A Different ‘Spotlight’: Hollywood’s Unholy Weinstein Scandal

“When you are dealing with decades of repressing the truth about acts of violence and a culture that has forced so many to live in fear and denial, resolution does not come via a policy change or an apology. It does not come quickly. And those organizations that were responsible for the crimes certainly do not get to dictate the terms of how and when a crisis ends.”— Fr. Jim McDermott, “Five Things Hollywood Could Learn From the Catholic Church After Harvey Weinstein,” America Magazine, Oct. 11, 2017

In 2015, Hollywood bestowed Oscar gold on a movie about male patriarchy, abuse of power, and serial acts of sexual violence against multiple victims who eventually found their voice.

I know what you’re saying: “But I didn’t think they had made a movie about Harvey Weinstein already.”

And right you are—though there have certainly been times when Hollywood, when in the mood, can turn out pictures almost that fast. (Recall that in 1993, less than nine months after Mary Jo Buttafuoco was shot by her husband’s teenage lover, three major TV movies aired about the “Long Island Lolita.”)

But the Best Picture Oscar for 2015 went to Spotlight, a film about how the Boston Globe uncovered the story of the cover-up of pedophile priests in the Archdiocese of Boston. That scandal broke in 2002, so over a decade passed before it was covered on the screen.

I doubt very much that the Harvey Weinstein imbroglio will be filmed with comparable speed. Those inclined toward charity might attribute that relative slowness to scripts endlessly rewritten by screenwriters who may or may not know each other. (The end result of this process, in which an abandoned screenplay languishes in limbo while rights to it are negotiated between an interested studio and the one that dropped the project to begin with, is known as “turnaround”—a word that implies a fun carousel rather than the legal and creative hell it really is.)

 A Hollywood 'War on Women' Decades in the Making

But the more suspicious (and—full disclosure here!—I’m among this crew) are likely to see this slowness as an example of the film colony’s reluctance to deal, in anything other than a fictionalized manner, with its gamier aspects until anyone who might sue over their portrayal is safely six feet under.

Sure, there have been movies that fictionally treated the seamy side of Hollywood, such as The Bad and the Beautiful, The Big Knife, or The Player. But a movie that featured even some amount of truth about a real-life person? An entirely different story.

Case in point: producer Eddie Mannix. For three decades, he functioned as MGM’s all-purpose fixer—squelching stories about stars’ affairs, abortions, bordello patronage, and drunken-driving incidents. With his knowledge of the secrets that could make or break careers, he inspired intense fear and loathing.

It was one thing for screenwriters and directors not wanting to tangle with him during his lifetime. But even after his death in 1963, the only “Mannix” bandied about in story conferences for the longest time was Joe Mannix, the fictional private eye played by Mike Connors in CBS’ hit series of the Sixties and Seventies. In fact, it would take four decades before Hollywood touched on Eddie Mannix, in the film Hollywoodland, about the love triangle involving him, his wife and Superman star George Reeves.

Mannix started in the studio system just as the phrase “casting couch”—shorthand for producers’ and directors’ exploitation of starlets—came into its own. (See this article from Slate about his role in crushing a lawsuit by actress Patricia Douglas after she was gang-raped at a 1937 studio party.) While the physical artifact may have disappeared, the misbehavior it connoted has endured. It did so because Hollywood, like the Catholic Church, operated amid a culture of deference. And that culture required hundreds of people who, reluctantly or not, stayed silent about the heinous behavior.

We have heard much in recent years (including from many in Hollywood) about a "war on women" being instigated by conservatives. It turns out that for years--generations, even--Tinseltown had its own "war on women." The problem is that in the not so distant future, when the children of the film colony, ask, "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" (or Mommy), an awful lot of people will quickly change the subject out of embarrassment and shame.

As I have watched the Weinstein scandal unfold, a sense of déjà vu has enveloped me. The front-page coverage in a major Eastern newspaper, the additional accusers coming forward until it became a veritable flood, questions of civil vs. criminal actions, prior settlements that only postponed the inevitable reckoning, the sharply escalating outrage over decades of abuse—where had I heard that before? Ah, yes—the Globe’s coverage of how Bernard Cardinal Law tried to sweep under the rug the crimes of Fr. John Geoghan.

Fr. Jim McDermott had that sense, too. His recent piece comparing the two scandals in the Jesuit periodical America noticed five major similarities between the two controversies. (My favorite: “When cultural expectations change, they change overnight and with no tolerance for the allowances of the past.”) Above all, he stresses one lesson learned at great pain by the American bishops: Engage in full disclosure immediately, because the truth will come out anyway. I strongly recommend clicking on the link at the start of this piece so you can read his examination in full.

7 Similarities Between the Weinstein and Catholic Church Scandals

As good as Fr. McDermott’s piece is, though, he does not mention some other notable similarities between the two scandals:

*Revelations that came when the abuser was suddenly—unexpectedly, after so many years—vulnerable. The Catholic Church found that education and years of disquiet over sexual morality had left its flock far less compliant to ecclesiastical decrees, let alone Cardinal Law’s heavy-handed threat in the 1990s to “call down God’s power on the media, especially the Globe.” Similarly, Weinstein’s box-office clout was fading. Last year, the Weinstein Company's seven releases earned just $64 million, ranking it 13th among domestic distributors with a 0.6% share, quite a bit off its usual 1%-3% of the domestic theatrical market, according to Forbes contributor Rob Cain.

* Incidents often reported two or three decades later. The statute of limitations has expired in many cases, which would normally worsen the difficulty in making individual charges stick. But in the case of both the Church and Hollywood, multiple claims involving the same individual have eroded this defense.

*Internal investigations and “fixes” supposedly meant to get to the bottom of the incidents that really led nowhere. The Financial Times reported that at least some among the board of directors of the Weinstein Co. did not understand the full dimensions of the scandal because Weinstein's lawyer, David Boies, blocked access to his personnel file. In the case of the Catholic Church, Father Thomas Doyle, a canonical lawyer at the Vatican’s Washington embassy, wrote a 1985 report with Ray Mouton and Michael Peterson outlining the dimensions of the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal and calling for a coordinated response that would help heal victims and limit damage to the Church’s credibility. Instead, Doyle was pushed out of his position and the Church reaped the whirlwind.

*The role of settlements not just in concealing the abuse, but ensuring their continuance. A New York Times piece earlier this month included Weinstein among a group that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in a report issued last year, called “superstar” harassers—i.e., individuals considered such “star’ performers that company overseers are willing to overlook flagrant serial misconduct to retain their services. In Weinstein’s case, this involved at least eight settlements that allowed him to continue to prey. Similarly, individual settlements quietly reached allowed the Church to evade the issue of collective responsibility for priest molestation cases for decades.

*“The “lawyering-up” default pursued by both the Church and Hollywood executives. Even as the Weinstein accusations became a flood, his attorneys, much like Bill Cosby’s, fought the collection as if they were single ones that could be stamped out as easily as before. They acted without the slightest public recognition that their client had entered a far more dangerous legal zone. Similarly, lawyers for the Catholic Church often continued to contest charges, even after the point when legal badgering of the accusers opened their wounds even wider.

*With great power comes great impunity: Wait, you’re thinking: something about that last sentence sounds familiar, but a bit off. Correct. In the first Spiderman film starring Tobey Maguire, the tortured teen’s beloved Uncle Ben warns him, “Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.” But Hollywood’s most powerful twisted that quote to something they liked far better. Why did they repeat the same misconduct over and over again? Not because they were sexual compulsives, but because their positions of power gave them the license to feel—young flesh, that is, of both the female and male variety. And nobody was there to stop them—till now, that is. In the case of the Catholic Church, individual priests capitalized on their considerable moral authority to prey on their victims. But it was the church hierarchy that turned it into a full-fledged scandal by transferring these priests to other parishes where, with their crimes unknown, they could molest again.

*Repercussions that extend far beyond their immediate realm. Over time, it became apparent that church molestation cases extended beyond the archdiocese of Boston or even the United States to encompass the entire globe that Catholicism had made its intention to propagate. In ways little understood at the time, the church abuse scandal ended up raising concerns in arenas far removed from the rectories where they began, including Mormon temples, synagogues, children’s athletic leagues, Olympic gymnastics training facilities, public and private schools. Now, the Weinstein scandal—helped along by the #MeToo meme reposted by actress Alyssa Milano —has led to high-profile fallout not just in entertainment but also print and electronic journalism, the art world, and fashion.

The Silence of the Hams

As of this writing, nearly 90 women have come forward to accuse Weinstein of either sexual harassment or sexual assault, in incidents dating back 30 years. We know that at least two of these women, Mira Sorvino and Gwyneth Paltrow, told their boyfriends at the time. Is it conceivable that none of the other women did? And, if the logical conclusion is that at least some of them did, how could it not become common knowledge that Weinstein was a pig that starlets—indeed, any woman with whom he came in contact—would do well to avoid?

 Call it "The Silence of the Hams"--a horror show of celebrities who would do anything to hawk a film or mount a soapbox, but gulped nervously about what was going on as a monster roamed among them.

At the height of the church-abuse scandal, I groaned at the New York Times’ saturation coverage. Plenty of Hollywood celebrities joined in, gleeful to take down an institution that advocated socially conservative views.

Now, it is these celebrities’ turn to feel uncomfortable. While I only had to endure the drumbeat of headlines about my church in silence, Hollywood has no such recourse. Stars, directors and producers, already facing the public constantly, will now be badgered constantly for a response not just to this news, but what they themselves did or didn’t do in the film colony’s “War on Women.”

First Self-Congratulation, Now Hypocrisy

Some years ago at the Oscars, host Whoopi Goldberg, fully participating in the annual ceremony’s orgy of self-congratulation, followed up one montage by telling the audience, “Aren’t we just great?” Actually, I thought, you’re not.

The fallout from the Weinstein accusations has only confirmed that feeling, especially as I watch the following directors, actors and producers wiggle uncomfortably as they are faced with lingering suspicions of their own hypocrisy, including:

*Woody Allen: Following accusations that he had inappropriately touched the daughter he adopted with Mia Farrow, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director-star was considered toxic by studios. Weinstein’s company at the time, Miramax, gambling that Americans were a forgiving people, backed him on Bullets Over Broadway. To abandon Weinstein now after this past support might look like ingratitude, but to stand by him would incite a hornet’s nest on Allen for his own suspect behavior. Predictably, Allen’s response pleased nobody. While saying he felt sorry for the women (for what they endured) and Weinstein (for messing up his life), Allen also warned against any possible “witch-hunt” against others. More than a few observers could be forgiven for thinking that Allen saw himself as a possible future target.

*Kate Winslet: The actress recalled that she was so annoyed by Weinstein’s bullying, bragging ways that she purposely left him off those she thanked when she accepted her Oscar for The Reader. But, lest you think that she is now shunning anyone with an overhanging sexual misconduct cloud, remember that her upcoming film, Wonder Wheel, was made with…Woody Allen. Evidently, the chance that she could appear in an Oscar-winning role written for her by Allen, as Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, and Mira Sorvino have done, was too much to resist.

*Quentin Tarantino: As soon as I heard Ms. Sorvino’s accusations against Weinstein, I wondered how her boyfriend at the time, the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, could not have known what the mogul tried to do to her. Indeed, Tarantino ‘fessed up in an interview with The New York Times that he could give no good reason for why he continued working with Weinstein—not only on the absurdly overpraised Pulp Fiction, but on several more productions. His moral indignation is a marvel to behold: knowing no bounds when he criticized police officers accused of misconduct by the Black Lives Matter movement (in a range of cases that, predictably, run the gamut from gross police misconduct to prosecutorial overreaching), but marvelously adaptable when it concerns his own livelihood.

* Ben Affleck: Good Will Hunting, produced by Miramax, earned the actor a Best Original Screenplay statuette with friend Matt Damon, along with irresistible momentum on his own career as an actor-writer-director. No sooner had he denounced his old backer than a trifecta of complaints chastened him: a tweet by actress Rose McGowan, accusing him of lying when he said he had not known of Weinstein’s transgressions; a 2003 video of him groping a breast of 21-year-old MTV’s Total Request Live host Hilarie Burton, forcing his own shame-faced admission that he had “acted inappropriately” toward her; and yet another video of Affleck asking a journalist to expose herself.

* Russell Crowe and Matt Damon: When The New York Times began investigating Weinstein 13 years ago, that initial report appears to have been spiked after calls from the two actors. In Damon’s case, he initially denied any knowledge of Weinstein’s transgressions, only to admit later he had heard about it through Brad Pitt (who had threatened Weinstein with a “Missouri whooping” for his actions toward then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow).

* Roy Price: Already facing a claim by Rose McGowan that she warned him about Weinstein, the Amazon Studios’ head was forced to resign when a female producer  of the Amazon series "The Man in the High Castle” accused him of sexual harassment.

*James Toback: The director of The Pick-Up Artist evidently fancied himself in the role of that title character. Unfortunately, his attention was not welcomed by the more than 50 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct following a Los Angeles Times piece. Those numbers mount by the day.

*Tyler Grasham: A claim by 20-year-old actor Tyler Cornell that the APA talent agent molested him several years ago has led to similar allegations from other young men; to the loss of Grasham’s job; and to an investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department of sodomy charges.

Nothing (Oscar) Gold Can Stay

Not even Oscar gold will any longer provide miscreants with power, camouflage or even artistic license. The following figures will surely not be the last who will pay what Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan sees as a "terrible price"--not just the loss of their jobs, but the recognition that "the first paragraph of their obit will now include something like, 'but fell from his position of power in the sexual-abuse scandals of the 2010s'":

* Roman Polanski:  Okay, I get that the director has helmed at least two studies in evil that, since their release, have entered the pantheon of landmark American cinema (Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown). But I’ve never been among those who regarded him as some kind of persecuted aesthete because of the criminal case that made him flee to France. For those who don’t recall, back in 1977, Polanski pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” to avoid a trial that would involve five charges, all stemming from drugging a 13-year-old model and having sex with her when she was in no condition to consent. Yet in 2003, he won a surprise Best Director Oscar—and a standing ovation from those present—for The Pianist. Six years later, a host of Hollywood figures—including Weinstein and Allen—signed a petition demanding his “immediate release” by Swiss authorities who had arrested him in connection with his 1977 arrest. Since then, four other women have accused Polanski of sexual misconduct against them when they were between the ages of 10 and 16. Let’s see how long the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ignores the rising number of calls for it to boot Polanski out of the organization as it did with Weinstein.

* Kevin Spacey: The two-time Oscar winner thought he could couple a long-delayed admission that he was gay and entrance into an addiction program with a sort-of statement of contrition (he couldn’t recall the events clearly) for making advances to a teen while under the influence. But, with more than a dozen men accusing him of misconduct, his “House of Cards” is collapsing. Noting all the projects from which his participation has been scrubbed, The Weekly Standard has likened "de-Spaceyization" to "de-Stalinization."

* Dustin Hoffman: Spacey’s fellow double-Oscar winner imparted wisdom onscreen in his spectacular cross-dressing stint in Tootsie about how "I was a better man with you, as a woman... than I ever was with a woman, as a man. ” Evidently, the actor didn’t learn well enough from his role. He was forced to apologize after writer Anna Graham Hunter complained, in a Hollywood Reporter article, that he had sexually harassed her when she was a 17-year-old production assistant on his 1985 TV film of Death of a Salesman. The excuses that Hollywood still accords the powerful became evident when Hoffman’s director on the film, Volker Schlöndorff, defended him as a “clown” and a “kidder” and even blamed the victim, observing that “only a teenager in her unlimited fantasy could take it seriously.”

Vituperation about Weinstein has been launched with all the force (and ugliness) of spittle flying through the air. A sample of some of the more scathingly amusing comments about the erstwhile self-proclaimed “f-----g mayor of this town”:

*Brenda Fricker, the Irish actress who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for My Left Foot, lashed out during an interview with the Irish Independent not only at Weinstein but also his minions: "He certainly exuded an air of someone who was very important and there was an awful lot of a***-licking around him.”

*Melissa Sagemiller, to the Huffington Post: “He was taking Accutane at the time, and his skin was peeling all over his face. His lips were peeling. He was like Jabba the Hutt. He was like a lizard that was molting. It was so disgusting.”

*Kate Beckinsale, on Instagram: it “did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him.”

The Sin of Collaboration

But Weinstein and fellow Hollywood predators didn’t terrorize the town solely because of their own animal instincts, any more than the priests who ran amok in the Church abuse scandal. They required staffers to do their bidding, publicity flacks to contain the damage, lawyers and detectives to sow doubt or even blacken the reputations of victims. 

(In this regard, Ronan Farrow's recent New Yorker article revealing that Weinstein lawyer Moies had personally signed off on a contract calling on the Israeli-based intelligence agency Black Cube to uncover information that would spike the Times story on his client might be even more important than Farrow's earlier piece for the magazine adding more names and details to the Times' original blockbuster piece.)

“Every sin is the result of a collaboration,” Stephen Crane wrote in his classic short story “The Blue Hotel.” In the new millennium, that continues to hold true in the rectory, an on-location film set—or the back of a van carrying a reality show star with political aspirations who says, “And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”  

(The photo accompanying this post was taken by David Shankbone of Harvey Weinstein attending the 2010 Time 100 Gala. Seven years later, the magazine would feature Weinstein on its cover, in far darker hues, with the tag line, “Producer. Predator. Pariah.”)