Wednesday, September 28, 2016

How old was Joan Crawford, anyway?

Stories of age discrimination have always been a thing in Hollywood. You have people at the young end trying to claim they're older than they really ae so they can be adults, and then at later ages, people claiming they're younger than they are so that they won't be preceived as old. I've seen various years of birth listed for Joan Crawford and Jane Wyman, for example, with the younger ones turning out to be the correct one as far as anyone can tell.

Apparently there are people still worried about age discrimination. Somebody actually tried to sue IMDb for putting out their real age; the person had been a subscriber to IMDb Pro which apparently people in the industry use for information. I'm not in the industry so I wouldn't know. But the Screen Actors Guild has responded by getting the California legislature to pass a law preventing web-sites from revealing dates of birth of paying subscribers. On the face of it, this seems reasonable, in that one shouldn't have one's personal information released. But this is a site where people are publicizing themselves.

The law is probably unconstitutional, and it's interesting that one of the only lawyers to say it does pass constitutional muster is the one working for SAG. But with today's judges, who knows what they'll find constitutional?

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