In 2020, when Harvey Weinstein shuffled in and out of a New York court pushing a four-wheel walker, the once-feared producer was accused of playacting in a bid for sympathy. In his solidly reported book Hollywood Ending, reporter Ken Auletta disagrees. Weinstein was physically ill, Auletta writes, on top of the emotional and moral sickness that was evident for many years for anyone who cared to look.
More than anyone, Weinstein and his Miramax studio spearheaded the rising generation of ‘90s filmmakers—Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, et. al.—that shook the dust from Hollywood’s threadbare conventions and gave audiences an alternative to assembly line cinema. Transactional sex between producers and stars, the infamous casting couch, had a long history in Hollywood. However, the revelations that led to Weinstein’s trial and conviction were astonishing. He was guilty not only of routine sexual harassment and trading sex for starring roles. He was also a serial rapist. There was no line he wouldn’t cross.
Auletta looks to the childhood of Harvey and his younger brother-junior partner Bob for clues to their personal development as well as the origin of their studio’s name, Miramax. Their father Max was quiet and competent but deemed a failure for his inability to rise in New York’s competitive diamond trade. Max counseled his sons to “take no shit” and always be loyal to each other like “John and Bobby Kennedy.” Their flamboyant mother Miriam dominated the family through the sort of verbal bullying that became Harvey’s modus operandi.
Harvey and Bob loved go to movies from their teenage years. “There was magic in the theater. We felt close to our dad,” Bob recalled of Saturday matinees with their father. A turning point came when the brothers discovered Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. “I didn’t know you could make movies like that,” Harvey said, adding that he wanted to follow in Truffaut’s steps. And follow he did, after sharpening his hustler skills as a concert promoter in Buffalo. Phil Collins, of all people, became the pivot from the music to the movie business when the drummer mentioned that he’d made a concert film that no one wanted to distribute. Harvey said he’d do it.
Genesis: A Band in Concert became the steppingstone on the way to Miramax, the company that lifted a new generation of filmmakers beyond the art house and into multiplexes after the 1989 success of Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, “the big bang of the modern indie film movement.” The Weinsteins’ enthusiasm for artists such as Soderbergh was real, as was Harvey’s deep personality disorder. The careful eye-averting within his circle began with brother Bob and extended to the industry’s far reaches when Miramax became the signal studio of the ‘90s. With the profitability of The Grifters, Cinema Paradiso and My Left Foot, “the spotlight was on the Miramax brand itself, not just the films they distributed.” The Weinsteins drew actors for the prestige of association with their name.
Although Harvey was notorious in the ‘90s and ‘00s for public outbursts and insane rages, the press and entertainment industry accepted his bad behavior. After all, he was a risk taker, a swashbuckler, just like a certain New York real estate tycoon-power broker who insinuated himself into entertainment and eventually politics. Weinstein was politically active too, keeping company and raising money for the Clintons and organizing the post 911 benefit concert at Madison Square Garden featuring a constellation of rock and pop stars.
Making Excuses
His aggressive sexuality was seen as just rock and roll, a continuation of the predatory habits of male stars as well as moguls from Hollywood history. As Gwyneth Paltrow, the star of many Miramax films, explained, “We all knew he was hitting on all of us. It was sort of an eye roll.” She added that it wasn’t common knowledge that his sexual assertion—his sense of male entitlement—crossed often into sexual assault. “We all wanted to make excuses for a lot of his behavior over the years because of the movies he was making.”
Like that unspeakable New York real estate tycoon, Weinstein was impulsive, erratic, lacking self-control in business as well as what passed for him as pleasure. By the time revelations snowballed as more and more women came forward, Weinstein’s reckless investments in fashion, theater, publicity and other ventures—along with releasing a plethora of motion pictures—had driven his company to the brink of bankruptcy. In 2017-’18 as Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly fell to accusations from women, Rose McGowan broke her 1997 non-disclosure agreement with Weinstein and opened “the defensive dam of silence that had always protected him.” Weinstein tried to stop the oncoming flood of stories from women through his network of powerful friends, offering to reward, silence or punish anyone who cooperated with investigating journalists. And yet the world had turned, and Weinstein faced a harsh new day.
Already in 2017, with Bob’s assent, Harvey was fired by the board of the Weinstein Company. The accusations moved on to court where he was tried, convicted on several counts and sentenced to prison. Many in his circle, including Bob, have termed Weinstein’s problem as “sex addiction.” The author disagrees. “What if he was not an addict, but a serial abuser, someone lusting not just for sex but for control and power over another person?” he asks. Weinstein’s narcissism and lack of empathy suggest that he’s a sociopath without genuine guilt or shame over his actions.
Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence is published by Penguin Random House.
