I’ve waited a bit to tackle this topic, but I’ve decided that now’s an ideal time, given that this story won’t really be slowing down anytime soon. Harvey’s day of reckoning sped toward him like a bullet train on Monday when he was convicted of two charges for rape and sexual assault. He’s fixin’ to be a little-squashed penny.
What are my two cents on this whole Weinstein “saga”? Everyone in Hollywood knew about this. They may not have known the scope of Weinstein’s perversion — could anybody, save for maybe his closest aides, grasp the systemic nature of this? But those fuckers KNEW A LOT.
They all just felt it was the price of entrance to the ball, to Harvey’s party. Harvey was the biggest and the meanest SOB around, and he could make or break you. So people capitulated, and rationalized, and dealt with the devil they knew. There’s a lot of dirty hands in Hollywood because this scam took many people to perpetuate.
The only reason why it's now a big deal is that a) his power has severely diminished over the last few years and b) there is a general journalistic hunger for revenge afoot right now.
Remember when “Family Guy” creator Seth Macfarlane knew enough about Weinstein’s sexual deviousness that he was confident enough to joke about it while hosting the 2013 Oscars ceremony?
“Make no mistake, this came from a place of loathing and anger,” Macfarlane said later. Whatever that means.
It must have no doubt been a tricky proposition for any actor or actress to come out in support of #MeToo and against Weinstein because, ever since Weinstein was ousted as serial rapist back in October of 2017, the rules seem to continuously change — can you still claim that you never knew about it? Hell, even Ben Affleck played the “I’m shocked, shocked! to hear that such a thing would occur - this is unacceptable, we need to do better!” card, only to be, a few hours later, accused of groping two women on two separate occasions.
Hell, even I knew about it. Weinstein’s “casting couch” was not a story that all-of-a-sudden popped up out of nowhere in late 2017. It was well-known beforehand, people just shut their mouths about it and moved on, even chuckling or joking about it. In fact, the “casting couch,” the perversely immoral ways execs used their power to take advantage of hungry up-and-coming actresses has plagued the industry for decades, all the way back to Louis B. Mayer’s days as head of MGM in the 1930s.
Then there’s the case of Hollywood journalist Kim Masters, who shared a curious Tweet, unknowingly ousting herself as an “enabler” of Weinstein'‘s, following his guilty verdict this week.
The message quickly inspired blowback; why did Masters stay quiet, especially as a journalist, when she knew such important info for the case? Masters got defensive, trying to deflect the attention towards former NBC journalist Ronan Farrow’s attempt earlier this decade to bring down Weinstein, only to have his bosses refuse to publish the story.
The journalists and celebs who spiked the Weinstein story, all for their own ill-intentioned positioning, will no doubt be a stain on the culture for years to come. There are too many examples to point out, but, off the top of my head, I can think of Brad Pitt’s acknowledgment that he learned about Weinstein’s knack for sexual assault from first-hand accounts from his then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow. Ditto Quentin Tarantino who had heard similar stories from Mira Sorvino and Uma Thurman.
“I knew enough to do more than I did,” Tarantino later said.
How about Lena Dunham and journalist Tina Brown both trying to warn the Hilary Clinton team about Weinstein’s vile actions? Clinton ignored the warnings.
The sheer hypocrisy of this industry has been in full display since #MeToo started, but, contrary to what many believe post-Weinstein, it will take a long time for Hollywood to recover from this.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.