Mind The Gap | Don’t write off Weinstein’s comeback, because Hollywood works on cold opportunism
The last time I met Harvey Weinstein was in 2008 at the Captain’s Bar at the Mandarin Oriental hotel through a friend of mine who was a film financier.
Weinstein suddenly decided to step up onto the stage, ask the singer for the microphone, and proceeded to launch into his version of Frank Sinatra’s My Way. Brash and bellicose - a man with boundless confidence. But, he is in trouble today because he did it his way for too long.
The media and Hollywood are writhing in an apoplectic fit as it tries to exorcise its own long running and not-so-secret history of hypocrisy in sexual harassment.
“I’m shocked, shocked there is gambling is going on in here,” Claude Rains remarked in the classic movie Casablanca.
Hollywood’s shabby treatment of women has already been explicitly described in the 1995 book You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, with celebrities named. The only difference is that women today feel more empowered, and have been empowered by social media.