Saturday, March 13, 2010

This explains some things about Hollywood

Check out Fox's interview of Gilligan's Island star DawnWells, who asserts that finding someone to play her character will be difficult in a remake of the classic show. Why? Let's take a look at her own words:

Mary Ann is a good girl. She was a virgin, so casting now is going to be difficult.

In short, the level of lewdness in Hollyweird has risen to the level that Wells can't think of someone who can even act like she's innocent. So when we have an entertainment culture that values scandals, special effects and "plastic surgeon effects" over little niceties like plot and character, we not surprisingly find that it's hard to find actors and actresses who can't even portray youthful innocence.

It's a lesson we ought to remember when we consider whether we ought to go to the movies.

3 comments:

Night Writer said...

It may not be as much a decline in morality as it is a decline in acting ability!

Hollywood back in the day wasn't too pure, but they could carry off the illusion - perhaps because people wanted the illusion. I don't know that the "culture" today would buy into a sex-less Gilligan's Island without it being turned into "Desperate Castaways". Most of the "ingenues" today seem to have been, um, overexposed in the tabloids already anyway.

pentamom said...

Good point, Night Writer. Fairly recently, I heard an anecdote about the egregious version of "Pride and Prejudice" made in the 40's (scripted by Aldous Huxley, of all people) in which one of the actresses (most of whom were quite young) said, "We were all trying to remember what it was like to be virgins." Hollywood was hardly cleaner in the Gilligan's Island days and only marginally so in the 40's, yet actresses still knew how to play ingenues. It's probably the lack of the market for it, and therefore the lack of skill developed that way, more than any change in the availability of real ingenuous actresses that makes the difference.

Not that that really changes Bert's main point.

Bike Bubba said...

Yup, at least in the past, actors and actresses had to behave while they were in public....good training in acting for sure.