Pamela Anderson

2023 - 2 - 1

'Pamela, a love story' works to help Pamela Anderson reclaim her ... (CNN)

The word “Intimate” is frequently used when describing celebrity documentaries, but it certainly applies to “Pamela, a love story,” which at one point shows ...

The indignities of that “blond bombshell” status are nicely documented here. (There’s no mention of “Home Improvement,” or Anderson’s Anderson’s account actually does little to detract from that Emmy-nominated production, which was quite sympathetic in portraying the hurt she felt and the way the media treated her. The result is a humanizing look at a woman often reduced to cartoon caricature, while occasionally feeling too conspicuously like a licensed product. [“Ask Dr. The word “Intimate” is frequently used when describing celebrity documentaries, but it certainly applies to “Pamela, a love story,” which at one point shows Pamela Anderson lounging in the bathtub as portions of her diaries are read as voiceover.

'People are going to be really surprised': inside the Pamela ... (The Guardian)

The actor and activist has reclaimed her narrative in a revealing Netflix film that shows her at her most vulnerable and honest.

“She really challenges you not to land in those binaries, in the way that now we live in a very binary world where you have to see things one way or the other or you’re wrong,” he said. As a documentary film-maker, “I have to believe staunchly that we should be able to tell stories about real people and real public figures,” said White of the series. White sees Anderson as “another key part of that conversation or a key part to continuing that conversation”, in how she recalls her own treatment in the media, and participation in the bombshell image, with a mix of disappointment and bemusement but rarely bitterness. (She holds nothing against James, she added.) At the time, Anderson said nothing publicly; she refocused unwanted attention to her Broadway debut as Chicago’s Roxie Hart for a winking, [well-reviewed](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/may/09/pamela-anderson-chicago-broadway-roxie-hart) eight-week run (a personal triumph celebrated in the film’s final section). “She wasn’t willing to do things for drama, she wasn’t willing to do things to make a more traditional documentary,” said White. The only topic Anderson seems reluctant to discuss – and the only times during filming, White says, that she would get too nauseated to continue – is the tape: the theft of an intimate video made by Anderson and Lee shortly after their wedding, which was distributed without their consent and became a viral hit on the nascent internet. not a lot of thinking went into anything”), her work as a pin-up and actor proudly. Her molestation by a babysitter as a child and rape by a 24-year-old friend of a friend at age 12, which left her “very, very shy” and ashamed. “She just seemed so different than the public persona,” he said, “that I thought if we could bottle this Zoom conversation up and translate it to documentary format, I think people are going to be really surprised.” There’s a softness to the film that owes something to how Anderson characterizes her own life and career – vulnerable, reflective, a little cheeky, seemingly bemused and baffled by celebrity. I wanted her to be the shepherd through her life story.” [Pamela, a Love Story](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/27/pamela-a-love-story-review-pamela-anderson-looks-back-baywatch-sex-tape), the new Netflix documentary on arguably the most recognizable blonde bombshell of the last 30 years, that Pamela Anderson is a stellar archivist of herself.

Pamela Anderson Knows Even a Memoir Can't Tell All (Vulture)

Pamela Anderson discusses Tommy Lee, Rick Salomon, and Kid Rock marriages in her new memoir 'Love, Pamela'. She talks allegedly getting flashed by Tim Allen ...

“She said she’d spoken to Julian about me, and she knew I deserved a lot more respect than people gave me, especially in the media,” Anderson writes. She used a commercial shoot in Australia as an excuse to visit Assange’s home country and lobby with members of Parliament on his behalf. “A few months later, my assistant found what he thought was a crack pipe in the Christmas tree,” she writes. She thought that it would help me become a stronger and more serious activist, because my intelligence was being overshadowed.” Though Anderson took her notes under “serious consideration,” she doesn’t think being a bombshell and an intellectual are mutually exclusive. Rick insists to this day that my assistant planted the pipe in the tree to break us up.” They annulled the marriage after the incident. The late Westwood, her husband Andreas Kronthaler, and Teller watched Obama’s inauguration from a blow-up mattress in 2009. She met her ex-husband at a charity concert she attended with partner in crime and photographer David LaChapelle. But luckily, I couldn’t stand the taste of hard alcohol and the nausea forced me out of the tub. When Mario Van Peebles found out she was living there, he convinced her to leave the arrangement and that it could become dangerous. I was fine the way I was.” Trying not to look, but I couldn’t help myself and caught his eye in the reflection. Combining prose and free-verse poetry to weave a chronological tale that begins at birth and arrives at the present, Anderson offers 250 dizzying pages of straightforward recollections.

What a New Documentary Reveals About Pamela Anderson's Life ... (TIME)

'Pamela, a love story' digs into Pamela Anderson's extensive personal archive to tell a different kind of story.

“From the beginning, both Pamela and I have said that this has nothing to do with taking the narrative back from that show—she never liked that type of messaging,” White says. For Anderson, who has not seen the series and has no plan to, the goal behind making the documentary was not to correct the narrative, but to tell her story authentically. Upon being given access to the archive, White flew up to Ladysmith, where he filmed Anderson diving back into the old journals and tapes for the first time in years and later, in some of the sweetest moments of the film, reviewing home videos with her sons on a VCR and monitor that White got from a local pawn shop. When White began doing the research for the film back in Los Angeles after the first trip to Ladysmith, he tasked Lee with carrying the first shipment of tapes back to L.A. “I think through the years after going through so much, she’s clung to a lot of her personal treasures and guarded them over the years,” he says. “She does not want to step on the artist’s toes ever because she knows what that feels like. [kept a journal](https://time.com/5947472/collective-documentary/), writing about everything from her career goals to her romantic relationships and family life; in one particularly bittersweet scene in the documentary, she writes a letter to her then-one-year-old son Dylan, following the incarceration of her then-estranged husband Tommy Lee. The extensive materials become the thruline of the film, showing the growth and evolution of Anderson throughout the years, from her childhood to present day. “She’s very collaborative from an emotional level and an artistic level, but when it came to the filmmaking and editing conversation, she was very detached from the process, which appealed to me as a storyteller,” White said. In addition to her journals are an archive of VHS tapes that document everything from home life with her sons and their childhood birthday parties to vacations with ex-husband Tommy Lee. Anderson’s life appears to reach its apex once she falls in love with, marries, and starts a family with musician Tommy Lee, but that image is shattered once a stolen intimate home video of the couple becomes the Internet’s first viral moment. [turbulent childhood](https://time.com/104478/pamela-anderson-says-she-was-raped-as-a-child/), during which she suffered multiple abuses, to her discovery at a Canadian football game, to the dizzyingly meteoric fame that came after she became a Playboy model and television star via [Baywatch ](https://time.com/4793889/baywatch-movie-review/)in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Netflix's Pamela Anderson Documentary Is a Wake-Up Call (Slate Magazine)

The Baywatch actress gets the Framing Britney Spears treatment, and the results are grim.

Horrific snippets of the court transcripts show Gross’ lawyer asking the teenager “You like to be sexy, don’t you?” even claiming in an affidavit that Shields had “sought and acquired the image and persona of a Lolita and a femme fatale … By the end of each documentary, the simple fact of Shields’ and Anderson’s continued existence feels like a miracle. Both women have lived a life in the public eye, dealing with decades of harassment and changing attitudes. Later, when Anderson and Lee decide to sue Penthouse in order to stop the distribution of the sex tape, Anderson, then seven months pregnant with her second child, is forced to endure a humiliating deposition. Naked photos were used in the room as proof that she had no right to privacy, and repeated questions about her sex life implied that Anderson was in some way culpable. There’s one point in Pamela, where Anderson and Lee are enjoying a night out after the birth of their first child, who’s at home with Anderson’s mother. [discovered in the crowd of a Canadian football game](https://slate.com/culture/2022/02/pam-tommy-episode-6-pamela-anderson-jumbotron-playboy.html) in Vancouver in 1989, and was catapulted into the limelight after starring on Playboy magazine’s October cover later that year. Her rebuttal to Cruise (which received wild cheers and applause from the audience at the movie’s Sundance premiere) is the kind of moment Anderson never really gets. But the subject, and content, of the film—a historical drama in which Shields plays a child prostitute and appears nude—sparked a child pornography debate. It isn’t that her roles weren’t questioned at the time, but that she and her mother were made to answer for them, while little was asked of the men who cast and photographed her. And once a woman is labeled as a whore, she’s frequently dehumanized by the men who come to see her as a sex object, and treated with callousness by women, who see her as a traitor to the cause. It’s a documentary subgenre that’s becoming increasingly familiar: a look back on the career of a controversial woman in the spotlight.

Pam & Tommy 're-traumatised' Pamela Anderson, her new Netflix ... (Stuff.co.nz)

Pamela, a Love Story presents a compassionate, complicated portrait of a woman all too often reduced to a late-night punchline.

She said it was very difficult to watch but that she was really proud of it, and she was proud of her vulnerability. A: We had a conversation from the beginning that there was going to be no lighting in the film. But Pamela is going to follow her heart on all of her decisions for the rest of her life. I learned very early on that when I threw out an idea to Pamela, she was gonna say, "I think that's a little dumb." Part of that getting blown up was, I think, the fact that she had me there once a month, stirring up all these emotions in her either through our conversations or having all the diaries around and tapes that she might pop in the VCR. During that first Zoom, I thought, "What a perfect little narrative arc, this island girl who got swept up in this crazy Cinderella rock 'n' roll story and returned to her island to live out the rest of her life and is married to a local and taking care of her parents. She watches a few of them in our film, and it was so emotional and triggering that she never wanted to do it again. I thought she was never going to watch it, or maybe she would watch in 10 years. That was a rule of thumb in the edit room. Even if she was too nauseated and said, "I just have to go to my bedroom for the rest of the day," she was back the next day. A: It was key that Brandon, her son, was one of our producers, because she felt a safety in [handing over] the archives. I assume you had to be particularly sensitive about anything you found that was intimate or very personal in nature.