Posted on 01/12/2018 7:20:21 AM PST by Kaslin
Whoa. Stop the music. When Ethel Merman belted out "There's no business like show business" as Annie Oakley in "Annie Get Your Gun," a little girl could have been forgiven for believing it. On Broadway in 1946, the stars of showbiz, like the stars across the Milky Way, were protected by myths of glamour and mystery, and the studios could keep the bad stuff out of the newspapers. Naughty deeds went undiscovered and unlamented.
"Annie Get Your Gun" posed other myths for women to live by. Annie took on her rival, a macho cowboy, and she let him know that "Anything you can do, I can do better" and proved it. There was a quickening in the female brain and a flutter in the breasts of women everywhere that a sexual revolution could be powerful and might one day be on the way. It was a seed that flowered decades later.
Life in those bad ol' days wasn't as bad as portrayed in "The Handmaid's Tale" show about abused women in a patriarchal society. The series has just won two Golden Globe awards, but as recently as the first decade of this century, the casting couch was such an accepted showbiz institution that a sign at Disney's California Adventure theme park could advertise a fanciful "Philip A. Couch Casting Agency," an inside joke that provoked only laughter.
But women in Hollywood have taken off their white gloves and put on black dresses, and they may even have their own candidate for president. But as old myths fall, new ones are challenged. The internet and social media are cruel record-keepers, pushing graphic memory, but not every woman is happy about the preening on the red carpet.
When actress Rose McGowan, who went public with the first rape allegations against Harvey Weinstein, heard of the black dresses planned for the Golden Globes, anger flared. She said in a tweet with the capital letters so beloved by President Donald Trump: "Actresses, like Meryl Streep, who happily worked for The Pig Monster, are wearing black @GoldenGlobes in a silent protest. YOUR SILENCE is THE problem."
No one can accuse women of remaining silent now, but there's occasionally a burst of what sounds like women protesting too much. Streep's brilliance on the screen remains unblemished, but calling Weinstein a "god," joining in a standing ovation for Roman Polanski, who was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl and fled the country before sentencing, besmirches Miss Streep's moral judgment.
Nor do the numerous photographs of Oprah Winfrey kissing the villainous Weinstein burnish her image in the burgeoning "Oprah for President" movement.
After Elisabeth Moss accepted her Golden Globe for best actress in a drama series for "The Handmaid's Tale," the Twitterscape lit up with accusations of hypocrisy for preaching freedom from sexual harassment as a practicing member of Scientology, a cult accused of covering up abuse. When she said women are no longer "gaps" between stories told by Hollywood -- "We are the story" -- her remarks were interpreted by some as ironic.
That's doubly true for the unwary in the public eye of the storms surrounding celebrities. Exposing the gap in conversations between the public and the private, critic Daphne Merkin set off a firestorm of political correctness when she wrote in The New York Times that many women are troubled by the "unnuanced sense of outrage" over unproven accusations that border on a witch hunt.
She wrote: "Publicly, they say the right things, expressing approval and joining in the chorus of voices that applaud the takedown of maleficent characters who prey on vulnerable women in the workplace.
"In private it's a different story. 'Grow up, this is real life,' I hear these same feminist friends say. 'What ever happened to flirting?' and 'What about the women who are the predators?'"
The French actress Catherine Deneuve joined a hundred female writers, performers, academics and businesswomen this week to sign a letter in the Paris newspaper Le Monde to denounce what they call "new Puritanism" in the wake of the wave of harassment scandals. With impetuous Gallic ardor, they wrote that men should even be "free to hit on" women.
With an ear well-tuned to both the superficial and the grave, Megyn Kelly of NBC News presented a wide arc of discussion the other day, on two segments of her morning show. In one, women talked of the mixed messages of the expensive black-dress protest, and on the other, she interviewed Brian Banks, former NFL linebacker, about how he was convicted of raping a teenage girl in 2002, spent five years in prison and was released as a registered sex offender. The girl, now a woman, has admitted to making up the story. We're learning that some accusations are more serious than others.
No one held a gun to the heads of anyone.
Choices were freely made.
Flame away.
Better version with Betty Hutton and Howard Keel, Keenan Wynn & Louis Calhern
There’s No Business Like Show Business - Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lakGIwI9u0
They still have the Porn Industry that is either ruining or killing the young women. Once in a while we hear about a death of a women!
There were some allegations of outright rape to be fair
A lot of these allegations though are just poor boorishness sexual offensiveness by dumb guys
Since it’s almost completely directed at the Left we are enjoying it
What dismays me is the faggot predatory culture is pretty much getting a pass and it’s a more criminal issue in Hollywood with young boys
The lib women have the ball no pun intended and they are running with it
Anyone went to grade school knows girls are well versed being victim and tattling
NPR and its ilk are promoting the NAMBLA-friendly "Call me by Your Name" as love, their way. Not pedophilia ... love, their way.
And at the Golden Globes Seth Unfunny made poisonous jokes about Kevin Spacey who was looking for underage boys too ... but now he's somehow a pariah.
Earlier. The old Police Gazette made a living reporting on such things back in the 1870s.
“Look up the infamous murder case against Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle from the early 1920’s.”
Well, that whole incident is still a bit of a mystery. He was tried 3 times and eventually found not guilty. Some people who studied the case have since pointed the finger at others in the movie industry as the real culprits, arguing Fatty was set up to take the fall, but at this point, we’re not likely to ever know much for certain.
There are plenty of strange things like that in “Old Hollywood”. For example, there was Mabel Normand, one of the more popular costars to the silent era comedians like Chaplin and Arbuckle. In real life, she was addicted to cocaine and rumor was that she was the “connection” for other Hollywood stars to get it too. She was the last person to see director William Desmond Taylor alive before he was shot and killed in a non-robbery in Hollywood, and later she was present when her bodyguard shot a man she was partying with in an incident that everyone present kept telling different stories about. Never went to jail but her career was ruined.
Back then, most of the scandals were probably just swept under the rug by the studios and their fixers. Still there are plenty of crazy stories around that the press found out about any way. Then there were stories that the press sensationalized way beyond the facts, and the legend that the journalists came up with became all that anyone remembered.
Yeah, Spacey was the one queer that got caught in the scandal, but since then they have circled the wagons, and I don’t think Spacey will even suffer much as a result, he is too big of a star.
Meanwhile fags like Bryan Singer and David Geffen have gone radio silent while their lawyers run around with bags of hush money to keep them out of the press.
No probably about it.
Google Howard Strickling or Eddie Mannix.
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