Harvey Weinstein's excuse, when law finally caught up to his decades of sexually deviant behavior with his co-workers - starlets and subordinates alike - was particularly telling - "I am sorry, but I have grown up in different times". "When this kind of behavior was condoned, if not ignored", went without saying. In Hollywood, the seat at the head of the table, reserved for the producer, is the intersecting point for power and opportunity. And taking full advantage of it with females, famous or otherwise, who either sought out plum roles in his otherwise reputed productions or wanted to collaborate with his production house for promotional or other business activities or who just wanted a job in his busy movie office, was Weinstein who simply saw no wrong in his wrongdoings (no... outright criminal activities). And his reasoning, that's how it always was, that's how I was raised in this business. In his mind, it was a simple trade-off, opportunity for chastity, a true Shylockian barter for a pound of flesh. Sexual harrassment and other predatory behavior at workplaces is a sad rem(a)inder of the 50s and the 60s culture when women were freshly entering the work scene and a majority of their job descriptions essentially translated into serving the needs of their superiors, as secretaries, gophers, and sometimes as window dressings for the store fronts, owing to their lack of higher education and desperation for work. And where there is desperation, for minimum opportunity and consequently upward mobility, exploitation stood right at the doorstep grabbing the "opportunity" with both the hands. It was the same everywhere, be it corporate America or Hollywood, from Main Street to the Wall Street, in politics or media, whereever females were relegated to positions that demanded more of their beauty than their brains, a different Weinstein guarded the stepping stones to success with lecherous eyes in a ready to pounce pose.
Fox News owed to much of its meteoric rise during the late 90s to the Clinton Lewinsky scandal. While also trying to provide an alternative narrative with a conservative voice to a traditionally left leaning liberal media, Fox (riding the coat tails of a rejuvenated Republican Party under the leadership of Newt Ginrich) found fame as it positioned itself as a (lone) moral arbiter in the scandal egging its commentators, pundits, and opinion makers to take hard stance on traditional family values denouncing the President (and the Democratic Party) for transgressing on sanctity of the highest institution in the country. As the Democrats were writhing in the wind with no where to turn, unable to stand behind (or endorse) a philandering President nor walk way from his otherwise stellar record in employment and economy, the conservative mouthpieces of the country had a field day pounding hard on the table and crying hoarse about erosion of the fabled Americana. The President was finally impeached, the Democrats lost power (against the backdrop of a roaring economy) and Fox News and the Republicans became the proverbial hand in glove, sheath and sword, voice and speak, so to say. And the biggest irony of it all, Republican lawmakers who stood on a moral high ground during the Clinton impeachment process, had their own skeletons of moral impropriety tumbling out of their closets, the hypocricy of which was amply exposed by the adult magazine publisher Larry Flynt. And decades down the line, the moral pundits at Fox - the chief among them, Bill O'Reilly, and the biggest catch of all, the founder of Fox News himself, Roger Ailes - themselves had to settle multi-million dollar lawsuits against their co-workers and employees, falling from grace and losing their places from their high horses. 'Bombshell' is yet another recounting (along with 'The Loudest Voice') of those turbulent times at the Fox network where the traditional values of 'anything goes' went up and drowned under the then ever rising tide of the #MeToo.
'Bombshell', a clever play on the word, would equally have worked as 'Shell Shocked', for the way it rattled the industry and took down the titans indulging in what they naively considered as 'routine business' or 'just another day at the office', preying upon the weak, culling the vulnerable and pouncing upon the desperate. It has been an open secret in Hollywood dating back to the start of the industry itself that producers, studio heads and and other men in power had their pick of the litter, choosing nubiles from obscurity, and grooming them into starlets, in expectation of having their confidence and benevolence paid back in kind. The media turf was no different. As the many scandals that broke out during the #MeToo revolution at the media houses indicate that men (in power) were men, regardless of the stripes or stars, political persuasion or affiliations, and that attractive women who chose to opt for the media glare as a career had no choice but to also fend off (and sometimes succumb) to the persistent advances, pressures, harassements and hostilities of their superiors, while being superlative at their jobs. The environment that expects the head of the network (be ir Roger Ailes at Fox, Les Mooves at CBS, Harvey Weinstein at Miramax and many such big and small players) be satisfied with carnal favors for a move up on the rung of the career ladder, the automatic assumption of the superiors that their subordinates are also subservient (per an unwritten job description) and hence can be bent to their will, toyed with and "house broken" (O'Reilly at Fox, Matt Lauer at NBC, Charlie Rose at CBS et al), all this just to keep their jobs and careers as working women, the natural expectation that the litigation industry, which survives entirely on the misdeeds of the corporate America, would come the rescue of the powers that be in case of any change of heart of the aggrieved, unwilling and unable to take the abuse any longer, swooping in and sweeping up everything under the carpet so that the business can continue unaffected - all these get blown to smithereens in 'Bombshell'. The free market capitalism that the conservatives vouch to abide by is the only known cure to this workplace excesses, in that, any kind of behavior that might run afoul of profit generation, in this case multi-million dollar litigations, is just bad for business and therefore the perpetrator, however popular he might be, automatically becomes "bad news" in the eyes of the advertisers and therefore gets sidelined. Ironic, when people who frame the rules in their favor get trapped in the same.
Oscar Baits 2020: Once upon a time in Hollywood
checkout http://kanchib.blogspot.com for Srinivas's Blog.
