Sarah Polley: The Men You Meet Making Movies

He told me, in front of the publicist and a co-worker beside him, that a famous star, a few years my senior, had once sat across from him in the chair I was in now. Because of his “very close relationship” with this actress, she had gone on to play leading roles and win awards. If he and I had that kind of “close relationship,” I could have a similar career. “That’s how it works,” I remember him telling me. The implication wasn’t subtle. I replied that I wasn’t very ambitious or interested in acting, which was true. He then asked me about my political activism and went on to recast himself as a left-wing activist, which was among the funniest things I’d ever heard.

.. Women in technical jobs were almost nonexistent, and when they were there, they were constantly being tested to see if they really knew what they were doing.

.. the photo shoots in which you were treated like a model with no other function than to sell your sexuality, regardless of the nature of the film you were promoting.

.. How would one have left that meeting, or those hotel rooms, which have been described by others, with that relationship intact, when he displayed such entitlement and was famous for such anger? I was purely lucky that I didn’t care.

.. Shortly afterward, I started writing and directing short films. I had no idea, until then, how little respect I had been shown as an actor. Now there were no assistant directors trying to cajole me into sitting on their laps, no groups of men standing around to assess how I looked in a particular piece of clothing. I could decide what I felt was important to say, how to film a woman, without her sexuality being a central focus without context. In my mid-20s, I made my first feature film, “Away From Her.”

.. Most directors are insensitive men. And while I’ve met quite a few humane, kind, sensitive male directors and producers in my life, sadly they are the exception and not the rule. This industry doesn’t tend to attract the most gentle and principled among us.
.. I went into a film as an actor with an open heart and was humiliated, violated, dismissed and then, in one instance, called overly sensitive when I complained. One producer, when I mentioned I didn’t feel a rape scene was being handled sensitively, barked that Dakota Fanning had done a rape scene when she was 12 — “And she’s fine!”
.. for a long time, I felt that it wasn’t worth it to me to open my heart and make myself so vulnerable in an industry that makes its disdain for women evident everywhere I turn.
.. he was just one festering pustule in a diseased industry
.. I hope that when this moment of noisy sisterhood dissipates, it doesn’t end with a woman in a courtroom, being made to look crazy, as these stories so often do.
.. I hope that the ways in which women are degraded, both obvious and subtle, begin to seem like a thing of the past.

We need to look at ourselves.

  • What have we been willing to accept, out of fear, helplessness, a sense that things can’t be changed?
  • What else are we turning a blind eye to, in all aspects of our lives?
  • What else have we accepted that, somewhere within us, we know is deeply unacceptable?

And what now will we do about it?

Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s Oldest Horror Story

Nearly 80 years later, that aroma of perversion and maladroit du seigneur clings to Hollywood. Now we are inundated with grotesque tales of Harvey Weinstein pulling out his penis to show to appalled and frightened young women, enlisting the pimping help of agents and assistants to have actresses delivered to his hotel rooms, where he pestered the women to watch him shower or give him a massage or engage in intimate acts.

“The ill will towards him for getting away with it all for so long has unleashed something so primitive,” a prominent male Hollywood producer told me. “If people could rip him apart, they would

.. a man trusted by the Obamas to have their daughter intern at his company.

.. Often the actresses scrambled, trying to figure out how to get out of the room without having their futures shredded by the vindictive satyr, who also threatened to destroy actresses who balked at wearing dresses designed by his wife Georgina Chapman’s fashion label on the red carpet.

.. Min recalled attending the $400,000 speech Barack Obama made as an ex-president to an A&E Networks advertising upfront at the Pierre hotel in New York in April.

.. “There probably needs to be some introspection about how certain people who engage in horrendous mistreatment of women can co-opt the media,” she mused. “The fundamental predatory nature of Hollywood is young, attractive people — largely females — putting themselves in front of men to be judged and appraised and chosen.

.. In Hollywood, unlike at other Fortune 500 companies, the one-on-one meetings take place in hotel suites and bars. It’s an exploitative and oddly personal process.”

.. Harvey had proven time and again he could get you the Oscar that could make your career. It’s the difference between being in the reboot of ‘Saved by the Bell’ or getting 15 million for your next role.”

Hollywood is a culture that runs on fear. And it is not like other professions, one top entertainment executive said, because “no one comes with a résumé. It’s about what you look like and who sent you.”

.. There was resentment against Weinstein in Hollywood, not only for the stories bubbling around about women, but the way he humiliated men who worked with him. He even berated a 15-year-old girl at a screening because her parents supported a political candidate he opposed.

.. Like Trump, that other self-professed predator, there were complaints that in business deals he stiffed people on bills (advertising and public relations payments), and he had a reputation for lying, cheating, taking advantage, acting like a thug. Many in the film community felt he besmirched the Oscars by turning it into a marketing race rather than a contest of quality.

Put Women in Charge

Cumulatively, incidents like this erode women’s self-confidence and make it hard for them to find mentors as their male peers do.

.. For most of my 20s and 30s, I never had to worry that getting ahead in my career meant staying in the good graces of a straight man.

.. Research “shows that when workplace power disparities are gendered (e.g., most of the support staff are women and most of the executives are men), more harassment may occur,”

.. The president is a misogynist thug who has boasted of some of the same crimes Weinstein is being pilloried for. His daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, mouths platitudes about female empowerment while supporting the rollback of a federal rule on equal pay. Her attempt to portray herself as a champion of “Women Who Work,” the title of her most recent book, seems tailor-made to support left-wing critiques of what’s sometimes called “corporate feminism,” a feminism that fetishizes the success of elite women.

.. the type of “You go, girl” feminism obsessed with professional cheerleading and pop culture affirmation has come to feel as dated as shoulder pads. Feminism’s energy has shifted left, toward women who want to dismantle the ruling class, not diversify it.

..  as long as we have a hierarchal society, the gender of those at the top matters. In any field where women consistently have to please men to realize their ambitions — or simply to survive — there will be exploitation.