It was at the beginning of all this tabloid frenzy. Our garbage was being gone through, and we were involved in all these chases getting home, and people camping out on our property to get pictures.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The incentive for digging up gossip has become so great that people will break the law for the opportunity to take that picture. Then it crosses the line into invasion of privacy. The thing that's really bad about it, though, is that the tabloids don't tell the truth.
For a blink of an eye, there was so much media glare. It was unexpected, and I don't think we realized the magnitude of the message we were imparting with 'The Nanny Diaries.' There was also this added challenge that some of the media power players whose publications were doing stories on us perceived us to be sniping at their lifestyles.
I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.
When we are out there selling a new picture, when did it become part of the deal that you have to sell the family? To use the juicy part of your life to get attention? I'm not blaming the reporters. It's the system.
I had people sleeping in front of my home. I couldn't go anywhere. It confronted me from the moment I woke up. There would be 100 people at the lot where we shot 'The Partridge Family.'
What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody.
What happened in 2008 stopped people in their tracks. People stopped looking at their homes simply as commodities to exploit and starting thinking about how they might personalise that space and make them less bland and more autobiographical, and that's healthy, I think.
We're still in the ditch, and the Gennifer Flowers story about Bill Clinton says it all. A tabloid fired several bullets into the air, and the rest of the herd began to stampede.
Now if you look at the London 'Times,' you'll find that with quite a number of the photographs, you touch them, and they turn into videos. I think newspapers come alive that way. We talk about 'papers.' We should cut out the word 'paper,' you know? It's 'news organizations.'
No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay.