A response to Judd Apatow’s interview in Deadline: “Can Hollywood Turn Sex Scandals Into Meaningful Reform?”

Dear Judd,

Thank you for stepping up and speaking out about this issue. You’re doing more than most people I know. Many of my own friends didn’t share my op-ed about sexual harassment on social media. People are powerfully averse to addressing this topic. I’m grateful you’re willing to tackle it. (It made my day to see “Mike Pence has some sort of mental problem” in print.)

Your definition of the problem and its complexities is, in my experience, correct. You say we need to “change the culture.” When you hear about a harasser you’re “never going to work with that person again,” which makes sense for someone who wields a lot of power. Most people don’t. Your solutions, unfortunately, only usefully apply to you and a handful of people. Please hear me out on this: your approach is going to be part of the problem in the long run.

When I was sexually harassed by my boss, a director on a studio film, I had nowhere to go. Who does someone on a crew talk to when the director is harassing them? Or the producer? Or the star? Your Deadline interview mentions sexual harassment training videos are currently shown to staff on TV productions. That’s seriously great; one area of the business where there’s a framework for starting work on the right note.

But you know like I do that on a film, made at a studio or independently, the process is a free-for all. It’s nearly impossible to get a movie greenlit. Everyone jockeys for their jobs for months. Once they’re there, a director is king (very rarely queen) of the production. The stars are revered. The cast and crew come together as a temporary family, often traveling on location together, staying in hotels, working long, strange hours, and socializing with each other during downtime, because who else is around? The cast and crew are at the mercy of the above-the-line people who are going flat out to meet insane deadlines. I don’t care how much sexual harassment training you give a cast and crew, speaking up about anything controversial puts the movie in jeopardy and could cost everyone their jobs. This is the nature of entertainment work that’s largely absent from the present discussion: across the board, entertainment workers are interdependent in highly unusual ways. One person really can take down a whole production. As we saw with Louis C.K., one person’s disgrace can bury a completed film and shut down multiple productions in 24 hours. It’s true that Ridley Scott’s decision to reshoot All The Money is going to provide jobs, but I don’t remember this having being done before on a completed film. It would be a huge step forward if this response became the norm.

Today, however, no one wants to hear complaints from anyone about anything when you make a movie. A second camera assistant was willing to walk on live train tracks because a director asked her to, and I wouldn’t judge her decision to acquiesce as extreme if it hadn’t ended in tragedy. (The fact that she was asked does make me extremely angry, though.) Your solution is to change the culture we’re working in, but do you honestly think a crew member on location, in Cambodia say, is going to rock the boat with a sexual harassment claim against a director? Culture is always going to be what we create within each production. If the director is toxic, the culture will be toxic. We need more formal solutions than “better culture.”

As for not working with people after you hear something about them, this is confusing advice. Hollywood is a town of storytellers. Gossip is the primary information machine in this business. Gossip has been weaponized against women for at least as long as I’ve worked out here. You mentioned Maureen O’Hara’s news clipping that circulated on twitter. She pointed out that the gossip machine was brutally effective at torture and character assassination. As you noted, women today are badmouthed as difficult, crazy, cold, not talented, not funny, and on, and on, and on, but your solution to the harassment and abuse problem is to expect people in the business to decide not to work with someone based on what they hear about them. You expect people to discern between lies about women and truths about men in the mountain of gossip they traffic in daily. That’s not feasible. The choice to work with Harvey Weinstein was not greedy for many people. It was a paycheck, and it came with baggage that could just as easily be true as false. That’s the nature of gossip.

It is also not necessarily greed that drives people to smooth over sexual assault claims when, in so many cases, they’re keeping the ship afloat for the hundreds of people who will lose employment if it goes down. In reading your piece I felt like you might have lost track of this. They’ve got horrible choices to make and many of them know it. I agree with you that the culture of the business has evolved to a point where it’s way too easy to make bad decisions, and I’m certainly not in any way defending anyone who has silenced a victim, but I’m unwilling to generalize that it’s always done out of greed. Only millionaires comfortably walk away from work when they smell something fishy. For the rest of us, those decisions border on impossible.

In my experience the most powerful reason people in Hollywood don’t speak up, or speak out, is fear of losing their proximity to fame. That’s true of everyone from assistants all the way up to studio heads. The right kind of famous for most people working in this industry is being celebrity-adjacent. It’s how you get jobs, jump onto projects, get your work read, get your movie made, and on, and on. Being there means you know how to keep secrets. Predators like Harvey who compulsively dominate and destroy women and verbally and physically assault men are protected by this dynamic because outing his behavior is a violation of the secret-keeping culture of celebrity. Clearly from your interview, your immediate focus is on reporting criminal activity, and I agree with you. It should be. However, Hollywood is full of criminal activity. Until recently, smoking a joint was illegal! I’m confident “discrete” will return as the most prized recommendation for any job after this intense house-cleaning is over. Hollywood may redefine its relationship to women, but it will also revert to a culture of secrecy. We may have to wait a generation before the culture truly shifts.

While we wait, here are a few solutions that came to me while reading your interview, useful for people working in and out of the business, that can bring about real change today:

1. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are, or aren’t, the first response to hearing someone has been assaulted is to ask them what they need from you. If they want to file a report or complaint, tell them you’ll support them. This addresses the problem of someone feeling too isolated to speak up.

2. Be a voice of reason if there is public push back, with the victim’s permission. (You speak to this in your interview, but not in a concrete way that involves the victim’s wishes; that part is so important.) Remind people that fame and financial success are not indicators of good character. This addresses the problem of powerful harassers having a louder voice and wider reach in the court of public opinion.

3. If you’re in a position of power, be mindful of who you elevate. Hold people accountable if they empower someone who does harm.

4. Whenever possible, formalize ways for victims to speak out.

5. Finally, be transparent in your hiring process and above all, HIRE DIVERSELY.

Thank you.

This letter responds to Judd Apatow’s interview in Deadline — “Can Hollywood Turn Sex Scandals Into Meaningful Reform?” http://deadline.com/2017/11/judd-apatow-harvey-weinstein-sex-scandal-reforms-commentary-breaking-news-1202204254/