Telling the Woman’s Side of the Story: “She Said”

 

The first time I heard of Harvey Weinstein was back in my Roger Corman days, when Harvey and brother Bob formed Miramax (named after their parents) to produce and distribute international art films. Roger had paved the way by showing that serious foreign-language films like Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Fellini’s Amarcord could make money in U.S.  markets. When Miramax came along and upped the ante, Roger went back to genre flicks. Miramax, meanwhile, distributed such offbeat hits as Pulp Fiction and The Crying Game, while also entering the production field. The company eventfully nabbed a Best Picture Oscar for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, while being involved with many other classy projects.

 If Miramax sealed Harvey Weinstein’s reputation as a strong, hands-on producer, it took a while for the world to discover that Weinstein was hands-on in a more unfortunate sense. In 2020 his apparently insatiable demand for sexual favors from actresses and staffers earned him a 23-year prison term in New York, and a Los Angeles jury has just convicted him of heinous crimes. So it’s no secret today that Weinstein is capable of sexual harassment, even rape, But his behavior was still an industry secret back in 2017 when two female reporters on the New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, began investigating rumors of his mistreatment of women. Their groundbreaking articles showed the world Weinstein’s dark side, and encouraged scores of additional women to come forward. Eventually Kantor and Twohey turned their reporting into a 2019 book, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. And now that book is a movie, with a strong cast led by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan.is IHis in

 If you’ve ever had a yen to be an investigative journalist, you’ll find She Said both fascinating and daunting. The film makes clear that reporters spend most of their days (and nights) far from their laptops. Before they can tap out the stories that will change people’s lives, they devote days, weeks, even months to tracking down cold leads. They’re forever phoning potential informants who hang up on them, and traveling great distances to have doors slammed in their faces. Somehow, even in the face of rejection, they know what to say, and are able to remain sympathetic to victims who just can’t bring themselves to tell what they know. Which means this two-hour film seems very long indeed, as we watch Jodi and Megan doggedly try to overcome all obstacles that will keep them from uncovering the truth.

 After watching the two cajole members of Weinstein’s inner circle over cups of coffee and glasses of wine, we see them wearily trying to keep their home fires lit. In real life both women have husbands who are themselves involved in writing professions (one a columnist, one a literary agent). In the film, all we know is that these guys are remarkably sympathetic to their wives’ overtime work obligations, despite the fact that there are young children who need attention. (Kantor’s spouse takes it in stride when, on a day’s notice, she jets off first to California and then to London in the line of duty.)  It’s  a far cry from the traditional Hollywood movie in which the man leaves on an exciting but difficult mission, while his wife stays home, worrying about his safety and keeping the kids in line.

 When the breakthrough moments do come, and when there’s finally enough on-the-record material to print a Weinstein exposé, we do feel a real sense of accomplishment. Too bad it’s such a slog to get there. 

Memo to Harvey Weinstein: A Secretary is Not a Toy

Of course the big news out of Hollywood at the moment is Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace. He’s a big man, and his departure is making a big splash. But I certainly can’t feel sorry for someone who apparently spent decades hitting on actresses and company employees, using the power of his position to get women in compromising positions.

Of course the casting couch is nothing new. But I’m happy to say that my years in the film industry were largely untainted by that kind of sexual byplay. Of course there was that meeting (I think there were four of us in the room at the time) when a creepy actor’s agent put his hand on my thigh and just kept it there. Yuck! And yet my boss, Roger Corman, was never less than a gentleman. Cheap, yes, but not one to chase a starlet -- or a story editor -- around the office.

(In fact, some of the weirder moments in my working life took place when I was a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Still, given the news stories coming out of USC of late, I guess that’s not so surprising.)

But I digress. The booting of Harvey, following an inflammatory story about his misdeeds in the New York Times, coincided with my sitting down to watch a movie I’d gotten from my local library. In L.A. you never know WHO you’re going to meet over lunch. At the Brentwood Country Mart I made the acquaintance of a very nice lady who turned out to be playwright and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. She has been involved with such high profile screen adaptations as The Girl on the Train. But she introduced herself to me as the writer of Secretary, a film I knew only by its reputation as something controversial and kinky. Naturally I wanted to check it out.

Secretary, based on a short story by Mary Gaitskill, is the offbeat tale of a troubled young woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) given to cutting herself in moments of stress. Newly released from a mental hospital, she tries to remake herself as a super-efficient but humble working gal in the office of a rather ominous young lawyer (the always slightly sinister James Spader). He finds multiple ways to degrade her, then confuses her thoroughly by sometimes being unexpectedly sympathetic to her wants and needs. Their relationship bumps up a notch when his punishment for her misspellings turns physical. (Though perhaps his cruelest act is to force a 21st century office assistant to take care of all correspondence on an old-fashioned typewriter. What? No spell check?)

Secretary is the rare movie that acknowledges the possibility that pain can be a part of pleasure for both women and men. At times it’s darkly funny; at other times merely strange. But, curiously enough, its two central characters are completely credible, and not as off-putting as one might imagine. This is due at least in part to Gyllenhaal and Spader’s no-holds-barred performances, which allow for tenderness as well as cruelty, love as well as sado-masochism. Gyllenhaal in particular evolves before our eyes from a scared young girl to a confident, self-motivated woman. I’ve also got to credit my new friend Erin’s credible writing and director Steven Shainberg’s elegantly visual handling of the action. 50 Shades of Grey -- the obvious comparison – seems both far cornier and more clumsy than this intriguing, thought-provoking film.

But I wonder how Harvey Weinstein would respond to Secretary’s suggestion that power can be sexy. Surely it would make him rise to the occasion, right?

Philomena Meets Hands-On Harvey

Will a small British indie called Philomena take home any Oscars? If it does, its cast and crew will have Harvey Weinstein to thank. And they won’t be alone. Here’s a recent tidbit from the March 2014 issue of Harper’s:

Number of Academy Award winners in the past twenty years who thanked God in their acceptance speeches: 7  

Who thanked Harvey Weinstein: 30

Everyone who knows something about Hollywood has heard of Harvey Weinstein. He and his brother Bob started out circa 1970 as concert promoters. Soon, taking a tip from the Roger Corman playbook of that era, they formed a company called Miramax (named after their parents, Max and Miriam) and began importing challenging art-house flicks from Europe. The strategy worked. Looking for material closer to home, they soon had some major hits on their hands. These included Errol Morris’s powerful documentary, The Thin Blue Line, and Steven Soderbergh’s provocative chamber-piece, sex, lies, and videotape, which blew away audiences at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. By the time Miramax scored once again with The Crying Game, Disney was angling to buy the company for big bucks. Under the Disney umbrella, the brothers started producing as well as distributing, and the hits kept on coming. (Harvey and Bob eventually left Disney to form The Weinstein Company, though I've heard they’re now planning to buy Miramax back. But that’s another story.)

Harvey Weinstein, it goes without saying, is a control freak. It’s not unusual to see him yank a film off the distribution schedule seven weeks before its planned opening. That’s what he did in January with the Nicole Kidman starrer, Grace of Monaco, after feuding with the director over editing issues. But he’s a genius when it comes to promoting his films. Everyone in Hollywood believes it was his clever marketing that helped push Shakespeare in Love past Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in the 1999 Oscar race.

Harvey’s films, which include the whole Quentin Tarantino canon, have continued to do well at the Oscars ever since. (He’s also been accused of trying to take down his rivals, for instance spreading rumors about some unsavory aspects of John Forbes Nash’s character when A Beautiful Mind was looking Oscar-bound.) This year, boosting Philomena along with August: Osage County and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, he has been particularly ingenious. When Philomena, the true story of an Irish mother looking for the son who was stolen from her by the Catholic Church, was rated R by the MPAA because of a few expletives dropped by Steve Coogan’s character, Harvey swung into action. He quickly persuaded the film’s star, Judi Dench, to assume her “M” role from the James Bond films to humorously threaten the MPAA in a video clip. It went viral, and soon Philomena was reclassified PG-13. That new rating made it a far more comfortable fit for the mature audiences who shy away from the sex and violence that an R-rating generally implies.

Next Harvey took advantage of opposition to the film by some Roman Catholic groups, placing enormous ads that boldly parried their complaints. But his real coup was getting the actual Philomena Lee, a charming and gutsy eighty-year-old, to show up at press events and help spread the word. Focusing on her own story rather than the film version, she has not run afoul of the Academy’s rules for Oscar campaigning. Still, her presence has its own sort of clout, and the undauntable Harvey is clearly positioning her as a potential spoiler in this year’s Oscar race.