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When Ryan O'Neal was promoting Paper Moon in 1973, the actor told the press that he did not want his nine-year-old daughter and co-star Tatum to appear in other films until she came of age. “I've seen what it's done to child stars,” he said. He claimed that on Peyton Place, the soap opera that made him famous, babies who appeared on screen were sedated to keep them from crying unless the baby was required to cry, which was accomplished by sticking pins into the baby's foot.
According to Tatum, O'Neal was a jealous and abusive father, and a neglectful one—when she won an Oscar for Paper Moon, neither he nor her mother attended the ceremony. Yet even a man as limited as O'Neal recognized, if only half-heartedly, that his daughter could have avoided the horrors of the Hollywood machine into which he had thrown her. (She didn't: Tatum made five more films before she turned 18.) More than fifty years ago, anyone with any common sense could have understood the dangers of forcing minors to work gruelingly, feigning emotion for a vast and invisible audience, long before their brains were fully developed.
Given this history, the outraged behavior of many of the scene moms in Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, a three-part docuseries currently airing on Netflix, is striking. All of them allowed their teens to create content for social media star Piper Rockell, whose cast was called “Squad,” as well as for their own channels. The kids and parents describe working 12-hour days in the home of Rockell’s “mom” and creative director, Tiffany Smith. The kids filmed comedic skits, staged macabre “crush challenges” (“Last to Stop KISSING BOYFRIEND Wins **COUPLES Challenge**💋”), and pulled increasingly bizarre pranks orchestrated by Smith and her director-editor boyfriend, Hunter Hill. One episode involved faking a boy’s arrest (“I got arrested in front of my crush to see her reaction. PRANK!! **SHE CRIED**”). In another, Rockelle pretended to pass out (the posthumous transcript of the episode was titled “Something TERRIBLE Happened to My Best Friend **CHALLENGE GOES WRONG**🚑🤕”). Sometimes, cameras captured the hysteria of unsuspecting participants caught in the middle of pranks. “We didn’t know a lot of what was going on — we weren’t allowed to be there,” one mother told Inside Edition. But much of it was available on YouTube. That’s where the money was coming from.
The families of eleven Squad members eventually filed a lawsuit against Smith and Hill, alleging that Smith created an “emotionally, physically, and sometimes sexually abusive environment” that included inappropriate touching and a barrage of insults and innuendo. They also claimed that Smith violated child labor laws by failing to provide adequate breaks and failing to allow regular study sessions on set; in “Bad Influence,” one of the girls notes that she would wake up early to “study” on her tablet for a couple of hours before the start of the filming day. (Smith and Hill deny all allegations of wrongdoing, and the lawsuit was recently settled out of court.)
One mother says the lawsuit is a way to highlight “what happened to all of us,” as if she were talking about a listeria outbreak or a tornado. Another says, “I hope we can prevent other kids from having to go through what our kids went through.” A third mom, who briefly worked as a Squad stylist — which meant finding crop tops and stilettos for girls as young as 11 — broke down in tears while discussing the revelations in the lawsuit. It’s as if each of them had thrown their child out of a plane and then pretended to be shocked that the ground was so hard.
“Bad Influence” calls to mind notorious recent examples of parents who used violence and coercion to create lucrative content, including YouTubers Ruby Franke (convicted of felony child abuse, now in prison) and Michael and Heather Martin (convicted of child neglect, now on probation). But Franke and the Martins operated within essentially closed family systems, while Smith attracted contract participants to her small quasi-film studio. The documentary highlights the cultish aspects of Piper Rockell’s experience, and perhaps the cultish qualities of the entertainment industry as a whole. Smith is shown as a gifted but unpredictable leader whose magnetism can be lost on outsiders; she isolates her followers, makes them emotionally and financially dependent on her favor, and imposes harsh penalties for dissent or disobedience. Several young YouTubers, having left
Sourse: newyorker.com
