Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

When Harvey Weinstein turned 66 on Monday, March, 19, his battered old haunt The Weinstein Company (TWC) also made headlines seeking bidders to shield itself from bankruptcy court.

This is six months after the sexual harassment scandal broke wide. Specifically they announced a “stalking horse bidder,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, like we’re all supposed to know what that means. Basically it’s a favored bidder out of the gate to keep lower bidders from devaluing the company’s assets. Or put more simply, now in the aftermath, TWC is merely trying not to kiss its assets goodbye. And the company promises all those hush-hush NDAs are scotched. (Along with any future payouts, is the fine print?) But the business-as-usual legal proceedings don’t even begin to touch on the shuddering zeitgeist, emotional unrest, and drowning bewilderment that has ravaged the entertainment industry since October.

In fact, during this past Award Season, the insider joke was ‘The Shape of Something IN the Water.’

You need only look to the Twitter-borne Rose McGowan birthday greeting for her “rapist,” as she has called him, to see how warping the situation has been.

A message to Harvey Weinstein on his birthday #RoseArmy pic.twitter.com/YP61rONbjg

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) March 20, 2018

Believe it or not, there’s a reason Rose and every other person touched by this scandal hasn’t moved on, and appear so jarred by it all. The man who reimagined sexual harassment has also created a new breed of survivor.

Rose Army image from Rose McGowan.

In October, when the Harvey Weinstein scandal hit in 2017, there were many reasons to call time on Hollywood as usual. Frankly you didn’t know who was next. And many of us who are entertainment journalists as well as screenwriters had to pause and reflect. Was it really that simple? Fucking Harvey? The secret to success in Hollywood? No. (Remember the old joke that no one sleeps with the writer?)

A deeper dive is that a lot of us really liked Harvey, or more specifically, The Harvey Mystique. Let’s face it, the man represented what was best about Hollywood on a creative level, right?

This same Harvey brought us eye-watering movies from the 90’s to now with PULP FICTION, the star-maker GOOD WILL HUNTING to the redefinition of onscreen romance with SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE to SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Those are just the lazy Oscar-winning examples. The point? Miramax was outwardly beloved. TWC was outwardly beloved. (Meaning who the hell knew what it was like to work for him. Oh wait. Some have sued.)

Harvey with brother Bob were billed as heir-apparent moguls within the industry. Artistic, creative, high-powered siblings in the tradition of the archetypal show biz founders.

They were as important to the story of cinema as Louis B. Mayer, or “LB,” Cecil B. DeMille, Jack Warner and the Warner brothers - you name the mogul. Harvey inhabited the modern version of that role. Yet sadly, this “icon” was literally following the pre-cut pattern of sexual harassment and abuse laid down early in the history of moviemaking by a few of these same iconic founders. So there’s no news there.

But here’s where the heart-wrenching ironic plot twist appears for many of us looking at the scandal through a long lens back to the rise of misbehaving moguls dating to the Silents. Harvey reimagined sexual harassment as a covertly violent coercion/control fantasy that even the most practiced historic Hollywood narcissists would find breath-taking.

Daily News goes apoplectic.

Lecherous Howard Hughes pales in comparison because he was a recluse; whereas Harvey went to nearly every party. Then made you pose in his photos, made you turn your body in to his, or pulled your arms back if you pulled away. He wasn’t sheltering behind the traditional studio high walls or lost in an entourage. There was no camouflaging himself in a herd of suits, the blue-jeans-blazer hipster acted it out on his own. This solo act honed with flying monkeys tapped to set his traps.

Those studio bosses who ran the five o’clock 1950’s studio brothel loan-outs look like amateurs compared to hiding-in-plain-sight Harvey. In sum, he made sexual harassment personal, not business. Rose Army is the backfire, the unintended consequence of his arrogance.

And that will be his legacy. Well that and the ingenious way he stole the language of women and turned it against them in private. Consider the haunting dialogue as a matter of record ‘you think I’m fat.’ A new low for forced sexual contact, all while shedding the strange tears predators use to shame their victims.

So while Harvey Weinstein was never a movie star, he was making his own movie this whole time, through the decades, across new platforms as they emerged. Similar to the year’s-long shot sequences in BOYHOOD, though no reflection on that film other than the parallel technique. We saw the women grow up around Harvey. They’d lose their girlhood in those clenching embraces of his, posed intimacy that indicates tacit agreement with whatever crazy-making event has happened behind the scenes. This was premeditated and systematic, not just a pattern of behavior.

The old titans of Show Business didn’t require you to appear in a documented public way that underscored your humiliation. At least not more than once a year during Award Season, because the conquest was secondary to doing business.

Much more adept than those busy, married, moguls of Golden Age Hollywood, who did serial discards of proteges as if throwing a small fish back in a guilty charade, Harvey was an artist. He reinvented sexual harassment, gave it a stealthier signature, made it able to thrive in the bright lights and the light of day.

With Harvey it was clearly more important that he paraded himself with the victims of his conquests all year long, more often than doing the business of making actual movies.

These images aren’t sanctioned studio shots, nor group shots usually, but one-on-one trophies. Two-shots from his POV. Alone. Him against them.

Oh, and what are they wearing? Did he pick out their clothing? He was a one-man studio all right, location scouting all over the globe to piece together a film that should be called GIRLHOOD, for every takedown he documented in his viewfinder. You can’t call it a documentary though, because it is his fictional account, all those wary professionally courteous smiles and his breast-brush hugs.

Harvey perfected the sexual harassment playbook for our times, where you don’t just hook the unwitting fish, it was catch-and-release, over and over. Until somebody called #timesup and #metoo on his fishing season… which says something about fish and bicycles, but you get the idea.

For those who constantly ask ‘Why Hasn’t He Been Arrested? Why Hasn’t He Gone to Jail?’ Here’s your answer.

This movie-savvy maestro stretched the platforms of Film, TV, Social Media, PR, movie junkets, and even wardrobe, to create an alternate narrative. His was an ingenious overlay on top of the wrongdoing, a bespoke reality that has made him unassailable. Talk about seeing your dailies or watching the rushes. Clearly he got his rush by starring in his own long-running alibi.

Guess they’ll all just ride off into the sunset now with their stalking horse bidder... or maybe not?

Rose McGowan is viral at this point.

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