Dowd has an amusing way of writing, but sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information. This article is especially puzzling. First, why didn't Dowd stick with the Harvey Weinstein story? Dowd mentions at one point that she's talking to Thurman at 3 a.m. on the second day of the interview. What didn't make the cut? In yesterday's post, I highlighted quotes from Thurman that showed — even though the headline called Thurman "angry" — that Thurman had "complicated" feelings that included what sounded to me like guilt over allowing other women to fall into Weinstein's clutches. Where is the depth of analysis on this subject?
Halfway through, the article switches to the topic of a car crash that occurred in the making of the movie "Kill Bill." Here, the villain is Quentin Tarantino (whose name does not appear in the article title or subtitle, which promise to give us the story of Thurman's outrage at Weinstein). The problem with Tarantino has nothing to do with sexual harassment or even anything personal. It's completely professional: Tarantino the director was a taskmaster who talked her into driving a car down a dirt road at 40 miles per hour when she wanted a stuntperson to do it:
“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)There is embedded video at the link — film shot from the back of the car — showing Thurman attempting to control the car and driving it into a palm tree.
“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”Clearly, Thurman had grounds for a lawsuit, and we're not told when Thurman got a lawyer and how the lawyer initially interacted with the production company Miramax. Dowd employs a jump cut, straight to this:
Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.So there's already a lawyer. It's 2 weeks later, and they'd like the footage, but everyone knows of the potential for an expensive lawsuit (and the need to keep Thurman on board finishing the movie and promoting it).
Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.Signing a document and paying a settlement? Obviously, the footage is evidence in the lawsuit, so if the lawsuit is not settled, the footage will come out in discovery, so what happened? Dowd says absolutely nothing and just makes it sound as though Thurman and Tarantino had a long personal struggle:
Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”Her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled??? There was a lawyer in the picture. When you're suing somebody or threatening to sue somebody it's not a matter of a rattling mind meld! Rattled mind meld sounds funny, and tort lawyers in car-crash cases sound dull. It's like Dowd is swerving us into a palm tree because continuing to drive at 40 miles an hour down the dirt road isn't interesting. But what the hell happened? A lawyer dropped in, but get that guy out of here! Bring back Tarantino! Here's an exciting sceen: Soho House, shouting, a fateful fight!
Lest you think about the boring lawyer, here's a very long sentence. See if you can read it. It may cause you not to think about the other question that could be nagging you — why does Thurman's old grievance about a moviemaking car accident and a mysterious settled/not-settled lawsuit belong in an article about what Thurman knows about the sexual harassment reckoning and Harvey Weinstein? Here, read:
Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.Dowd's answer to my question is: The Reckoning reminded Thurman of this other dispute she has with Miramax. It can be portrayed as similar because it happened to her body, but one story is about a man who (she says) intentionally imposed sexual violence on her body, and the other is about a different man who (at most) meant no harm but was a link in a causal chain that ended with her crashing a car into a tree.
I would add that the stories are also similar in that evidence remained suppressed for years, but one involves Thurman herself declining to go public with accusations (and herself becoming causally connected to the sexual abuse of other women), and the other involves film footage that was relevant to a subject that Maureen Dowd is hiding from us: the at-least-threatened lawsuit over the crash.
“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”Atoned? I'm assuming Miramax suppressed it as the lawsuit progressed — "permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees" means, in lawyer talk, very high damages. Thurman had a lawyer, threatening a lawsuit, so it wasn't a personal relationship anymore.
And I wonder what's going on now. Is Thurman still trying to collect damages and using Dowd and the NYT? Is there a pending lawsuit? Why didn't her lawyer get the footage years ago in the normal (and very boring!) process of discovery?
This drama about Tarantino atoning himself — unrattling the mind meld — by turning over the footage is offered for our amusement, but to me it's ridiculous, because I'm seeing this phantom lawsuit and wondering whether that's the main thing going on now.
As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.So there's Dowd, lured into Thurman's "elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side" by the promise of a story about Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse (and, perhaps, Thurman's complicity in the abuse of other women), and what Thurman wants is something else entirely — to go on about a tort case.
“When they turned on me after the accident,” she says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”
“Harvey assaulted me but that didn’t kill me,” she says. “What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?” She says she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.
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83 comments:
This doesn't seem very complicated. In any working relationship you put up with a certain amount of shit in order to move the project forwards. Every now and then you decide it's no longer worth it.
Actor reasoning. Everything is about me.
Logic is too difficult.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever" and nothing is more obscure than the names of the women who said no to Harvey. So what's the name of the competitor Umma sent along, knowing she'd say no, and knowing just who would get the role, the glory and the money. Can't wait to see that story in the paper that prints all news that's fit to print. Seems like a good case for a lawyer.
I think Althouse is correct. The purpose of the Dowd story is to get some money for the tort case long after the statute of limitations had run. The Weinstein stuff is necesssay to get it printed in the paper.
I’m also wondering if it is a work comp case or a regular PI case.
And Hollywood people are very strange.
"Actor reasoning. Everything is about me. Logic is too difficult."
But Dowd isn't an actor. She needs to write an article that makes sense (even as she strains against the horror of being boring).
Maybe there was a deal: I'll give you what I have to say about Weinstein, but you need to make half the article about this old legal claim of mine.
It's an article about women drivers, metaphorically speaking.
Harvey and Quentin are business partners and even friends. Isn't the implication that the decision to put her in the dangerous situation driving the car was a form of Harvey rolling the dice with her safety and career? Indirectly through a proxy, but he said he could ruin her career, her reputation, her family. Was she in the car because they needed that shot or because they wanted to scare her and remind her who was in control?
She wrecked a perfectly functional car all by herself and it was someone else's fault.
Is that the definition of a feminist?
[Dowd] needs to write an article that makes sense
Dowd is trying to make Uma's trivial adventures sound interesting. Tough project!
How about this; Uma needs some exposure so she agrees to talk to MoDo. MoDo wants to hang with Uma so she can brag to her friends. MoDo's editor wants a story and something juicy about Weinstein would great. Those three elements come together and you get this half-baked piece that's supposedly about the evils of Harvey Weinstein, but ends up being about Uma having a car crash because they've got to print something that will get the Times readers all worked up. "Uma was in a crash! Damn that Tarantio!".
Etc, etc, etc.
Was she in the car because they needed that shot or because they wanted to scare her and remind her who was in control?
She was in the car because she decided to drive it.
I checked IMDB. Since Kill Bill 2, Una has not had many good roles. Some would say none.
No wonder Weinstein got away with what he did for decades. These women really didn't consider it important at the time.
Feminists have truly blown this one. They had an opportunity before an open minded public to present victims and elicit reforms. Surely there are a few lower class women whose options have been stymied by some abusive man. But no, they have to trot out lily white women of privilege who can't even get their stories straight.
This was nothing but a story about a woman driver, and we all know how that usually works out, don't we?
QT is an idiot. The shot was from the back and the stunt double would have worked fine for the film.
I was struck at the end by this - "the greater good in my work with Quentin."
Could someone PLEASE explain what "greater good" she is talking about? I will check in later to see if anyone can explain. For now, I have to go undertake the "greater good" of shoveling off my sidewalk.
"Dowd has an amusing way of writing, but sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information."
Possible explanations:
(1) Dowd works for the FBI.
(2) Dowd is a garden variety liberal.
(3) Or, of course, Dowd works in the mainstream media.
Jon Burack said...
Could someone PLEASE explain what "greater good" she is talking about?
See my avatar ---->
(Hint: it's not frogs).
"The shot was from the back and the stunt double would have worked fine for the film."
> That was my thought yesterday. QT could have used a race car driver with a wig on.
"QT is an idiot."
> Depends on what the outcome QT was looking for, nefarious or not.
When I watched that movie I remember thinking how cool it would be to have a Karmann Ghia like that (I've always owned ragtops); Dowd fails to explain what was wrong with the car and why it was dangerous to drive.
Driving a car down a sandy road aint that hard, and if UT felt she was losing control she should have just slowed down and told them to fuck off. As mom used to say, if Quentin told you to jump off a bridge would you do that too?
I have total sympathy on HW stuff, but on the car crash she comes off as too much of a powerless waif w/ no sense of agency. She was a world famous actress & the star of the movie.
New expanded definition of sexual misconduct, a man convinces a woman to do something she doesn't want to do?
Google/Blogger disappears my comments. My mind meld with Google/Blogger is rattled.
My favourite is Uma saying she has had to learn that if a man says he loves you, this is closely linked to the cruelty that is now coming your way--can't get one without the other. She claims to speak for her generation: that is just the way it is, for now, but we can all hope for something better. Her parents are famous Buddhists. Is she saying none of the Buddhist/hippie stuff really sank in with anybody? That Weinstein and Tarantino are the best you can do, and let's face it, they can give you a pretty exciting ride?
Uma's mother was married for a short time to Timothy Leary, I guess a hero to many hippies, but also a ruthless user of people.
Aside from a remake of the Stuntman scenario, the implied logic is interesting. As Chanie says, Harvey and Quentin are old buddies and business partners. Uma is a tool who knows too much. Harvey asks Quentin for a favor and Quentin brow beats Bimbo Uma into driving into a palm tree.
I think the logic is clear; but Maureen is too much of a chicken shit to put it into writing OR ask the right questions.
So. What is Uma holding back?
Maybe QT was drinking his own Kool Aide and really did believe that Uma could do anything.
If it was her idea about the bride thing, that was brilliant, BTW.
It looked to be a hard-packed road with loads of potholes. If you don't have a firm hold of the steering wheel and one of those holes catches a front tire, it's going to turn the wheels. Keeping it steady at 40mph+ makes it more likely.
It's my invariant routine to take the dog for a walk after dinner. During the winter months it's dark outside and we walk through this suburban subdivision of single-family detached homes. It has sidewalks.
Some of the houses have light fixtures by the front door activated by a motion sensor so sensitive or perhaps so misaligned that we walk by on the sidewalk and the lights turn on at the front door, but there's nobody there.
It was slightly amusing the first time but readily anticipated and therefore uninteresting thereafter. Not much to think about and, besides, it's important to keep an eye peeled for that big, dopey, overly excitable and untrained labradoodle and its feeble-minded owner who thinks that speaking comforting words to it is going to keep it from jumping all over me and my dog. I've found that it's best to simply avoid such things.
The sun rises every morning and after a while you come to expect it.
Forget it, Althouse. It's Hollywood.
In the real world Thurman would be getting sued to replace the car she wrecked.
"Regrets of a Hollywood Whore"
Maybe starlets should have stunt doubles go to private meetings with guys like H.W.
It is kind of funny that Uma has an epiphany that Tarrantino is heartless bastard that wants to see killings, and more killings and her's is included. As she noted, she thought that if she would give herself to them in a mutual project, then they would care for her back.
That is the biggest mistake known to man. It is the one that gets every child ever abused by preditors abused and killed.
It was reckless to have her drive the car.
That said, the article is strange and difficult to follow. At one point it has Uma going up to a hotel room and then cuts to her coming back rattled. That would make sense if Down had interviewed a companion, but it makes no sense when she's talking to Thurman.
The Greater good is, for the audience, entertainment. For Uma she wants it to be thought of as art. A mind melding of definitions.
My point was that the article made no sense. It was about Thurman and her feelings. Dowd is sometimes good at feelings but a 15 year old lawsuit is not going to get going again.
The article made no sense but then look who is involved.
I am confused.
Heh - I just noticed this excerpt from Grimm's Fairy Tales
As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.
https://westhunt.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/uncle-fester-at-the-movies.jpg
Thurman is not using Dowd, she is an incoherent twit. The fact is that Thurman can't drive a car.
The utter stupidity of nearly every actor and actress in Hollywood and nearly all the directors is truly astounding. Weinstein still has Thurman bamboozled.
a 15 year old lawsuit is not going to get going again.
Was it ever filed? I couldn't figure it out from the story. I don't see how it can get going if the statute has run.
It sounds like she never sued because she didn't want QT to be mad at her. She could always guilt-trip him later.
Michael K pontificated...
The article made no sense but then look who is involved.
Feminists. Althouse, who is a feminist but not a screen actress, is apparently eating it up and trying to digest it to the tune of 1479 words mostly devoted to making Thurman's bad driving and general wimpiness seem to be the fault of naughty men.
SteveBrooklineMA said...
Maybe starlets should have stunt doubles go to private meetings with guys like H.W.
Bravo, Steve.
"sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information"
Why does Althouse wonder why MoDo omits info? Why does she assume an NYT article has to "make sense"?
Faux questions aside, I understand that logic isn't the article's way of making sense--I'll leave the deeper meaning of that to rhhardin--but Men Bad, Women Good would seem the axiom being applied here.
Why wasn't this a worker's compensation claim?
Why do I care?
Uma Thurman never 'wowed' me as an actress and I thought her mostly looks with little depth (that is until I saw Jennifer Lawrence, who makes Uma seem like the Mariana Trench in comparison)
So the idea that she put out to get her roles is not exactly a shock.
When one sells ones soul for lucre and fame, there are bound to be bad feelings about the exchange (See Faust). Make sure Satan gives you a fair price (and Uma seems to have done right well out of the bargain)
Her car crash?
Jeez Louise! Ask Buster Keaton or Jackie Chan about the price of price and dangers of her self selected craft. Hell, even Bruce Campbell would sneer at her and call her a female genital organ.
But she can't drive a fucking car at 40 mph.
I take that back. She obviously knew she was an idiot and lacking in skill, so I guess her fears were valid. But I find it precious that she felt entitled to that fame and fortune without cost or risk.
No lawsuit was filed. It was settled because she didn’t get the tape until much later. She probably got a small sum and is now mad because she claims permanent damage.
I can’t see how she gets around the statute of limitations and her probable settlement.
If it was the first time she drove a rear wheel drive car on a slippery surface, it’s pretty easy to wipe out.
You have to practice until the instinct to turn in the wrong direction is corrected.
Ms Althouse,
As a Republican, we've seen the work of Ms. Dowd at obscuring facts and misleading readers. Her of the 'free floating ellipse' which removes context while painting black.
So this is nothing new from a Times Reporter. It is nice that you are finally catching up to things that Conservatives have noticed for...um...decades that you probably dismissed when they did it.
Welcome to the party, pal.
I don't think the car crash is just another tort case, not for Uma Thurman. It's a man and a woman and he forced her to do something against her will. Sometimes it's rape, sometimes it's driving a car. The Great Reckoning means whatever these famous women want it to mean.
Three or four years ago, well after KB and KB II, there was a rumor that Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino were dating. She's quoted in various articles about laughing with him about it because it wasn't true. That might have been a moment when she could have said, "are you kidding, he made me drive a car in KB when I was scared and didn't want to do it and I drove into a tree and was hurt really bad" but she didn't say that. I don't know why. Trauma maybe? Still being manipulated and bullied into doing what she didn't want to do?
I wonder what color they'll wear at the Oscars, the other actresses, to show their solidarity with women forced to drive a car against their will.
"She needs to write an article that makes sense"
Ok, so when did Dowd start caring about that?
Her of the ‘free floating ellipse’ which removes context
I call that “Dowdlerizing,” which I think is pretty funny, but nobody else ever seems to, so I will give the context of “Bowdlerize.” But she is actually one of the honest ones! I say that because she never sold out to the Clinton machine, and has taken heat for it.
She was probably heavily pressured to remove stuff that hit too close to the mark. Cutting up the Clintons was part of her brand, but now we are getting close to Obama.
She didn't sue because she didn't care, so long as she got another role. But she never got another role, and now she's angry that HW and QT didn't hold up their end of the deal.
I'd be interested to see an interview with Tarantino where he is honest about his relationship with Harvey.
Quentin was involved romantically with Mira Sorvino, who was victimized* by Harvey, and her career stalled.
(*I am using the word 'victimized' even though I know many might argue the point. Consider it shorthand.)
Quentin saw Uma as his muse, a woman who was victimized by Harvey, and he did nothing.
There seems to be an unrequited love on his part for Uma, too.
Quentin started as a video-rental-store clerk / movie geek who Harvey took to the Big Time.
He got to have a movie-star girlfriend: Mira.
He wanted to have the Hollywood Goddess as his, and made a movie purposefully making her an icon to try to seduce her.
The 'icon' part worked, but not (apparently) the seduction.
These women told him about Harvey, but he didn't act: Harvey was the one who rescued him, a nobody, from a life as a nobody. Who probably would then just talk about movies on the internet.
He has his riches, but squandered love. Hollow.
The Karmann Ghia is his Rosebud.
I wonder what spin he puts on this to keep the depression and guilt away.
- james james
"Why wasn't this a worker's compensation claim?"
My first inclination is that she was not an employee. Second, at her income level, it's a pittance.
David Begley's got to be on the right track on this one. A threatened lawsuit pending for 15 years? Makes no sense. The statute of limitations wouldn't have been tolled that long.
She probably was leveraged by the classic Hollywood carrot/stick (we are considering you for some really big roles, be a shame if this unpleasantness gave you a reputation a hard to work with) into a settlement she now considers insufficient. All she remembers now is that getting a look at that footage was a big deal in the first few months she retained the lawyer, even though it become irrelevant after she settled.
My guess? Her career was toast after she hired the lawyer. No likely settlement was gonna be big enough to compensate that.
Perhaps his Kill Bill role for Uma was a way for Tarantino to make up for Uma his inability to take action in the real world.
Here is how I see YOU. You are not a victim.
I understand.
I may not have acted in real life, but I have made my response in Art.
Something like that.
- james james
"made a movie purposefully making her an icon to try to seduce her." I always thought that was at least one motivation behind many male director/female star projects: geek gets goddess. Are there any movies where it worked the other way, female director gets male stud?
the holes in the article were big enough to drive a Karmann Ghia through them. Her not remembering what happened after visiting HW with her friend, was that implying mind altering drugs ala Bill Cosby? if not, how does she not know what happened? Total BS.
On behalf of the commentariat, I do want to express my appreciation to Althouse for doing her Petersonesque duty of a sane woman trying to hold crazy women accountable.
But Peterson may have overestimated anyone's capacity to "control" them.
I'd prefer to live in an Althousian world. But we don't.
This post by Althouse is why I come back, multiple times a day, to this blog. This comment by rhhardin is why I persist through even the longest comments threads. So wicked, but so funny.
It's an article about women drivers, metaphorically speaking.
Darrell said... "Google/Blogger disappears my comments. My mind meld with Google/Blogger is rattled."
The spam filter has a thing about you, and only you (almost). I go into the spam folder solely to deal with this problem.
I think the connection between the two incidents in the mind of Dowd and Thurman is that powerful men are doing harm to powerless women in situations where the women really aren't able to protect themselves, or at least believe so. Weinstein did his harm by forcing himself on actresses sexually, Tarantino by using his anger to force an actress to do something she was afraid to do, with disastrous results. It's a way of saying that misogynistic, powerful men are harming powerless women in all sorts of ways.
Dowd has an amusing way of writing, but sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information.
She's amazingly well-adapted to her environment.
Forget it, Ann; it's MoDo-town. (h/t, "Chinatown")
If you're looking for that long comment of mine that I deleted (at 9:42), it's on the next post, where it belongs.
Here's the quandary. Pain and suffering will only gain you so much money. Your next role from QT will gain you immeasurable fame and fortune. Best to be a brave soldier and carry on. A career in Hollywood does not lead to Buddhahood.......Stardom exists on a higher astral plane than Buddhahood, but the moment passes and then you have to spin around on the wheel of life again. It's hard to cycle on with damaged knees.
I do thank you, Althouse, for restoring my comments. Still, since you know I never posted SPAM, the deletions must be for some other reason--like having posted YouTube videos that Google doesn't like. Google doesn't like Conservatives. It's hate speech, you know.
I'm guessing that the car was unsafe because the Karmann Ghia is a rear engine design which is prone to oversteer. According to Wikipedia "this causes vehicle instability. For this reason, rear-engine design has been abandoned as a design option for regular passenger cars".
On a regular road at 40 she probably wouldn't have a problem. On a bouncy dirt road it obviously was a problem.
Something important, that Dowd included and Althouse made no mention of, were the humiliations at the hands of Tarantino. In the scenes where Kiddo is being spit upon and where she is being choked with a chain, the director "acted" those opposing roles.
Maybe being pressured into driving that death-trap of a car was the last straw for Ms. Thurman.
Surely your mind is supple enough to grasp that both Weinstein and Tarantino treated Thurman like a piece of meat, hence the connection in Dowd's piece.
As Hitchcock explains, "I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle."
Dowd's first few paragraphs are the very definition of turgid prose.
2014:
"'He's loved her for years': Quentin Tarantino and his muse Uma Thurman go 'from friends to lovers'"
Workers comp law not controlling?
Let them all accuse. Open the gates, suspend disbelief, statute of limitations be damned. Let the stars, hacks and wannabes all retail their heart-wrenching tales that they stoically held inside for 25-30-40 or more years. Let the victims get their full victim on! The rape victims can stand shoulder to shoulder with the awkward pass-rejecters, the bad dates, the role-not-gottens, the no-talents. Now is the time, the Golden Age of #Metooism! Let us feel your pain for the act (or recovered memory) itself and your bravery for coming forward when no one else (besides a million other camera-hogging victims) would dare to take on these titans of the boardroom, studio, or campus. Join your voice with all the other wronged women, men, and the various other nomenclatures for beings the proper terminology for whom I have got the time or inclination to master. Sing your sad, brave song!
Cacophony!
I've come to the end of this long list of comments, and I still don't know: What's an Uma Thurman? My guess is that it's a degree of temperature in the Swedish version of Kelvin. But I may be wrong.
The only thing interesting in the Dowd article was the information that Thurman's father, who is a distinguished professor of Buddhism at Columbia University, believes his daughter is a "reincarnated goddess." I could go with that.
If a goddess is reincarnated as a human, doesn't that mean that she was a very naughty goddess in her past life?
So, Godfather, 1995 wasn't your favorite Academy Awards show?
That's no way to treat a reincarnation of the Buddha.
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