I always count down the seconds before Judd Apatow goes to Twitter to join in on the next witch hunt. The talented writer-director has been very vocally supportive of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, despite, hypocritically, not condemning his buddy James Franco (we’ll get to that a little later).
Recently interviewed by The Daily Beast, Apatow was asked to weigh in on disbarred comedian Louis C.K.’s first major stand-up tour. Apatow didn’t hold back by calling C.K’s jokes about Parkland and Trans people “offensive” and then making the comparison to Aziz Ansari’s more “appreciative” tackling of his own #MeToo situation.
“I appreciate what Aziz did and a lot of us feel like, we wish Louis said that on day one,” Apatow tells The Daily Beast. “And why wouldn’t you say it? Why wouldn’t you say, ‘I hope people feel better, I’m trying to learn, I hope something good comes from this, I don’t want people to be in pain.’ It seems like the natural thing to say.
What is going on with Apatow these days that he needs to virtue-signal any chance he gets? Don’t mistake me for being anything but supportive of the #MeToo movement, which has brought forth plenty of good progressivism to third-wave feminism, but Apatow is acting as if he’s been injected with some potent Me-Too steroids, and he’s ready to go to war for it any chance he gets.
With all of the relentless grandstanding that the writer-director has done these last few years for the movement, you start to realize that guys like Apatow, who over-virtue signal, are often hiding something. Hell, the guy even lashed out at poor Diane Keaton last year for supporting her good pal Woody Allen’s case against the Farrows. "I see a man who wanted what he wanted and didn’t care that he was having an affair with a 19-year-old when he was 54 who was also his daughter’s sister,“ tweeted Apatow back in January of 2018. Oh, for the love of …
In an interview with Vanity Fair, from this past January, Apatow defended his vocal political #MeToo advocating by saying “It’s fair to criticize anybody on a public stage” and, when he was asked about Louis C.K’s recent stand-up routine, where he joked about trans people and the Parkland kids, Apatow stated that “sometimes your humanity is more important” than crossing the line and telling a politically incorrect joke. Whatever that means.
Apatow (who still refuses, and has mastered the art of ducking, the five allegations of sexual misconduct against frequent collaborator James Franco), seems to be thinking he has been appointed by someone as the moral epicenter of Hollywood. My question automatically leads to the obvious — what does he know that the public doesn’t? Don’t forget this is the same man who, in the early aughts, had a knack for producing and directing films about dumb, sexually lecherous men who manipulate women into bed. And you’re telling me he has a squeaky clean past? Careful Judd, everyone’s skeletons have a way of finding their way out of the closets.
As mentioned, Apatow has been blatantly quiet about the Franco accusations. Even when finally asked about his double standard in a March 2018 interview with Slash Film, he unsurprisingly dodged it with a hypocritical response:
“Well, I’m not going to go into all my conversations with everybody. Oddly enough, I know an enormous amount of accusers and people who are being accused. I feel like in brief articles you can’t really get into the depth that you need to in order to be thoughtful and honest about it. Everybody wants that because it’s all clickbait, but these situations are very complicated and they raise an enormous amount of questions. That doesn’t mean I let anybody off the hook for anything, but they’re not simple. We have a long way to go to figure out how we want to handle all of it.”
Yeah, doesn't that say everything you need to know about the man? It's easy to condemn people that you don't necessarily have any affiliation to, but friends? God forbid touch that, let alone even say a few words about what they did might be wrong. Hypocrisy at its finest folks. Do I think James Franco deserves the hate he got after it was revealed that he had women on a movie set strip down for him? Well, he still denies it, so do most of the actors being accused, so what do I know.
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.