Springfield News-Sun

How Weinstein’s survivors came together, again

Women tell their stories in ‘She Said.’

- By Meredith Blake PICTURES/TNS

When director Maria Schrader and screenwrit­er Rebecca Lenkiewicz began developing “She Said” as a film, they quickly establishe­d a few ground rules.

Their dramatizat­ion of the New York Times investigat­ion that toppled Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and triggered a global reckoning would not include visual depictions of sexual assault or harassment. Instead, the survivors — some even playing themselves — would recall the incidents using their own words.

There would be no female nudity and no brutalized victims at the crime scene. Survivors would be fully rounded humans, defined more by their bravery and resilience than their encounters with an abusive Hollywood power player.

And, in arguably the most radical departure — given the outsize influence he wielded in the business and the industry’s enduring fascinatio­n with violent predators — Weinstein himself would exist at the edges of the story. In fact, the audience would never even see his face.

“The film is not about Weinstein, it’s about a collective of women who break down decades of silence through their bravery,” said Lenkiewicz, who began adapting the investigat­ion by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey even before it was published as a book in 2019. “We all felt that

Weinstein had taken up enough oxygen for several lifetimes and I couldn’t envisage writing a script with him in it.”

A propulsive procedural that, like the Oscar-winning “Spotlight,” shows the persistenc­e, institutio­nal support and good, old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting it takes to break decades of silence and coercion, “She Said” is a celebratio­n of the determined journalist­s who managed to crack the case and, especially, the unsung women who came forward to share their stories after their Hollywood careers were sidelined.

“She Said” opened in movie theaters Nov. 18.

Tellingly, the film opens from the perspectiv­e of Laura Madden (played in flashback by Lola Petticrew and in the present day by Jennifer Ehle) as she stumbles onto a seemingly magical film set in Ireland. But the spell is quickly broken: Seconds later, we see her running, in a panic, down city streets. Later, we learn how Weinstein lured her to a hotel room, asked her for a massage and pressured her into unwanted sexual contact — a decisive pattern that would emerge in the accounts of many survivors.

Along with Madden, two other women become crucial sources in the investigat­ion — and characters in the film. Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton) and Rowena Chiu (Angela Yeoh) were both assistants in Miramax’s London offices in the late ‘90s when Chiu told Perkins that Weinstein had attempted to rape her at the Venice Film Festival. Perkins reported Weinstein’s

Survivors

 ?? UNIVERSAL ?? Carey Mulligan (left) as Megan Twohey and Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor in “She Said,” directed by Maria Schrader. The movie shows Twohey and Kantor as reporters for the New York Times pursuing and developing long buried reports of sexual assault or harassment committed by Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein.
UNIVERSAL Carey Mulligan (left) as Megan Twohey and Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor in “She Said,” directed by Maria Schrader. The movie shows Twohey and Kantor as reporters for the New York Times pursuing and developing long buried reports of sexual assault or harassment committed by Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein.

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