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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 232482" data-attributes="member: 57984">I have no trouble separating Joan from Mommie Dearest just because people hit people. They just do. And many people aren't cut out to be parents -- and the culture was really different then, and abusive parents could get away with a lot more, let alone rich ones with a film studio's press spin-doctors available and the police in their pockets.Sure, Christina seems much more snarky in later decades than when the book first came out in 1978, but back then it was the first significant tell-all memoir about growing up amidst the rich and famous, pulling back the veneer. So Christina was very cautious in making her allegations on TV chat shows like DONAHUE and elsewhere, because of the ferocious blow-back she knew she'd get and did.Today of course it's no big deal, and Christina is full of vim and vinegar and lots of eye rolls. But for me, the book, very sensitively written, rings true. (Unlike, say, My Mother's Keeper written seven years later by B D Hyman about her mother, Bette Davis -- a book with obvious truthfulness here-and-there, and yet fraught with such a small and petty tone, its credibility is minimized, to say the least. Hyman is today a homophobic born-again cow, while Davis' adopted son, Michael, a sweet and honest guy, disowns the book but is careful not to disavow the details, many of which are likely factual-ish).Can all Christina's Hollywood supporters who knew Joan really be dismissed as attention seekers? (And Christina openly admits that she and her brother became rebellious and problematic  -- how could they not?)The 1981 movie MOMMIE DEAREST was obvious campy shlock. I was in the packed theatre when it opened (many years before the day of my birth) and the audience screamed with laughter in all the right places, and some of the wrong ones. It was Paramount's biggest September release up until that time... As one of the first neo-'40s cinema entries of the 1980s -- glossy, trashy, hyperbolic and superficial, one could only wish DYNASTY had been this entertaining (but mostly wasn't, except for the rare season). I've never defended the movie (despite purchasing the DVD some 14 years ago, but I also bought most years of DYNASTY, which I've regretted more) but its biggest creative issue seems not to be what the film version did, but what it didn't --- and a clunky lack of transition between the scenes and eras was a major factor in making the picture feel so idiotic and foolish. (And Joan's films were almost completely ignored).Years later, Christina told Larry King that the Dunaway version wasn't any more exaggerated than the real Joan but simply different: Dunaway's Joan was merely a glamorous woman who wanted be obeyed, but in real life there was no placating Joan Crawford; complete compliance didn't save you from mistreatment, that dynamic a hallmark of an abusive relationship.Stupid Faye has disowned the movie since its release, but that couldn't be more disingenuous. Everyone knew what the already infamous book was about long before the movie was made, so Faye had to know it wasn't a love letter to Joan Crawford. But after Anne Bancroft pulled out of the movie once she sensed the script was getting too campy, Dunaway campaigned for the role, undoubtedly because she knew it could be a career-building part and knowing that Joan had praised a young Dunaway's star-quality years earlier... But once Faye realized that the movie was going to be the shyte, she publicly began dismissing Christina's story and started talking as if her own participation in the project had been almost coerced, the idiotic diva But I'll hand you that Christina's later unconstrained relish for tearing her mother to shreds doesn't help her case, but I think she's long-since been like, "WTF, Joan was  bitch," and I myself am fine with that even if everybody else isn't.If anyone hasn't heard, Christina has long-since identified QUEEN BEE (poorly directed by the screenwriter, but fascinating nonetheless) as the role most similar to the real Joan Crawford, and one has to believe it. And it's not just because Joan plays a "bitch" in the picture because, by her own admission, she'd played many bitches in her career -- she even managed to portray a "reformed" axe-murderess who was somehow more sympathetic than the woman she played in QUEEN BEE. (I also suspect the role she plays in THE BEST OF EVERYTHING hits pretty close to home, too). I'd also recommend re-watching that interview with Anne Helm about getting fired from  STRAIT-JACKET.By the way, there was a documentary released only months after Joan died -- and only months before Christina's book came out -- which seems to paint Joan Crawford in a very similar light.<img src="https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/2017/03/crawford_christina_2_copy.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></blockquote>

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