What was Harvey hiding?
Filmmaker Barry Avrich explains why he made a second Weinstein film: his first missed a few details
When you spend your life making films about largerthan-life personalities, you can discover there is a darkness hidden beneath the lacquered veneer of fame.
In 2005, during production on The Last Mogul, a documentary about Universal Studios icon Lew Wasserman, I uncovered alarming connections to the mafia. A later film on famed Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne exposed certain odd fetishes.
Sometimes, the secrets are so well hidden by a malicious design that you might not ever expose the real truth.
When I made Unauthorized, my first film on Harvey Weinstein, in 2011, many said it would be career suicide — possibly even personally dangerous.
Others warned me that the powerful producer would never allow the film to get distribution.
I did not fear Harvey, though we did exchange close to a dozen emails, and aggressive calls in which he asked me not to make the film. He even suggested that Quentin Tarantino would be chronicling his life, so I need not bother.
While many of Weinstein’s business principles and strategies redefined industry practices, his style and approach was as legendary as it was often degrading and deplorable. And yet he gave the world Pulp Fiction, The King’s Speech, Life is Beautiful, Shakespeare In Love, Chicago and The English Patient, as well as dozens of other indie film classics.
While many came forward to tell me their stories about working with Weinstein, there were no serious alarm bells beyond his explosive temper and need for control that foreshadowed the epic scandal to come seven years later.
Just as I was wrapping up production, two final interview subjects, a producer and a journalist, hinted about a more salacious side to the Harvey Weinstein story. I asked them to confirm their accounts on camera and they refused.
He was too powerful to take on. I followed up with a few highly placed calls to see what I could find and I hit a wall.
Without proof or confirmation of what dark behaviour they were alluding to, it was just a haunting whiff of unsubstantiated rumours that were impossible to document in a film. What was Harvey hiding? What happened next was a classic Weinstein power move that I never saw coming.
During distributor screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival, American indie distributor IFC Films aggressively approached me to screen the film and subsequently made a generous offer to buy it. I never imagined that IFC, with close ties to Weinstein, would demand edits that watered down his behaviour, which included his obsession with reshooting a sex scene. IFC ultimately would bury the film in the U.S.
You needed a St. Bernard in a blizzard to find it.
Fast forward seven years and life for Weinstein has taken a very bad turn.
Many roller-coaster business cycles and film flops had weakened his influence, and now many women felt brave enough to unleash a tsunami of sexual harassment charges against him.
Weinstein had become the Hollywood poster boy for male misconduct, and things would only get worse.
Within weeks, the entire industry was being gutted by new assault and harassment accusations as the #MeToo movement gained steam. Powerful and successful men — including Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey, James Toback and many more — saw their career prospects shrivel up.
I wanted to uncover and document what was driving this revolution.
Was Weinstein finished for good? Did powerful political players and studios cover up his behaviour? Was Hollywood fuelled by hypocrisy and fear?
I immediately approached IFC, which still holds the rights to my original film, and suggested we go back and do a deeper dive on the subject. Let’s give many of the women who had the strength to come forward a voice. The response was blunt: “We have no interest in this story and have elected to take the high road.”
Screw IFC. I would make a new film equipped with the right ammunition. The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret features brave interviews with many women who had the courage to rise up and speak — including TV reporter Lauren Sivan, actress Melissa Sagemiller and Woody Allen accuser Dylan Farrow — plus former employees who witnessed the depravity, and the journalists that kept the flame burning.
I wanted to capture an era in Hollywood that will create change for many industries, not just Hollywood. Despite the fear of critics looking for some revelatory exposé on new predators, I am proud of The Reckoning as it was designed to keep the debate going in a social-media-driven world where the public becomes quickly bored with a rapid news cycle.
It took the downfall of one man for an industry that looked the other way to start correcting its course — thanks largely to the public outcry and media scrutiny of Hollywood, a place obsessed with its own image.
Without that kind of external pressure, we might never see such change on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and perhaps Washington.
The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret will screen on Saturday, April 28, at 1 p.m. at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, featuring an extended post-screening Q&A with special guest subjects, and on Saturday, May 5, at 6 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.