BEASTLY BEHAVIOUR
It’s not a secret any longer
When Harvey Weinstein threw a tantrum, he would rip phones off walls, scream profanities, throw furniture and leave employees quaking with fear. He was an awful boss.
Such was the inner life of Miramax Films in its glory days. This feisty independent may have been delivering a succession of hits — The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Pulp Fiction — and giving the raspberry to establishment Hollywood in the process, but working for its founders, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, was a nightmare.
“It was all about aggression,” says one former employee. “I was a basket case,” says another. “Working there was like having your feet held to the fire,” a former publicist says. “Everyone had terrible stories.”
These accounts and others receive ample exposure in journalist Peter Biskind’s 2004 book, Down and Dirty Pictures. “Miramax ran on fear,” former production executive Stuart Burkin tells Biskind.
But neither then nor in the brothers’ later reincarnation as The Weinstein Company did stories about Harvey’s sexual behaviour really surface. At least not until recently. (There has also been an allegation against Bob, but the bulk of the focus has been on Harvey.)
Still, Biskind’s book did drop the occasional hint. The image of a flabby Weinstein presiding over 7:30 a.m. meetings clad only in a bath towel can scarcely be described as normal behaviour, and it now provides an unsettling prologue to the accusations of sexual misconduct — more than 50 and still counting — that have toppled Weinstein.
Coverage of Weinstein’s downfall has focused on the high-profile charges of stars like Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow. But revelations have also come from ordinary Miramax employees whose claims suggest their boss’s peculiar sexual needs contributed further to the toxicity of the company’s work culture.
Why did people put up with it? The short answer is that the Weinsteins exercised a perverse mystique in their heyday. Actors and directors respected their track record. Ordinary employees were prepared to endure abusive work conditions.
Weinstein could be charming, apologizing often for his bad temper. But then he would explode again. “It wasn’t like he was gonna throw chairs,” a former colleague says. “it was more you thought he was gonna go right for you, strangle you.”
Any journalist covering Hollywood during the heyday of Miramax would be aware of the stories of bad behaviour. But there was also a tendency to cut Weinstein a great deal of slack. It was easy to get him off the hook by simply saying it’s just Harvey being Harvey.
He was getting a free pass despite heading an organization that had secured its powerful foothold in the industry through intimidation and dirty tricks.
As for his sexual misconduct, it’s now clear that people in the know were prepared to keep quiet about it. Director Quentin Tarantino has admitted as much. In the years following the success of Pulp Fiction, the filmmaker remained loyal to the Weinsteins, but in an interview, he admitted having known for decades about instances of sexual assault by Weinstein — with his former girlfriend Mira Sorvino one of Weinstein’s alleged victims. “I knew enough to do more than I did,” Tarantino now says.
Then there’s the case of Paltrow, who won an Oscar for her performance in Shakespeare in Love. She says she was the victim of sexual advances from Weinstein at the start of her career — but she remained publicly supportive of him, feeling she had to keep the secret. And it seems her loyalty was repaid.
Despite their reputation for quality films, the Weinsteins were bullies. And rival studios would brace themselves for bruising marketing campaigns. Indeed, given the continuing revelations about Weinstein’s own sexual conduct, the company’s tactics revealed an astounding degree of hypocrisy.
Weinstein saw the smouldering sexuality of Pulp Fiction as a key marketing tool. And until cooler heads prevailed, he was cynically planning a Good Friday release for Priest, an explosive 1995 film about a homosexual Roman Catholic cleric. But he also knew when it was expedient to turn moral crusader. When Universal’s A Beautiful Mind, which deals with Nobel laureate John Nash’s struggle with schizophrenia, posed a challenge to Weinstein’s own Oscar ambitions, Miramax quietly triggered a media campaign suggesting Nash was homosexual.
Film historian David Thomson wasn’t sounding especially judgmental a few years ago when he defined Weinstein’s credo — “you can do anything, screw anyone, so long as you insist that you love the business.”
For decades, Weinstein got away with it. Not anymore.