SAG?
http://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/
SAG-AFTRA Threatened To Sue Director Amy Berg Over ‘An Open Secret’
Leaders of SAG-AFTRA tried to sanitize director Amy Berg’s explosive documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood, threatening to sue her if she didn’t remove all references to the union from An Open Secret, which opens in a platform release in three cities beginning today. It may be the first time a Hollywood union has ever threatened to take legal action against a filmmaker over the content of a film...
...The guild leaders, through their outside litigation counsel, demanded that Berg delete all references in the film to the SAG-AFTRA Young Performers Committee. They also wanted Berg to remove all references to one of her main target’s longtime connection to that committee. And they demanded that Berg cut a large portion of her interview with the co-founder of BizParentz, the organization that has done more than any other to raise awareness of child abuse in Hollywood...
...The relationship between Berg and the union had been rocky from the start. She and the film’s producers, Matthew Valentinas and Gabe Hoffman, had been looking into the sexual abuse of child actors since 2011 and had uncovered some disturbing information about Michael Harrah, a manager of child actors and a former child actor himself who’d been a longtime member of the SAG Young Performers Committee, which he co-founded in 1975 and chaired from 2001-2003.
Berg contacted SAG-AFTRA to set up an interview with Harrah, but the guild offered two other committee reps instead – actress Elizabeth Sarah McLaughlin, the chair of the committee, and Leslie Slomka, the committee’s staff liaison. But Berg held firm; she wanted Harrah. It was going to be an ambush.
...A guild rep was on hand during the interview, and when it was over, so was Harrah’s long service to the guild. Berg sat down with Harrah for the interview at the union’s offices in Hollywood on March 26, 2014. He abruptly resigned from the committee a few days later. “Mr. Harrah voluntarily resigned as a member of the SAG-AFTRA Young Performers Committee within a matter of days following the interview,” Mirell told Wickers. “No public statement by SAG-AFTRA accompanied Mr. Harrah’s voluntary resignation from that committee.”
Harrah, the film reveals, had questionable relations with some of the child actors he once represented; some of them even lived with him at his home. During the interview, Berg asked him if he is “attracted to young boys.”
“Not particularly, no,” he replied.
Joey Coleman, a former child actor who was once Harrah’s client, presents evidence in the film that appears to contradict that – a taped telephone conversation in which Harrah acknowledges that he’d made “unwanted” advances towards him when Coleman was a kid.
“I didn’t like when you tried to have me sleep in your bed and touch me and everything,” Coleman told Harrah on the phone. “I hated that.”
“Yeah, and that was something unwanted I shouldn’t have done,” Harrah replied, unaware that he was being taped. “And there’s no way you can undo that. But it certainly is something I shouldn’t have done...”
...In the film, Harrah says that he had been molested when he was a child actor, but was vague about the details. “I suppose somebody did, but I would be hard-pressed to remember anything specific,” he said. “But it was not uncommon, let’s put it that way...”
One of Harrah’s other former clients, a former child actor who is identified in the film only as James G., recounts how Harrah had invited him to come live at his home while trying to break into show business. “You know,” he says in the film, “being up sometimes really early to go to these auditions and stuff, that’s when Michael Harrah approached me and said, ‘Well, you can come stay at my house with the other guys that are there.’ He had three other guys stayin’ in the house that were his clients.” The kids’ ages, he said, were “from 10-11, to 16-17, but I still thought it was rather odd, you know, that someone would let their 10-year-old son move in with, at the time I think, a mid-50s-year-old man.”
“Many of the kids that I worked with,” Harrah says in the film, “couldn’t have even been able to take advantage of being in the industry had they had to have their families move here with them.” Even so, he said, “I do see the possibility that things can be misinterpreted, and I try to be very aware of that. No matter how closely you’re working with someone, and you do work closely with clients in these situations, there still has to be that professional line in there where you say, ‘We’re not stepping over this.’ ”
Harrah told Deadline that there are currently young people “in their 20s” living with him. Asked if 11-year-old kids had ever lived with him, he said: “There have been kids that come and go.”
In the film, he also attempts to explain how child molesters are sometimes misunderstood. “So much of what goes on in these situations happen almost by accident,” he said. “You get the idea that someone out there was a child predator and they were preying on children and everything they did was to steer the child into this. A lot of the ones that I at least was aware of, they just sort of fell into it.” And this is the advice he says he’s given to child actors who have been molested: “Where I’ve had the opportunity to talk to someone about it and said, ‘Look, this is not a terrible thing unless you think it is. It’s just something that happens to you in your life.’ ”
Berg also got Harrah to admit that he had not complied with California’s Child Performers Protection Act, which requires criminal background checks on managers, publicists and photographers who have unsupervised access to young performers.
“I have to confess that I haven’t signed up yet myself and I should go and do that,” he told Berg. “I don’t know. Is it going to be effective? We have yet to see. There’s nobody running around saying to me, ‘Have you signed up yet? Why not?’ ” Indeed, that’s the main problem with the well-intentioned law – no one is enforcing it.
Asked if he’d signed up yet, he told Deadline: “I haven’t. I suppose I should. I don’t know. The great thing about laws is that passing them is easy; doing something about them is another story...”
“SAG would prefer an extremely narrow definition of the term ‘workplace,’ ” the producers said in a statement to Deadline. “Being at the home of a member of their Young Performers Committee, a founding member, prominent person, for work purposes, for lessons, or on their way to an audition or something, is a more realistic definition of the term...
The above is a really long article I found online (because conveniently Wiki doesn’t mention ANY of the SAG connection and related controversy in the article on the film).
It also gets into detail about time frame etc regarding SAG’s complaints against the film (the SAG employ was in that position at the time of the interview, he was quit/fired when his molestation admission came to light).