Frank Chu
Frank Chu just added me as a friend on MySpace. At this point he has fewer than 200 friends. That actually surprises me because I consider him to be pretty well known. He has a wikipedia page dedicated to him. There's a bar that was named in his honor and if you've spent any time in the city you're sure to have seen him.
Hounddog
I've seen movies or shows on TV in the past that included material that I thought, if i had children, would be inappropriate for them at that age. I can't help but notice the young actors in the scene and wonder how it affects them. They are after all real people, even if the scene they're acting in is fiction.
I wonder if most people notice that these are kids playing roles in these scenes and if they dismiss it because it's scripted scripted. Maybe it's less of an issue if the role they play in the scenes is minor. Perhaps children find themselves in these roles because the scenes themselves go largely unnoticed, start to become commonplace and are eventually accepted by both the viewers and the parents whose children are cast in the roles.
Exposing children to adult content during the creation of entertainment media isn't anything new. Brook Shields was 12 in 1978 when she appeared nude in the role of a child prostitute in Pretty Baby. At age 14, Jodi Foster was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a pre-teen prostitute in Taxi Driver.
Last week the film Hounddog premiered in competition at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The movie was filmed when Dakota Fanning was 12 and includes a scene of her being raped. From what I've read, the scene is supposed to be graphically disturbing.