Laurel Rosenhall reports:
Back before the internet made it so easy to find a celebrity’s age, a 29-year-old actress landed the role of a 17-year-old girl — and helped propel “Beverly Hills 90210” into a hit TV show in the 1990s.
That was the story actress Gabrielle Carteris told state lawmakers last year as she lobbied for a bill to strip actors’ ages from commercial websites used in casting. Now the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Carteris said she would never have been able to land the career-making role today because of websites like IMDB.com that publish actors’ ages.
In response, lawmakers — sweeping aside First Amendment concerns that the government doesn’t have the right to keep anyone from publishing information such as a birth date — approved Assembly Bill 1687, and the governor signed it into law.
That law is now being challenged in federal court with a lawsuit that says it amounts to unconstitutional censorship.
Read more on Bakersfield.com.