Especially for Parents

News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
October 2003

Fall From Grace

Although Hollywood and the entertainment industry have always been associated with a certain degree of scandal, there was a time in the not-too-distant past in which there were certain acts that would not be publicly tolerated, even by entertainment industry elites. Indeed, there was an era in which the public would not tolerate an entertainment industry that did not reflect at least the most minimal standards of decency.

In 1958, the very popular American rock-and-roll performer Jerry Lee Lewis arrived in England to begin a much-heralded musical tour. However, plans went awry when the British press made public the sordid details of his 1957 marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. Public outcry drove Lewis and his child-bride from the country, his concert dates canceled. In the United States, gigs were canceled and radio stations would not play his music.

Although he did continue to perform where he could, it took 12 years for him to return to the music charts. However, despite some musical success in the late 60's and early 70's, he never truly regained his lost status. He lost most of his personal assets to the IRS, for back taxes, in 1975, and in 1988 filed for bankruptcy. He continued to have serious financial problems through the 90's, especially with the IRS.

R. Kelly did not, however, face a similar fall from grace when, in January of this year, he was arrested on child pornography charges. These charges were in addition to ones that he already faced, stemming from a video that, allegedly, showed Kelly having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

In fact, in February he was nominated for both a Soul Train Music Award and a Grammy Award. He released the album Chocolate Factory in March. It sold more than 532,000 copies during its first week and by May the album went double platinum. In June, Kelly won a BET Award for Best Male R&B Artist and made the top of the R&B/Hip-Hop Single Sales Chart with his single Snake. By July, the single made the Top 40 list. With August came the news that his album R. had gone platinum eight times over, and his video for the song Ignition was nominated for a MTV Video Music Award. In September, Kelly was nominated for two American Music Awards. And that is the short version of this year's successes and projects.

The Hollywood establishment of today demonstrates a disturbing willingness to tolerate, even accept, those tainted with sexual crimes (proved or alleged) against children.

Over this year's Labor Day weekend, according to an AP report published by USA Today on September 1, the horror movie Jeepers Creepers 2 was the top earner, with 18.5 million dollars in sales. At the writing of her September 24, 2003, CNSNews.com article, according to Michelle Malkin, the movie had grossed almost 40 million dollars.

The movie was directed by Victor Salva, who began making short films when he was 12 years old. The first of his films to be noticed by Hollywood elite was the 1986 short Something In The Basement. That led to the opportunity to film his first feature length movie, Clownhouse, in 1988. Other film credits include Powder (a Disney film) and Nature of the Beast in 1995, Rites of Passage in 1999, and the 2001 Jeepers Creepers, these films being made after what Hollywood.com referred to as "an enforced career hiatus." In addition to his film work, he has written children's books, participated in the Big Brother program and, in 1985, worked at the Crawford Village Child Care Center in Concord, CA. Salva is described in a Hollywood.com biography as being a "talented, passionate and sensitive writer-director."

Rebecca Winters, of Concord, has a different understanding of who Salva is, as does her son Nathan. Writer Michelle Malkin reported that it was at a child-care center that Winters's son came into contact with Salva. Salva took an interest in him, and gave the boy a part in Something in the Basement, and later, a starring role in Clownhouse.

It was during the filming of Clownhouse that the child, then in the sixth grade, informed his mother, according to an October 25, 1995, report by Jim Herron Zamora, published in The San Francisco Examiner, "that Salva had forced sex on him."

Salva, wrote Malkin, "targeted, groomed, seduced, and filmed [the child and himself] in pornographic home videos. He molested the victim … from the time the boy was 7." After pleading guilty in 1988 to five felony counts of child sex abuse, he was out on parole after serving only 15 months.

Salva is a registered sex offender today, just as he was when hired in 1995 to work on the Disney film Powder, in which, according to Malkin, he worked with "young actors." In an October 31, 1995, Los Angeles Times story, Robert W. Welkos and Judy Brennan reported that although the children of cast members and production staff were on the Powder set, "the producers acknowledged that they did not notify the parents that Salva was a convicted child molester."

When the Winters and his mother came forward, publicly protesting Salva's work on Powder, a cadre of industry supporters rose to his defense.

The running theme among his supporters is that Salva made a "single mistake" and should not be penalized indefinitely for it. This, despite the gravity of that "single mistake" and the growing body of evidence demonstrating that molesters typically have many victims before they get caught and that these types of crimes are also associated with the highest rates of recidivism.

Those thoughts are particularly disturbing when considered in the context of Salva's current work, Jeepers Creepers 2. Of that film, Malkin wrote of "the boys, all buff and beautiful in that pedophilic Calvin Klein/Abercrombie and Fitch kind of way," and how "the camera lingers on the shirtless torsos of the boys, alive and dead," an "orgy of bare skin and blood spatter."

Among Salva's supporters is the director Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola's company, American Zoetrope, produced Clownhouse, Jeepers Creepers, and Jeepers Creepers 2. Interestingly, Coppola is among the executive directors of another project that offers yet another example of the movie industry's willingness to overlook sexual transgressions against children.

On the Myriad Pictures Web site, the movie Kinsey, which is currently in the postproduction stage and expected to be released next year, is listed as a comedy/drama. According to the synopsis of the film, the movie "is a colorful romp through the life of Kinsey - the man, the scientist." Fox Searchlight is listed as the U.S. distributor of the film.

The "colorful romp" will undoubtedly ignore the horrors experienced by children as young as two months of age and carefully collected and recorded -- rather than used to aid in the arrest and prosecution of such vile criminals -- by Alfred C. Kinsey for his books on sexuality. A January 20, 2003, WorldNetDaily.com article by Art Moore details the unsuccessful efforts of Judith A. Reisman, PhD., to place an advertisement in Variety, one of the major entertainment industry magazines, to alert its readers to the well-documented nature of Kinsey's research.

Dr. Reisman is president of The Institute for Media Education. She has devoted years to the study of Kinsey, producing two books on the subject - Kinsey, Sex and Fraud in 1990 (Reisman, et al.) and Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences, 1998, 2000.

Among the many issues raised by Reisman relating to Kinsey's research into the sexuality of children are the "speed of orgasm" and associated data revealed in Tables 31-34 of Kinsey's 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Even John Bancroft, current director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, admits that such information "could only have been collected through illegal activity," according to a February 17, 2003, WorldNetDaily.com article by Art Moore.

Reisman has demonstrated through painstaking research, including confirmation from Kinsey's co-author, Dr. Paul Gebhard, that Kinsey relied on information from practicing pedophiles. Kinsey also collected data from experimentation of a clinical nature, including observers with stop-watches. Children, even tiny infants, endured sexual abuse and pain -- framed in the detached vocabulary of "manual and oral techniques" and "prolonged and varied and repeated stimulation" - to determine the length of time that it took to achieve orgasms, as well as the number of orgasms that could be achieved during a measured period of time. These orgasms were supposedly evidenced by their "fainting", "screaming", "weeping" and "convulsing."

Yet, all of this will be overlooked by a film industry eager to produce an entertaining and profitable movie celebrating the life and achievements of "the father of the sexual revolution." To ignore the degree to which Kinsey's work is based upon the real suffering of children and to celebrate him in such a manner is simply reprehensible. Indeed, it could be argued that the distorted vision of children's sexuality as presented by Kinsey serves as the foundation of such cultural trends as the sexual commodification of children and justification for various movements that seek to validate sexual activity between children and adults.

While the entertainment industry's acceptance and nurturing of those convicted of or charged with sexual crimes against children is despicable, it is our own cultural fall from grace that in some ways is just as disturbing. With our own dollars, we support an industry in which the sexual exploitation of children is no longer a barrier to professional and financial success.