Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

90% of audiences don't care about directors either

I think for most people it would be like finding out that the head of a record company is evil (which, y'know), it wouldn't affect their opinion of the records

the work is the work

Yeah, my post wasn't saying anything about that either way tbf.

not much cognitive dissonance at all w/ Spacey because he usually played villains, murderers, criminals, or creeps. totally different story with someone like Cosby.

Spacey isn't in any good movies

makes things easy!

Swimming With Sharks is good. Moon too, but you don't have to look at him anyway.

hes not any good in movies but hes bad in some good movies

Glengarry is good and he's good in it iirc.

really good in GGGR and L.A. Confidential, good in Seven, excellent in The Ref, he's fine in The Negotiator (which is a decent late-'90s action flick, completely disposable but solid). Basically he was a perfect fit for certain roles which brought out his inherent prick qualities, he rarely played a total hero (The Negotiator being the only complete exception and even there it toyed a bit with his untrustworthiness, L.A. Confidential made him a hero for a minute after his selfishness cost someone their life but then...)

after he won his second Oscar (and arguably before, since American Beauty fits) he either turned into an unctuous martyr onscreen (Pay It Forward, The Life of David Gale) or went full asshole.

Baby Driver was dope

I watched Se7en for the first time recently and I thought it was p good and extremely gross

hes bad in ggr and all the others and baby driver is ass

you hate everything tho

i dont know how that gets around im unabashedly enthusiastic about lots of stuff

god man have some self-respect

I thought The Ref was good but didn't trust my memory. Glengarry is "good" but just too gross to spend time in, and I don't remember him in it

LA Confidential sucks, why even bother adapting mid-period Ellroy if you're going to be so basic. there are plenty of 150-pp pocket paperback potboilers he did earlier that let you put his name on the poster, and they're cheaper

anyway to Dench's point:

Are we going to negate 10 years at the Old Vic and everything that he did [as artistic director]

1) sorry, yes, those years are #cancelled. the sole reason you can't buy a ticket to see Niamh Cusack and Ruth Negga in Playboy Of The Western World tonight is because we're fomenting a vendetta against Spacey, not because it was staged in 2011

2) "everything he did" includes widely-reported predation on teenage boys throughout his tenure, both at the time and after his official me-too-ing in 2017. aren't you saying we should negate this

also zomg the theatre was owned and restored by Honest Ed Mirvish!

A judge said the young man came from a good family, attended an excellent school, had terrific grades and was an Eagle scout. Prosecutors, the judge said, should have explained to the girl and her family that pressing charges would destroy the boy’s life. https://t.co/KYK1Bj3jXP

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 3, 2019

(it can be argued that a 16yo should never be tried as an adult . . . but if any deserve to be, it's this one imo)

christ that whole story is awful

has anyone else watched the Hulu doc? idk why i watched it but i did. the interviews are essential; one thing that really stuck with me was an interview with "celebrity journalist" aj benza where he said that he had heard the rumors that actresses had "slept with" harvey to get their parts and he just assumed welp yeah that is how it is. the perniciousness and ease of digestion of this utter falsehood really reminded me how everyone is complicit with/to blame for rape culture. it's way deep in there.

also let's not kid ourselves, the 90s sucked.

the whole gossip industrial complex is designed to keep the status quo firmly in place. it’s even more apparent on newer outlets because the editing is so poor

i haven't paid attention to celebrity gossip in ages, i felt like it was sort of a bygone pastime -- is it still as popular as it was 15-20 years ago?
erika rosenbaum's story hit esp hard because she describes a very relatable sensation of wanting to "take a risk" and also feeling deeply unsafe. ugh.

celebrity gossip powers the internet afaict

The authors of She Said gave a long (20 mins!) interview at of all places Morning Joe today.

100%. also US Weekly, People magazine and the like still circulate to millions

really? i admit that i don't pay any attention to entertainment "news" (though i do read music stuff). all the 90s/early 2000s stuff in the doc seemed like a thousand years ago. i see the magazines in the checkout aisle and they all look grotesque.

it’s a pernicious influence and it’s very much there. popbitch (!) has done some excellent digging on AMI (owner of enquirer etc) and its mucky dealings

yup. nothing's changed, just the names and the royalty. a lot more reality show "stars" to cover if anything

the Lisa Bloom stuff is pretty disgusting

the NY Post page 6 folks (current and former) still have a bit to answer for too.

Another reason there more be more smears ahead...Weinstein switched his legal team earlier this summer, and here's a profile of who he hired:

https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/February-2018/The-Defender/

Regarding Rose McGowan, an early accuser, Bloom told Weinstein, “I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them.” She suggested a “counterops online campaign to push back and call her out as a pathological liar.” She educated Weinstein on “reputation management,” and encouraged him to stage preemptive television interviews, wherein he would invoke his deceased mother and claim that her passing had caused him to “evolve” on women’s issues.

placido out

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/arts/music/placido-domingo-met-opera-harassment.html

1/Just In: Actresses Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal tell NPR in an exclusive interview that they are suing actor and filmmaker James Franco for sexual exploitation and fraud, stemming from their time involved in his Studio 4 acting school in Los Angeles.

— NPR (@NPR) October 3, 2019

Took long enough for that shoe to drop

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/robert-de-niro-sued-for-gender-discrimination-by-former-assistant.html

Pretty thrilling read by Ronan Farrow, investigating the two guys assigned to tail him in 2017, with two more parts on Black Cube coming this week,

Well here's a read (from Farrow's reporting partner at NBC).

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/how-nbc-killed-its-weinstein-story

At the time, I wondered if there was some sort of connection between NBC’s decision to stop me and Ronan from investigating Weinstein—a decision for which Oppenheim and Lack had offered no credible explanation—and the network’s rejection of any institutional responsibility for what Lauer had done. Weinstein was a staggeringly powerful man whose serial predation went on for years, in part because he was able to insulate himself via aggressive legal tactics that included payoffs and nondisclosure agreements. Could it be that NBC News knew it couldn’t risk having our reporting on Weinstein presented by a powerful news anchor with his own history of serial predation?

I asked a former NBC executive that very question. Was our Weinstein story killed because NBC knew it had a Matt Lauer problem?

“One thousand percent,” the former executive told me.

surprise surprise: AMI cited as Harvey's go-between, threatening to expose Lauer's multiple harassment, assault and rape cases in the Enquirer if NBC published on Weinstein

When Ann Curry departed NBC, it was clearly a very tension-filled thing, there was some clear issues she had w/Lauer and vice-versa. And now we know she went to NBC execs to report what she'd heard about his predatory behavior, and the one who was effectively forced out shortly thereafter was her.

weak cowards

that story is appalling

yikes

Lauer's disgusting flex laundry-listing all the sex stuff he 'consensually' did during his 'affair' w/his rape accusor...

having dissed him plenty in the past I want to give Chris Hayes some credit for his little segment on this the other night

powerful article about sexual abuse at Mount Sinai, the last line is devastating
https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/mount-sinai-david-newman.html

There's an abuse tolerance story growing around the World Series, i guess this will do for the uninitiated:

https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/10/22/houston-astros-roberto-osuna-suspension