Dinosaur attitudes on display in movie boss saga
LAST week, Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer called him ‘an old dinosaur’. That sounds like an insult to dinosaurs, since there’s no fossilised evidence that, millions of years ago, Tyrannosaurus Rex used to put on a bathrobe and ask you to watch him take a shower.
For decades, movie mogul Weinstein has allegedly been sexually harassing women, with reports of at least eight settlements by him between 1990 and 2015.
As a high-powered film executive, he guided dozens of films and actors to Oscar glory – until yesterday, when he was fired by the company he co-founded amid accusations from young women hoping to break into movies, as well as established actresses such as Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan.
Digging into this saga has become murky. Emma Thompson called Weinstein out on the set of Brideshead Revisited, when he tried to bully her co-star, Hayley Atwell, about her weight, telling the 24-year-old actress that she looked like ‘a fat pig’ on screen.
Meanwhile, when the New York Times first tried to investigate Weinstein in 2004, Russell Crowe and Matt Damon are said to have called the reporter directly and to have helped kill the exposé. times, men did not go to work thinking that during their teabreaks they were entitled to harass women.
This is not the excuse of a man who grew up in less enlightened times, this is the excuse of a selfpitying aggressor who would like his behaviour viewed as a kind of psychiatric affliction, as opposed to a straight-up moral failure.
Accepting it on face value would be an affront to the decent men who grew up in Weinstein’s era, and earlier.
Accepting it on face value would offer an excuse to others in the industry too: the Oscar-winning film director who cannot be left alone in a room with a female journalist or publicist.
The one-time matinee idol who tried to rehearse a love scene with his co-star too authentically. The action star who wants to hold meetings in the evening, in his hotel room.
Perhaps Mr Weinstein will be back some time in the future with some retroactively applied explanation about how he has been reeducated to understand that bullying women for sexual favours is socially unacceptable, and will survive to fight another day. You never know: just ask Mel Gibson.