The Introverted Detective: Movies and Abused Actors

I know that movies feeding off of real emotion look good and authentic, but can you force distressing emotions to come out of an actor by abusing them? Yes, you can. Ask Shelley Duvall about her film experience. Even putting donald and goofy voices to the steps scene in the shining won't make the scene less unsettling. Today we talk about her and many other cases of abusing actors.

Courtesy of looper.com
Tippi Hedren in The Birds

Today I am focusing on The Shining, The Birds, Singing in the Rain, and the alleged Dan Schneider situation that arose at Nickelodeon. You'll never see these movies and shows the same way again.

The Shining

The book alone is, I'm told, unsettling by itself. It is about a family living in a hotel during winter. During this temporary stay to watch someone's hotel alone, the father gets haunted by a spirit making him violent toward his family and the son sees horrible psychic visions. Unsettling? You bet. The movie shows the mother of the family as submissive, but readers will know that isn't like the original (and movies almost never are, anyway).

Shelley Duvall spent hours crying during filming, to the point of dehydration. She was criticized and the cast wasn't allowed to speak or be nice to her. The stairs scene was filmed 127 times. I'll leave a clip of the stairs scene here, if you dare to watch it. It isn't gory.

She almost quit acting after this. She was diagnosed with acute anxiety and I think you can guess why. If the scene above is her mental state, she needs serious therapy. Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist when it came to films, which is why this all happened to her. Yes, he got the effect he wanted, but at what price? Duvall started losing her hair. It didn't help that Stephen King himself and others criticized her performance because it conflicted with the book character.

Singing In the Rain

What? Yes, I love this movie, too, but Gene Kelly was not pleasant to Debbie Reynolds. He was negative and worked her tirelessly. She had 3 months to learn the dances that Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor had already mastered. You can't tell on the screen how much work she went through to make it look good. Fred Astaire encouraged her when he found her crying at a rehearsal piano, stating that he works himself to frustration and anger, as well, which helped pull her through.

Hard work, however, is not abuse. What I am talking about is dancing until your feet bleed. Good Morning filming took 14 hours to film. Her feet bled and she was ordered by a doctor to stay in bed 2 days afterward due to exhaustion. While Gene Kelly admitted how badly he treated her, he also did something unthinkable.

According to Nickiswift.com, Debbie Reynolds said "Gene took me tightly in his arms ... and shoved his tongue down my throat. ...It felt like an assault. I was stunned that this thirty-nine-year-old man would do this to me." You can't see the movie in the same way after this. Again, nobody said it was easy to break into the dance world, but situations like this don't help. She wrote about this in her biography if you want to know more.

The Birds

Alfred Hitchcock, for whatever reason, was not known for being nice to Tippi Hedren. Allegations of sexual assault and inhumane conditions during filming are two things that put Alfred Hitchcock on the list of obsessed directors who mistreated actors. He claimed for one scene he'd use mechanical birds, then used real ones when the mechanical ones didn't work. This means she got birds hurled at her for five days. She had birds tied directly to her and got birds hurled at her for the last day, as well. The birds attached would peck her. She was so focused on survival and learned later that the crew found all this to be heartbreaking - and Hitchcock was the only one who could stop it and wouldn't.

According to People.com, this is what happened.

"Hedren’s only reprieve came late in the day when a bird tied to her shoulder pecked her too close to her eye and she snapped, told her director “I’m done,” and began sobbing from exhaustion. “Minutes passed before I looked up to discover that everyone had just left me there in the middle of that vast, silent soundstage, completely spent, empty and alone,” she writes.

A doctor ordered Hedren to take a week’s rest and had to force Hitchcock to let her take it. “She can’t,” Hedren writes of Hitchcock’s response. “We have nothing else to shoot but her.”

“What are you doing? Are you trying to kill her?” Hedren’s doctor replied and finally convinced Hitchcock his star needed actual rest, which she took and returned a week later to finish the film."

During Marnie, Hitchcock sexually harassed Hedren and when she told him no he refused to loan her out while she was under contract with him. Hitchcock would obsess over leading ladies.

According to New York Post, this is the story.

It was during the making of “Marnie” that Hitchcock’s demands for Hedren to have lunch with him in the studio commissary escalated to lunches in his office, and finally to intimate Champagne toasts after each day’s shooting was completed. She became increasingly uncomfortable with his suggestive behavior.

“I was stunned and alarmed by his actions,” she recalled. “In the end, he made unqualified demands of me that I could not assent to. He said things like, ‘I want you to be available to me at any time, whenever I choose.’

“I don’t care about being an actress if this is what it involves,” Hedren says. Hitchcock never used her in another film, and refused all requests to loan her out for other movies while she was under contract, derailing her then-promising career.

Nikelodeon Situation

So, Dan Schneider's name has definitely been run through the mud. Jeanette McCurdy (Sam from Icarly) has written a biography and in the proccess exposed some of her run-ins with "The creator". It turns out she's not the only one to be made uncomfortable. Again, the female harassment theme continues. Schneider claims to be smear campaigned. I'll let you be the judge and do your own research on that. I am going to be as objective as possible and only use the facts I have found.

Jeanette McCurdy stated in her biography that someone called "the creator" massaged her shoulders, made her wear a bikini, and encouraged her to drink alcohol while underaged. Investigators have found Schneider's sets to be toxic and hostile in environment. In 2018 he was booted after proof of verbal abuse came out. No proof of other types of abuse has been found, but plenty is alleged.

Alexa Nikolas (Nicole in Zoey 101) has some experiences that she has shared. Daniella Monet (Trina in Victorious) claims he and all his male-only writers created sexual jokes unnecessarily for teenage actors to do. Schneider also advocated for a skimpier female wardrobe and Monet commented that it wasn't age-appropriate. Nikolas said it was common on set for female actors to sit on Schneider's lap. He also had an anger problem and screamed at the actors. He also (though this is contradicted by some sources) didn't like female writers in the room and didn't think women were funny. This was contradicted when he said Ariana Grande was hilarious and he likes Lucille Ball and Tina Fey. Jenny Kilgen accused him of gender discrimination and creating hostile work environments. Other writers tell stories of him asking for massages and asking them to do embarrassing acts for money.

Schneiders disputes all this and says he couldn't have done some much if he had abused his actors. Investigations echo McCurdy's story from her biography. He used to tweet foot pictures of the female stars he worked with. He was already in the doghouse before this and it is just more public now. They did not find proof of sexual misconduct in both investigations toward him. It is a messy issue.

According to looper.com:

Gradstein told the newspaper, "[Schneider] could be generous and validating, and it was exciting to be around his talent and passion for creating entertainment. But he was also unreasonably demanding, controlling, belittling, and vindictive with a willful disregard for boundaries or workplace appropriateness."

If you want to know more about Jeanette's story, go get her book. She is amazing. As she says, her time with Nickelodeon was only a short part of her biography story.

Amazon.com: I'm Glad My Mom Died eBook : Mccurdy, Jennette : Kindle Store