[QUOTE=Bricker]
And quite frankly, I’ve never really thought about it. To the extent that I gave it any thought, I always imagined that to get really young kids captured crying for, say, a scene in a movie, they waited until the kid started crying. I didn’t really imagine that parents would bring their kids onto a movie set for the purposes of letting some starnger deliberately make them cry.
Now, maybe that was hopelessly naive. But I can point to some thing that formed this opinion. I’ve read numerous interviews with young actors, who say that they make themselves cry by recalling old, painful memories - loss of a pet, or something. Obviously that doesn’t apply directly to toddlers, but it gave me the general idea that producing a required emotion is up to the actor.
I also remember a story in Patty Duke’s autobiography. Her youngest son, Sean Astin, had been bugging her to let him try acting. She relented, and he was cast as her son in a TV movie she was doing that dealt with child abuse: “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.” She relates that while filming, he couldn’t react properly to her; her character was so outrageously bad that he started laughing when he should have been terrified. After several spolied takes, she says that just before they started rolling, she gave him a genuine “I’m furious” glare – not as her character but as herself. Sean was appropriately petrified, and the take went well. But after that, she told him she’d never do something like that to him again – that she was sorry she did it and it was wrong, and that he was on his own for coming up with the requisite reactions. (Given his successful career, I guess it worked).
So based in part on those stories, I always thought of reactions from child models and actors as not being forced, and to use tactics like she used here is not right.
At least some other photographers agree with me. Jeremiah McNichols, a professional photographer, writes in his blog the following:
First, to establish his political position, let me quote him as he says: He’s obviously not a Bush fan.
He goes on to say:
It seems reasonable to assume that her tactics are not so much “…It happens all the time, for very mundane purposes…”
I await education to the contrary, however. If it turns out that this DOES happen all the time, and is a perfectly normal and accepted part of child modeling or acting, then I will be happy to withdraw the bulk of my criticism. I’ll still personally believe she’s being cruel, but I’d be forced to admit that she’s acting within normal, accepted standards. I don’t see that yet.
[/QUOTE]
You can be quite reasonable when you’re not looking for knee-jerk anti-Bush responses from Democrats.
I’ll bet that you might not have gotten such a hostile response if you’d written the OP something like, “I think it was cruel of the photographer mentioned in this article to deliberately cause children to cry just so she could take pictures of them doing so. Does anyone else agree?”
