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This makes me want to watch American Beauty again. I've only seen it once, and it's a great movie. I really like Kevin Spacey as an actor. It's too bad his career got ruined by something he did decades ago. I can understand people's reaction, and certainly don't condone what he did, but I think it's pretty tame compared to what a lot of other people in Hollywood have done. A lot of actresses get told they have to do nudity if they want to make it in the business, and they wouldn't have done it otherwise, but they get manipulated. Some actresses were tricked by the director who had a camera hidden when they were lead to believe their nudity would be off-camera.
Spacey is basically a pervert, but I can forgive him. I can forgive Marlon Brando, and it seems some people aren't quite sure what really happened. I did do some reading up on it when there was a thread about it in the past. I don't know a whole lot, but what I read is that he and director Bernardo Bertolucci discussed using butter without the actresses knowledge in order to get an authentic surprise in her performance, but otherwise she agreed to doing the rape scene. The only thing that wasn't consensual was the use of butter as lube. She said in interviews that she felt like she was raped, but not that she actually was. It reminds me of all the scandal over Blue Is the Warmest Color when the actresses said things like, they felt like prostitutes, and it was difficult to do those long sex scenes, but they also said they didn't regret it and weren't manipulated. They loved doing the movie and it pushed them as actors and launched their careers, but just because of the way people took their comments a little out of context in interviews it created a controversy where there wasn't one.
It's no wonder the Harvey Weinstein's of the world get away with it for so long when people are so preoccupied with witch hunts over lesser offenses.
I'm reminded of Roman Polanski. He was accused of pedophilia, but it's not like he had sex with a twelve year old. He had sex with a teenage girl who looked like she could have passed for 18. I still don't condone it, but I don't think he deserved the prospect of prison time. So I really don't have an issue with him fleeing the country and continuing to make movies elsewhere in the world. He's a brilliant filmmaker and I don't care if he has consensual sex with teenage girls who want to have sex with the big famous filmmaker to try and get rich and famous and pursue their dreams of becoming movie stars. I'm much more concerned about so many young women being coerced into doing nudity and sex scenes, and models being taken advantage of all over the world. Many 14 and 15 year-old girls want to become models and get sent around the world with no one to protect them where they're easy prey for sexual predators. And then there's the porn industry where many girls and women do get raped.
I just think we need to sort out our priorities in these matters and at the very least devote more time to exposing the worst crimes than we do condemning people for lesser crimes.