Girl 27

Girl 27 (2007)

For 70 years, money and power buried the truth...

The reclusive Patricia Douglas comes out of hiding to discuss the 1937 MGM scandal, in which the powerful film studio tricked her and over 100 other underage girls into attending a stag party, where she was raped.

Date of release
2007-07-27
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (17)
Runtime
1h 26m
Genres
Documentary
Director
David Stenn

Casting

Interesting facts

Girl 27 is a 2007 documentary film by writer/director David Stenn about the 1937 rape of dancer and occasional movie extra Patricia Douglas (1917–2003) at a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer exhibitors' convention, the front-page news stories that followed, and the studio's subsequent cover-up of the crime. Also covered in the film are a similar assault on singer Eloise Spann, following the same party, and her subsequent suicide, as well as the better-known scandal involving actress Loretta Young and her "adopted" daughter Judy Lewis, the product of her date rape by Clark Gable during the production of The Call of the Wild.

Production

Stenn first came across the story while researching Bombshell, his 1993 biography of Jean Harlow, and spent a decade in pursuit of the facts relating to the Douglas case. That led to his discovery that Douglas was still alive. He located her and persuaded her to tell her story, which he first detailed in a 2003 Vanity Fair article, "It Happened One Night ... at MGM".

You name it, I did it wrong. I used my own money, which is the first no-no of all time, I did everything myself, like legal clearances, our crew was tiny, and I just didn't really know what I was doing. It was based on complete inexperience. I broke a cardinal rule by using my own money, but that turned out to be very liberating because I had complete control.

After its premiere in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, the film was picked up for distribution by Red Envelope Entertainment (Netflix), then Magnolia Pictures. It has also been selected for inclusion in the film collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress, and is available for free streaming at David Stenn's YouTube channel.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended