The New Yorker:

The parents who exploit their kids for clicks in Netflix’s “Bad Influence” want you to think they couldn’t have known better.

By Jessica Winter

When Ryan O’Neal was making the promotional rounds for “Paper Moon,” in 1973, the actor informed the press that he did not want his nine-year-old daughter and co-star, Tatum, to make any more movies until she reached adulthood. “I’ve seen what has happened to child stars,” he said. He alleged that on “Peyton Place,” the prime-time soap opera that made him famous, babies who appeared in scenes were sedated to keep them from crying, except for one occasion when a scene actually called for a baby to cry, which was achieved by sticking pins in the child’s foot.

By Tatum’s account, O’Neal was a jealous and violent father, and a neglectful one—when she won an Academy Award for “Paper Moon,” neither he nor Tatum’s mother attended the ceremony. And yet even a man as limited as O’Neal possessed the moral discernment to hope, however idly, that his child might climb out of the Hollywood threshing machine into which he had tossed her. (She didn’t: Tatum made five more movies before she turned eighteen.) More than fifty years ago, any semi-sentient being could recognize the dangers of forcing minors to work gruelling hours performing emotions for the delectation of large and unseen audiences, long before their brains had finished developing.

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