Archive for 2017

PAULA FROELICH: Harvey got exposed because he’s not profitable anymore.

To answer these questions, let’s look beyond the Harvey-shaped elephant in the room. Behind the touted veneer of creative genius and imagination, the Hollywood studio system (an umbrella term that now encompasses movie studios, television networks, news organizations, tech companies and new media) was built on top of the cushions of the casting couch. And, as we’ve seen several times this year, that couch was never retired.

I witnessed a lot at Page Six — only a fraction of which ever hit the paper (for a multitude of reasons). But I will share one incident in May 2004 that has always summed up for me how this industry really feels about women.

I had gone to dinner with a friend who was in town for the upfronts (the big annual congregation where television network executives fly in from Los Angeles and present their upcoming slates of new shows). He worked at United Talent Agency and was psyched when I scored us an 8 p.m. reservation at the hottest place in town, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market, unfortunately, next to a table of three drunk and loud television executives, one of whom I knew headed up a cable network.

“I need a hooker while I’m in town,” one man quasi-yelled.

“Dude — the top-shelf whores go for $1,000 an hour, $5,000 a night,” the cable exec bragged to his friends.

“That’s all? All night?”

“All night — whatever you want — and these are working actresses.”

“No way — who are we talking about?”

The executive, in between ordering more bottles of Patron silver, proceeded to bray out the names of women who were indeed working actresses as well as models — including one woman who was cast in a show on his network. He was her boss.

“How do you think she got the job?” the executive joked, as the others high-fived him.

To be fair, this isn’t sexual abuse, it’s prostitution.

NATIONAL SECURITY’S MILLENNIAL PROBLEM. “What ties Winner, Snowden and Manning together is their belief that laws on protecting classified information didn’t apply to them. Some sort of imaginary public ‘need to know’ what they learned through their jobs motivated them to leak secrets—with themselves as the sole arbiters of what the public should find out. . . . There’s plenty of blame to go around in the Winner, Snowden, and Manning cases, above all on a failed counterintelligence system that granted high-level security clearances to people who were clearly psychologically unfit to hold them. Yet that does not absolve the criminals here, and it’s impossible to miss that they’re all Millennials too. . . . The Millennial generation, or at least a portion of it, includes Americans who seemingly reject centuries of understanding about why state secrets must be kept. Blame ought not be placed entirely on such Millennials, who after all were raised to reject many of our nation’s core values.”

Well, there are leakers and there are whistleblowers. The former are dangerous, but the latter are the only reason the national security establishment might possibly be trustworthy. I wrote on this a while back.

STACY MCCAIN: Harvey Weinstein Is the ‘Patriarchy,’ and Other Feminist Non Sequiturs. “Nearly half a century has passed since the radical Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in the late 1960s. Why is it that Harvey Weinstein — an avowed ‘progressive’ and a major donor to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats — got away with preying on young women for decades?”

EPIC BLOWBACK: How Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood Tape Led to Hollywood’s Sexual Misconduct Reckoning. “While the Access Hollywood catastrophe barely put a dent in Trump’s career, it did act as the catalyst for something else: the gradual allegations of widespread sexual misconduct in the film community. A direct line can be drawn from the tape to the current wave of well-known figures in the movie world who have been ousted from their positions after being undone by disturbing allegations.”

GOP CONGRESSMAN WARNS U.S. INSOLVENCY COULD ‘COST MILLIONS OF AMERICAN LIVES:’

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said any member of Congress who refuses to figure out ways to reduce federal spending and move closer to a balanced budget is “betraying their country and betraying the future of our kids and grandkids.”

The U.S. national debt recently surpassed $20 trillion.

“Everyone who refuses to examine this issue and come up with constructive ways to cut federal government spending so we can balance our budget and minimize our risk of insolvency and bankruptcy, everyone who refuses to do that is betraying their country and betraying the future of our kids and grandkids because they’re going to suffer enormously from the burden that we’re placing on those who have no right to vote because they’re not old enough or aren’t even alive yet,” Brooks said during an interview with PJM on Capitol Hill. “We’re talking about America’s future here.”

Read the whole thing.