By the standards of the internet, the photograph is relatively tame: an
18-year-old girl, standing in a bedroom in front of deep red curtains,
pulling back her hair and smiling for the camera.
She’s stark naked, of course.
She’s stark naked, of course.
But this is a nude picture like no other. It could, in fact, represent one
of the most expensive PR disasters in recent media history.
The naked girl is none other than Vanessa Hudgens, star of The Walt Disney
Company’s hugely lucrative High School Musical franchise, which has
generated an estimated $1 billion of operating profit for company over the
past two years. The show, like Walt Disney itself, is as wholesome as
children's entertainment gets: one of the reasons it has become such a
cultural phenomenon.
Just to make things more difficult, the photograph was allegedly taken by
Zac Efron, Hudgens’s 19-year-old boyfriend, and her co-star on the show.
Together, the couple are by far the biggest “tween” stars in America,
frequently appearing on the covers of celebrity magazines.
It is not known how the photograph ended up being published on the internet.
All this has left Walt Disney company – and its superstar chief executive,
Bob Iger – with an impossible dilemma. If it supports Hudgens, will more
nude pictures, some more explicit than the first, later emerge? And if it
dumps Ms Hudgens, will fans dump the show?
So far, the company has chosen to back Hudgens, for fear of meddling with a
proven formula, thus forcing parents across the country to have to explain
to their children why their teen idol had disappeared from the screen.
High School Musical, about a group of teenagers putting on a show, was
watched by 7.7 million people on its first showing in 2006, then a record
for the Disney Channel.
Christer Fuglesang
Født i Sverige
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