He's a multi-millionaire and a prominent filmmaker; the annual interest from his net worth alone (simply placed in a savings account) would represent more money than I've ever made in my life.
The man's entire existence is a crock of crap.
* * *
Allow me to engage in a little schadenfreude at my former employer's expense.
* * *
Brooke Shields did a nude spread at age 10. This is a well-known fact. Back when her mother was her manager.
...I'm not going to get into the wisdom of her mother's decision, nor am I going to attempt to worm the sense from it. From here it looks like her mother thought, "Best way to promote my daughter as an actress? Every well-known acress has done nude photos!" *sigh*
In 1985, I was 18 years old, and for a few months I made trips to a local convenience store to buy Penthouse, the same way many 18-year-olds do. Like the rest of them, I was putting on airs: "Look at me, I'm an adult" when in fact I was just a shit-for-brains 18-year-old. Like the rest of them. (Being able to legally purchase pr0n does not make you an adult.)
I mention this because one issue that I bought--I think it was early 1986--contained an ad for prints of the nude Brooke Shields photographs. The prints were poster-sized and had some ungodly huge price tag (something around $500 per image, at a time when $16,000 would buy you a really, really nice car).
I am careful to mention all this because I wish to place my next statement into the correct context and avoid prosecution: in a completely legal fashion I saw thumbnail images of the photographs in question. The thumbnails were about two inches on a side, more or less.
...they ain't nothin'.
The images of a nude, prepubescent Brooke Shields aren't pornographic. While she's obviously nude, there was some strategic airbrushing of the genital areas--at least there were in the thumbnails--and all you can see is a skinny girl with no curves and far too much makeup.
Generally speaking, to be pornographic the representation must be "lewd" or "graphic", and it used to be that mere nudity was not "pornography" regardless of who was posing. (You know, back when everyone was so uptight about nudity and sex, like the 1950s. But you could take pictures or even movies of "baby's first bath" without risking a visit from the FBI, because people knew the difference between sexual and non-sexual nudity.) These pictures of Brooke Shields are neither "lewd" nor "graphic", and in fact they have all the erotic energy of an anatomy textbook. In all the images I saw, she was standing in or near a bathtub. Her knees were always close together, meaning there was no possible view of anything but her pubic mound even if it hadn't been airbrushed. In a couple you can't even see that as she has her back to the camera.
She's not exactly letting it all hang out, if you know what I mean.
That's what this entire thing comes down to: the pics of Brooke, age 10, are nonsexual nudity, but our culture has completely lost its shit and--ironically--is now more uptight about nudity than it has ever been before.
Conversely, I don't think these pictures should be celebrated as art, either. They are emphatically not art; they have no redeeming value, not even as an examination of the human form. There's no beauty in them; there's no emotional content at all. The only reaction they provoked in me was, "Wow, these are...lousy pictures."
They prove to me that owning a lot of photographic gizmos and knowing how to work them doesn't make one a photographer. You can spend a shit-ton of money on large-format cameras with expensive Swiss optics, and do your own developing, and still not know the first damn thing about how to take a good picture.
"Art" it is not. So does that make it por0n?
Again, I don't think so. The photographs were legally created within the usages of the time (1975) and they have never counted as child pr0no (as far as I know), so in all liklihood they are "art", at least from a legal viewpoint. And so this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.
The people who are upset over the display of Brooke Shields' nudes from 1975 would find a better use of their outrage for kids who are/were actually being abused and exploited. I'd like to ask the people who complained about this exhibit what they think about Roman Polanski?
* * *
Here is a planet which could support silicon-based lifeforms! It rains pebbles!
That's really cool, and it proves that the universe is likely stranger than we can imagine. (Who said that? Clarke, wasn't it?)
* * *
...now it's almost 5 AM and I still haven't played any WoW. I shall remedy this now.