Documentary AN OPEN SECRET (2014-15) reviewed by Lead Writer and Principal Researcher Carl J. Kieck

Documentary An Open Secret (2014-15) reviewed by Lead Writer and Principal Researcher Carl J. Kieck on behalf of the Carl J. Kieck International Research Group in Society and Education:

19.07.2020

I recommend that parents watch the production, rated as a PG 13, in the company of their adolescent children, thereby utilising it as a proper and unique parentally guided sex education tool in the form of first-rate cautionary and explanatory material. Instead of allowing overwhelmingly amoral (or completely immoral?) social media platforms to shape your children’s values, viewing and discussing the themes evinced by An Open Secret can help your family to reach consensus about what constitutes normative sexual conduct, followed up by more planned opportunities for discussion and values formation at later stages.

Carl J. Kieck writing on behalf of the Carl J. Kieck International Research Group in Society and Education

The documentary An Open Secret (2014 – 2015, re-released alternatively via Vimeo in 2017) about a paedophile ring in Hollywood, could never muster enough internal support within the industry for a normal release and well-deserved exposure by running on the theatre circuit. The film therefore has a lot of baggage, i.e. it has unfinished business with Hollywood and the entertainment industry owing to its being so thoroughly disowned and denied, but thinking more exactly from the viewpoint of the audience, we – the public – are actually the ones who have the most unfinished business with Hollywood and the entertainment industry, in the form of its chronic problem of moral turpitude surrounding sex and sexuality, even after the Harvey Weinstein revelations. If you ever doubted the existence thereof, An Open Secret provides proof, for Hollywood does have a paedophilia sub-culture and any attempt to deal with it is only in the very earliest stages.

Whereas #MeToo Movement supporters and exponents may like to think that they have made progress in some areas, these are in fact vainglorious achievements and indirectly misandrist for their continued disregard of the plight of abused men, especially young male children and teenage boys. After pointing out a number of noteworthy general reasons for viewing the movie, which is still available online (see link below), I recommend that parents watch the production, rated as a PG 13, in the company of their adolescent children, thereby utilising it as a proper and unique parentally guided sex education tool in the form of first-rate cautionary and explanatory material. Instead of allowing overwhelmingly amoral (or completely immoral?) social media platforms to shape your children’s values, viewing and discussing the themes evinced by An Open Secret can help your family to reach consensus about normative sexual conduct, followed up by more planned opportunities for discussion and values formation at later stages.

The documentary was directed in somewhat controversial fashion by Amy Berg who was accused of delays regarding delivery, ‘incompletenesses’ and a lack of support post production, making it seem as if there may have been a form of internal sabotage at work: Hollywood industry pressure? Earlier, Berg was also responsible for Deliver Us From Evil (2006), dealing with sex abuse in the Catholic Church and Prophet’s Prey (2015), probing a range of abuses carried out by Warren Jeffs in relation to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.

The main focus of An Open Secret are the firsthand testimonies of five former male child actors recounting their experiences of abuse at the hands of Hollywood insiders with common enough industry roles such as actor managers, agents and publicists, but even directors who are as well-established and renowned as Bryan Singer. Singer earned fame for his directorial efforts on the XMen franchise and his most recent project, highly acclaimed, was Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Another production, Red Sonja, was apparently completely cancelled following a renewed round of allegations.

The allegations about Singer (more or less continuously since 1997, based on my research) are as yet unresolved, for he is directly accused of abusing several young teenage boys - part of the ‘unfinished business’ alluded to in the opening remarks above - but most of the other testimony narratives provide at first shocking , then highly informative and descriptive routes into the conduct of the paedophile ring and its modus operandi, making it possible to extrapolate certain traits, techniques and features that can be found in similar activities at different locations and in different contexts. The guidance and counselling value of An Open Secret, when properly contextualised by parental supervision, lies not only in fostering understanding of the pitfalls for the under-aged participating in the film and entertainment industries, but for most other spheres in life where they may wish to participate, such as cultural pursuits, education and sports.

Organised for the most part by Marc Collins-Rector, who was sharing the hosting estate, located in the Encino area, with Chad Shackley whom he’d met in an online chatroom when he was only 15 (Collins-Rector being 31 at the time), loud, lewd drug and alcohol fuelled house parties were held where boys and teenagers cavorted naked with adult men in pools and hot tubs. Those who are familiar with the early ventures and commercial history of the entertainment industry on the Internet, may recall the ‘D.E.N. Network’, based on the Nickelodeon concept, short for Digital Entertainment Network.

Interestingly, Collins-Rector (subsequently on the run, but ultimately convicted for sex offences) was one of the co-owners of this innovative ‘new media entertainment’ concept which showcased productions featuring young actors, but programming and broadcasting naturally took place online. So as to complete the picture, Singer was another one of the original investors in the business. ‘D.E.N.’ and its after hours programme, as revealingly portrayed in the documentary, became almost something of an excuse to attract you child actors and throw the wild parties mentioned earlier, but would ultimately be brought down by allegations and subsequent arrests for child sexual abuse against its senior management figures.

The personal testimony against this lurid background provided by Evan Henzi, a former child singer-actor, about his ‘relationship’ with agent Martin Weiss, is one of the most complete and articulate of the crop. This point is an ideal one to suggest to parents who may wish to go ahead and use the documentary as a sex education tool that discussion of this aspect, the problematic Henzi-Weiss ‘relationship’ in the documentary, would be an ideal locus for educational purposes.

Some of the reasons for this are that Henzi is exceptionally articulate, therefore able to describe his experiences in consummate detail as part of a process of deliberate grooming. Additionally, what he divulges, helps to chart, insightfully, a full course of events from what is ostensibly at the beginning a professional arrangement, through the following stage of an inappropriate child-adult friendship, to further stages of exploitation and abuse, succeeded by incrimination through entrapment, prosecution and ultimately, successful conviction.

What’s especially alarming is that Weiss managed to side-step and hoodwink Henzi’s parents for much of the time, with the obvious inference that many parents themselves are in need of a kind of orientation about the dangers of the entertainment industry before contemplating the possibility of allowing their children to proceed. What this reviewer found commendable, with suitable re-viewing, analysis and research, is how Henzi junior managed to collect the necessary evidence, which helped to convict Weiss, and feel that where possible, children who are old enough to do so should be encouraged to effect the same, with the necessary guidance of their parents and also professionals, if required.

The potential educational benefits for parents, using the film as a starting point for family discussions about sex and sexuality, and infringements surrounding these, are enormous. Apart from exposing the features and hidden traps of the grooming processes referred to above, concepts and terms like ‘abuse’, ‘predator’, ‘rape’, ‘gay’ or ‘being gay’, ‘sexual preferences’ and not least of all ‘paedophilia’ itself, are used and discussed widely.

There are a few instances where some of the alleged and/or convicted paedophiles, such as Michael Harrah (himself a former child actor) provide eye-opening accounts of how they view life and relationships, with the resulting impression consisting of four predominant component clusters: (a) a disregard for social norms and boundaries; (b) the absence of moral guidance or moral frameworks; (c) falsification, lying, deceit and cheating; (d) lack of remorse and absence of rehabilitation in most cases. That some of these individuals characterise their preferences in terms of a Darwinist struggle and compare male sexuality, in unrecognisable form, to unbridled “animal nature” is not only beyond the pale, it throws an intense questioning light over the featherweight sentences doled out for actions that helped to destroy many young lives, not least of all the plea bargain made by Marty Weiss who’s given six months but released for time already served.

Viewers may also note that although in most instances the adult predators seek information regarding sexual preferences, they press on with disregard for the typical heterosexual preferences that are usually expressed, taking us into the troubling territory of deliberately attempted ‘flipping’ (the American slang term) of sexual orientation, an egregious form of sexual abuse still to be encoded by most criminal-justice systems in the world, perpetrated by homosexuals against heterosexuals, often in the latter case young and helpless.

Sexological analysis of the details that emerge throughout the movie, can provide parents with specifics about the procedures that paedophiles may follow once they get access to their children: In this way, Anne Henry (the co-founder of the BizParentz Foundation) relates how as a mother of male child actors she discovered that agents were selling, through their networks, headshot photos on eBay without consent, a covert form of additional financial exploitation. In some cases, it seems, photos had been taken of actors whilst they had been deliberately intoxicated in order to lower their inhibitions, facilitating more daring shots as well as poses, and other forms of abuse such as touching of intimate parts.

Parents can also look out for other telltale behavioural and postural signs of abusive relationships that may only be salient to an expert forensic sexologist or criminologist. For instance, Henry describes, in searing words, how the preferred manner of posing in many shots was that of children looking up – from a subject position towards the adult/phtographer, by sitting, leaning, lying down or being on their knees - at the camera: “The children are looking up at the camera as they would be looking up at the predator in an abuse situation” … . One of the oft repeated observations made by the victims in the documentary, is namely that of how their abusers had power over them and that they felt they didn’t have any alternative but to submit to the solicitations that were directed at them.

Effectively serving up disturbing revelations with regularity about the darkest aspects of Hollywood that the entertainment industry would obviously prefer to keep under wraps, An Open Secret is nonetheless not without significant shortcomings in terms of stylictics and presentation. The perspectives of the five main complainants vis-à-vis the investigated paedophile ring, tend to overlap without proper delineation and as a documentary, generically seen, there is a need for signposting either from an anchor perspective or interviewed participant, or an expert voice-over to provide the currently missing connections, as well as further explications, background information and clarifications.

If An Open Secret does finally succeed in making it onto the international general release circuit, it would be beneficial to consider these suggested improvements in order to render it more palatable to an ordinary movie-going audience. Nonetheless, these stylistic, narratological and presentational shortcomings don’t detract in any way from the documentary’s educational potential for parents (or educational institutions), as proposed at the outset. As a kind of rough material, it may thereby be rendered even more suitable, in a certain sense, as the parental audience will be able to act as ‘finishing editors’ by imposing the guidance and message that they wish to convey to their children or the family in its entirety.

An Open Secret in its present form is more than coherent, and, persuasive enough to get its message across concerning the glaring dangers inherent to an adventure in the brightly lit world of showbiz, primarily to the young and innocent, but also secondarily to their loving and caring parents. Those who dare to wade into the turbid waters of today’s Hollywood and other centres of the entertainment industry have been forewarned.

REFERENCES SECTION:

MAIN DOCUMENTARY CREDITS:

Financing: Gabe Hoffman

Producers: Gabe Hoffman and Matthew Valentinas

Writing: Amy Berg, Lorien Haynes and Billy McMillin

DIRECTOR: Amy Berg

Cinematography: Jenna Rosher

PRIMARY REFERENCES:

Link to Documentary An Open Secret on Vimeo & YouTube:

TRAILER: An Open Secret:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjQvFgkI0R4

FULL DOCUMENTARY: An Open Secret:

https://vimeo.com/142444429