How Hollywood Needs to Change in a Post-Weinstein World
In the weeks following the New York Times' explosive October 5 report that detailed allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Harvey Weinstein, hundreds of women — and men — have come forward with their own stories of abuse at the hands of powerful men in Hollywood.
In turn, a veritable laundry list of once-exalted men are being held accountable on the public stage:
Brett Ratner, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, James Toback, Dustin Hoffman, Jeffrey Tambor, Sylvester Stallone, Mark Schwahn, Roy Price, Tom Sizemore, George Takei, Gary Goddard, Steven Seagal, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeremy Piven, Ed Westwick, Robert Knepper, Danny Masterson.
The list grows and the floods show little sign of stopping.
But the real shift isn't just in publicly shaming and punishing these predators for their past crimes. It's in the industry's decision to no longer tolerate the culture of turning a blind eye.
With each new account of an inappropriate request or chilling touch, comes the familiar chorus:
Everybody knew.
The rumours were around for years.
Sure, he's a scoundrel, but I never thought he'd do something that bad.
The degrees of industry culpability are varied and, some would say, ethically murky. From the casting directors who employed men they knew to be toxic to the assistants who discreetly left the room and the talent agents who put their clients forth knowing the dangers.
In recalling how Seagal once unzipped his pants during an audition, Portia de Rossi noted, "I ran out and called my agent. Unfazed, she replied, 'Well, I didn't know if he was your type'."
Lupita Nyong'o wrote of how she was greeted by an "on edge" assistant ahead of her scheduled dinner meeting with Weinstein: "Harvey arrived and the assistant immediately disappeared."
(Soon after, Nyong'o wrote, the mogul aggressively tried to ply her with alcohol and convince her to "cut to the chase" and go to his hotel room.)
But now, there are emerging signs that Hollywood, collectively as an industry, is ready to say enough.
Gal Gadot refused to star in Wonder Woman 2 if Ratner — who produced the first blockbuster film and was recently accused of rape by multiple women — was attached to the project in any way. Ratner was subsequently removed from the 2019 sequel.
Director Ridley Scott swiftly ousted Spacey from his Oscar-hopeful All the Money In the World and is now ambitiously re-shooting all of Spacey's scenes with Christopher Plummer ahead of the film's December release.
These changes are trickling from the top, where the safety nets of power and a level of indispensability lie, but they will, hopefully, spread.
"The problem with our industry is that those people are worried they'll never work again if they're the person who calls a prosecutor or the head of an agency or studio and says, 'He's harassing all these people'," director Judd Apatow told WNYC this week. "That's what we have to change.
"We have to find a way to get the business manager who writes the check to the woman that Harvey Weinstein harassed or raped to say, 'I won't write that check. I'm not going to do that'."
