That's right, Other Tribeca Filmmakers, I am admitting what we all do.
We cruise our own comments online; a pastime creepily similar to posting a personal to see if your significant other hits on you. IMDB, AICN, Fansites. I am on them all.
Sometimes the comments are downright hilarious. One board is claiming that one of the stars of the movie was caught in flagrante delicto and is being forced to consider gay porn. Another says that the movie contains a seven-minute "orgy scene reminiscent of Caligula." And now I just keep hearing John Gielgud saying all of Ashton Holmes' lines. Sometimes I go on there and cause trouble, flame everyone, flame myself, call the director a "lascivious whore."
I have to say nothing prepared me for the Huffington Post commenters. (By the way, how long do I have to wait to go all tu-toi and call it Huff-Po?) What are you guys doing? Are you having actual debates on the comment boards? Are people being smart, and calm and... seriously where are the trolls? Where are the flamers? Someone send me an angry 40-year-old guy who thinks I'm trying to sell 16-year-old girls into white slavery.
For example, here is the comment from user guitarsandmore:
The liberal in me says that there should be nothing wrong with telling the truth about teenage sex but the realist in me is saying it's gonna lead to a lot of unwanted soft porn and get people thinking about having sex with teenagers. Probably not a good idea.
I respectfully and in the spirit of HuffPo disagree. Porn already exists. There is so much porn out there on the internet, totally free, that I couldn't download it all to my computer if I wanted to. And fiction films aren't going to "create" porn. Some of the first films were naughty films...peep show nickelodeons. People will objectify each other and over sexualize people they don't know if the only thing out there was Veggie Tales. (I've never seen it but if there isn't an asparagus playing Ecclesiastes, I don't want to watch it.. that's right, bible humor from the sex movie girl!!)
Films are a form of storytelling. They are not, as you say, real, a film reflects (or refracts) reality. That said, an artist has no more social responsibility than a bus driver or a bank teller. Filmmakers are often held to a lower standard of social responsibility in the name of mindless entertainment.
Nothing I do as a filmmaker is going to stop teens from having sex. And here is the most important thing: nothing I do as a filmmaker is going to make American kids have more sex. I can't make kids do anything by making a movie. Except one thing. I can try to make them talk. To each other, to their parents, to themselves. I can try to make them think, and reflect. I can't change their behavior or convince them to change their behavior. Movies, especially now that Leni Riefenstahl is dead, are not propaganda.
But imagine a world where girls have sex only with who they want and only because they want to share an intimate moment with someone they care about and trust. Imagine that teenage girls stopped having sex to be cool, to get guys to like them, to keep their boyfriend. That's the world I want. I want my daughter, if I ever have her, to have sex for all the right reasons when she's ready. I want to raise a daughter who knows when she's ready. And hiding sex, and sexual politics in the hope that she won't catch on is an impossible and fruitless task. I prefer to challenge the status quo by making a movie about girls who have sex, don't apologize for it, but also come up with a way that sex is on their terms, with more internal than external factors.
Okay next time I'm posting about famous people. Or about how OK Go were bumped for some Olympic swimmer from Leno and didn't perform the closing song from the movie "Let It Rain"