SALMA HAYEK IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too.
One of the forces that gave me the determination to pursue my career was the story of Frida Kahlo, who in the golden age of the Mexican muralists would do small intimate paintings that everybody looked down on. She had the courage to express herself while disregarding skepticism. My greatest ambition was to tell her story. It became my mission to portray the life of this extraordinary artist and to show my native Mexico in a way that combated stereotypes.
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And with every refusal came Harvey’s Machiavellian rage.
I don’t think he hated anything more than the word “no.” The absurdity of his demands went from getting a furious call in the middle of the night asking me to fire my agent for a fight he was having with him about a different movie with a different client to physically dragging me out of the opening gala of the Venice Film Festival, which was in honor of “Frida,” so I could hang out at his private party with him and some women I thought were models but I was told later were high-priced prostitutes.
The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.”
When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress.
In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.
One of Kahlo’s final paintings before her death at age 47 in 1954 was titled “Self Portrait with Stalin.” As Nick Gillespie wrote at Reason last year, “That is some fucked-up art right there. Uncle Joe had died the year before and only the most deluded bitter-clingers were under any illusions about his reign of terror.”
When Hayek writes, that in Weinstein’s eyes, “I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body,” she’s also neatly describing how the dictator whom Kahlo worshipped viewed his subjects in the Soviet Union, where, the Times staggeringly claimed earlier in August, the sex was awesome. I wonder if the Gray Lady would still have the chutzpah to run that article today, seeing as how the Weinstein allegations set in motion an ongoing Soviet-style cultural purge by the American left.