The tale of Harvey Weinstein is now a thread that has tangled its way through Hollywood, connecting women, mostly actresses, in a depressingly common way. We all seem to have a Harvey story, each one a little different but with essentially the same nauseating pattern and theme. Women were bullied, cajoled, manipulated, and worse, and then punished.
My Harvey story is different, mostly because of timing. I was in one of the first films that Weinstein produced. I accepted a supporting role in a small movie based on “Loser Takes All,” the short novel by Graham Greene. I was twenty years old. The idea of playing a supporting role in a small British movie appealed to me after having just made a big splash in the John Hughes movies. Plus, I was an enormous fan of Greene’s writing. When we began filming, in France, I was warned about the producer, but I had never heard of him and had no reason to fear him. The feeling on the set was that he and his brother Bob were becoming powerful and were difficult to work with, and that it was inadvisable to cross them. During a dinner at the Chèvre d’Or, in a tiny medieval village, there was a tense, awkward moment when Harvey became testy toward our British co-workers and accused them of thinking of us Americans as just the “little guys in the colonies.” It was sort of meant as a joke, I suppose, but it made everyone cringe, and all I could think was that the guy was volatile.
Thankfully, I wasn’t cajoled into a taxi, nor did I have to turn down giving or getting a massage. I was lucky. Or perhaps it was because, at that moment in time, I was the one with more power. “The English Patient,” Weinstein’s first Best Picture winner, was still a few years away. The worst I had to contend with was performing new pages that Harvey had someone else write, which were not in the script; my co-star, Robert Lindsay, and I had signed off to do a film adapted and directed by one person, and then were essentially asked to turn our backs on him and film scenes that were not what we had agreed to. We hadn’t even finished filming, and the movie was already being taken away from the director.
After that, the film was completely taken away, recut, and retitled. Weinstein named it “Strike It Rich,” because he insisted that Americans couldn’t stand to have the word “loser” in a title. He also changed the poster: he had my head stuck onto another body, dressed in a form-fitting, nineteen-fifties-pinup-style dress, with a hand reaching out to accept a diamond, like Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” I wouldn’t have posed for a picture like that, since it had nothing to do with the character I portrayed; it struck me as ridiculous false advertising. (I was always a little mystified that Harvey had a reputation as a great tastemaker when he seemed so noticeably lacking in taste himself. But he did have a knack for hiring people who had it, and I figured that’s what passes for taste in Hollywood.) In any case, the film tanked. I had a percentage of the gross, and, as it turned out, you still make money if you have a gross percentage. I found this out about a year later, when my lawyer called to tell me that I had been denied the percentage owed to me. She asked if it was O.K. if she went after the Weinsteins. I ended up suing them for the money, which I got, and I never worked with Harvey or the company again.
While my own Harvey story may be different, I have had plenty of Harveys of my own over the years, enough to feel a sickening shock of recognition. When I was thirteen, a fifty-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection. When I was fourteen, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set. At a time when I was trying to figure out what it meant to become a sexually viable young woman, at every turn some older guy tried to help speed up the process. And all this went on despite my having very protective parents who did their best to shield me. I shudder to think of what would have happened had I not had them.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/all-the-other-harveys
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