Gadot, whose Wonder Woman is the lone real breakout superhero of the DC movie franchise, reportedly declared that she wouldn’t sign for future installments unless the movies were no longer financed by RatPac-Dune Entertainment. RatPac is co-founded by director and producer Brett Ratner, who has been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault by a number of women.
.. Actors in Hollywood work on contract. Often, that makes them vulnerable: By preventing a woman from getting cast in new projects, super-producers such as Harvey Weinstein can start a slide that derails her entire career. But the reverse is also true.
.. So for those with power in Hollywood who want to make a difference, here are some places to get started:
1. Transparency around sexual harassment cases and settlements:
.. his behavior stayed a secret because of the non-disclosure agreements his lawyers wrote into those settlement contracts. If Weinstein hadn’t been able to do that, maybe his alleged victims wouldn’t have received financial compensation. But his misconduct also might have come to light much sooner.
.. what if actors asked that productions provide a full accounting of whether anyone in a supervisory position on a production has been charged with, sued for or paid a settlement involving sexual misconduct? That wouldn’t just protect people at the top of a production; it would let folks in every department on set know whom they’re working with.
..
2. A reverse “key man clause”: Roger Ailes, the former chief executive officer of Fox News, tried to entrench himself at the network with something called a key man clause in his stars’ contracts. That legal language meant that if Ailes left the company, other people who worked at Fox News would have an opportunity to renegotiate their contracts, and it was intended to create a disincentive for the network to force Ailes out.
.. But maybe stars could negotiate clauses that, rather than protecting them from being fired, allow them to walk off a production without penalty if one of their colleagues reports being harassed or assaulted, or if an independent outside monitoring group says that harassment is happening on set and victims are being blocked from making reports.
..
3. An end to arbitration and confidentiality clauses
.. Big stars such as Gadot could not only refuse to sign contracts that force them into arbitration and require them to keep silent about anything that happens to them on the job. They could also refuse to work on any project that requires any employee at any level to abide by such provisions. By doing so, they’d preserve their co-workers’ right to sue if they were harassed and make it harder for studios and directors to hush up misconduct.
.. If an actress can progressively raise her salary, that gives her more leverage in future situations, more financial independence from a director, producer or studio head who might try to sexually harass her, and more ability to sign with a new agent should hers misbehave.
‘The Ugly Environmentalist’
The rhetoric of climate-change alarmists grows ever more hysterical.
.. A recent New York magazine cover story on climate change assured readers that all of the previous climate-change alarmism was too tepid. Basically, by the end of the century, the living will envy the dead and much of the planet will be uninhabitable or a reenactment of a Mad Max movie.
.. A recent New York magazine cover story on climate change assured readers that all of the previous climate-change alarmism was too tepid. Basically, by the end of the century, the living will envy the dead and much of the planet will be uninhabitable or a reenactment of a Mad Max movie.
.. It’s remarkable how many of the people who rightly recoil in horror at the idea of using, say, the war on terror to justify curtailing civil liberties have no such response when someone floats similar ideas for the war on climate change.
.. Filipovic is precisely one of those writers you’d expect to go ballistic if some conservative Christian opined about the reproductive choices women should make. But if it’s in the name of the environment? Let’s wag those fingers, everybody!
.. But if you really want to yoke your reproductive choices to the issue of climate change (a bizarre desire if you ask me), maybe you should have as many kids as possible and educate them in science and engineering so they can come up with a solution.
For instance, did you know America may end up complying with our Paris-accord obligations despite our withdrawal? It’s all thanks to breakthroughs in natural gas, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. Thank goodness the people who came up with that stuff didn’t have parents who believed all the hype.
Racism: Avoiding Explanations that Suggest No Remedy
I think, a political and moral error to content oneself with explanations that suggest no remedy at all, or that suggest prima facie problematic responses like ridiculing, ignoring, disenfranchising, or going to war with large groups of fellow citizens, unless no other explanations are colorable. It turns out that there are lots of explanations consistent with increased susceptibility to racist appeals that also suggest remedies less vague and more constructive than, say, “fighting racism” or censoring the right-wing press.