NYDN: Fanning Abused For Art's, Oscar's Sake?
Today’s Daily News is your unlikely source for variously harrowing film bits, including more conjecture about the controversial NYFF-opener The Queen and Paul Colford’s dispatch from those rescuer-friendly preview screenings of World Trade Center (“They had it – down to the dust,” said PAPD union president Gus Danese). But then there is the little matter of Dakota Fanning, whose latest film Hounddog receives a disturbing close-up from Lloyd Grove:
The screenplay for Hounddog – a dark story of abuse, violence and Elvis Presley adulation in the rural South, written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier – calls for Fanning’s character to be raped in one explicit scene and to appear naked or clad only in “underpants” in several other horrifying moments.
Fanning’s mother, Joy, and her Hollywood agent, Cindy Osbrink, see the movie as a possible Oscar vehicle for the pint-size star. But despite Fanning’s status as a bankable actress – whose movies, including last year’s War of the Worlds, have earned more than half a billion dollars since 2001 – the alarming material seems to have scared off potential investors from the under-$5 million indie project.
“The two taboos in Hollywood are child abuse and the killing of animals,” a source close to the situation told me. “In this movie, both things happen.”
I guess it would be presuming too much to attribute the dish to Hounddog co-star and executive producer Robin Wright Penn, whose candor and feline defensivenesss so captivated Grove at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. At any rate, Grove also discloses that Fanning’s rape scene has already been filmed, and that the completion funds came through in the end–the film wraps Friday.
In the meantime, while you know I’m not much for Oscar prognosticating, I would bet that on-camera sexual abuse puts Fanning near the top of Vanity Fair’s cover-girl picks for ’07. Annie Leibovitz is checking her calendar as we speak.
Had they cleared the rights for the Elvis songs yet? The Presley Estate is fiercely protective of his songs and image so I can’t imagine they would want to touch this project with a ten foot pole.
The movie seemed challenging until the moment elvis presley came to the picturte.,is’nt this a bit like “Lilo and Big Creepy Man” too you.
According to the June 6th issue of Variety, the film is set in the South in 1961 and revolves around a precocious girl who overcomes the negative effects of abuse by singing and dancing like Elvis. In the past two days other news sources have been reporting news of Fannning being naked in the film and of investors backing out and halting production.
I am good friends of people that told me about this early on and refused to work on this film because of the script calling for the graphic portrayal of a child being brutally raped. I am also friends of people less judgmental that worked on the production and they have kept me well informed.
The director’s prior movie was about a child being raped. This, her second movie, is about the rape of a child. The script called for a graphic portrayal of the violent act. Basically Dakota Fanning pretended to be raped. And basically that is against the law.
There is a law (NCGS 14-190.16 (a) (4)) in North Carolina which states that it shall be the First Degree Sexual Exploitation of a Minor, a serious Felony Offense in which records, photographs, films, develops, or duplicates for sale or pecuniary gain material that contains a visual representation depicting a minor engaged in sexual activity.
When Hollywood talks a child into taking her clothes off, allowing herself to be pawed, groped, licked, and humped while crying, pleading, struggling and ultimately yielding in front of a camera over and over again, take after take, it is called potential Oscar material, when Chester the Molester does it in his basement he goes to jail. Go figure.
Now that the world (NY Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, ABC News Australia) are beginning to catch on to this story we may see some action by law enforcement.
The investors pulled out of this after reviewing the dailies and objecting to the graphic violence captured on film, just like Ted Turner did when he saw the clips from Bastard out of Carolina, another film shot in Wilmington about a child being raped.
We have been warning folks about this before filming began. But some people do not see a victim, they see a movie star, a cash cow.
I see it as a child pretending to be raped on film for money.
What’s wrong with that? Plenty!
Just ask Jodie Foster and Charlize Theron about how traumatic it was for them, as adults, to pretend to be raped.
Better yet why not go up to a 12 year-old girl and her mother in your local shopping mall, ask the girl if she would let you film her naked while she pretended to be raped, check your watch, then wait to see how long it will take for the police to cart your ass off to jail.
It just isn’t right!
Thanks, Tre, for a not-at-all-hysterical take. Let’s go after Catholicism next–I hear it’s basically cannibalism of Christ at Communion!
A child is exploited in this fashion… and all you people can think of is whether or not it’s Oscar material?! Unbelievable! Is there any sense of moral outrage left here?
P.S. Benson- thanks for the research!
Tom: As you consider Tre’s well-reasoned comments to be “hysterical”, it’s not surprising to learn that you’re anti-Christian as well.
1st Brokeback Mountain now this sht… Hollywood is going too far! Why did they feel the need to be so graphic with the subject? For example, A Time To Kill there were no nude/physical rape scenes in that movie, but you knew the little girl got raped. What’s next? I think this scene is unnecessary and just disturbing!
If you want to know who has the power to do something about this violation of NC state law and morally corrupt Hollywood filmmaker, contact NC Attorney General Roy Cooper. http://www.ncdoj.com/default_contactus_form.jsp?sectionid=ag&subsectionid=general
Good work, Bo…and thanks.
brooke shields did it.
Exerpts from the script can be found at http://www.bluelineradio.com/dakotafanningscript.html
dakota i like u , u are so mature and i think with this movie youll be making millions good job
Danielle: Is this the way you’d want YOUR daughter to make money? Would you truely want to see your little girl- or ANYONE’S- shown being stripped naked and molested on a big screen for anyone to see… forever? Is any amount of dollars worth your child’s humiliation, her emotional trauma, the disgrace to her once-well regarded name and the heartbreak to those millions of other children who once loved and admired her? No child is equipped by nature with enough “maturity” to deal with this. May God help her and may He forgive those who have led her down this darksome path.
I cant believe this, when i heard that this young’n was going to be shown expicitly in a movie, i was outraged, and i blame her parents for all of it, how could they let their daughter, or any child for that matter, do something that could ruin her forever
Im sory
Aren’t we all, James. Let’s just hope enough people care about little girls enough to get our legal authorities off their dead ends. Then, maybe, they’ll start enforcing all those child protection laws that were supposed to stop things like “Hounddog” from ever occuring.