While reporting a New Yorker profile of Harvey Weinstein in 2002, the veteran US journalist Ken Auletta obtained a disturbing tip: the Oscar-winning producer had sexually assaulted a younger worker 4 years earlier on the Venice Film Festival.
Auletta had heard the whispers that Weinstein sexually abused girls; right here was his probability to show them. But as a substitute, Auletta bumped into the wall of non-disclosure agreements that protected Weinstein for many years.
The ensuing New Yorker article, “Beauty and the Beast”, included on-the-record accounts of all method of dangerous behaviour from Weinstein. But Auletta couldn’t verify the darkish tales in regards to the film mogul’s predation.
“I believed Harvey was guilty of beastly sexual behaviour. But I lacked proof,” Auletta writes in his thirteenth e-book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence.
This deeply researched e-book — Auletta spoke to a whole lot of sources about Weinstein — leaves the impression that he by no means fairly received over watching the mogul slip via his fingers.
Weinstein’s secrets and techniques would come to mild 15 years later when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times persuaded girls to interrupt their NDAs and go public with their tales, incomes the journalists a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 and serving to to launch #MeToo as a viral motion. Auletta aided Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on Weinstein for the New Yorker by handing over his previous notes.
Those reporters revealed their very own books (She Said by Kantor and Twohey, Catch and Kill by Farrow) leaving Auletta, 80, with the problem of discovering contemporary materials. He discovered it in Weinstein’s 2020 trial — which ended with the one-time Hollywood energy dealer being sentenced to 23 years in jail — and by digging into his formative years.
But Auletta is maybe best when describing the interior workings of Miramax, the movie studio Weinstein launched in 1979 together with his brother, Bob, and the ill-fated Weinstein Co. This is pure territory for Auletta, who has written in regards to the media business for the New Yorker since 1992.
Miramax produced culture-shaping movies equivalent to Shakespeare in Love and Pulp Fiction and launched the careers of Gwyneth Paltrow and Quentin Tarantino. But Miramax additionally served because the automobile that allowed Weinstein to ensnare his victims and canopy up his crimes.
Miramax was at all times a household affair — the identify is a mashup of Harvey and Bob’s mother and father, Miriam and Max — and Auletta attracts a line between the mogul’s abuses and the boys’ formative years in Flushing, Queens.
Miriam’s “ear-piercing screams” have been frequent, he writes, noting that she “constantly berated Harvey and never seemed satisfied — with his grades, his eating habits, his weight”.
The brothers received their begin in present enterprise in Buffalo, New York, displaying artwork home movies and placing on rock live shows within the Nineteen Seventies. Buffalo was additionally the place the primary credible accounts of Weinstein as a sexual predator start, Auletta writes.
The Weinsteins moved to Manhattan in 1979 as “bottom feeders” within the film business, however by 1990 Miramax had emerged because the chief of the impartial movie revolution, because of its distribution of Sex, Lies and Videotape and backing of My Left Foot.
Behind Miramax’s indie picture, nonetheless, was a extra sophisticated image. Bob produced popcorn films on a budget, such because the 1996 horror hit Scream, that usually made many of the cash. Harvey, nonetheless, was an “uncontrolled spender” whose status films received prizes however have been much less worthwhile and sometimes lossmaking.
Miramax had an entrepreneurial tradition that attracted the younger, gifted and bold. But all the pieces revolved round Weinstein’s risky temperament and uncontrollable appetites. “His lack of impulse control . . . sometimes served him well in a negotiation, in getting movies made, in marketing them, in bulldozing actors and directors to succumb to his wishes,” Auletta writes.
The creator succeeds in his purpose of conveying that Weinstein had expertise and was “more than a monster”. But Auletta’s try to find the “hole in [Weinstein’s] psyche” that compelled him to such monstrous behaviour comes up quick.
When Auletta asks Bob how his brother might have dedicated such foul acts, he reaches for a Hollywood reference for the reply. “You’re looking for a Rosebud clue why Harvey did all he did,” Bob says, in a nod to Citizen Kane. “You’ll never get that.”
Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence by Ken Auletta, Penguin Press $30, 480 pages
Christopher Grimes is the FT’s Los Angeles correspondent
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