Filmmaker gets in way of ‘Girl 27’s’ sad story

Writer David Stenn stumbled across the shocking story of Patricia Douglas and MGM around the time he was finishing his biography of Jean Harlow, and he immediately sprang into action: He lunched, fashionably, with his editor, Jackie Onassis, and ran it by her as the possible subject for his next book. Stenn recounts the incident early in his strangely self-obsessed documentary “Girl 27,” one senses, mostly for the chance to attribute the following lines to the iconic first lady: “If anyone can find out what happened to her, David, it’s you.”

Instead, he writes an article for Vanity Fair in 2003, on which the film is based. Stenn, who allows himself ample time in front of the camera to recount every bump, dip and nuance of his emotional journey as he discovers, courts and eventually becomes deeply involved in Douglas’ sad story, remembers the Jackie go-ahead with a raised-brow, hand-to-chest, who-me? awe that pervades the movie. “When you’re given that kind of mandate from that kind of person,” he says, “How can you not do it?” Needless to say, the question is rhetorical.

Thus fortified, Stenn (whose screenwriting credits include a re-imagining of “Rebel Without a Cause” as a rap movie with Vanilla Ice in the James Dean role) sets out to discover what happened to the chorus girl who, along with dozens of others, was lured to an MGM sales convention in June 1937 under false pretenses. Having dutifully reported to wardrobe for her abbreviated cowgirl costume and then to legendary producer Hal Roach’s ranch for what she thought was a movie shoot, Douglas was force-fed whiskey and then taken out to a field and raped by a drunken conventioneer from Chicago named David Ross.

What made the story remarkable was that Douglas, then only 20, filed a federal suit against MGM, a decision so impossibly brave or naive or both that it knocked even the death of Harlow and the abdication of Edward VIII off the front pages. The story of the massive cover-up and probable miscarriage of justice that followed -- it seems almost everyone, including the district attorney and Douglas’ own mother, were snug in Louis B. Mayer’s pockets -- is full of fascinating details about Mayer’s sun king-type powers. (La loi was him, basically.) And Stenn cuts together archival movie footage into a collage of violence against women that’s especially interesting in light of the fact that at the time sexual assault was seen as a self-canceling crime, since clearly any woman it happened to was asking for it. (And that then, even more than now, the sight of a girl getting slapped sold tickets.)

Far less endorsable are the smarmy outrage of Fox News analyst Greta Van Susteren and Stenn’s disingenuousness and increasingly bizarre displays of narcissism. Although the first part of the movie is dedicated mainly to Douglas’ story and made up mainly of archival footage, stills and interviews with Douglas’ contemporaries and her estranged daughter, the second half is mostly devoted to on-camera interviews with Stenn and Douglas, whom he eventually finds living in a one-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas.

A lonely, obese, thrice-divorced recluse who divides her time between her sofa and her bed, she refuses at first to participate, launching Stenn on a seduction mission that culminates in his personally scrubbing her toilet.

“I guess I love her,” he says after revealing this particular detail. Douglas feels the same.

“I never met anyone like him,” she says. “I wish we could be doing his story!”

Tragically, she died before the film was completed, not knowing her wish had indeed come true.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

“Girl 27.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Playing at Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 274-6869.