In what will undoubtedly take the cake as being the most disturbing viral marketing campaign for any movie this year, Tyler Perry, in a recent message on his website, described the first time he watched Precious, and how it opened a spigot of repressed memories from a childhood wrought with unthinkable abuses. "I'm tired of holding this in," he wrote. "I don't know what to do with it anymore, so, I've decided to give some of it away..."
Among his memories:
· The time his mother tried to escape with his two sisters, but since she took a car registered in his father's name, he had her arrested and had all three thrown in jail. He bailed them out in California and beat his wife in front of the kids for the entire trip back to Louisiana.
· He recently came face to face with the mother of a childhood friend who, thirty years ago, locked her son in the bathroom and told Perry that if he wanted to leave her apartment, he'd have to fish the key out of her vagina.
· Perry's father once came home drunk and beat him with a vacuum cleaner extension cord until the "skin was coming off my back."
· He was once approached to pay for the funeral of a neighborhood man who'd molested him.
· When his grandmother found out Perry visited the doctor once a week for allergy shots, she forced him to take a bath in ammonia, saying, "Ain't nothing wrong with that damn boy...he just got germs on him. Stop wasting all that money."
[Photo: SHIHO FUKADA/AP PHOTO]
· We're all PRECIOUS in His sight [TylerPerry.com]