I was Deflowered by Bugsy Malone

As I was deleting this afternoon's batch of spam enticing me to check out (among other things) the latest in digitized child pornography, I was suddenly reminded of how it all started. The whole idea of kiddie porn, that is. I mean, for me: the first time I ever had the notion that such a thing could exist. The moment I lost my innocence.

Jodie Foster and Scott Baio did it.

For those too young to remember (or too old to pay attention to it), back in 1976 the movie Bugsy Malone came out, starring the still-pretty Scott Baio and the still-tomboyish Jodie Foster (they were about 13 or 14 during filming). I was only a year or two younger. The gimmick of the movie was that it was a 1930's gangster movie, but with all the parts played by kids, and the violence emasculated by turning the machine guns into whipped-cream-splattering "splurge guns". And a musical, to boot. Good clean, G-rated fun.

Except for the sex.

OK, there were no actual sex scenes. But the film was loaded with references to classic gangster flicks, and even at the tender age of 11, I recognised that Jodie Foster's character Tallulah was a... I mean, maybe not really, but... I'd heard of Tallulah Bankhead, and... one of the songs explained it clearly enough, singing her praises as a... hostess: "No one south of Heaven's gonna treat ya finer. Tallulah had her trainin' in North Caroliner." I didn't need grass on my infield to see where that pitch was headed. Pop fly.

Now, there was nothing especially prurient about these bits. The movie got an easy "G" rating. I understood that she was just a kid playing "grown-up". Just like the other boys and girls in the movie were pretending to be adults. That was fun to watch, and I started to think how fun it would be to see more movies done this way. Not just gangster musicals, but other kinds of films. Let kids do the acting, replace the violence with harmless stuff like splurge guns, and you could do all sorts of movies that kids don't get to see otherwise!

I'd never seen a film rated beyond PG at the time, but I was aware enough of the world to know that there were movies in which people did naughty things, and even some in which adults "did it". In an instant, my mind made the connection: between Bugsy Malone and Debbie Does Dallas. Kids playing adults having sex. My mind exploded: Boom! Kids... my age. Ba-Boom!! Like Scott Baio. Va-va-voom!!!

Through the combination of innocent naivete and the childish belief that one's ideas are far more clever and original than they really are, I thought I had conceived of something completely new. I know now that it was a long way from the truth. Heck, Shakespeare staged a romance between two kids about Scott's and Jodie's age nearly 400 years earlier, and if they hadn't killed themselves they would've ended the play with more than a kiss and some poetry. And despite the greater difficulty of illicit moviemaking in those pre-Betacam days, I'm sure that had been done already. In Polaroids if nothing else.

But I can't help wondering if Scott "Bugsy" Baio and Jodie "Tallulah" Foster might have planted the same concept into the heads of other young moviegoers attending matinées across America, while Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford vied for the presidency and the country celebrated its Bicentennial. And if that might explain some of the flood of sites promising to really show me what I first imagined a quarter century ago.

I'm not blaming or accusing Alan Parker, who wrote and directed Bugsy, and especially not Scott and Jodie and their fellow cast members. But I do have to wonder: was I the only kid whose mind was introduced to the concept of kiddie porn by this film?