Grace Van Dien, an actress best known for playing Chrissy in Season 4
of Strang Things has decided to focus on twitch streaming, rather than a career
in Hollywood, after producer made an inappropriate sexual request to her.
She described the experience on a recent Twitch stream, take a look.
>> Turning down acting projects and deciding to stream more.
But, the fact of the matter is the last few projects I've worked on,
I didn't have the best experiences with some of the people I had to work for.
And with streaming,
I get to choose who I hang out with,
who I talk to, etc, etc.
Yeah, one of the last movies I did, one of the producers asked me to,
he hired a girl that he was sleeping with, and
then he had her aske me to have a threesome with them.
So that's my boss, and then I didn't,
and I cried, and I was so upset.
Van Dien goes by the user name Bluefield on twitch where she has almost
300,000 followers.
She plays video games like Fortnite and Valerie on stream.
However, she also said she's not fully done with acting just yet.
Quote, I'm developing my own projects.
I'm hoping that someone decides to fund them because then I can be in control
of my own set, and I'm not gonna ask my actors to sleep with me.
That's a quote from variety.
And here's a tweet that she sent out, as I get older,
my work priorities are changing.
I'm waiting for the right project/the right people to work with.
It's nice to feel calm.
And then tweeted the following, Monsters and Muses, a short film I directed,
produced, and acted in.
More of this and lots of awards from different film festivals.
This is the situation leaving mainstream Hollywood for
the control of twitch seems to me also like a wild place.
But, what are your thoughts.
>> Yeah, so I'm fascinated by this story, cuz I think it's
a culture clash thats very ever present but rarely discussed.
So there's the old world of the new world, and my cut off for
that roughly is 45 years old.
If you're for about 45, you grew up on TV, you grew up in a different
top down culture, we tell you what to do and you listen, okay?
Under 45, you grew up on the Internet and you're not having any of that, right?
It's more rebellious.
And some of the rebellions lead in the wrong direction, QAnon and
that kind of nonsense, right?
Some of the rebellions lead in the right direction.
So, here is the clash of those worlds.
Because of all places, historically,
one of the most conservative disgusting places has been Hollywood.
Now, why do I say conservative?
Because the bosses were allowed to get away with the worst
kind of abuse of their employees.
So now sexual harassment is a giant part of, asexual assault is etc.
That part I naively didn't even know as I tangentially worked in the industry in
a couple of jobs.
But the other part of it, everyone was aware of.
The other part is a verbal harassment.
So if you're from the new world and you've never experienced that at a job,
you would be bewildered by what happened in Hollywood, and
that still happens to some degree.
But by the way, the older generation is bewildered by the younger generation.
So, if you work on a movie set or a TV show, not every time,
but a significant majority of the time, you'll be deeply humiliated,
shamed, yelled at for ridiculous reasons.
And you'll have to kiss people's ass in the most dehumanizing ways.
It's just abuse after abuse and the industry in Hollywood says,
that's perfectly normal.
What do you mean? That's the most normal thing in the world.
>> Pay your dues.
>> Yeah, pay your dues, right?
And if a young person complains, hey, I don't wanna be humiliated in front of
the whole set, they're like, get out of here.
I don't know, they don't know how to work hard.
No, it doesn't have anything to do with working hard, right?
So there's a giant culture clash.
So she's got a little bit of fame there, right?
Stranger Things and apparently a really interesting, smart person, right?
So, she's like, wait, you want me to sleep with you?
No weirdo perv, I'm not gonna do that.
And old Hollywood is like, what?
Now we can't even sleep with our young actresses, right?
>> [LAUGH] >> So when I worked in TV for
like a second, the verbal stuff was normal, very, very, very normal.
And by the way, like overt- >> The verbal abuse?
>> The verbal abuse, the overt racism,
sexism instead of all that stuff was normal.
I remember an executive, a Cable executive saying,
we can't have that New York look for a host, meaning Jewish, right?
And I was like, I literally raised my hand, cuz I'm that's the kind of guy,
this big meeting and stuff.
And I'm a tiny, junior writer, I'm sorry, but
isn't the number one show on TV Seinfeld, okay?
And then they said, we need a more midwestern look,
you wanna know what the translation to that is?
Not black, okay?
I'm like yeah, God damn it, what's this guy gonna say this?
I'm like, isn't the number one show in daytime Oprah, right?
So that stuff was so normal, right?
But now, the young people are saying no, it ain't normal to me, man.
No, you don't get to sexually assault me.
You don't get to treat me like dirt.
>> Yeah, and it's crazy because some of the vestiges of
old Hollywood are still here and as an actress, I have to deal with that stuff.
I mean, the fact that Harvey Weinstein was flat out about
raping actresses for decades and everybody knew it.
Everybody in the business knew it,
and nobody did anything, that's how toxic this business was.
And it's a paradigm change.
It takes a long time to turn the train that's been going 100
miles an hour in the, hey, I'm a producer and if I wanna bang my actresses, I can.
If I wanna ask my actresses to be in a threesome,
she should be in a threesome with me.
That was the world that we lived in.
I mean, James Hong, who I just saw won the SAG award,
incredible, this guy has been working in TV and
film since the thirties has insane stories about racism in Hollywood.
He was in yellow face movies, playing a background actor where the lead
was Charlton Heston with his eyes taped back being, I'm a china man.
This was Hollywood for years.
>> Seriously.
>> And it's crazy and it takes a long time to turn the train.
But I think you're right.
I think the younger generation is like, no, no, no, no.
Right. >> Because I've been in situations where I
remember I got into it with a hairdresser.
She was older, and I said, I'm not really sure this style is working and she said,
you know what?
You're not high enough on the call sheet to make comments like that to me.
And I was like, excuse you,
I'm not high enough on the call sheet to comment about my own hair?
That is such an old school way of thinking.
And if I brought that to a producer today, she would be fired, she would be fired.
>> But obviously at a point, it was fine for her to say things.
>> And so luckily now, she gets to go on twitch, people get the opportunity to do
whatever they wanna do and then have millions of people being sexist and
racist towards them, but at least they're not their bosses.