Category: media

This happened first: “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.” Then today, he clarified, “When I said I felt sad for Harvey Weinstein I thought it was clear the meaning was because he is a sad, sick man.”

Christopher Rogers of Halt and Catch Fire:”We call it redefining the story of losers. History seems to gravitate toward narratives centered on big personalities, so when you talk about this world, you talk about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. If you talk about search, you talk about Google. But it’s so much more complex than that. It’s millions of people in obscurity who did most of the heavy lifting, only to have somebody step in and get the credit.”

The Academy’s press release emphasized that its decision was about more than just Weinstein. “As Academy standards go, it was a very swift response. But it leaves the question of other members like Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby, whose behavior has been equally as troubling as Weinstein’s.”

But has anything changed? Jackie Kong, director of the 1987 cult classic Blood Diner, says no. “This is real life. … You’re still not trusted; you’re still not hired. You can be this icon, this cult figure, but they have to be enlightened already, otherwise you’re fighting an uphill battle.”

“Harvey Weinstein may be the central-casting version of a Hollywood predator, but he was just one festering pustule in a diseased industry. The only thing that shocked most people in the film industry about the Harvey Weinstein story was that suddenly, for some reason, people seemed to care. That knowledge alone allowed a lot of us to breathe for the first time in ages.”

Richard Brody, responding to the great director’s dyspeptic guest column in The Hollywood Reporter, argues that the Internet has made criticism more democratic and often better-informed, that the aggregated critical scores on Rotten Tomatoes really do help identify good new films, the best of which rival anything from Scorsese’s heyday, and that Scorsese’s unhappiness arises from a major generational shift.

If there was any fallout from Picturegoer series, it didn’t make the papers. Nobody got fired, nobody was disgraced, nobody followed up. Nearly 20 years later, on May 21, 1975—so around the time producer Sam Spiegel was allegedly trying to force himself on Theresa Russell, but a few years before Roman Polanski was arrested for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old—Variety, reporting on a new committee the Screen Actors Guild was establishing to investigate what were euphemistically called “morality complaints,” asked, “ ‘Casting Couch’: Fiction or Fact?”

Uta Briesewitz, who was David Simon’s director of photography on The Wire and is now directing episodes of his current series, The Deuce, talks about filming a masturbation scene with Maggie Gyllenhaal and explains how she can tell just by watching whether a sex scene was directed by a man or a woman.

“The disembodied hand has a sinister cinematic reputation. … But on social media, the hand has been cast in a new role, as a symbol of artisanal craftsmanship and entrepreneurial zeal. … This time it’s a helping hand, channeling its energies toward cooking party foods and executing creative household hacks.”

Manohla Dargis observes how Weinstein’s treatment of relatively powerless young women has been considered normal behavior in the film industry for most of its history – and considers whether the current backlash is a turning point.