EDITOR’S NOTE: Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11, 1979 and July 10, 1980.

Director Randal Kleiser went from TV movies like this, The Gathering and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to Grease, The Blue Lagoon, Flight of the Navigator, Big Top Pee-wee and more. This was written by Darlene Young, who went on to write Panic In Echo Park, Can You Hear the Laughter? The Story of Freddie Prinze, The Plutonium Incident, Little Darlings, Marilyn: The Untold Story, The People Across the Lake and more, as well as acting in the TV series Grimm and the movie Pig.

Eve Plumb stars as Dawn, a role that ended up angering Brady Bunch fans when she took this instead of doing the Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which replaced her with Geri Reischl as Jan. Reischl was also in Brotherhood of Satan and I Dismember Mama. She was to play Blair Warner on The Facts of Life, but had a contract with General Mills playing Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz in commercials for Crispy Wheats-n-Raisins.

Plumb plays Dawn Wetherby, a runaway who has come to Hollywood and is instantly attacked and mugged. She soon meets sex worker Frankie Lee (Marguerite DeLain) and fellow runaway Alexander (Leigh McCloskey, Inferno) before working for a pimp named Swan (Bo Hopkins). TV watchers had to be shocked, as the first john she has — and loses her virginity to, saying  “I felt nothing—just stared at the ceiling and became a woman.” — is played by Patty Duke’s TV dad William Schallert.

You can blame her mother for not having a husband, I guess, or maybe not treating her well. It’s all very moralistic, as you would imagine — unlike a movie like Angel, in which yes, sex work is dangerous but you get to hang out with Rory Calhoun and Susan Tyrrell — but this was one of the first times that TV would tackle this hot topic. One imagines a young Bret Michaels was taking notes — “She stepped off the bus out into the city streets / Just a small town girl with her whole life / Packed in a suitcase by her feet” — in his Butler, PA living room.

This was so popular that a sequel — Alexander: the Other Side of Dawn — came out a few years later. I didn’t like Alexander too much in this, as he’s such a downer. Then again, Bo Hopkins is a lunatic and somehow he’s able to get his hooks into Dawn instead of this guy, but we learn in the sequel that Alexander has dealt with some issues, like a famous football star who pays him to pose.

You can watch this on YouTube.