(Many women faked orgasms at that point, just to get him to stop.) Everything - in his business life and his sex life - was bargaining at one point, lying naked on top of some helpless woman, he said to her, "One thrust and I'll pull out, I promise."
He actually believed in this quid pro quo: After he'd forced a woman to have sexual intercourse with him, he'd sometimes force her to endure cunnilingus, under the ludicrous impression that he was repaying her with pleasure that was complementary to his. While it's true the "casting couch" had been in constant use for decades, the bargaining in Hollywood had never been that blatant. His understanding of that concept is far-fetched and self-serving. Harvey justified this sort of behavior (even the forcible rape) by claiming that all the sex he provoked was consensual. She claimed that for Harvey, "the power play was perhaps more fun than the sex. One of his staffers, Zelda Perkins, had a different take on his motives. She stormed out and, despite the fact that she was given a small part in "Pulp Fiction," believed, like the rest of his accusers, that he had harmed her career. Auletta reports, and when she pulled it away, he boasted of his ability both to further her career and to damage it. "She says he grabbed her hand and pushed it onto his exposed penis," Mr. When she arrived, he'd be naked, and ask her for a massage whether she complied or not, he could do whatever he wished with her. The author describes Harvey's sexual modus operandi as something like this: By some means, he'd contrive to be alone with an attractive woman (usually an aspiring young actress) in a hotel room. Auletta points out the paradox in his Jekyll and Hyde personality, in that he also blamed that revolutionary decade for his incessant sexual impulses and his inability to control them - not that he ever tried very hard. That was the decade when foreign films began to show up on American screens, and Harvey credited Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" with providing the epiphanic moment when he realized that a new form of cinema was not only possible but inevitable. Eisner, the mouse-in-charge, his power and reputation grew boundlessly. Miramax grew exponentially, especially after it merged with Disney, and despite many disagreements between Harvey and Mr. Let's remember that, as the alpha male at Miramax, the studio he and his brother founded, he gave us "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" (his first hit), "Shakespeare in Love," "Like Water for Chocolate," "Pulp Fiction," "My Left Foot," "The Piano," "Good Will Hunting," "Cold Mountain," and "The King's Speech." He had an encyclopedic memory, a famous ability to fix a troubled script, great salesmanship, and a keen sense of how movies were changing as he grew up in the 1960s.
Auletta describes the intelligence and industry of the young Harvey, a boy who devoured books and watched every movie he could. Auletta's careful documentation, it might seem fiction, let's take a minute to recognize a couple of positive attributes of the shambling, six-foot-tall, 300-pound, blackhead-covered behemoth who screamed at everyone who worked with or for him and couldn't scarf down a burger without half of it ending up on his shirt. The author is scrupulous about maintaining journalistic ethics, supplying times and dates to the events he says occurred, and providing voluminous quotations from everyone concerned - Harvey, his brother, Bob, Disney's Michael Eisner, and of course the dozens of women who leveled charges ranging from sexual harassment to forcible rape at him.īut before we avert our eyes from behavior so heinous that, without Mr. Weinstein, "Hollywood Ending" is not a hatchet job. Auletta refers to him throughout) is to be believed (always a big ask), the judge himself.ĭespite Mr.
If Harvey Weinstein had not existed, he would have had to be invented - by Ken Auletta, or another experienced biographer with a nose for scandal and an ear for racy dialogue.Īt this point, his career as a serial rapist is well known, and the fact that a New York judge sentenced him to 23 years in prison (a very tough stretch, even for crimes as brutal as his) testifies to the animosity of the public at large and, if Harvey (as Mr.