An Open Secret is an American documentary film directed by Amy J. Berg exposing child sexual abuse in the film industry in California.
The film features interviews with victimized performers, who were targeted when they were young boys, as well as industry figures, the predators themselves, and journalists. Wikipedia Berg decided to make the documentary after she was approached by Matthew Valentinas in 2011. Valentinas and Gabe Hoffman wanted to make a film about victims of sexual exploitation. Valentinas said,
"We chose Amy because we didn't want it to be exploitative or tabloid. We wanted it to be empowering for the victims."[4] Matthew Valentinas, an entertainment lawyer, came up with the idea when he heard #CoreyFeldman talking about his sexual abuse as a child actor in a TV interview.[5] Berg's 2006 film Deliver Us from Evil, a documentary on systemic child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. An Open Secret has an approval rating of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews from 17 critics.[7] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on reviews from 9 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[8] The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film offered a "sober look at accusations that lend themselves to sensationalism."[9] The Los Angeles Times describes the movie as "not the hard-hitting exposé that it aims to be" but as "an unsettling look at pedophilia in Hollywood".[10]
The New York Times wrote that the "topic deserves a tenacious call for answers" and hoped for "further aggressive reporting" which they missed in the movie, when Berg linked Martin Weiss "to a string of other men" but only presenting "a secretly taped conversation and some menacing music".[11] Flavorwire claims that "the film feels less shocking as a cult-of-celebrity document and more just quietly horrifying, as it details the trauma and the abuse of power inflicted on young men with stars in their eyes."[12] Indiewire described the documentary as "an incisive and utterly unflinching look at a subject too rarely scrutinized."[13] #pedowood
