“This business, movies, is all about two
things—power and sex. And guess what, they're the same thing.”—Producer Peter
Guber (Batman, Rain Man), quoted in Tina Brown, diary entry for June 6, 1989, in The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 (2017)
For decades, Hollywood execs pushed Guber’s neat
equation to its natural limit. While most of America came to see rape as less
an act of sex than an assertion of power, Hollywood continued to operate under
a different set of rules, as old as the proverbial “casting couch.”
We’re about to see if the guilty verdict this week
against Harvey Weinstein (pictured when he was riding high) is going to
alter matters—if it actually represents “the biggest seismic change that we
have ever had” that Oscar winner Julianne Moore thought she had witnessed last
October.
Don’t bet the ranch on it; the forces of reaction
are awfully powerful. But maybe, after all this time, something fundamental has changed.
Bully baby that he is, Weinstein complained about the
injustice of his indictment, saying his “work had been forgotten” after he had
done so much for women. These last several days, that ludicrous statement may
have turned out to be true after all—but only because it required a monster as
repulsive as Weinstein to bring Americans face to face with the consequences of
what they had excused for far decades.
(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.”)
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