When Jaycee Lee Dugard was 11 she was abducted from a bus stop outside her home in South Lake Tahoe, California. The search to recover her was frantic but fruitless and it seemed like the little girl would be lost to her family forever. That is until a now 29-year-old Dugard was able to emerge from her captor and alert authorities as to the unbelievable life she had been forced to endure since her kidnapping. For 18 years she was held against her will by a psychotic husband and wife duo who repeatedly abused and raped her, which resulted in Dugard giving birth to two of her captor's children, the first of whom would have been born when the poor girl was 14 years old.It's a hell of a frightening story and now it's set to become the subject of a film called Abducted Girl, An American Sex Slave, only unlike most biographic pictures, the family of Jaycee Dugard desperately wishes it wouldn't exist. A representative for the family explained, "If and when Jaycee and her family think it is appropriate, their story will be told by them, in a forum of their choosing with the respect and thoughtfulness they so deserve. Anyone else speculating about the details of such a personal hurt, for financial gain, is exploitative, hurtful and breathtakingly unkind."
And if you have any doubt that the maker of Abducted Girl, Shane Ryan, has anything but exploitative ambitions, take a look at his no-budget, z-grade horror movie filmography: Amateur Porn Star Killer 1-4 (the latest of which was in 3D!), So, We Killed Our Parents, Warning!!! Pedophile Released and Sex Kids Party aka The More the Better. Which brings up a sad question: What if a person doesn't want their story told?
It's a common enough gimmick for horror movies to boast a "Based on Real Events" title card to draw in an audience, but even films like Open Water and The Strangers don't pinpoint whose story they're telling, whereas it will be quite obvious whose life Abducted Girl is about even if they change the family's name, which I assume they will. I honestly hadn't given it much thought before, but it makes me wonder how the families of all of Law & Order's "ripped from the headlines" episodes feel seeing their own personal tragedies done up for mass consumption.
I personally find this turn of events to be remarkably unsavory and it stuns me that, even with his history, Shane Ryan has the gall to exploit Jaycee Dugard's life this way; despite his claim that her's is just 'an interesting story'. I suppose the only saving grace here is that, as with all of his other films, most people will never see or even hear of Abducted Girl. I guess this is one of those rare times were having only ever made dreadful, unwatchable, hate-filled films has what can, unfortunately, be described as a silver lining.
1. Have you even watched trailers for my films?
Warning!!! Pedophile Released
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlkz-NHbTpI
Amateur Porn Star Killer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN7nckMIqs8
Isolation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s66nxIyr-Lg
I'll send you a copy of our new film, Warning!!! Pedophile Released. If you still think I'm scum then so be it. But imagine you had a dream at 5 years old to make movies and started pursuing the hell out of it, and then 24 years later still pursuing it and realizing you can’t turn back now because you don't know anything else but this still isn't even paying for my coffee in the morning let alone anything real important. It's freakin' hard and it sucks and sometimes you just can't push on anymore.
So, you realize that suddenly if you start changing your titles and adding a sex scene in your film every body turns their heads. So, you decide, why not come up with some exploitative titles, since that's apparently what the world wants (unless you can get Brad Pitt in your film) and then have a hidden message in your film, or in the case of Amateur Porn Star Killer, the second people put the DVD in they realize, "wow, this is way more serious than I thought it would be". You make a couple more of those and then you try to tell the story of when you were 5 years old and you were in that terrible car accident where you had to explain to your blind mother that her head was ripped open and her own mother was hanging from the windshield. You go to the hospital and then a few weeks later draw pictures of it. Suddenly people think you're being molested based on these pictures and you get put in foster homes for 2 years and your 1 year old brother, your only sibling, lives in a foster home the rest of his 17 childhood years and doesn't finally come to terms with it until, get this, A WEEK AGO! You're isolated in school, get beat so bad by other kids you still suffer injuries from it. I wanted to kill kids at my school if they hurt me one more time but I couldn't even accept the thought of imagining, let alone doing, harm to a human being, an animal, even an insect. That's been my life, and I could go on with worse. Not as bad as what happened to Jaycee, but I can relate. I TRIED TO GET THAT MADE INTO A MOVIE. After years I gave up, nobody responded. (This would be Romance Road Killers. I took my life and my favorite movies, and a real killer from the 50's and molded into something I thought worked).
I make some more films, a few acting parts for work that I wasn’t really proud of, but most actors go through that. I then make a meaningful film, if you were to actually watch it, Warning!!! Pedophile Released. After that I decide I want to make a movie about human trafficking, I’ve wanted to for awhile. I announce it, to no response hardly at all, of course, and start working on the idea. Then Jaycee Dugard is found, so I say, wow, I’ve never heard anything like that. If our sex slave movie could be something meaningful like that which actually has a happy ending, and really explore the mentality behind a situation like that, now that’s a really important story, let’s do something LIKE THAT. I’m sure anybody doing a movie about sex slaves, or human trafficking, and there’s been a ton lately, heard about this story and got ideas. So, I think, I can relate to isolation, I can relate to feeling kidnapped, I have a girlfriend who was abused severely, attacked and almost killed, while several months pregnant and living homeless under a bridge. Why don’t we work on this story together, bring the pain and suffering we’ve been through, and somehow make a film out of this but about a victim and her captor. It IS NOT A PORN FILM, it IS NOT ABOUT JAYCEE DUGARD, but the media gets one interview wrong and next thing you know everybody publishing one press release all over the net, talk about lazy. What qualifies for reporting nowadays? (although I will hand it to you Peter Hall, for at least taking the time to write your own story, though of course bashing me without knowing me, I still don’t get how people can do that). So, reporters should get their facts straight before they make somebody the most hated person for 40 hours (it really was 40 hours and then suddenly the death threats stopped, that’s how short attention span we have).
And get this, a major talk show wanted to interview me today but when I told them this wasn’t a movie about Jaycee, that I merely had some inspirations but it was not her story at all, and that is surely was not porn, they changed their minds. The producer even admitted they probably wouldn’t cover it if they couldn’t bash me. That’s the world we live it. That’s the media. Just thought I’d say something coming from the actual source and not a trail of bullshit.
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Posted at 6:31PM on Nov 19th 2009 by Shane