Casting couch (or, at least now I know who Harvey Weinstein is)

Quick. Name a Hollywood producer who’s not mostly known for being an actor or a director?

Okay. I bet that last week, you probably couldn’t have. But today, there’s a pretty good chance you said Harvey Weinstein.

After all, his name has been all over the news lately, as one ex-employee and/or actress has come forth in “I’m Spartacus” manner to reveal that they had been harassed by Weinstein at some point over the past couple of decades.

The stories are, of course, gross: Weinstein asking young women trying to build their careers by working with or for the great Harvey Weinstein to meetings in the splosh hotel suite where he lived while in Hollywood. Once the young woman arrived, she was asked to massage his back. Or watch him shower. Or take a bath with him. Or whatever. Over the period of a couple of decades, his company settled with eight women (who took the money but were enjoined not to talk.) In perhaps the worst of the accusations, he cornered a journalist in a restaurant hallway and jerked off in front of her. Ewwww…..

So, a total pig. And a story we’ve heard way too many times before. In all sorts of industries, at all sorts of levels.

Forty+ years ago, a friend of mine worked for a while for a state government muckety-muck. I don’t think he was at a cabinet level, but he was pretty high up there. This guy used an intermediary – his right- hand man in the office – to approach my friend, and the euphemism that was employed was that Mr. Big wanted to know if the lowly female staffer in her twenties, the one he had his eye on, was someone who would “dance.”

Well, no, she wasn’t, and we, in fact, used to laugh about it. (When I see my friend this winter, I’ll have to put this on our catch-up-and-reminisce list.) But working for this a-hole made her uncomfortable, especially given that he deployed his right-hand man a couple of times to inform my friend about just how disappointed he was that she didn’t “dance.” (As far as I can tell, Mr. Big is still alive, but the right-hand man, who wasn’t that much older than we were, died over a decade ago.)

I worked at one tech company where the president was a particularly egregious jerk when it came to dealing with women. The stories about him were legion, especially the one about him hiring an office furniture sales person to come in and become his advisor on strategy. (It goes without saying that our company had nothing to do with her area of expertise in office furniture.) At a Christmas party, this guy asked a colleague of mine to dance. Given his reputation, my colleague was a bit uncomfortable and felt it was something of a command performance. (She was a fabulous ballroom dancer.) While they were dancing, he asked her out. She said “no”. (It goes without saying that he was married.) His response was, “You’d go out with me if I wasn’t the president of the company.” Unfortunately, my colleague had an esprit d’escalier moment, and didn’t come up with her rejoinder until after the dance was finished. What she wished she’d said was “If you weren’t the president, I wouldn’t have danced with you.”

I believe that things are getting a tiny bit better out there in the work world.

But here we have the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, still at it.

The latest on this saga is that, yesterday, Harvey Weinstein was fired by the board of the eponymous company (Weinstein Co.) he co-founded with his brother a decade or so ago. (Earlier, he’d started Miramax, which was bought out by Disney.)

Now, you tell me that the board wasn’t aware of Weinstein’s behavior until now.

Don’t they look through the financials? Are the general numbers so large that these payments just flowed through as “other”? And had they never heard rumors? Weinstein’s behavior was said to have been an open secret.

The truth is, of course, that all the publicity – the kick-off article in The New York Times and the kabillion stories that followed it – was what prompted this prompt board action.

Anyway, I’m not 100% certain I even knew who Harvey Weinstein was before I started seeing the stories. When I first heard the news, my reaction was “I thought he was gay,” because, of course, I was thinking of playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein. This, apparently, is happening a lot. Poor Harvey F!

But then I sort of vaguely recalled reading about him, and knowing that he’d produced some impressive films, including Good Will Hunting, and that he’d won a couple of Oscars. (The scuttlebutt is that he’s off the Oscar track for good, at this point.) And I sort of vaguely recalled that I’d seen him mentioned as a big donor to Democrats.

Well, now I know who he is.

Predictably, he has half-denied some of the allegations, and managed to blame it on

…coming of age “in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when all of the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” an excuse that was widely viewed as tone deaf and offensive. (Source: LA Times)

I, too, came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, and I’m pretty sure that the rules about behavior and workplaces weren’t all that different. What was different was the willingness of women to shrug this crap off, chalk it up to boys being boys, and – if it got too outrageous – go somewhere else. (There may be too much overreaction these days – and I’m not talking Weinstein here; he’s a gross violator – but there was too much underreaction in my era, I’m afraid.)

Before he was ousted, Weinstein sent out a last-minute e-mail appeal to his Hollywood “friends,” asking them to help him out. Not surprisingly, the email was leaked:

My board is thinking of firing me. All I’m asking, is let me take a leave of absence and get into heavy therapy and counseling. Whether it be in a facility or somewhere else, allow me to resurrect myself with a second chance. A lot of the allegations are false as you know but given therapy and counseling as other people have done, I think I’d be able to get there.

I could really use your support or just your honesty if you can’t support me.

But if you can, I need you to send a letter to my private gmail address. The letter would only go to the board and no one else. We believe what the board is trying to do is not only wrong but might be illegal and would destroy the company. If you could write this letter backing me, getting me the help and time away I need, and also stating your opposition to the board firing me, it would help me a lot. I am desperate for your help. Just give me the time to have therapy. Do not let me be fired. If the industry supports me, that is all I need.

With all due respect, I need the letter today.

(Source: Hollywood Reporter)

Now he’s all about the heavy therapy and counseling.

Didn’t he read the script? That would have told him that this ain’t the 60’s and 70’s no more. “Heavy therapy”? Too little, too late.