What has changed in Hollywood after the Harvey Weinstein affair?

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1 January 2018 magazine The New Yorker published Dana Goodyear material on how Hollywood is going through the consequences of the Harvey Weinstein case and others accusations in dubious sexual behavior towards directors, producers and actors. From the material it follows that the culture of sexual superiority has dominated Hollywood for decades, but now the situation is changing dramatically: almost every Hollywood man fears that he can be accused of anything - while women activists are trying to ensure real changes in the film industry in the film industry. equal rights. "Medusa"Tells what turned out from the material The New Yorker.

After the Weinstein Affair and the Followers revelations Other major filmmakers, many of whom ended in layoffs and cancellations of projects, have a paranoia atmosphere in Hollywood: one of the interlocutors The New Yorker calls everything that happens "purge." According to the interlocutors Goodyear, the story about sexual harassment and violence comes to any business meeting and any party - and white men often wonder if they have done something they can put on their looks. “No one knows how to behave now. The rules have changed, ”says one TV manager.

These rules apply even to small things. For example, people in Hollywood almost stopped hugging (“unwanted hugs” were one of the accusations against the head of the studio Pixar John Lasseter). Producer and head of the Women in Cinema organization, Katie Schulman, says that now when she meets with men in their cabinets, they demand that the door be left open, and at meetings the managers try to say a neutral “they” instead of “he” or “she” and apologize if they use gender colored pronouns.

All the Hollywood men Gojiro spoke with are worried. They do not understand what they can be blamed. Most of them have assistants — young girls — and they don’t understand how to deal with them.

“I have never done anything comparable to what these guys were doing, but I'm not perfect,” one of them says. “Men live like Jews in Germany.”

Journalist The New Yorker also shows that the culture of sexual superiority and abuse of power has been prevalent in Hollywood for decades. So, she tells the story of an actress who started acting in 1930 at the age of three and played mostly the role of big actresses in her childhood. When she turned 16, screenwriter Harry Raskin, one of her main patrons, invited her to lunch, showed her a script with a role written specifically for her - and made an obscene offer (specific conditions, like the name of the actress, are not specified in the material) . The actress did not agree and stopped her film career. She argued that her celebrity friends did not understand her decisions - they advised to get used to such situations and not pay attention to them.

Another story happened at the end of 1990, when black girl Amani Lyle got involved in the screenwriting group of Friends, one of the most popular American TV shows at the time. Her job was to write down the ideas of the writers, who were white men. As Lyle subsequently stated in the court testimony, men constantly talked about masturbation, anal and oral sex, discussed the hair color and breast size of women; one of them regularly talked about his fantasy - the “Friends” series, in which one of the heroes finds the heroine in his heart and rapes her. One of Lyle's proposals was to add a bit of racial diversity to the series — an African American girl should have appeared in Joey. Four months later, Lyle was fired - the reason was that she was printing too slowly.

Lyle sued, accusing the studio of unfair dismissal and racial discrimination. The studio responded by saying that what was happening inside the scenario group was protected by the first amendment to the American Constitution guaranteeing the right to freedom of speech: all these discussions were a “creative necessity” for scriptwriters writing a serial about unmarried adults. In 2006, the California Supreme Court took over the studio. After Lyle filed a lawsuit, her Hollywood career was essentially over. Lyle says that if she hadn’t been fired, she wouldn’t have any complaints about what was happening in the scenario group: according to her, she was “completely immersed” in the culture of Hollywood.

The New Yorker tells the stories of other women who say that the culture of sexual superiority was ubiquitous in Hollywood. One television scriptwriter admits that she has developed psychological mechanisms in herself that allowed her to adapt to the situation when she was looked down on and constantly joked with her about sex. The former vice-president of one of the production studios tells how the boss constantly harassed her: when they talked about work, he asked not about the projects she led, but about how she looked naked; He openly told her that he wanted to sleep with her, while showing off the beauty of his girlfriend.

More recently, rumors of dubious sexual behavior in Hollywood have come to nothing. Kim Master, employee The Hollywood Reportermade an investigation into allegations against the head of the studio Amazon Roy Price in August - but he did not want to publish, because the woman herself, who had accused Price, was reluctant to talk to a journalist. After the publication of investigations about Weinstein, she changed her mind and told Masters everything; Price was removed from office on the day of publication of the material and subsequently resigned.

Now in The Hollywood Reporter there is a special department of dubious sexual behavior; it employs 7 people who come from 10 to 15 stories per day. Masters argues that new revelations are inevitable. In parallel, the Los Angeles police set up a task force on sex offenses of 10 people; they are already conducting 27 investigations into various allegations. The profession of a private sex investigator is thriving. On the contrary, there are almost no demands on people who had previously engaged in the rehabilitation of those accused of sexual crimes: now companies do not send men for treatment, but, as a rule, immediately get rid of them.

Hollywood activists are trying to use this whole situation in order to change the rules of the game seriously and for a long time. According to interlocutors Goodyear, the situation in the industry from the point of view of gender equality is still deplorable: Stacy Smith, a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, cites statistics according to which, for example, among the heroes of Hollywood films and TV shows that are older than 40 years, men - almost xnumx%. More than 75% of writers and almost 70% of directors are men.

Smith proposes to introduce in Hollywood a rule similar to Rooney's rule in the NFL: it requires that various candidates be interviewed for the position of head coach. Influential Hollywood women - Oprah Winfrey, Ava Duverney, Reese Witherspoon and others - get together for meetings to coordinate actions to change the industry (2 January 2018 of the year is knownthat they organized the movement Time движениеs Up - approx. "Jellyfish "). Two agencies have already said that by the year of 2020 they should achieve an equal gender balance in their leadership. “We use the concept of catastrophe capitalism invented by Naomi Klein - when, for example, a natural disaster occurs and corporations earn on the chaos it generates,” one of the activists explains. - We are engaged in disaster feminism. How can we make structural changes in the current chaos that will remain in place even when it is all over? ”

Photos of the accused are removed from the walls of honor; their names are erased from the buildings they financed; roles are redefined with other actors; online catalogs are deleted, movie projects are canceled. A private sex crime detective says: "Now it’s extremely toxic to associate with the accused - one wave follows another, they are erased from memory in the Soviet style." In this metaphor, a link to Siberia may mean, for example, that one agent recently informed a former client: he “changes strategy” and plans to reinvent himself in the technology industry.

THE NEW YORKER

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