Hollywood Ending

I spent part of the month reading Ken Auletta’s devastating, deeply reported Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, published earlier in the summer. Not a fun, but a fascinating, book depicting a true crime Jekyll & Hyde story. On the one hand, Harvey Weinstein was a dynamo of independent film, bulling his way into the business by sheer force of will and overwhelming personality to become one of the most important Hollywood players in the 90s and 2000s. On the other hand, he was a physically repulsive, world-class professional bully, serial rapist and abuser. The eventual poster boy for the #MeToo movement, he will almost certainly die in prison after convictions on charges in New York; other criminal and civil cases against him are continuing to move forward. He’s currently been extradited to a Los Angeles prison, where he awaits his second major trial.

The sexual abuse of women (and men) has been endemic in the film business since its founding in the early twentieth century. Much of that abuse has been among the worst kept industry secrets for a hundred years. Finally, the culture is changing. While it’s true that sex scandals could harm or even end careers in the past, those cases were few and far between. The “casting couch” of legend, meaning the trading of sexual favors for jobs in the movies, has always been a real thing; it still is. The business is built on power, sex appeal and sudden, capricious changes in fortune. It’s hard to imagine this ever changing, although the penalties for crossing lines may also be more pronounced. This is at the highest levels of course; the people who actually make everything and do everything are the thousands upon thousands of anonymous skilled workers “below the line.”

But the industry is cutthroat from top top bottom. It’s not that everyone behaves that way, but the culture is one of relentless climbing, instability, stress and compartmentalization. If you don’t have the ability to at least consider stabbing people in the back, you won’t get very far without stupefying luck. Moving up can be difficult; moving laterally nearly impossible. Auletta devotes plenty of space in the book to the support structure that allowed Weinstein to commit his crimes for decades and he names plenty of names.

Abused people can find it incredibly difficult to challenge their abusers, a well-documented phenomena in psychology. In Weinstein’s story, only a handful of people ever managed to challenge him on his behavior, even some of the most powerful people to ever lead the industry. Michael Eisner failed to find a way to challenge Weinstein’s staggering fiscal irresponsibility, incompetence and waste as CEO of Disney (which purchased the Weinsteins’ Miramax company in the early 1990s; Pulp Fiction was actually a Disney movie in corporate terms). When the brothers later spun off The Weinstein Company, their toothless, enabling board watched helplessly as Harvey lost hundreds of millions of dollars. (Meanwhile, Bob Weinstein’s division, Dimension Films, raked in money on highly profitable horror and comedy franchises, money Harvey could then blow on ten thousand dollar hotel suites, private jets and secret payouts to women.)

But the lower level assistants, legions of them, who passed through Miramax on their way to their own independent producer careers, via years or therapy, or flamed out due to Harvey’s relentless bullying and abuse, enabled his bad behavior for many years. Some of them escorted young models and actresses to his hotel rooms, in some cases, physically trapping the women with a predatory Harvey who attacked, assaulted and even raped them. That many of these women continued to maintain relationships with him is part of the complicated psychology of abuse victims, many of whom calculated the risk of coming forward as being too high.

Less understandable is the complicity and enabling of his staff, those he merely verbally abused, threatened and belittled relentlessly. The truth is, that while a subset of human beings will not stand for such things, unfortunately a majority will simply opt for personal survival. They wanted careers in the movie business, they devoted enough time that it would be difficult to leave for greener pastures, or Harvey would poison the well if they left. And the rewards could be intoxicating—flying in private jets to Europe, attending celebrity parties at Cannes, getting their own deals down the line. It’s perhaps the trickiest aspect in some of these stories to process—all of the people who allowed him to get away with what he did to other people, when they knew but wouldn’t admit it to themselves.