Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

New piece

http://variety.com/2017/film/news/john-lasseter-pixar-disney-whisper-network-1202620960/

Separately, this is still looming. Ashley Feinberg's update:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vice-sex-harassment-shane-smith_us_5a1063b9e4b045cf4371cbe4

xp eugh that Variety piece is so gross:

The company’s co-founder is known as a hugger.

check please!

A number of ex-employees described Lasseter as an overgrown boy, with a limited sense of boundaries.

Some told Variety that he would make inappropriate comments about women, or touch them on their legs or backs. Some described receiving hugs that went on a few seconds too long.

“There is a currency there — the currency is touch, and being touched by this person who is always in charge,” said another former Pixar employee. “It’s personal and intimate and probably not appropriate.”

Another former employee said that after Pixar grew out of its Point Richmond office and moved to Emeryville in 2000, Lasseter’s behavior became more brazen. She said he would walk up to women in the office and kiss them on the lips.

“I found it shocking,” she said. “That’s not a normal way of greeting a colleague.”

😳

from that paris review piece

Hemingway’s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (Well, I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.

And a further Lasseter piece

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/disney-pixar-john-lasseter-leave-allegations

"Hemingway’s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn" is maybe not the correct way to describe Martha Gellhorn.

Key line from the Lasseter Variety article:

She said she never reported these issues because the systems were not in place to address the problem.

after we delete men, can we delete everyone left in HR?

i dvr charlie rose & my local pbs station this morning aired antique roadshow instead in that slot & tbh im reasonably just as fine watching this

there’s a lot of egregious we usage and overreliance on rhetorical questions in the beginning of that paris review piece. i want to finish it but man i hate polemics in the platform age

he’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it.

classic mid 20th century post-Freud twaddle, as if creation weren't often a matter of "I want to write, I can write, let me make stuff up."

what?

i think her point is just, if you're a shithead, try to channel shithead energies into making something good for other ppl

shower the people you love with shit

I liked that article. I did think the writing at the beginning was a bit...extra, but it smoothed out as she made her point.

yeah agreed. i had a similar convo w/ someone recently, the notion of art itself & success w/in creative milieu involves levels of selfishness and it creates lots of strange moral dilemmas...its unsurprising that many "great artists" are selfish to an extreme degree

shower the people you love with shit

Yeah I liked that piece on the whole. Seems like everybody criticising it didn't read the whole thing, which is understandable, but - maybe read the whole thing

Eg "egregious we usage" at the beginning is there specifically so that she can call it out like two paragraphs later

(Not that this exactly counters criticisms of overcooked rhetoric tbf haha)

As someone whose comic sensibilities were crucially shaped by Woody Allen, I've tried to make it clear that I find the Soon-Yi relationship creepy at best, as is his persistent fetishization of teens, but based on the evidence I find it curious to use WA as the #1 "monster" artist.

(assuming everyone is agnostic on the Dyan Farrow accusation, as I think the current established facts force us to be... those of us who remember the McMartin daycare scandal anyway)

also re "ugh the Manhattan character is dating a (17-yo) high schooler," I'd like to see the author's list of what makes the Call Me By Your name 24/17 affair not disgusting, or equally disgusting.

i’m trying to read the whole thing. there are a lot of other “whole thing”s out there that don’t barrage me with poorly edited writing for paragraphs on end.

even in the post editing age!

agree that piece is flat-out awful

xp ok it got better. still too many rhetorical questions though

and as someone who’s often pushed back at male supremacy defining a whole other art form - particularly when it comes to grossly “transgressive” (ie woman hating) masculinity being way overpraised from elite types - and been taken way less seriously as a critic for doing so, i’m like “...sigh”

like you can probably draw a bright line from that one dude getting super defensive about MANHATTAN to “the avant-garde need not be moral” and similar self-defensive statements

I think this is because WA uses his standpoint as his raw materials for writing these movies.

Which is not the same as Polanski or Weinstein..

the heck with woody, this was the male role model for generations of men:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16ZKTw9FA_o

Nick Carter on blast now...

Yep

https://pitchfork.com/news/backstreet-boys-nick-carter-accused-of-rape/

well, if a girl doesn't immediately bite your dick off and call the cops it's consensual right? sheesh these ladies

these women clearly need someone to explain to them what "consensual" means, preferably the person they're accusing of raping them

i didn't read that whole paris review thing and i'm not saying that it is like this but i never ever have to read any variation on: will i ever be able to watch sleeper again???????????? kinda thing ever. as long as i live.

i don't watch his movies anymore. i don't want to know about him. he's gross. he was a hero of mine when i was a kid too but who cares. there are lots of movies to watch. and for woody fans out there look at it this way: in a hundred years if there are still people nobody will care what he did and everyone will delight in his antics again.

he's gross.
this is exactly what my mom taught me when she told me that woody allen is gross. i was probably in my early teens, interested in watching movies with romantic examples i didn't find repulsive, and she was like "not woody allen, he's gross" and i believed her and she was right!

My partner always left the room when I had Louis CK on, like "ok, see you some other time when you're doing something that's not this"

Surprised Michael Fassbender hasn't came up in all this. For beating up his ex-girlfriend.

hemingway could kill with a phone call. true story!

"Pfeiffer spent the rest of her life in Key West, with frequent visits to California, until her death on October 1, 1951 at age 56. Her death was attributed to an acute state of shock related to her son Gregory's arrest and a subsequent phone call from Ernest. Gregory, who had experienced gender identity issues for most of his life, had been arrested as a male caught entering a woman's restroom in a movie theater. Years later, after he had become a medical doctor, Gregory interpreted his mother's autopsy report as indicating that Pauline had died due to a pheochromocytoma tumor on one of her adrenal glands. His theory was that the phone call from Ernest had caused the tumor to secrete excessive adrenalin, and then stop, the resultant change in blood pressure causing her to go into the acute shock that caused her death."

agree that piece is flat-out awful

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:39 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Fla

Why??

i didn't read that whole paris review thing and i'm not saying that it is like this but i never ever have to read any variation on: will i ever be able to watch sleeper again???????????? kinda thing ever. as long as i live.

i don't watch his movies anymore. i don't want to know about him. he's gross. he was a hero of mine when i was a kid too but who cares. there are lots of movies to watch. and for woody fans out there look at it this way: in a hundred years if there are still people nobody will care what he did and everyone will delight in his antics again.

― scott seward, Wednesday, November 22, 2017 10:44 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That’s not really the point of the Paris review piece, thankfully

Nick Carter was abused by Lou Perlman right

also it's weird that the paris review piece ran there when its editor has its own, uh, problems

where is the paris review piece? did someone link to it upthread? i can't find it w/ google

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/

Surprised Michael Fassbender hasn't came up in all this. For beating up his ex-girlfriend

Was just thinking about the sighs of relief Joss Wheadon had after the Weinstein story broke and people stopped discussing his 'feminism as a front for macking on actresses'.

oh it's a "can we separate the art from the artist?" piece, pass

that paris review thing is just kinda bloggy. like from the old days. i do love that she uses the word "pettifoggery" because that's how the newspaper writer in my fave show Zoo gets busted and loses her job. she is writing an anonymous anti-corporate blog and her editor at the paper - a paper owned by the corporation the writer is blogging about - knows its her because she's the only person who ever uses that word.

I don't think Whedon is really going to benefit from the Warvey Heinstein explosion. Especially not Fassbender.

wait, i just noticed that PR thing IS a blog thing. so, you know, that would make sense.

oh it's a "can we separate the art from the artist?" piece, pass

― flappy bird, Wednesday, November 22, 2017 1:21 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thats really not what its about, either

although i guess its kind of glib about that point near the beginning

its editor has its own, uh, problems

Have any allegations been published?

not yet

Inevitable

http://ew.com/tv/2017/11/22/law-order-svu-harvey-weinstein