If there was an upside to doing Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, Drake Bell said it would be the strangers who have approached him with gratitude before sharing their own sad tales of abuse.
But Bell, who participated in an FYC event Tuesday for the Investigation Discovery series, also talked about the sense of conflict he’s been feeling ever since he agreed to expose some of the darkest parts of his childhood in the four-part docuseries. In Quiet on Set, the former Drake & Josh star revealed he was abused by Brian Peck who worked as a dialogue coach on Nickelodeon’s All That and The Amanda Show.
“I’m in the fire right now,” Bell told the audience at the Saban Media Center in North Hollywood. “Having to tell this sensitive of a story, something I held inside for so many years … I’m still reeling from the idea of bearing my soul to the world.”
“Hollywood is a beautiful place, full of fantasy and imagination and fun. But it’s also a completely dark cesspool of disgusting waste,” said Bell, who was joined on the panel by filmmakers Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz, as well as former child stars Giovonnie Samuels and Bryan Hearne, to help garner support and Qvotes come Emmy time. “I’m hoping that we see shifts and changes inside the industry that are needed.”
Bell told the audience that long before Quiet on Set was made, he had been approached about sharing his story on camera for another documentary. For years, Bell was only known as the John Doe who helped to convict Peck, who is now a registered sex offender.
“Hollywood is very small, especially when you work on shows. You become a family. People talk,” recalled Bell. “I just was not in a place where I wanted to talk or put it out in the world. The response was unbelievable. They wrote back and said, ‘because of people like you, more children will be hurt in the industry. You need to speak out.’ I was like, did you just really send that to me? I was shocked.”
Bell said his initial instinct was to ignore the Quiet on Set producers because “I was struggling a lot at that point in my life.” After several meetings with the filmmakers, Bell opened up to the idea of finally sharing his story.
Today, he’s surprised that the bad behavior that was allowed to fester back in the ’90s on kids shows was never exposed by the press. “The biggest concern here is you have two people working on the same show within matter of months getting arrested for unspeakable and horrific things,” recalled Bell, in reference to both Peck and Jason Handy, a former PA on The Amanda Show and All That who pleaded no contest in 2004 to distributing sexually explicit material by email, lewd acts on a child, and sexual exploitation of children.
“If I was a reporter, I would be frothing at the mouth for that story,” Peck told the crowd. “There were years I would go and Google to see who has written about it. It was nowhere. I couldn’t find stuff on Brian, there was more on Jason. I was so perplexed by that. This is the response that I feel should have happened so many years ago, the reaction that everybody is having now. This needs to change.”
