Hollywood exposed: Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in She Said. Photo / Supplied
As Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan star in a new film, insiders reveal the legacy of the mogul’s downfall.
“The story sounds so good, I want to buy the movie rights,” Harvey Weinstein joked when, in October 2017, he was asked about rumours that an exposé was being prepared about him. Five years on we have She Said, a film about the New York Times story that ended the producer’s career and shook Hollywood to the core. But the 70-year-old will have to watch the film behind bars. Weinstein is serving 23 years for sexual assault and rape convictions in New York.
The movie shows him bullying women and in one powerful scene we hear a real recording of him coercing a young actress into giving him a massage. Played by Mike Houston, he is always shot from behind — the idea being that the industry can, finally, see the back of him.
She Said is a love letter to journalism as Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) persuade scared sources to take down Hollywood’s big beast. It works because it plays the complex, grim events like a thriller — the scene in which Kantor and Twohey prepare to publish the story is as tense as any high-stakes gunfight.
It is a shoo-in for the Oscars, when the film fraternity will pat itself on the back for having listened to women — and changed.
Or has it? Maria Schrader, the director of She Said, wants her film to reignite a #MeToo movement that has lost its momentum. “Where are we at?” she asks. “What exactly happened in the last five years? What were the setbacks? What is still so unsolved?”
Certainly the courts are still busy with #MeToo cases. Only this month it emerged that Warren Beatty is being sued for allegedly coercing an under-age girl into sex in 1973. The director of Crash, Paul Haggis, has been ordered to pay US$7.5 million to a woman who accused him of rape. There are continuing cases against the sitcom actor Danny Masterson, who is charged with three counts of rape, plus the Scrubs producer Eric Weinberg, who has been accused of sexual assault. Even Weinstein is back on trial in Los Angeles, the city he once ruled, on 11 counts of “rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual battery”.
Taking down power players was just one goal for a movement that wanted to change an entire culture, though. #MeToo wasn’t simply about ending sexual harassment, it was about getting women a fair share of jobs in the industry. And the two are intrinsically linked: more women in a room equals less male misconduct.
“It has taken twists and turns,” says Twohey, who with Kantor won a Pulitzer. “What we’ve noticed, though, is people tend to measure success by whichever powerful man is rising or falling. Weinstein is convicted, Bill Cosby is set free — those are easy litmus tests to measure this complicated movement’s success. But that is a real mistake.”
“Everything’s changed, and nothing’s changed,” says Zelda Perkins, the British woman who worked as an assistant to Weinstein, tried to uncover his conduct aged 24, and years later broke her non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to alert people to her boss’s behaviour. “We have to celebrate the enormous change in the conversation and the power women feel they have now to discuss these issues. But changing culture and changing law does not happen fast.”
NDAs remain a problem. How can we judge whether sexual allegations are rising or falling when rich people and companies can still buy the silence of people making allegations rather than go to court? While there has been a crackdown on the use of NDAs in the US, they remain common in the UK. Perkins, a co-founder of the campaign group Can’t Buy My Silence, is fighting to prohibit their use for pernicious ends, but progress has stalled. “I still feel like that 24-year-old trying to right Harvey’s wrongs,” she says. “And, essentially, our system’s wrongs.”
On the face of it there has been a shift. Only 15 years ago it was normal for the Cannes film festival to host parties in which industry types went “bimbo fishing”: hook a bikini-clad woman and be rewarded with a lap dance. No longer.
“Hollywood existed for over 100 years with acceptance of abusive behaviour,” says Amy Baer, a producer and the president of the pressure group Women in Film. She says that despite Weinstein’s abuses of power being “the worst-kept secret” in a male-dominated industry, women were afraid to speak up in case it damaged their careers. When A-listers like Ashley Judd — who movingly appears in She Said as herself — came forward, it all changed.
Away from the court cases, the impact of #MeToo on what we now see on screen is clear. An influx of female writers on House of the Dragon meant the Game of Thrones spin-off, unlike the original, did not linger over sexual assaults. Last year the Oscars honoured Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, which offered a provocative insight into sexual assault in a way no man would write. Think of No Time to Die — a James Bond film with no sex and a lot of equality. It feels like a different franchise to the Pierce Brosnan era.
Other key changes occurred behind the scenes — above all, the end of the casting-couch culture that led to women being alone in hotels with predators who could hire or fire them. Sex scenes are now overseen by intimacy co-ordinators. Baer says there is now “zero tolerance” to any physical contact in the workplace.
Since 2017 productions have been eligible for a WIF ReFrame Stamp — awarded if women or gender non-conforming people are in four out of eight key positions. Five years ago 12 of the top 100 grossing films in the US earned the stamp; last year 28 did so.
Yet Hollywood is a sprawling machine. There are huge studios that feel under corporate pressure to be held to account, then the rest. And the further you get away from the big players, the easier it is to avoid costly, time-consuming #MeToo measures. “It’s harder to report bad behaviour on an indie because there isn’t really one entity where the buck stops,” Baer says. “It’s easier to say, ‘Can you look the other way? Go do your job.’ "
Denise Gough — who stars in Andor, a Star Wars spin-off — is hesitant to celebrate. “It’s hard to see if we’ve got that far because at a certain level you’re looked after really well, but the power structure is such that I don’t think an actor who’s No 46 on the call sheet is going to be treated as well as No 1 or 2.”
Then there is the question of what is a just sanction for men who transgress. If they admit to a serious accusation, should they ever be allowed back to work — or if not, how long should they be banished? Since 2017 James Franco has been accused of several incidents of sexual misconduct, admitting to some and settling one lawsuit out of court for US$2.2m. He was not in a film for three years, but now has four in the pipeline. John Lasseter, the Pixar boss who left after many complaints of sexual misconduct, has a new job at Apple. We can call Johnny Depp a “wife-beater” thanks to the verdict of a British court, but this month he was paraded at a Rihanna fashion show. He is also making films again in France.
To some, such cases point to #MeToo still being little more than a public naughty step, par for the course for a system that awarded Roman Polanski an Oscar in 2003, 25 years after he admitted to raping a 13-year-old. And while 83 per cent of those who responded to a survey by Women in Film to mark five years of #MeToo believed the culture in Hollywood had improved, 80 per cent said they or someone they knew had experienced sexual abuse or misconduct since Weinstein was disgraced.
“I have had co-workers slap my butt numerous times — but only once in the last five years,” was one response. “An agent pulled his genitals out of his underwear in front of me,” said another.
George Clooney is a weather vane. When the Weinstein news broke in 2017, Clooney said that a society that just elected a president who admitted to grabbing women’s crotches was one able to keep the mogul’s crimes secret.
Last year Clooney praised #MeToo, but expressed caution about how far it may have gone. “Now,” he said, “there is sometimes an overcorrection, where everyone points fingers. But that will settle.” What he worried about was the publicity from flimsy or minor allegations distracting from the movement.
Baer, the wife of a white male producer and mother of two sons in their twenties, accepts that #MeToo has made it tougher for men who used to have it easy to find jobs. “In the last five years one of the hardest things to be in the industry has been a middle-aged white man,” she says. “There’s been a pendulum swing and if you’re on the receiving end of that overcorrection it’s painful. And now you are starting to see the pendulum swing slightly back in the other direction.”
Baer believes a business that still mostly has men in power will take any chance to revert to how it was. “It’s like they gave it a go over the last five years and hired all these women,” she says. “But now the energy has died down, so it’s easier to start hiring men. Women are feeling backlash from the backlash.”
And so the focus moves to 2027 — what do people want to see a decade after #MeToo? “I’d like to have accountability that is proportionate to behaviour,” Baer says. “I don’t think cancel culture helps anybody. There are many people who just make mistakes. It’d be great if, in five years, we have a system — legally, corporately — that is proportionate to their bad behaviour, but also helping to enlighten people who still don’t understand it.”
She mentions Morgan Freeman — in 2018 he was accused of being “overly flirtatious” on the sets of the films Now You See Me and Going in Style. This was not a Beatty-level accusation. The actor quickly apologised to anyone who felt “disrespected”, but the damage to his reputation was done.
Baer wants a new balance to be struck, a place where Freeman, who is 85, can learn that his old-school habits do not sit well, but without suffering public disgrace. “There is nuance to this,” Baer says. And that, really, is the next big test. The one that will define if the business will ever be able really to see the back of Harvey Weinstein.
She Said is in cinemas now.
Written by: Laura Pullman and Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
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