HIP HOP & HOLLYWOOD
Source: Post by feliciag " I'd like this thread to be a place where anyone who has firsthand, in person, experience with interacting with celebrities can talk about what they have observed. This includes anything "anomalous" which might speak to the idea of replacements, clones, synthetics, and - yes- spiritual possession. Even if all you did was see someone perform "live" at a concert, or you attended a book signing or political rally, or maybe you had a random moment where you walked past a famous person, I'd love for you to post observations here. Also I would love people who have worked onstage professionally, worked as model, or worked on film, TV, or music video sets to share any observations they might have about weird "things that make you go 'HMMMMM?" The entertainment world is FULL of high strangeness. My own history comes as both a former actress/singer and also as a writer. Also, I am just someone who has come across a lot of celebrities and people who work in show business as part of my daily life. Some of it comes from the area where I live, which is an artistic area where lots of celebs and artistic people chose to vacation and/or retire. I think I only understood the idea of replacements being possible on an intuitive level for a long time. Most of what I've observed has to do with significant emotional/spiritual/and interpersonal changes that happen when people are presented with really big show business opportunities. Please understand something very important as you read this thread. At any given time, the members of the Screen Actors Guild are 99% unemployed. And there are many, many other actors who are non-union who are also working in the industry on and off, and they are also about 99% unemployed. There is also a TV actors union called AFTRA, and a union for stage actors called Equity. For the years I worked as an actress I was "Equity eligible," which at the time was a sub-category of stage performers who had worked on jobs earning Equity minimum rates, but had never actually been hired in an Equity show. At the peak of my "acting career" I was making Equity minimum rates, which in the late 80's/early 90's was $300 per week. That was "rich living" in the acting industry, believe it or not! Most acting jobs last from four weeks to three months if you're doing a stage show, such as with a regional theater, dinner theater, or youth theater. That's part of the reason why the unemployement rates are so high. Jobs don't last very long because shows might have a run for just a few weeks, and then you have several weeks of rehearsals before that. So your entire "work" period might consist of a very short period of time. I did many different kinds of work ranging from regional theater to Shakespeare in the Park type stuff to summer stock to kids' theater/school tours and more. In between, I worked as much as possible doing things like voice over work, live events like industrial work at auto shows as a spokesmodel, and TV and film bit parts. I was lucky to work steadily during the time I was a professional actress. I never took work as a waitress, for instance, to keep me going between jobs. I seemed to always have a gig going on. Most of my friends, in the meantime, made more as waiters and hostesses in restaurants and worked for 2/3rds of the year in the restaurant industry. And many of them were a LOT more talented than I was. Show business is just a brutal, brutal industry. The competition for women is also horrible. For every fifty women who would audition for a show, there would be one or two men. This was at the Actors Equity offices in New York. And then you have the horrible math of the shows themselves. Almost always, there would be about two major female roles to about 10 - 15 male roles in a given show. So to get a major speaking role, let alone a major role, as a female performer took a helluva lot of work - and some talent. I only ever worked in major roles as an actress with the exception of one dinner theater musical I did as a chorus player. So I think I was pretty good back then! In the stage world, which centers in New York, you have the Gay Mafia running things. Befriend this crowd and you will continually get work. Piss them off, and you'll never work in this town again. I had written a play once that a former Broadway producer was looking at. She was a lesbian woman who had worked on several big name Broadway musicals in the 1980's and 1990's. At one point, she pissed off some of the gay males who run the industry in New York. And she literally became homeless almost overnight from blacklisting. She liked my play but told me she couldn't really help me since all her former friends had turned on her. So, to be clear, it is the gay MALE mafia that runs the theatrical world in New York. This makes for a very weird dynamic when you seek stage work in New York, as I did. Many gay males took to me because at the time I was pretty glamorous and looked like Jennifer Connelly/Brooke Shields, a popular look at the time. They got me work. When the rare straight male stage director auditioned me, it was always a casting couch situation - sleep with me or you dont' get work - and I always refused. So the only work I got in the theater from my New York auditions was from gay male directors. On the flip side of things, if you were a gay man auditioning for work and a gay male director was casting, you also needed to be ready to sleep with the director. One of my friends was very willing and got a supporting role in a Broadway musical - but the show bombed, unfortunately. He didn't care about sleeping wiht the director, he thought it was just fun! I am explaining the background here about the stage world. The stage is very different from TV and film, which I'll discuss in a moment. Most of my steady work came from auditioning in New York for theaters that were out of town, so I travelled and did tons of work up and down the East Coast. A lot of the jobs were very fun (again, because I worked for either gay male directors who admired me or straight female directors who simply cast me for my talent.) I mostly did comedies, kids shows, and period pieces like Shakespeare, with a few musicals thrown in. Stage work can be very beautiful because you get to project loving and positive energy to a crowd and attempt to share something uplifting or educational with the masses. All of the actors I knew were very sweet, and we all tended to be the typical right-brained creative types who were idealistic and naive about the world. And often very, very over-sexed. Any cast I was in always became an orgy of almost everybody sleeping with everybody else! Where it got weird was when the power players, the producers or directors, "adopted' a cast member as a lover. Then that person was usually elevated to a position of power - they suddenly took over the lead, for instance, with the original person suddenly not showing up for work, etc. But the theaters I was involved with were relatively small time, so I didn't see much of the bigger, darker stuff until I started to work in TV and film. I will continue that story in my next post. Aug 26, 2010 at 8:44pm Post by feliciag on Aug 26, 2010 at 8:44pm To continue - for whatever reasons, maybe because the arts allow us to express ourselves and be creative, show business attracts tons of wannabe performers all over the world. This desire to be seen, to be noticed, and often, to receive "love" and adoration on a massive scale seems universal. I was fortunate to come from a loving family, but many of the performers and models I knew did not. When they came from abusive homes or single parent homes they almost always became more vulnerable to prostitution, abuse, and drug addiction. Some of it is driven by the very real harsh economics of working in that industry. 99% unemployment is really bad, let alone trying to compete with a gazillion people who are prettier, more talented, and who have bigger boobs/skinnier bodies than you do! :) So from a director or producer's perspective, when you have thousands of gorgeous young men and women dying to get a part, why not have some "hidden" job requirements like sleeping with the director? If one woman refuses to do it, chances are there are hundreds behind her in line who will say yes. That's the mentality. The problem is that young women often think that sleeping with the director means that they will be taken more seriously as a performer and get more access to meatier roles. It doesn't always work that way. I knew two actresses, one who was a comedienne/actress, one who was just an actress, who were trying to make it in New York and were pursuing every option possible, knocking down doors, pounding the pavements, etc. One of them ended up sleeping with yucky Jewish "comedian" Jackie Mason because he told her he would help her get live comedy gigs in the city. He did invite her to perform at one event, but that was it. She stopped sleeping with him pretty quickly and the entire experience really darkened her, blackened her spirit. She went from this gorgeous Italian-American New Jersey comedienne to this saddened, heavy drinking, harsh-toned woman almost overnight. She told me he gave her drugs, too, so God knows what really happened. The other girl, the actress who was friends with the comedian, actually had a TV agent in the city who put her up for a minor speaking role on the TV show ER. This actress was told that she needed to sleep with - I think it was the casting director, not the episode director - and she did. She got the small performing role. Her agent had basically operated as a madam - setting her up to sleep with the director to get the role. After the agent knew the actress was willing to go that route to get work, she set her up to work as a full-time escort between acting jobs. The last I talked to this poor actress, she had descended into full-time prostitution because she wasn't getting audiitons for acting work, but her agent was sending her loads of johns to sleep with! So many acting agencies are fronts for prostitution, escort services, S&M/dungeon master stuff, and worse. Joe Franklin who had a late night TV talk show in New York was another one famous for getting young girls to sleep with him while making promises about how he would set them up in show business. Which never happened for any of the women. It was all a set up. When men of power see all these gorgeous, talented, and often very sexual women pursuing jobs in New York, many of them take advantage. Now, I'm still talking about stuff happening on a relatively human level. Man to woman. It's abusive, it's nasty, but in some ways, it's a story as old as time. What I want to talk about next has to do with the price of celebrity and the whole replacement issue. Post by feliciag on Aug 26, 2010 at 10:33pm What I've talked about so far is what happens in the very lowest levels, the lowest "tier" of show business. This is where I was, where people were basically just working for a living, trying to keep themselves and their integrity intact, naive about the larger stuff going on for the most part. Some made bad choices, fell into prostitution, drug use, and/or porn - amongst the models, actors, and actresses I knew. But most of the people I personally knew well then stayed at that level. They never became famous or "big." I did, however, have many firsthand brushes with celebs who were on a much higher tier. And weird stuff was constant within these circles. As I mentioned in another thread, I do believe that there are two realities within the industry. Insider/bloodline types who literally make a phone call after they get out of Juilliard or film school and immediately get work in the industry - who have often come from multi-generational abuse families. And then there are nobodies like me who get work but don't have those connections. In my career, whenever I would cross slightly over into the reality of potentially getting bigger roles (in TV or film,) I was always presented with the "pay to play" prostitution demand, which I refused. I kept thinking each time I hit that wall in various cities, and various shows and film projects, that surely, at some point I would find a big role that didn't require that, but I never did. Casting directors, agents, and/or directors always made it clear that you not only make yourself available to sleep with that specific power player, but most actresses are expected to be on call in what's basically a pool of prostitute/escorts for other powerful people that particular person might know. Models also end up in this situation, only it starts very young for them, since a model's career is usually over by 25. They start working at 13 - 16 and begin working as prostitutes from day one in addition to going on modeling calls. Because models also have to keep an extremely, inhumanly thin physique, they are fed cocaine the very first time they are at a modelling shoot, usually, and this keeps them lively and bouncy for the photo shoot, lowers their sexual inhibitions, and makes them feel part of the "adult" crowd. I have lived on a property where many Ralph Lauren and other high profile clothes catalogue shoots have been held, in addition to many women's magazines shooting photo spreads there. Cocaine was handed out at the refreshment table much of the time. (I usually showed up, grabbed a snack, and left! I couldn't believe how open the drug use was. The models were sickly thin but looked great in the bulky clothes. ) So to cross into the higher echelons of entertainment if you DON'T have family connections, you work yourself through the drug use/sexual permissiveness/prostitution/escort levels, and this in turn leads to things like mind control, having handlers, and into darker levels of what I believe is spiritual possession or soul loss at a profound level. At some point, if you "wake up" from the almost constant mind control and trance induction, and you say "No," you can either be told you will never have a career (As happened to me before I got involved with the crap;) and/or you can have your physical well-being threatened. I had death threats from one assistant director who had chosen me to play a recurring character (non-=speaking) on a TV show. I did about ten episodes. He was always inappropriately flirtatious with me, in a really creepy way, and when I showed up one day with an engagement ring on my finger after getting engaged, he got really nasty. He threatened my boyfriend's life and mine. I couldn't figure out why. I was just a bit player, nobody famous, nothing. I just laughed it off at the time but I knew another girl who had gone the prostitution route on the show and slept with this same assistant director, which got her exactly six speaking lines in one episode, and she became creeped out by him very quickly. She talked about how he was violent with her during sex, always feeding her copious drugs, and talked about how the next time she came over he would bring some of his friends over from the set and she would have to sleep with them. She refused and broke up with him after that, naively thinking that theirs was a relationship of equals. She moved back in with her ex-boyfriend and the boyfriend had the tires shot out of his truck, she was gang-stalked while out driving for months, and her agent would no longer return her phone calls for her "unprofessional" behavior. The unprofessional part was her breaking up with the assistant director. Again, though, I'm just talking about lower level shenanigans in the industry. I will talk more about observing actual celebs next. I just wanted to provide more background on the thuggery, mandatory prostitution, and drug use that is a constant in the TV/film world. ( I really didn't see this in the stage world at all, so it seems more tied to the modelling, TV, music video, and film worlds.) Post by feliciag on Aug 26, 2010 at 10:46pm What I've described so far is really the "grooming" stage which I believe later can set the stage for a performer, once they get famous, to become deeply embedded in a very dark world, indeed. And having seen how dark it is, I can't help but see that there must be people who protest and wake up at some point, and also I see how their waking up must be a real threat to the controllers of this system, so of course they are threatened, silenced, or killed. That's the way the game seems to work. Awful. One TV show I did starred Carroll O'Connor and the show was haunted by problems. Parasitic drug dealers literally took up residence in the tiny Georgia town where we filmed, preying on the cast and crew. Actor Howard Rollins had a major cocaine problem throughout filming. Carroll O'Connor's son Hugh, who had been given a small role on the show so Carroll could keep an eye on him (he was prone to drug problems) became a sitting duck for the drug pushers and sunk deeper into drug addiction. Some years later he died of an overdose. And the women on the show were so horribly skinny and coke-addicted, it was terrible. They keep the women of TV and film horrifically thin. I could see the ribs and backbones of the main actress, Anne Marie Johnson, and a guest star who was a woman from soap operas, when they filmed a party scene wearing backless gowns. They seriously looked like refugees from a concentration camp - just like models. And neither of these women was large in any respect - they needed to each put on another 20 pounds just to be healthy. Many of the episode directors complained about how Anne Marie was getting too fat. Yeah, the residents of Dachau were SO frickin' fat, what lard-asses they were. What twisted people. I didn't see any signs of replacements in these people, although celebrities are always different in person than you'd expect. Carroll O'Connor was always polite yet distant with everyone. Once in a while you'd see his famous humor come through in some improvising - shades of Archie Bunker coming through. The show was very serious and dramatic and slow-paced (It was the TV version of the film In the Heat of the Night.) I was struck by how Carroll O'Connor seemed smaller and frailer than he did as Archie Bunker, but I wrote it off as age. Plus he had a heart condition and the stress of having to film extra hours due to his co-star's drug problems added to that. At one point during production he had a heart attack, but I wasn't working with him then. Still--I should double check some photos of him to see if he's a replacement possibility, just because you never know! And there was a big gap between him filming his last Archie Bunker material, Archie's Place, I believe, in the early 80's? And In the Heat of the Night, which we were filming in 1989. Anyway, the environment of filming on TV and film is just very toxic and it would seem that most of the players on this set were trancing out with drugs most of the time. Other TV and film sets I was on were much the same. It's a pretty miserable life, in many respects, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that people might try to "rebel" at some point and later get replaced. Especially given the intense demands these days to be in front of cameras 24/7 and to be just as "interesting" off camera as on. Post by feliciag on Aug 26, 2010 at 11:03pm I want to fast forward and mention some candidates for replacement that I'd like to research more up ahead. I had a friend who was friendly with Ann-Margret's biographers and sometimes saw her backstage after her various shows. He had been going to see her live in concert since the 1970's, when he was a young boy. He never spent more than a few minutes with her, but she was always friendly and knew him by name. One time she was performing at Caesar's in Atlantic City, doing a stripped down version of the same show she had recently done at Radio City Music Hall in New York. (I think this was 1996 or so?) My friend got us tickets and also, through the influence of his friends, her biographers, got us backstage to talk to her in her dressing room reception area for a few minutes after her show. She wore dark sunglasses throughout and you couldn't see her face very well. She was a petite thing, curvy and sweet, very polite. My friend had made it sound like she really KNEW him and would call him by name, but she didn't do that. It was more like she was forcing herself to be polite and do the obligatory guest greetings backstage. We made small talk for a few minutes, complimented her on her show, and then left. My friend was shaken and freaked out afterwards. He talked about how her face looked really, really different (beneath heavy makeup and her hair hanging over her face I did think I saw some signs of facelifts and facial work, but I didn't think anything of it - such is the way with older women in Hollywood.) He also said how she didn't recognize him by name, and usually she did. (Admittedly he hadn't seen her for a while backstage one on one. He had SEEN her backstage at various points in the mid to late 80's but not one on one like we did that day in - I think it was - 1996 or so? She probably met lots of fans, so did she forget him? Probably?) He also said how her show had been really lackluster and her singing was just awful compared to the way it had been at Radio City Music Hall. He said that show had been great, and this was really awful in comparision. In retrospect, I'm wondering if she was replaced at some point? Or even if she sends a replacement out to do some of her shows for her? Is that possible? I've been looking at photos and in some of her photos as a young woman she really looks like she has brown eyes, and in others they are lighter. Also she goes from being really bosomy to not having as much bosom to bosomy again. She had an accident in concert in the 1970's in which she fell from a stage and supposedly had to have her entire jaw wired shut and restructured. Now I'm wondering - was that replacement time? Or was that when a replacement took over for a while while the original recovered, and from time to time she trots out the replacement to cover her in a show? My friend said she did NOT seem like the same Ann Margret he had watched onstage so many times and seen a few times backstage - and that the performance we saw was nothing like the same version of the show he had seen at Radio City. I also have my radar out about her since she slept with Elvis many years back when they fell for each other during a movie shoot - and who knows which version of Elvis it was? Many people say that Elvis and she were like spiritual twins, extremely connected and linked and powerful when they got together - like soulmates. Sometimes when one celeb is replaced they replace an entire surrounding constellation of people - as we've seen with the Beatles and with many of the cast of Friends, etc. So anyway, I wanted to put that story out there to return to later for further research.