I don’t believe in airing dirty laundry if you’re profiling someone involved with a new film (actor, director, etc.) for its own sake. However, you should absolutely get into it if it applies to the work. Naturally, being an L.A. Times piece, you won’t find this criteria in Michael Goldman’s interview with Jenny McCarthy about Dirty Love (First Look, 9.23). Starring and written by McCarthy, the film is described on the IMDB as “an edgy comedy about a girl who has fallen out of love” and more particularly about “a jilted photographer who sets off on a mission to get back at her philandering model boyfriend.” It is therefore not only allowable but necessary to ask if the reason for McCarthy’s divorce from John Asher, the film’s director, is echoed in the movie’s plot. Goldman wimps out, of course. He writes that the divorce was due to “irreconciliable differences” and quotes Asher as saying that getting divorced “was something that Jenny felt she had to do.” Damn it, did they get divorced because Asher cheated or what? Did the idea of a “philandering boyfriend” come to McCarthy as she was writing the script because of marital experience with Asher…yes or no? If not, what real-life experience was McCarthy drawing from? The decision by Goldman and his Times editor to sidestep this was cowardly.