Ben Affleck Whines About Privacy

WaPo media critic Liz Kelly explains “Why Ben Affleck Should Shuddup” about the lack of privacy that stars must endure.

In Venice to promote his new movie “Hollywoodland,” Ben Affleck gave the press a piece of his mind about the paparazzi and how they are ruining the film industry:

“I think more and more people pay attention to actors’ private lives (and that) makes it difficult to suspend disbelief when you are going to watch their movie because really what you are thinking about is whatever you have read about them in a magazine rather than the performance they are giving, and it makes the actor’s job harder,” Affleck said at a news conference. “The movies become incidental pit-stops and commercial breaks in the soap opera of their life.”

Kelly’s retort is a pretty good one:

There are pushy photographers who lie in wait for scandal shots and some scurrilous characters who will insist on sifting through famous trash cans, but let’s be realistic here — a star who does not want to live life in the glare of the National Enquirer and TMZ.com can pretty well escape that glare by avoiding certain Hollywood night spots, not making one’s offspring a desired target, foregoing public drunkenness, leaving Perez Hilton off the invite list for family functions and not making ill-informed statements blaming the press for making their lives harder.

Following Ben’s logic we’re answerable for Lindsay Lohan or Tom Cruise’s over-active off-screen shenanigans — shenanigans which have resulted not only in increased press attention, but real world consequences like admonitions from studio chiefs and loss of financial backing. But, when was the last time you couldn’t buy Meryl Streep’s performance because you had a searing image of her pole-dancing on a yacht in St. Tropez burned into your retina?

Fair point. Many Hollywood actors do indeed manage to live reasonably private lives and those who are most in the tabloid headlines are those who seem to crave the attention.

Still, as nutty as Tom Cruise’s behavior has been in recent years, I’m not sure that gives photographers the right to stalk him and his family. Tom Cruise has sought the spotlight, to be sure. Suri Cruise hasn’t.

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Ben Affleck Whines About Privacy

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