Conversations about Harvey Weinstein at the New Yorker Movie Facebook Club

Richard Brody shared a link.

There's an ugly aspect of misguided Hollywood mythology and self-mythologizing in Harvey Weinstein's grotesque abuses of power, both intimately and professionally: https://www.newyorker.com/…/harvey-weinstein-and-the-illusi…

Harvey Weinstein and the Illusion of the Vulgar But Passionate Old-Hollywood Studio Boss

Weinstein’s methods as a producer were based on a damaging idea that old-fashioned behavior is part and parcel of an old-fashioned love of the movies.

NEWYORKER.COM

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/harvey-weinstein-and-the-illusion-of-the-vulgar-but-passionate-old-hollywood-studio-boss

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Comments

Andrew Kay This has been known for years and now there's a reactive sanctimonious reaction. Utter hypocrisy. He was the successor to Don Simpson. Just read on how Jennifer Beals was chosen for Flashdance... like a piece of male masturbation fodder. That was 1983. Etc, etc.

Peter Sennfeld Thank you Richard, the New Yorker's hallmark of quality writing is like a beacon of light amidst all the social media fueled noise and chatter. I was getting very tired of this story but this article helps to put things in perspective and is well worth reading. 5 stars!

Andrew Kay The story will run and run. The next issue of The New Yorker will be a meaty one about Weinstein. Then others will be brought to book and there will be a lot of he said, she said and smoke and mirrors. But none of this is revelatory. Good people (women, especially) did nothing, evil triumphed. Good people that turned the eye got promoted, bigger houses, nicer cars, bigger expense accounts. Happens in most corporations. I don't condone any of it, but it's not a surprise. Where was the Duty of Care?

Patrick McEvoy-Halston Andrew Kay They know the shame of being the sort of people who aren't the Garabedians of the world... those whose resolve to abet the good and defeat cruelty cannot be drawn to subside or waver. They'll feel already forgotten to history, and none of their current remonstrances with their friends about how they couldn't really do anything for his being too powerful, won't deflect their awareness that there was a better way for them, and that in having enacted it, they would have felt a higher form of personal integrity, a higher form of life and love.

Andrew Kay They could have whistleblown and left on principle.

Cammie Cowan Anyone who read about what was done to Judy Garland and was not appalled can hardly claim surprise about abuse of people willing to be exploited, or otherwise exploitable. This story has not been a secret for a long, long time.

Adelle Leiblein Andrew...I wasn't a whistle they had to blow. 😩

Liz Kelton Sheehan What a privilege to be able to get tired of this story. You know who is tired? WOMEN.

Andrew Kay Other men are tired of other men sexually abusing women too.

Patrick McEvoy-Halston Isn't the complaint by the Sanders crew -- the "far left," that is -- that the last few decades have been dominated by the rise of an empowered liberal "professional class," at the cost of an ever-expanding mass of people out there forced to endure humiliating experiences in low-respect livelihoods? That is, in co-operating in making this about a stereotype of a creature-of-appetite producer we have been lead to believe is necessary for Art, are we serving to distract attention that the bigger societal problem isn't the prevalence of gross men of enormous appetites like Weinstein, but those of, if not actually much smaller, at least more circumspect ones -- the professionals; the educated liberal elite -- who've long lorded over society, enjoying the multitudes of attendance provided by the debased service/servile industry?

Actresses, in being forced in their profession to have endure "casting couches," where they are available for absolute rejection, and with their often not possessing university degrees and their not being associated with the possession of them, seem to constitute a profession akin to the low-wage, who are perennially, frighteningly vulnerable, which is why the abuse was given a pass by a class of people who'd come to understand upstairs/downstairs as the now legitimate normal. For some of us to live well, others must know despondency. And as a class, with your defining features, you seemed best fit for the role of despondency.

Most of us operate under this way of thinking these days. It hasn't been a time where it seemed excused for each and every one of us to win, and we're admitting the results of this fear of shared, universal prosperity, right now.

Aman Ganpatsingh Sanders is not the ‘far left’ lol

Patrick McEvoy-Halston Aman Ganpatsingh I agree. But is ascribed as such by some.

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Julia Lagrua But these are really all first world problems; films that could have been better if the auteur’s vision had been respected, actors who were sexually abused and chose to look the other way rather than risk their careers. I’m sorry but I feel for the third world workers in this country who don’t have a choice. Who care for other people’s children, clean houses and hotels, sew garments, pick fruits and vegetables, all for shit money, and they keep silent about rape, not to protect the chance of appearing on some sitcom, but to hold on to a minimum wage job that supports their family or to avoid deportation. You know, if you keep quiet about this kind of abuse you’re not only giving the abuser a pass, you’re putting others who follow you at risk.

Patrick McEvoy-Halston This is my concern too. We liberals are way past wanton, probable predator Bill Clinton and onto clean, fit, wholly exonerated Obama. If accusations (of inflicted sexual humiliation) can be focussed onto someone who seems to recall some personage -- i.e., Weinstein / Bill Clinton -- we no longer identity with, and exonerates those who are tidier and more professional -- the good family man -- then we cut short our own self-examination and really just mozy on, even as we're still mostly for an economic system that makes people of certain backgrounds "fit" for our evolving cosmopolitan world, and everyone else, if not simply muck or trolls, then still really just a nuisance. We'll once again be amongst the last to really stand up for all the precariously placed workers in America, for young people, and their plight, and therefore for the encouragement of sexual abuse that occurs in workplaces where workers have no one to turn to, and who sense, rightly, self-evidently, that even their ostensible "own" don't really give two sh*ts.

Valda Vee Julia, I think you are missing the bigger picture. Harvey W. appalling behavior has women all over the world opening up about sexual harassment in all jobs, all situations, not just the actors who "chose to look the other way" -which is a bit too self congratulatory, for me. #metoo -

Julia Lagrua I’m all for opening up, Valda, it’s cathartic if nothing else. But simply telling your story without identifying your harasser is useless and leaves him/her free to continue abusing others. Reese Witherspoon, arguably the most powerful actress in the industry, told of being assaulted at 16 by a director or producer but didn’t give us his name. The story about Carrie Fisher delivering a cow’s tongue to a friend’s rapist-very amusing but who the fuck is this guy? How is a young actor with no money or connections, or an immigrant nanny whose rapist holds her passport hostage, supposed to fight back when empowered celebrities continue to be coy about outing these abusers?

Valda Vee Julia Lagrua that wasn't a main point of your comment. I was referring to your rather deprecating reference to actors and their experiences as being of lesser relevance/importance than those women/ men working outside the film and tv industry- "first world problem"?

Julia Lagrua Valda, it was the main point of my comment. The entertainment industry has paid my bills for 35 years, I know how it operates. Actors condoning illegal behavior of all kinds (some potentially lethal) so their careers won’t be detrimented, makes the abuse/negligence a first world problem. Worrying about whether your artistic aspirations will be squelched if you act responsibly is a first world problem. Women are being gang raped in Somalia (and in virtually every third world country) but a rich, powerful, obnoxious masher who makes movies and was enabled by his victims, gets all our attention.