Thursday, February 9, 2012

GUILTY OF BEING "TOO MUCH":  Anne Helen Petersen explains the fall of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle:
A man was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and paid the tragic price. But as should be clear, Arbuckle’s demise, like many star scandals, had much more to do with American anxieties about class and gender than any actual wrongdoing. Arbuckle became the figurehead for all that was dangerous about Hollywood — the unbridled wealth, the unchecked vice — and no jury could acquit him of being an overweight, asexualized man.

3 comments:

  1. Nigel from Cameroon12:22 PM

    Good (as in interesting) stuff. Can anyone shed light on the details in Hollywood Babylon re: the Arbuckle scandal that Peterson (rather melodramatically) refers to but refuses to specify?

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  2. It's the bottle story, I believe.

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  3. The bottle story and more.  I just looked it up -- lots of detail, whether true or not, and quite lurid in the style of the entire book.

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