MEDIA > ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS > 2007

NO MORE KID STUFF FOR FANNING
from Premiere, January, 2007
By Henry Cabot Beck

Imagine Dakota Fanning, as the motherless Lewellen in the independent film Hounddog, playing a kind of prepubescent Janis Joplin, wailing full-throttle on a variety of Elvis Presley hits as she runs wild through the Alabama underbrush in the late 1950s. Imagine, also, watching Fanning making a boy drop his jockeys by promising him kisses, sleeping beside Lewellen's naked, brain-addled father (played by David Morse), and forcing two children to strip at gunpoint and embrace as she wraps a snake around them.

Needless to say, we're a long way from Dreamer and Charlotte's Web.

But the scene in Fanning's new movie that has really caused an outcry is the one in which Lewellen suffers a devastating rape by an older boy who tempts her with Elvis tour tickets. Since news about this scene broke last summer during filming, Hounddog writer-director Deborah Kampmeier has been besieged with outraged, unwanted attention; she's even had to hire someone to screen her hate mail.

"It took ten years for me and my producing partner, Raye Dowell, to put this project together," says Kampmeier, sitting on a park bench in New York City's Chelsea district on a gray November day. "There were so many stories I needed to tell in Hounddog, about motherlessness, the cycle of abuse, the triumph of this girl's spirit, and the power of female sexuality."

Kampmeier, 42, suffered the thousand indignities shoestring independent features are heir to — and then some. "I had Robin Wright Penn in the cast, who I worked with in Virgin [Kampmeier's first film, released in 2004; it also centers around a young rape victim] and who has been the most ferocious supporter of this project [Penn is one of Hounddog's producers]. David Morse was in place, and I thought once I got Dakota attached there'd be no problem getting money," she says. "Especially as the film had a very modest budget and everybody, Dakota included, was working for scale. And I could not get it financed. No one wanted to touch the material." Eventually she raised some funding, but her most secure backer pulled out about a half hour before she arrived on location in Wilmington, North Carolina, last summer with her five-year-old daughter and her dog. A local producer offered some start-up cash, and producer Jen Gatien (daughter of New York club owner Peter Gatien) helped secure further funds, but Kampmeier had to put her movie on hold twice more, once for a week before filming started and again for a week during the shoot. "The crew was utterly supportive of the project," she says, "but they were understandably upset when we had no money to pay them."

Then, while the film was still shooting, a weekly family-values radio program in North Carolina obtained a copy of the screenplay; the following month, a disgruntled fund-finder leaked the story of Fanning's rape scene to the New York Daily News. The story got about the same amount of attention it might have if the 12-year-old Fanning had been cast in an NC-17 remake of Lolita. One website now features a petition demanding that the local authorities prosecute Kampmeier for violating several child porn statutes, including sexual exploitation of a minor (at press time, the petition had 652 signatures; calls seeking comment from the assistant district attorney's office were not returned). Another online petition advocates they "arrest the sick mother and agent of Dakota Fanning and block the release of her movie, Hounddog." And Paul Petersen, the former Donna Reed Show star-turned-child-actor advocate, has weighed in with a multipart essay, "The 'Rape' of Dakota Fanning," which is running on several sites.

"Young performers who do this sort of work are like bugs stuck in amber," Petersen says by phone. "Pretending leads to reality. Intellectually, kids feel it, live it, express it. Children can't shrug it off."

"I think to some extent what they're accusing me of is putting Dakota through some ordeal or a simulation of rape, but that's not the case," says Kampmeier. "The scene was never run through from start to finish; it was shot in increments, over and over, never in a single take. The construction creates the impression of the violence, but doesn't represent the feeling on the set or something that might have traumatized Dakota, especially since there had been so much rehearsal.

Despite her problems financing the movie, Kampmeier was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction to its plot details. "I was naive — I had no idea this would come," she says. "Our decision was to not respond to any of it 'cause everything that's been written or said about us is false. But at a certain point it was so upsetting to read lie after lie and be powerless to change the public perception. I finally had to stop focusing on that and get back to the film."

Through it all, Kampmeier says, Fanning and her team never wavered. "When potential investors tried to change the script or would, for example, ask to remove the rape scene, they said, 'This scene stays as is.' They understood the rape is part of that character's journey."

"I've been working with Dakota since she was five, and this is something we haven't seen her do," says Cindy Osbrink, Fanning's agent. "Something that really challenged her talent. Hounddog was one of the best experiences of her life, a story that needs to be told, and she tells it with her soul as no one else can."

Kampmeier was still in post-production at press time; she says that the title could change and that the licensing of the music, including several Elvis tracks, was not yet in place. "Again, that all has to do with money," she says. "I have no reason to believe the Elvis estate will have any objections, and we have a great music guy working on it." The movie does not yet have a distributor; a rough cut was submitted to the Sundance Film Festival.

"I'm not a political filmmaker," says Kampmeier, still visibly shaken by the controversy. "I'm just trying to tell one particular story about one particular girl. I didn't set out to answer any big questions." She is talking with Gatien about another project, a biopic. Though she won't go into more detail, it "absolutely does not have a rape in it," she says, laughing.

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