There was also a tendency to cut Weinstein — a man who loved movies — a great deal of slack. It was easy to get him off the hook by simply saying — oh well, this is just Harvey being Harvey. Jamie Portman,
Harvey Weinstein’s beastly behaviour was an open secret and went unchecked ... until now, Jamie Portman writes.
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 and shredded his reputation.
Coverage of Weinstein’s downfall has focused mainly on the high-profile charges of stars including Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow. But seamy revelations have also come from ordinary Miramax employees whose claims suggest their volatile 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 — drawn to power like moths to light — were prepared to endure abusive work conditions.
Weinstein could be the most charming of individuals, 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.”
The word “dementia” crops up in Biskind’s narrative to illustrate just how out of control Weinstein could be. But the book is so enjoyable that in an odd way it makes the reader culpable, offering the kind of guilty pleasure that lures us into viewing his outrageous conduct as some kind of spectator sport.
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 man who loved movies — a great deal of slack. It was easy to get him off the hook by simply saying — oh well, this is just Harvey being Harvey.
He was getting a free pass despite heading an organization that had secured its powerful foothold in the industry through fear, intimidation and dirty tricks.
As for his sexual misconduct — well, it’s now patently 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 intensely loyal to the Weinsteins, but in a recent interview with The New York Times, 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.
Miramax marketing coordinator Amy Hart complains in Biskind’s book that working for Miramax was like “factory labour in a Third World country” and that while she was trying to survive on a meagre salary, Weinstein was “throwing money out the window, $100,000 for Gwyneth Paltrow to have a weekend in Paris, just for the hell of it. He got her a private jet from New York to Paris, got her a Mercedes so she could have fun.”
Despite their reputation for quality films, the Weinsteins were bullies. And rival studios would brace themselves for bruising and often patently unfair 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.
Even worse was the offensive mounted against The Pianist, a rival studio’s lacerating film about the Warsaw ghetto. That was the year when Miramax had three Oscar nominations for best picture — but seeing The Pianist as a threat, its publicists sought to discredit it by reminding the public of director Roman Polanski’s past history of sexual crimes.
They were acting on the call of a man now engulfed in multiple charges of sexual abuse going back decades.
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.”
And for decades Weinstein got away with it. Not anymore.