WEINSTEIN SUPPORT CALL OPENED SMITH’S EYES ON SCANDAL

Director Kevin Smith says he received a call out of the blue from former Miramax CEO Harvey Weinstein a week before two bombshell articles exposing Weinstein’s alleged misconduct were published by The New Yorker and The New York Times in October 2017. “I felt sick to my stomach,” Smith, pictured, tells Business Insider. “He was starting to circle the wagons.” Weinstein launched Smith’s moviemaking career after Miramax picked up the director’s first feature, Clerks, in 1994, and the director wrote off all the sexual assault chatter about the producer as idle gossip before it dawned on him that there may have been an ulterior motive for Weinstein calling him after a decade had passed since they last talked. “It was him looking to see who was a friend still,” Smith speculates.