TNT’s “Rich & Shameless” seven-part film series will launch this summer, but the first installment, “The Crime Against Pam & Tommy,” is debuting this Saturday. And the sooner the better for director Jenny Popplewell, who wants the movie to “settle the truth” for Pamela Anderson about her sex tape with ex Tommy Lee, which Popplewell called “revenge porn before we knew it was revenge porn.”
“We reached out to Pamela Anderson right from the start and to Tommy and asked them if they’d like to be involved,” Popplewell said alongside “Rich & Shameless” showrunner and producer Tom Lindley during a Television Critics Association panel Monday. “And we heard back through their representatives that that’s just a period of their time that they’re not interested in looking at again. But there were people that we invited into the film who were very close to Pam and Tommy, who had been their best friends during that era and were able to speak on their behalf… They’re championing their story and they’re making sure that people understand that they had absolutely no part in this and they tried for years to stop this tape from getting out.”
The notorious story of Anderson and Lee’s stolen sex tape has recently returned to the public eye with the debut of Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy,” starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan as the actress/model and Mötley Crüe drummer.
Per TNT, “The Crime Against Pam & Tommy” will feature “never-before-told stories of the theft, release and exploitation of the most famous sex tape in history — revealed for the first time by the people involved. Among the exclusive interviews are Amanda Chicago Lewis, an investigative journalist and writer of the Hulu series ‘Pam & Tommy’; Helen Ingley, daughter of Milton Ingley, a low-budget porn baron who first sold the infamous tape; Cort St. George, an internet entrepreneur involved in publicizing the tape and Guerin Swing, a close friend of the pair who offers a unique insight into the couple’s mindset at the time of the scandal.”
“Until I worked on this, I had absolutely no idea to the lengths that they went to — and to the lengths that the people in this film went to to ensure that it was seen by the public,” Popplewell told reporters. “Like, I don’t know if this could happen today, but it’s quite an extraordinary tale of a domino effect where this tape goes from one hand to the next and each person comes up with a new plan as to how to get this out there, despite legal battles from Pam and Tommy. So Pam has given interviews for many years and stated that she has never seen the tape, that she didn’t release it, that she didn’t make any money from this release. And I still think that we didn’t really listen, we didn’t really acknowledge what she was saying. And when I look back at archive of interviews in 2015, 2017, it’s still kind of a joke. People are still laughing at her or with her, or she’s laughing with them. And I think that that’s been quite a key part of this film, is to turn that dial up and say it wasn’t a laughing matter, we needed to take her seriously, this was revenge porn before we knew it was revenge porn and I think that’s what this doc is going to do, it’s going to settle that truth for her and maybe it won’t be brought up in interviews again to be laughed at.”
Producer Lindley added that “several of the films” in the “Rich & Shameless” series are similar to “The Crime Against Pam & Tommy,” in that they “cover subjects where you thought that it was considered innocuous or fun or it didn’t matter and everyone was having a good time, and actually, there is a far darker world to some of that. I think that’s our idea with all the films.”