Saturday, June 27, 2009

Started Wikipedia stub for Girl 27


So last week we watched a very very interesting documentary called "Girl 27" about a 1937 rape case involving an MGM sales rep and an underage dance extra. (The young lady's name was the 27th listed on the call sheet for the dance extras that were unknowingly sent out as "entertainment" for the MGM sales convention.)

The other day I started a Wikipedia stub for the film; I was surprised to see that there wasn't anything about the movie, the movie's writer/director/researcher, or the incident itself there already.

One of the big points about this film was that even though it was banner front-page news for a while in 1937, MGM fixers managed to arrange it so that the incident was practically erased from Hollywood's memory, so that today, even film historians had no idea that it happened.

I really have to recommend this movie... It sounds salacious, and certainly by definition it dives deep into salacious material. (It seems like something that James Ellroy would have written about, though I don't believe he has.) My thought was "Well, what if they're just blowing things out of proportion?" - You can never be totally sure, but they present quite a bit of evidence in the doc, and also I see that when writer/director David Stenn wrote his biography of Clara Bow, that he actually debunked as urban legend a certain rumor about Ms. Bow and the entire 1927 USC football team. This suggests to me that he is not one to make explosive claims lightly.

You can watch the whole documentary here on Snagfilms. (Make sure to watch the part at about 29:30 where they show the girls dancing in the 1930s and intercut it w/ J. Lo.)

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