From "‘Hollywood Ending,’ a Cradle-to-Jail Biography of Harvey Weinstein/Ken Auletta looks for Weinstein’s Rosebud in this dispiriting account of the former movie mogul’s life" by Alexandra Jacobs (NYT)(reviewing "HOLLYWOOD ENDING/Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence" by Ken Auletta).
Maybe there's more in the book, but that's a pathetic explanation. I mean, it's such a cliché to blame Mother. If you're going to fall back on that, you need better material. It reminds me of this recent New Yorker cartoon — an adolescent girl says to her mother: "Nature, nurture—either way, it’s still all your fault."
It's always all Mother's fault. But, anyway, was that really her epitaph? "I don’t like the atmosphere or the crowd." She did have an obituary in the NYT, I see, back in 2016, before Harvey's reputation went to hell.
It's always all Mother's fault. But, anyway, was that really her epitaph? "I don’t like the atmosphere or the crowd." She did have an obituary in the NYT, I see, back in 2016, before Harvey's reputation went to hell.
Ms. Weinstein was a part of her sons’ business from the beginning. After Miramax was founded in 1979, originally just to distribute independent films, she was the receptionist at the company’s first headquarters, at Madison Avenue and 48th Street, and often brought pastries to the office....
In 2013, when a joint coproduction and codistribution venture was announced between Miramax’s new owners and the Weinstein Company, she issued a statement that began: “Over the years, Bob and Harvey have never let me talk, although I would have done better than them. After all, I am a Jewish mother.”
By that account, it was the sons who held her back! Or was she pushing them forward? I certainly don't care enough to read Ken Auletta's 466-page tome.
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16 comments:
Dorothy Parker didn't kill herself.
Social progress with regrets, remorse, and a tempered but progressive flame-colored trail in its woke... wake.
Harvey Weinstein's most unforgivable sin was forcing GOOP-brained Gwyneth Paltrow upon everyone.
Did she teach him to jerk off in potted plants ?
'Harvey Weinstein's most unforgivable sin was forcing GOOP-brained Gwyneth Paltrow upon everyone.'
She is a Hall of Fame inductee on the Crazy/Hot matrix...
Philip Roth insisted his real mom wasn't like Portnoy mom at all. But his shrink insisted that he must have a typical controlling mother because Jewish.
Roth argued with him then thought at least it would make a funny book.
Do not fight zee narrative!
Remember, all the lefties in Hollywood worshipped Weinstein and called him "sort of a god" even though they ALL knew what he had been doing for decades.
No, your mom couldn't have become another Sheryl Sandberg. She could have become another Harvey Weinstein, and we're lucky somebody stopped her because one was more than enough.
Big takeaway from the article: Ken Auletta is still alive.
Does she drive a Subaru with Bernie stickers?.....cuz, I think she might be my neighbor.
When I was a teenager, I knew most of the parents of the people I spent time with.
There were few surprises - the kids who had the hardest time in life (the boys who could not get a date, the girls who were depressed) almost always had the sort of parents you would expect.
After the age of 20 or so, I rarely met the parents of my friends and co-workers.
So my go-to assumption is based on old information, but I still think that it is likely that, if a young person is having a hard time in life, that young person has lousy selfish parents. It is just an assumption and I could be wrong.
(I am not even going to begin to comment on my friends who are parents and grand parents, and the extent to which they have may have made life better or worse for their children. I know that people like to think that all parents love their children, and would do whatever it takes to protect them from the harshness of the world, but it is simply not true).
A Golem Gollum then, Harvey certainly looks the part. Moms in the clear.
Harvey Weinstein's most unforgivable sin was forcing GOOP-brained Gwyneth Paltrow upon everyone.
Shakespeare in Love remains an awesome movie. Also I like Emma, her first.
I didn't listen in on the Weinstein trial. As far as I know, that was a proper rape conviction.
But there was a lot of prejudicial stuff in the media at the time. For instance...
The film producer Harvey Weinstein hired her for the lead in the Jane Austen adaptation “Emma.” Before shooting began, he summoned her to his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a work meeting that began uneventfully.
It ended with Mr. Weinstein placing his hands on her and suggesting they head to the bedroom for massages, she said.
“I was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified,” she said in an interview, publicly disclosing that she was sexually harassed by the man who ignited her career and later helped her win an Academy Award.
She refused his advances, she said, and confided in Brad Pitt, her boyfriend at the time. Mr. Pitt confronted Mr. Weinstein, and soon after, the producer warned her not to tell anyone else about his come-on. “I thought he was going to fire me,” she said.
Several points...
1. Harvey Weinstein is fat, and old, and ugly.
2. If Brad Pitt put his hands on you and said, "We should have some massages," you would become his girlfriend. Oh wait, you did that.
3. You need some of kind of standard in the law so that the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are not monsters for doing what the Brad Pitts of the world do. It's not illegal, or even bad, to ask a woman to have a massage.
4. If you have a double standard for Brad Pitt vs Harvey Weinstein, I get it. I don't like fat, ugly women hitting on me. But this dislike of the ugly is a prejudice. Recognize this prejudice and try to be fair about it. (Particularly when you throw out amorphous terms like "sex harassment," which in this particular case doesn't seem to fit at all).
5. If you were a charitable person you might see that Harvey Weinstein accepted Paltrow's rejection, and did not rape her. And at least from this media account, he didn't harass her for sex, either.
6. There is definitely a flavor of "you are beneath me, toad," in this account.
7. It is almost by definition a "drama" where Brad Pitt is the hero who saves the damsel from the fat ugly monster.
8. There is a term called "drama queen" for people who act in this fashion. Yes, you want to avoid hotel meetings with Harvey Weinstein. You probably want to tell other women to avoid hotel meetings with Harvey Weinstein. You might even enjoy the drama and tell somebody what happened and how weird it was.
9. If you were a brave person you would not be silenced by Harvey Weinstein. What you did, you waited years and years for other people to attack him, and then you jumped up and said, "he tried to massage me!"
10. You made your boyfriend get your haircut, which is about as creepy as getting a massage from Harvey Weinstein. As a society we need to distinguish between "creepy" and "call the cops creepy," and your matching haircuts and your non-massage drama are the former, not the latter.
Weinstein set himself up as a supremely influential figure in Hollywood. That took talent and luck.
Then, when the casting-couch market opened for him, as it would for any man in that position, he took advantage of it.
This is pretty low-end, morally, but professors selling A for sex are no better and it might be argued their victims are more desperate and thus with fewer good options.
Or a sale, or a promotion.
But the actual rape charge was....not characteristic of his M.O., not having been necessary.
A scumbag, for sure. But not as bad as Polanski.
Ha! Buying the Oscar win for "Shakespeare in Love" wasn't the worst of Weinstein's crimes, but it wasn't the least, either.
I remember a family visit to my grandparents' place. My mother and her brother were reading "Portnoy's Complaint" in tandem, laughing hysterically at passages they would not share with us. My grandmother came in and asked, "What's so funny?" They said, "Nothing."
I remember a family visit to my grandparents' place. My mother and her brother were reading "Portnoy's Complaint" in tandem, laughing hysterically at passages they would not share with us. My grandmother came in and asked, "What's so funny?" They said, "Nothing."
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