TOMWere you ever in a room with Harvey?
CAROLNope. Never.
TOMYou were in rooms alone with a boss who was a known womanizer.
CAROLI was in elevators with him when he was inappropriate.
TOMDid he ever hit on you?
CAROLHe’d flirt. He’d touch your hair. But none of us thought that was crossing a line.
TOMHe wasn’t exactly a predator.
CAROLWell, he made the receptionist find models he saw in magazines for an afternoon quickie. She came to me and asked, “What do I do?” And I said “You can quit.”
TOMDid she quit?
CAROLNo, I quit. Not because of the borderline behavior. Because he was so abusive. The next rung on the ladder of horror is the verbal abuse. I had to conduct therapy sessions with the staff he brutalized.
TOMThe way all this sexual stuff was taken for granted. That scene in Sullivan’s Travels, where Veronica Lake meets Joel McCrea in the diner…She’s given up on Hollywood…talking about having to be nice to casting directors…”Yes, Mr. Smearkase…No, Mr. Smearkase…Really, Mr. Smearkase…Oo, Mr. Smearkase, that’s my knee.” And that scene in The Deer Park, where a studio chief is getting a blowjob under his desk…Mailer couldn’t call it that, he had to resort to a dick metaphor: “Serving at the thumb of power.”
CAROLIt only got worse.
TOMI remember what Don Ohlmeyer said to me…The Anita Hill hearings were on TV… He goes, ”The workplace is going to be very lonely from now on.” He used to walk down a hall with his arm around a woman’s shoulders…and knead their necks… I never heard that anybody complained.
CAROLThe workplace didn’t change all that much, did it?
TOMMaybe at the margins. The consensus seems to be things will change. A “watershed moment.” From “player” to “predator,” overnight.
CAROLI guess we’ll see. It does seem to be changing already.
TOMBut predatory behavior is as old as the caves. Men were supposed to have as much sex with as many women as possible, according to the ev psych guys. Rape wasn’t rape in the cave days. Stalking wasn’t stalking. It was just what men did. Greek gods were rapists. A lot of preliterate tribes condoned rape.
CAROLWe can rise above our DNA.
TOMMost people do. But men who have sex with a lot of women are admired.
CAROLBy men.
TOMBy women too. Maybe “predator envy” will phase out. I do think there’ll be less sexual harassment now in Hollywood. People will be watching themselves. I wonder about the other forms of abuse. Will people stop throwing chairs and garbage cans?
CAROLI worked for Edgar Scherick for many years. He reduced people to puddles of tears. And nobody did anything. Yes, you can always quit your job, but people don’t quit these glamour jobs. Unless you’re asked to murder somebody. I had lots of good jobs, working for bad people. Meanwhile I was flying first class, staying at the St. Regis. And the work is fun. It’s a trade-off. But wrath like Edgar Scherick’s—you never knew what would set him off.
TOMIt’s emotional abuse.
CAROLIt’s emotional abuse. If you had a parent like that, I guess they could be reported to social services, if things got crazy enough. But with a boss you can’t do anything.
TOMAnd that kind of abuse—“Swimming with Sharks” abuse—screaming…belittling…it’s probably more widespread than sexual harassment. Or at least as widespread. It’s coin of the realm. “If you can’t take the heat,” etc. And it’s all a function of power. If the mailroom guy starts screaming at people, they call Security.
CAROLIf you’re in a work situation, with a screamer, you don’t realize what toll it takes, sometimes, until you leave. Like women who get out of a bad marriage, and look back, “I didn’t realize at the time how horrible I felt, how depressed I was.” And you start to believe, if you’re yelled at and told you’re worthless, you start to believe it, and then it’s even harder to leave. I saw one employee turn into an alcoholic, he was so belittled.
TOMAgain, the power factor. Somebody gets belittled, they think, well, I couldn’t abuse people the way he does, but that’s what it takes, that’s why he’s the boss and I’m the underling. They rationalize being abused.
CAROLThe behavior is valued.
TOMExactly.
CAROLThey create drama. They’re big personalities. People are attracted to that. How many times have we heard writers say, “I want to be with that agent. He’s a killer.” “I’m a nice guy, he’s an asshole, but he’s my asshole.”
TOMWhat about ass-kissing? Did these guys require their asses to be kissed, like Trump?
CAROLNot that I saw. But is Harvey Weinstein a surrogate for Trump? Is all the outrage at Trump being redirected? I think that’s a commonly held view. And Harvey will never be able to make a comeback, unlike Mel Gibson or Roman Polanski or Woody.
TOMWoody never went away.
CAROLSome people stopped going to his movies.
TOMWell, the movies got worse. The pitchforks are definitely out now.
CAROLThere is a danger. People may go after anybody who says, “Boo.” Somebody who says something objectionable in a casual or humorous way, and suddenly it blows up on social media and out they go. Or people are afraid to talk, to say anything or do anything, censoring themselves all over the place.
TOMThere is something faintly Stalinist in the air. All these ritual apologies.
CAROLThey’ll start to come out of the woodwork, people with old grievances. Or point a finger at someone, just to get rid of him.
TOMWhat sort of friendly behavior will be OK? Will women be allowed to touch men, but not vice versa?
CAROLAnd will these enablers be held accountable? The 150 people at Miramax, who knew what was going on, and they don’t say anything, should they be brought up on charges? What about the agents who set the actresses up with Harvey? Will they be charged?
TOMNo.
CAROLWhy not? If they were complicit in a crime. The ones who knew they were pimping for Harvey…telling the girls to go up to his hotel room…when they knew what was going to happen…is what they did illegal?
TOMWell, if they ran Harvey’s bath…
CAROLOr say if they delivered some manuscripts to the hotel room, and he answered the door in his robe, with the girl due any minute…they could have warned the girl…
TOM“Duty to warn.” I don’t know if it applies. How much of what Harvey did is illegal? Rape is one thing, but what about exposing yourself to a person in a hotel room? You open a raincoat on a subway, it’s indecent exposure…what about when nobody else is around? I guess the prosecutors can threaten the enablers with legal action to get them to testify…if Harvey pleads not guilty to this or that charge.
CAROLA lot of people think he’ll kill himself.
TOMDavid Begelman killed himself.
CAROLBut not right away. After that business forging Cliff Robertson’s name on a check, he still had a lot of support from his friends. People liked Begelman. Nobody seems to like Harvey. Nobody has come forward, if you don’t count Donna Karan, and she recanted her support. Though I know women who say they won’t wear her clothes anymore.
TOMO.J.—he had friends.
CAROLAnd he threatened to kill himself at one point.
TOMBegelman went bankrupt. Will Harvey? Somebody told me his net worth is a quarter of a billion.
CAROLBut if you’ve lost your company, your wife, you’ve been tossed out of the Academy, the Producers’ Guild…even your award from Harvard is taken away. You’re a national joke, a worldwide joke…attacked every day in the media…totally disgraced. And he was the king.
TOMWell, yes and no. I mean you look at his IMDb. There’s Quentin, and David O. Russell, and Beautiful Girls, but not that many more that I loved, anyway.
CAROLAre you saying he was overrated?
TOMIt’s not really the point, is it. But yeah. When Richard Rushfield asked people to send the Ankler their list of the five worst Oscar winners, Shakespeare in Love appeared on almost all of them.
CAROLI hear Harvey was a joke in the theater world. He produced Finding Neverland, didn’t know what he was doing. The production was a mess because he didn’t take care of business.
TOMI wonder how many girls had normal sex with him.
CAROLI don’t expect we’ll hear much from them. This whole thing has kind of united Hollywood…in a way we’ve never seen before. Which is a good thing, I guess, but there’s a lot of sanctimony here. Everybody’s better than Harvey. But what nobody talks about is, there are a lot of abusive women in Hollywood.
TOMI don’t know if they’re raping anybody.
CAROLBut the way it’s being painted…the men are pigs, and the women can do no wrong. All the women are preyed upon by these horrible men.
TOMWithout agency.
CAROLWith the help of their agents. Ha ha. Harvey supposedly went to an institution for sex addicts. In Arizona. Is he a sex addict?
TOMWell, the definition of any addiction…or personality disorder…one of the criteria is it has to disrupt your life. If it doesn’t, it’s not pathological. There are successful narcissists and unsuccessful narcissists. Functioning alcoholics and winos.
CAROLIt interfered with Harvey’s functioning.
TOMNot at the time. But there does seem to be something compulsive about his behavior. Very risky.
CAROLNot so risky if he got away with it. For thirty years.
TOMBecause everybody else was getting away with it.
CAROLUntil the movies started to tank.
TOMIf he’d been thinking ahead…”I’m not always gonna be making Oscar movies.”
CAROLPeople don’t think that way.
TOMNot if they’re compelled to do this kind of stuff. Did he do it all the time? Every project, zero in on some woman? Could he go for months without?
CAROLAll good questions.
TOMWe’ll wait for his memoir.