Sundance, Day Five: Hollywood scandals

Ty here. Fresh meat for the Park City Movie Machine.

The first movie you see at Sundance is always not quite as great as it seems; the air is thin here and it takes a while for body and brain to adjust. So I’ll say I was powerfully moved by David Stenn’s documentary “Girl 27” even while resisting its “Access Hollywood” touches and Stenn’s own insistence on putting himself in the story.

It’s remarkable enough without him: In July 1937, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brought its national sales force to Los Angeles for a convention, hired a large group of teeange female extras to sing and dance and entertain – the girls were told it was a movie job – and when a 17 year old named Patricia Douglas was raped, moved heaven and earth to bury the story. And because MGM head Louis B. Mayer owned the L.A. District Attorney, bought off witnesses and Douglas’ lawyer and even her own mother, the scandal disappeared for 65 years.

Stenn discovered it while researching a book he was writing and never let the story go. “Girl 27” digs up surviving children and wanders far afield sometimes – exactly what does Loretta Young and Clark Gable’s illegtimate daughter have to do with the story? – and he’s more a star in his own mind than in ours. But when he finds the surviving Douglas herself – 85 and a black hole of bitter clarity – his movie takes on larger and larger dimensions. Truth in this film is like water eroding a huge, immovable mountain – it takes years but finally it cuts through.