Quaaludes before having sex with her during a photo shoot in 1977, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office stepped in.

 

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Eighties child stars Corey Feldman and Corey Haim also have said they were given drugs and “passed around” by male higher-ups when younger.

 

Feldman told The Hollywood Reporter that Haim, who died in 2010 at age 38, “had more direct abuse than I did.

 

“With me, there were some molestations, and it did come from several hands, so to speak, but with Corey, his was direct rape, whereas mine was not actual rape,” he said. “And his also occurred when he was 11. My son is 11 now, and I can’t even begin to fathom the idea of something like that happening to him.”

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 22 April 2024 - 01:26 AM.

[Victoria Watcher]

Women aren’t the exclusive victims of the casting couch. The notorious agent Henry Willson, the subject of Robert Hofler’s book “The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson,” played the same power game with generations of boys and young men seeking Hollywood recognition. Counting Hudson, Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue among his clients as well as Lana Turner and Natalie Wood, the predatory Willson had a reputation as a “casting couch agent,” trading liaisons for opportunity in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

 

The closeted Willson, who had sex with many of his clients, had an eye for beautiful men in the rough. He lured them with a simple ploy: Come with me, do what I say and I’ll make you a movie star. He molded the gay Midwestern truck driver Roy Fitzgerald into the butch A-lister Hudson while providing his own secretary, Phyllis Gates, as a beard. With gays, yielding to sex with men in order to gain access also put the aspiring actors at risk for blackmail and exposure — giving the victims even more incentive to keep quiet about sexually exploitative business practices. In Hofler’s book, actor Roddy McDowall denounced Willson, saying he was “like the slime that oozed out from under a rock you did not want to turn over.”

 

 

https://variety.com/...ein-1202589895/

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 22 April 2024 - 01:31 AM.

[Mike K.]

Genuine concern about kids in general, or child stars?

Didn’t Corey Feldman try to make it public with Barbara Waltera, and she roasted him for it?

I don’t think kids are very capable of protecting themselves, and Hollywood could be more corrupt than we think.

Genuine, as in now that there is so much money to be made by instilling fears of abductions and human trafficking (it’s a major headline-maker these last few years) by selling digital tracking for private databases, are we finally recognizing the problem, or is it opportunistic to recognize it now?

Meantime, scholars are trying to argue that relationships between grown adults and children are normal, or if there is something amiss, it’s because of a disease the adult has.