History tends to have grimey realities whitewashed.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/0118200...with_the_devil_movies_lou_lumenick.htm?page=0
"Girl 27," another riveting documentary about rape, is set during the same year in Hollywood, where a young dancer named Patricia Douglas answered a call to perform in a musical. She had unknowingly been summoned, with 100 other dancers, to an orgy that MGM, then Hollywood's top studio, had organized for a sales convention.
Douglas' accusation of rape briefly made national headlines, and she filed the first federal rights case involving rape after the district attorney, who had strong ties to the studio, refused to press the case.
But MGM's lawyers made the case go away by paying off, among others, Douglas' lawyers and even her mother.
Building on a piece he wrote for Esquire magazine, writer-director David Stenn digs details of this long-suppressed case and provides a measure of vindication for the elderly and forgotten Douglas, whom he interviewed before her death in 2002.
http://www.mediarights.org/film/girl_27.php
Director David Stenn's Girl 27 is a fiercely dramatic account of a Hollywood scandal that is as pertinent and tragic today as it was in the late 1930s, despite the fact that it's an incident no one seems to remember. Stenn wades heavily into this more than six-decades-old cover-up, which he stumbled upon while doing research for a book on Jean Harlow.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/0118200...with_the_devil_movies_lou_lumenick.htm?page=0
"Girl 27," another riveting documentary about rape, is set during the same year in Hollywood, where a young dancer named Patricia Douglas answered a call to perform in a musical. She had unknowingly been summoned, with 100 other dancers, to an orgy that MGM, then Hollywood's top studio, had organized for a sales convention.
Douglas' accusation of rape briefly made national headlines, and she filed the first federal rights case involving rape after the district attorney, who had strong ties to the studio, refused to press the case.
But MGM's lawyers made the case go away by paying off, among others, Douglas' lawyers and even her mother.
Building on a piece he wrote for Esquire magazine, writer-director David Stenn digs details of this long-suppressed case and provides a measure of vindication for the elderly and forgotten Douglas, whom he interviewed before her death in 2002.
http://www.mediarights.org/film/girl_27.php
Director David Stenn's Girl 27 is a fiercely dramatic account of a Hollywood scandal that is as pertinent and tragic today as it was in the late 1930s, despite the fact that it's an incident no one seems to remember. Stenn wades heavily into this more than six-decades-old cover-up, which he stumbled upon while doing research for a book on Jean Harlow.
