One of the clips in this documentary that struck me the most was a scene where Frye has a conversation with her doctor before her operation. Frye was lucky enough to record her own.Īs a childhood star in Hollywood, she had to deal with a different kind of public pressure most kids don’t have to deal with, especially as she transitioned from a pigtailed 8-year-old to a puberty-struck 15-year-old, who people are either inclined to scoff at or slut-shame.įrye goes so far as to even get a breast reduction at 16 to curb the comments - even though it doesn’t do much. And the ’90s was the beginning of a time where soon everyone would have some kind of device to record their life. It’s more than helpful, then, when we have some tangible footage to back this up. Trauma might be one of them, or fondness another - either way, our lives are turned over and over again in our heads to the point where some memories might be unrecognizable to the person who was actually living them. We know scientifically we don’t often remember things exactly as they happen, for a number of reasons. So the answer to the question, “are memories real or are they stories we want to tell ourselves?” is one we don’t have to poke at too much to understand the answer. She even continued to see and interact with this person in her college years, kissing him in the bitter chill of an early spring Yankee game. And in a world where these teenage stars merge with the adult members of the industry, the line can blur into some traumatic situations.įrye was sexually assaulted by a close friend of hers who was many years her senior, an experience that as a young woman she rewrote into a consensual encounter in her mind to process it. Frye and friends spend one day in Antelope Valley, CA, completely tripped out on mushrooms, just laying in the wild grass with ladybugs crawling up their fingers having a grand old time.īut many of her friends also develop drug addictions and even commit suicide. There are good and bad experiences with this.
Teen suicide band autograph full#
It’s a fascinating way of looking at trauma.įrye and her friends were involved full swing in the typical teenage drinking and drug scene, only exacerbated by their encounters with the elite of Hollywood which gave them access to more exclusive and more dangerous illicit encounters. And this is the theme that carries the whole movie.įrye has the recordings of her time in LA, where she was born and lived until she moved to New York City at 18 to study at The New School, so she can measure up the memory of these experiences with how she really acted when they were happening. In the documentary, Frye asks “are memories real or are they stories we want to tell ourselves?” about looking back on her experience as a teenager. It’s a story of self-acceptance and an acknowledgment of the many many mental health issues that plague not just the industry actors, but normal teenagers as well. Warts and all.īut this documentary isn’t about exposing the teenagers of Hollywood for their ugly drug-addled underbellies. Face to face, she shows us - with hours of footage taken from her ‘90s-era camera recorder, displaying all the young teenage stardom of the ’90s in their glory. From then on she spent her childhood in Hollywood, with roles in more low-budget movies and minor character appearances on shows like “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” brushing elbows and swapping bottles with nowaday A-listers like Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp.Īnd not only does Frye tell us about her life in this documentary. Frye was a Hollywood child star, most famously known for her role on the ‘80s sitcom “ Punky Brewster ,” where she played the titular character at the age of 8.