Stars, sex and scandal: Peter Bradshaw on the best books about Hollywood
Ahead of the Oscars, the Guardian’s film critic shares his favourite books on the dream factory, including David Niven, Zadie Smith and Rose McGowan
Peter Bradshaw
Friday 22 February 2019
T
he Oscars approach in the more thoughtful mood created by #TimesUp. These days the awards are a more subdued hooray for Hollywood, but some of the best books on the industry have always warned of the dream factory’s problematic side. F Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, published in 1941, a year after his death, is a portrait of brilliant young studio chief Monroe Stahr, based on MGM executive Irving Thalberg, a man with control over people’s imaginations – the kind of power Mephistopheles might have promised Faust. Stahr is one of a priestly elite “able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads”, Fitzgerald writes. He can comprehend the alchemy of storytelling, spectacle, performance, music, publicity, sex, and deal-making – the mysterious totality of cinema inside and outside the screen’s rectangle. With a flourish of genius, David Thomson took the phrase for the title of his own unmissable history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation.
In ‘Brave,’ Rose McGowan Exposes Hollywood Exploitation
By MICHELLE GOLDBERGJAN.
29 January, 2018
Rose McGowan at the Women’s Convention in Detroit in October.CreditErin Kirkland for The New York Times
BRAVE By Rose McGowan 251 pages. HarperOne/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
If I had read Rose McGowan’s new memoir, “Brave,” in a vacuum, absent the feats of investigative reporting that took down the former Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, I would have thought it overwrought and paranoid. McGowan describes a life of almost ceaseless abuse, of falling into the clutches of one sadistic ogre after another as powerful forces conspired to crush her rogue spirit. “My life was infiltrated by Israeli spies and harassing lawyers, some of the most formidable on earth,” she writes on the first page. “These evil people hounded me at every turn while I went about resurrecting the ghosts that have made up my time on earth.” Come on — Israeli spies?
Of course, we now know: Yes, Israeli spies. In October 2016, McGowan posted three tweets accusing a “studio head” of rape, using the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport. She was referring to Weinstein, who, it’s since been revealed, had paid her $100,000 for her silence about a 1997 encounter at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. As Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker in November 2017, shortly after McGowan’s tweets Weinstein hired several private security agencies, one run largely by veterans of Israeli intelligence, to try to stop the story of his longtime sexual predation from coming out. Agents were explicitly directed to spy on and undermine McGowan. “It was like the movie ‘Gaslight,’ ” McGowan told Farrow. “Everyone lied to me all the time.”
One of the greatest tricks that the patriarchy plays on women is to deliberately destabilize them, then use their instability as a reason to disbelieve them. Much of “Brave” reads like the diary of a woman driven half-mad by abusive men who assume no one will listen to her. In this case, the truth was finally — and, for McGowan, triumphantly — exposed, but reading “Brave,” I kept thinking about how many more women must be written off as crazy and crushed under the weight of secrets no one wants to hear.
Even before she met Weinstein, McGowan had been through hell. She was raised in the polygamous Children of God cult, though her family fled when its leadership started encouraging sex with children. She then spent years bouncing back and forth between her cruel father and her unreliable mother, who for a time dated a vicious man who McGowan says was later charged with sexually abusing his own daughter. McGowan did a brief stint in rehab during junior high school and later lived as an itinerant street punk. Eventually she made her way to Hollywood and was emancipated from her parents before she was old enough to drive.
This bitter history clearly left a mark, and her book is furious and profane, wild and a little unhinged. “Very few sex symbols escape Hollywood with their minds intact, if they manage to stay alive at all,” McGowan writes early on. There’s no glamour in “Brave,” and very little joy; I’ve never read anything that makes being a starlet sound so tedious and demeaning.
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The book hinges on McGowan’s encounter with Weinstein, whom she refers to only as “the Monster.” Here, for the first time, she tells the story of what he did to her. It’s both disgusting and, if you’ve followed the Weinstein coverage, very familiar. She was summoned to a morning meeting in the restaurant of an exclusive hotel in Park City, Utah. When she arrived, the restaurant’s host directed her to Weinstein’s suite, saying he was stuck on a call. “I was certain we would be working together for many years to come, and we were here to plot out the grand arc of my career,” McGowan writes.
Instead, Weinstein pushed her into a room with a Jacuzzi and pulled off her clothes. “I freeze, like a statue,” she writes. As she describes it, he put her on the edge of the Jacuzzi, got in, and performed oral sex on her while masturbating. Her experience sounds similar to the one that the actress and director Asia Argento described to The New Yorker. Like Argento, McGowan says that she feigned pleasure in the hopes of bringing the event to a quicker conclusion. “He moans loudly; through my tears I see his semen floating on top of the bubbles,” she writes.
Afterward, McGowan writes, she was taken to a photo-op with Ben Affleck, her co-star in “Phantoms,” a movie she was promoting. Seeing her shaken and hearing where she came from, the actor said, “Goddamn it. I told him to stop doing that.” (It’s unclear what Affleck meant by that statement; he has never responded to the accusation that he knew about Weinstein’s abuse.) Others, McGowan writes, “counseled me to see it as something that would help my career in the long run.” Wanting to press charges, she spoke to a criminal attorney who told her she would never be believed.
Soon she heard that Weinstein was calling around town telling people not to hire her. “It seemed like every creep in Hollywood knew about my most vulnerable and violated moment,” she writes. “And I was the one who was punished for it.” Her film career was derailed.
McGowan would eventually find success playing one of a trio of witches on the TV show “Charmed.” She describes working on the show as a deadening experience, a “prison for my mind.” Her sense of martyrdom can be a bit much; she writes of feeling “robbed” by having to get married on TV before her real wedding. “Your entertainment comes at a cost to us performers,” McGowan writes. “You should know this and acknowledge.”
Yet it’s McGowan’s profound dissatisfaction with her profession — one she seems to have fallen into rather than pursued — that has given her the freedom to gleefully burn bridges. She loathes the entertainment business, describing Hollywood as a cult worse than the one she grew up in. Though she’s in her 40s, she sometimes writes with the grandiosity of an alienated adolescent whose mind was blown by “The Matrix.” “You may think that what happens in Hollywood doesn’t affect you,” she writes. “You’re wrong. My darlings, who do you think is curating your reality?”
For most adult readers, it won’t be much of a revelation that Hollywood trades in distortion and exploitation. But I hope “Brave” finds its way into the hands of teenage girls who may still look to actresses as they try to figure out how they’re supposed to be in the world, girls who aspire to the life McGowan once had. In the end, McGowan finds a measure of peace and redemption when she moves behind the camera, becoming a director and multimedia artist, subject rather than object. One of the lessons of her story is that being desired is no substitute for being powerful.
Michelle Goldberg is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
Rose McGowan's memoir Brave details alleged rape by Harvey Weinstein
In the book, actor also recounts her fight against the ‘Hollywood machine’ and its misogyny
Sian Cain
Tue 30 Jan 2018
After years of publicly accusing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, the actor Rose McGowan has detailed the sexual assault she said occurred after their first meeting more than 20 years ago.
In her memoir Brave, published on 30 January worldwide, McGowan recalled first seeing Weinstein, whom she refers to only as “the Monster”, at a screening of her film Going All the Way during the 1997 Sundance film festival.
Then 23 years old, McGowan wrote in Brave that, after the screening, Weinstein allegedly summoned her to a meeting at a restaurant, which was later relocated to his hotel suite. McGowan described being shown to his room for what she believed would be a meeting to “plot out the grand arc of my career”.
Instead, she alleged, after a half-hour discussion about her career, he held her down on the edge of a jacuzzi and raped her. Later he allegedly called her and described her as “a special friend”.
“I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being. I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it – not my responsibility, exactly, but – like I had had a hand in tempting him,” she wrote. “Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier.”
Describing Weinstein as looking like “a melted pineapple”, McGowan said that immediately after the rape, she attended a photo opportunity for Phantom, another Miramax film she was in, where she allegedly told a co-star what happened. The co-star, who has previously been identified by McGowan as Ben Affleck, reportedly said: “Goddamnit. I told him to stop doing that.” Affleck has never responded to this allegation.
Many of Weinstein’s 80-odd accusers have alleged the disgraced media mogul asked them to visit him in various hotel rooms, where he’d either forcibly performed oral sex on them or demand it in turn. A spokesperson for Weinstein in the US told the Guardian: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein. Mr Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.”
“Mr Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.”
Detailing her fight against “the machine, the manufacturers of myth, the gaslighters themselves, the sacred men of Hollywood”, McGowan detailed a troubled childhood while outlining her thoughts on misogyny in Hollywood and wider society.
Beginning with her childhood growing up in the polygamous cult Children of God in Italy, the actor detailed her family’s escape to America after some leaders began advocating child abuse. After becoming a teenage runaway, enduring a three-year abusive relationship, and being sporadically homeless, McGowan said this background was instrumental in her decision to not press charges against Weinstein.
“No work would land me back on the streets, and homelessness was a death sentence. I knew if I died I’d be remembered for revealing my rapist, but not for my achievements. I didn’t want his name next to mine on my obituary,” she wrote.
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Rose McGowan: 'I have been silenced for 20 years' – video
Likening her career as an actor to being a sex worker, McGowan described her decision to shave her head as “a battle cry” against the pampering regime that she says once turned her into “the ultimate fantasy fuck toy by the Hollywood machine”.
She wore the infamous “naked dress” to the 1998 MTV Awards as “a reclamation of my own body after my assault”, she claims and, at one point, described keeping fake blood and wounds on her face after filming episodes of the witchery drama Charmed to see how the public would react to a wounded woman. “Nobody asked to help me. Not once. They would just avoid eye contact and look down at the floor,” she wrote.
In the book, she also detailed her marriage to the director Robert Rodriguez, who she claimed used his knowledge of Weinstein’s alleged assault to punish her, particularly in a scene in the film Planet Terror, in which a character played by Quentin Tarantino attempted to rape her.
“I was in a backward world,” she wrote. “I was losing my grip on sanity.” Afterwards, in what McGowan intepreted as a cruel demonstration of power, Rodriguez sold the film to Miramax, Weinstein’s studio.
In a statement to Vanity Fair, Rodriguez said the Weinsteins had priority on his next project at the time, and that the scene was “in every draft of the script since the first draft was issued to cast and crew [and] if there was any objection to the scene there was plenty of time to address it. It was never brought up as being an issue.”
McGowan ends the book by calling for more women in producing and directing positions, and asks for the support of groups like the Screen Actors Guild to protect women and children, particularly the establishment of an anonymous tips line for victims of assault.
New Claims Against Harvey Weinstein Go Back to the 1970s
by Chris Gardner 2:01 PM PDT 10/30/2017
The latest investigative piece by The New York Times stretches Weinstein's alleged pattern of predation to the 1970s, while one accuser comes forward to break a confidentiality clause: “I want to do my part to help bring this to light so it doesn’t happen with other people in Hollywood or anywhere else."
Harvey Weinstein had secret hitlist of names to quash sex scandal
Producer hired team to investigate 91 film industry figures in attempt to stop harassment claims going public
Mark Townsend
Saturday 18 November 2017 21.57 GMT
The Observer has gained access to a secret hitlist of almost 100 prominent individuals targeted by Harvey Weinstein in an extraordinary attempt to discover what they knew about sexual misconduct claims against him and whether they were intending to go public.
The previously undisclosed list contains a total of 91 actors, publicists, producers, financiers and others working in the film industry, all of whom Weinstein allegedly identified as part of a strategy to prevent accusers from going public with sexual misconduct claims against him.
The names, apparently drawn up by Weinstein himself, were distributed to a team hired by the film producer to suppress claims that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women.
The document was compiled in early 2017, around nine months before the storm that blew up on 5 October when the New York Times published a series of sexual harassment allegations against Weinstein.
Individuals named on the list were to be targeted by investigators who would covertly extract and accumulate information from those who might know of claims or who might come forward with allegations against the film producer. Feedback was then to be relayed to Weinstein and his lawyers.
The size of the list – 85 names appear on one document, with an addendum identifying another six individuals – appears to corroborate claims that sexual misconduct allegations against the 65-year-old were an open secret throughout Hollywood.
Prominent stars were among the first tranche of individuals on the list to testify publicly against Weinstein. Among those named were the actress Rose McGowan, who days after speaking out accused the producer of raping her. Another was Laura Madden, who told how Weinstein pestered her for massages at hotels in Dublin and London, beginning in 1991. McGowan and Madden were among the first to speak out against Weinstein last month.
Rose McGowan Photograph by Richard Shotwell
A typed note on the document appears to suggest that by February 2016, Madden had already been targeted by one of Weinstein’s hired investigators. Her view of the producer is, says the note, “very bitter”.
Another name is Zelda Perkins, a London-based production assistant for Weinstein’s Miramax film company, who left the firm’s London offices on Brewer Street in Soho in 1998 after, she says, enduring years of sexual harassment by her boss. Last month Perkins revealed that she had broken a confidentiality agreement to describe alleged sexual harassment by the Hollywood producer.
Also on the list is the English actress Sophie Dix, who has described how her career trajectory was “massively cut down” after an alleged sexual assault by Weinstein in a London hotel and who was among the first to come forward.
Although at least 10 individuals are based in London, the majority live in New York, with others from Los Angeles. They include individuals working in acquisitions, marketing and distribution, along with producers, publicists and human resources staff, as well as actors. Forty-three men are named and 48 women.
Weinstein, the list confirms, was aware that the New York Times was gathering testimony from his victims long before it first ran the story. A public relations professional is named alongside a note stating that “HW [Harvey Weinstein] in contact w/him. Friends w/Jodi Kantor”. Kantor is the New York Times journalist who broke the story that immediately engulfed the producer and the film production company he co-founded with his brother.
Sophie Dix Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
More than 50 of the names have been coloured red to highlight those who should be prioritised by investigators – individuals Weinstein most keenly wanted to target. The names of the actresses McGowan, Dix and Madden are all coloured red.
Following an initial list of 85 names, another six individuals were identified during August 2017, including the actress Annabella Sciorra, who two months later publicly alleged she was raped by Weinstein after he barged into her apartment in the 1990s.
Also named on the later list is the US actress Katherine Kendall. Weeks later she revealed how a naked Weinstein “literally chased” her around his New York apartment in 1993.
Another is a former Weinstein employee, Lauren O’Connor, who documented several allegations against the producer in a 2015 memo in which she described a “toxic environment for women” at Miramax.
Interestingly, the document includes the filmmaker Brett Ratner, who has been accused of sexual harassment or misconduct by six women in the wake of the Weinstein allegations.
Annabella Sciorra Photograph: Bruce Glikas
It is unclear whether Weinstein intended subsequently to approach any of the individuals on the list with a non-disclosure agreement. Evidence has emerged which shows that over the past three decades Weinstein reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on condition of anonymity, after he was confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact.
Not surprisingly, considering the psychological abuse and bullying allegations emerging from his former film studio Miramax, more of the film studio employees are also named. Among them is Kathy DeClesis, former assistant to Weinstein’s brother Bob, who has revealed that she told him about Harvey sexually harassing women over a period of 25 years.
So far, more than 50 women have come forward with allegations of rape, harassment and inappropriate behaviour, prompting police investigations in the US and UK.
Weinstein “unequivocally denies” all claims of non-consensual sex, a spokesman for the producer has said. The spokesman dismissed reports that the producer hired spies to stop claims, saying: “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”
The producer’s alleged targets were often young, aspiring actresses. Among the high-profile names who have spoken out against Weinstein are Angelina Jolie, Cara Delevingne and Kate Beckinsale.