Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

lol

when did gilliam make his last good movie

Last one I saw in the theater was Munchausen. I'm kinda content with that.

when did gilliam make his last good movie

I was gonna say "1995" but realised I haven't seen any of the ones since then in full

I have seen Tideland

it was

well, it was something

The Zero Theorem is one of the worst films I've ever seen.

Of note:

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/media/weinstein-company-bankruptcy/index.html

At the same time as the bankruptcy announcement, the company said it will release victims of, and witnesses to, Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct from any non-disclosure agreements.

"Effective immediately, those 'agreements' end," the company said in a press release.

The company said "no one should be afraid to speak out or coerced to stay quiet."

!

Nickelodeon just "parted ways" with Dan Schneider and this sure feels like getting out in front of some story

btw Time Bandits and Brazil are Terry Gilliam's good movies

(at least one more than Spike Lee, j/k)

there was this thread about dan schneider a few months ago, I'd never heard of him before but it seems incredibly dark and grim:

thread of how much of a pedophile creep with disgusting fetishes dan schneider is and what really goes on behind the scenes of his shows:

— ‏ً (@deludedkiss) September 16, 2017

^probably should stress that it's really haunting nightmarish stuff, reminiscent of jimmy saville

^^ GIFs you don't want on your desk if you work in an open-layout office like I do!

I always forget he's the dude from Head of the Class and Better Off Dead.

yeah it's one of those cases where the rumors are awful and have been around for ages, but even the public stuff is very questionable on its own

^^^ This was way way way too late (the parting of ways).

The rumors of Schneider's pedo behavior are boiling over and some investigative journos have been working for nearly a year on a big story. It's imminent.

is there a source on that or can you not elaborate further

Can't believe it took this long for Schneider to get the hit. These allegations have been floating around for yeeeeeeears.

gilliam's don quixote movie is coming out soon actually, it's finished. probably not a good time for him to spout off and say stupid shit.

also yes zero theorem is terrible and his last good movie was probably...12 monkeys I guess. or fear and loathing, whichever was the last one to come out.

is there a source on that or can you not elaborate further

What Old Lunch said + friends in the biz

After the initial Harvey shitstorm and easy targets were rolled, the smart journalists just keep working. More and more people are willing to go on the record but there's not a sense of urgency given the charges that will inevitably be put out. Plus legal issues. But this little event about Schneider above is a tip of the hat that the studio has wind of what's up.

That schneider stuff is appalling, I didn't realize he was the person behind those shows although i've seen plenty of them. I remember that christmas one that is called out in one tweet in particular as my son was watching it and I walked into the room and was like "holy fuck what is that". NIckelodeon shares much of the blame in allowing that to go on IMO.

I've never seen these Nick shows but just looking at the clips that the above twitter pulled. WTF. How did that make it on air?

The power structure in Hollywood has been disgusting for many, many years.

I mean, journos working on a story doesn't imply "it's imminent," people tried to report the Weinstein story for a decade (or more?)

kim masters mentioned that she and some colleagues had been chasing down the story for years and that it’s been impossible getting people on the record

https://apnews.com/2036175b01ff44d8b1ba38b81037a7db/Ex-Weinstein-assistant-says-she-tried-to-stop-him-in-1998?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=APEntertainment

Zelda Perkins quit Weinstein’s film company in 1998, along with a colleague who accused the movie mogul of trying to rape her.

As part of a settlement, Perkins signed a non-disclosure agreement. It kept her silent, but also committed Weinstein to attend therapy for three years. And it required the company to spill the beans to its then-owner, the Walt Disney Co., or to fire Weinstein if he made any more payouts over alleged wrongdoing.

Perkins said her hope was to “create protection for people in the future.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Perkins chose the therapist Weinstein was to consult. She doesn’t know whether he ever went to the sessions.

“I have no idea if any of the obligations were upheld,” Perkins told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

She said that a year after she left the company she ran into Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival, and “he told me that everything I had done was pointless.”

ah, good to know

tweet, for those interested:

My colleague and I spent a lot of time chasing this story. No one had a word of substance to say. If that’s changed, you know where to find us. https://t.co/kN7PCoz6Ar

— Kim Masters (@kimmasters) March 27, 2018

(some masterful legal needle-threading there)

i do wonder how ironclad the ndas that were signed by parents could be. i also think that the general tumult at viacom could lead to more things coming out in the open

losing the support of a corporate backer seems to make it a little less intimidating for victims to come forward, which is depressing in its own way

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/business/canceled-deals-and-pulped-books-as-the-publishing-industry-confronts-sexual-harassment.html?smid=tw-share

I know a lot of that Twitter thread is speculation, but if turns out that there *is* a line that can be drawn between Schneider and the last decade of Amanda Bynes having personal problems in the public eye, this has the potential to be even bigger than Weinstein imo

Like it may cause a fundamental rethinking of tabloid culture writ large

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/business/canceled-deals-and-pulped-books-as-the-publishing-industry-confronts-sexual-harassment.html?smid=tw-share

― j., Wednesday, March 28, 2018 8:15 AM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

huh i nearly distributed the book in the header here

I know a lot of that Twitter thread is speculation, but if turns out that there *is* a line that can be drawn between Schneider and the last decade of Amanda Bynes having personal problems in the public eye, this has the potential to be even bigger than Weinstein imo

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, March 28, 2018 8:41 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Like it may cause a fundamental rethinking of tabloid culture writ large

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, March 28, 2018 8:42 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i want to believe but then again nothing really seems to have happened after it was revealed Weinstein had people who are still currently employed as gossip columnists on retainer to character assassinate accusers (cf. the woman who rejected his advances and then went undercover to make an audio tape.) I think Ronan Farrow went at some of them a bit, but didn't name names iirc. I think if you're a gossip columnist you're already maybe a bit less affected by moral qualms than others and your immediate peers aren't gonna call you out much either.

Yeah, but the obvious difference is that Weinstein was, to most Us/People/TMZ-reading human beings, is a behind the scenes figure, if on their radar at all. Amanda Bynes is a tabloid star that we've been rubbernecking for years .

Like, I'm saying, that if someone can successfully connect the dots from the last 20 years of Perez Hilton/TMZ "hahahaha Britney/Lindsay/Amanda is such a TRAINWRECK" to "Children who suffer from sexual abuse often have tumultuous adulthoods and also that abuse came from inside the industry" it might cause some amount of reflection on just what the fuck we've been doing

i think it's also pretty logical to imagine that a lot of "an insider told us..."-type sourcing about how much of a "trainwreck" someone is comes from people close to the ones responsible for the abuse, if not the abusers themselves.

i mean i guess that also did happen w/Weinstein in exactly that way, it was discovered he was putting out stories about Mira Sorvino and others iirc.

I'm optimistic about Whiney's point but I'm also afraid it's just as easily going to be another round of victim blaming, or blaming the parents of victims.

People have this fucked-up internalized idea that if someone's successful as a youth that being around predatory adults is just part of the game, and they're supposed to somehow magically sidestep those situations or accept it as part of the cost of success.

Or, if they're really vile, they're tweeting around how hollywood is run by liberals/jews/pedophiles and what did you expect

I regret even typing that last sentence but I made the mistake of looking at twitter replies earlier today and that appears to be the idiot sentiment

It takes a long time and a sustained, concerted effort to expose victims of sexual crimes to come forward. With Weinstein, there was a mountain of evidence and the story took years to reach a tipping point because of the stakeholders involved. That's because the stakeholders...are stakeholders in the very system that has evolved to intrinsically protect itself.

It's not only NDAs--which in Hollywood are legendarily tight--it's the threats of getting sued that would and should scare anyone against litigating or pressing charges. Defending yourself in a countersuit is cost prohibitive for the vast majority of accusers even outside of the entertainment world. And as noted by the silence of many, it's a bad for the career.

tabloid culture has survived for decades' worth of scandal, I'm sure it can outlast this.

can NDAs be made constitutionally illegal? I know noncompetes are illegal or unenforceable in some jurisdictions.

popbitch's four-part series on american media (publishers of enquirer etc) was very good reading, if you haven't read it yet

http://popbitch.com/2017/10/the-united-states-of-american-media-inc/

also, ami is responsible for this new publication...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-publisher-pal-puts-saudi-propaganda-magazine-in-us-supermarkets

NDAs are contracts between two parties so they couldn't be made "constitutionally illegal" in that way.

Noncompetes are very much enforced on a regular basis in many venues and most states have plenty of case law to support their enforcement, particularly in the past 20 years.

And by "enforced" I mean that lawyers have the confidence to sue, file injunction, etc. based on a failure to adhere to an NDA or noncompete.

really? last I'd heard, the majority of noncompete clauses don't hold up, unless they can prove trade secrets are in play

ah, now an x-post, and yeah... if you don't have the time or money for lawyers, noncompetes work

and unfortunately in Hollywood the other party is near-guaranteed to out-money you