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crowdvscritic · 4 years ago

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best picture project // THE ‘40s: WARTIME + PRESTIGE

In the immortal words of Don McLean, a long, long time ago, I can still remember how I wrote about the 1930s for my Best Picture Project. (Don’t fact check those lyrics to “American Pie.”) I titled that overview of the decade “Chaos + Influence” in that order—chaos led the Academy’s way through the Great Depression. In the 1940s, though, the motion picture community embraced the organization, and in many cases, it was because they realized how helpful it could be to their own reputations and pocketbooks.

At the ceremony honoring 1940, Jimmy Stewart was the only Best Actor nominee to show up, and Katharine Hepburn said on losing for her work in The Philadelphia Story, “Prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.” By 1943, the Golden Globes launched as a copycat show, and by 1945, Joan Crawford was campaigning to win for Mildred Pierce. Henry Rogers, who ran her campaign, said, “You know as well as I do that members of the Academy vote emotionally…I’m confident that people in our business can be influenced by what they read and what they hear.” He’s on record calling acting awards “more of a popularity contest than a talent contest” with “emotional and sometimes practical considerations, none of which have to do with the quality of the performance.” Studios began taking out ads for nominees they had under contract (even if they were nominated for pictures from other studios), and formal betting began in Las Vegas on odds-on favorites.

When Joan Fontaine defeated her sister Olivia de Havilland for Best Actress 1941, her salary didn’t see a change, but her studio, Selznick International, did. The fee for other studios to borrow her talents bumped from $25,000 to $100,000 after her 1940 nomination and to $200,000 after her 1941 win. Never mind that Fontaine had mixed feelings after her win. “Winning an Academy Award is undoubtedly a great accolade, supreme praise from one’s peers, a recognition to be accepted gratefully and graciously,” she said. “It can also damage irreparably one’s relations with family, friends, co-workers, the press…It was a fishbowl existence until the next year’s awards, when a new winner would occupy the throne. Naturally, there was many a doubter, many a detractor, many an ill-wisher. It’s an uneasy head that wears the crown.”

Still, success wasn’t a given for the industry during wartime, and the Oscars had to pivot like the rest of world. Statues were made of plaster for a time to prevent stealing metal from war efforts, and the 1942 ceremony was almost cancelled because of the U.S. had just jumped into World War II and Carole Lombard had just died in a plane crash while selling war bonds. But the show must go on, so the Academy pared the evening down, hosting a “dinner” instead of a “banquet” and discouraging fancy dress. The format of the show changed several times through the decade, eventually nixing the meal and moving to a theater for good. The Academy might invite soldiers for a variety-style evening, President Roosevelt might make an address, or Jack Benny might host a radio broadcast for soldiers abroad. Special awards were handed out for war-related service, including to Noel Coward for his war film In Which We Serve, the British Ministry of Information “for its vivid and dramatic presentation of the heroism of the RAF” in a documentary, and to Harold Russell “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans” in The Best Years of Our Lives. (Russell also won Best Supporting Actor, making him the only person with two acting Oscars for the same film.) Also of note, Winston Churchill praised Best Picture winner Mrs. Miniver as “propaganda worth a hundred battleships,” an unusual but powerful endorsement of the voting body’s picks.

Wartime adjustments weren’t the only new features. The Academy saw more than one big first:

ABC began broadcasting the show on the radio

New categories were introduced, including for documentaries, foreign language films, and costume design

Ernst Lubitsch won the first Lifetime Achievement Oscar

The Academy started keeping winners secret until announced on stage

Barry Fitzgerald earned noms both for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in Going My Way—oops! A new rule was added to prevent that from happening again

Hamlet became the first non-American Best Picture win, overcoming attitudes like that of one studio exec who said noms for foreign films were “an act of treason.” (Heaven forbid we learn what that guy would think of Parasite!) The Academy had tried to prevent this with special awards for international films, but basically Laurence Olivier would not be denied (to oversimplify it)

And a few moments qualified as blink-and-you-might-miss-this-didn’t-happen-yesterday:

Fortune reported The Best Years of Our Lives and Gentleman’s Agreement made $2 million more at the box office than they would have if they had not won Best Picture

When How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture, some speculated it was due to recency bias as the last nominee to be released. Today that film is best remembered as the one that somehow won over Citizen Kane, so, um, its reputation has not aged any better

At least two winners, Michael Curtiz and Greer Garson, acknowledged they didn’t have speeches prepared. Garson’s 5½-minute speech pushed the party past 1 a.m., which Jack Black and Will Ferrell would have something to say about

Bottom line: The Academy started as a body with middling influence and transformed into a prestigious organization, not just strong enough to withstand a world war but perhaps even bolstered by it.

Photos:

1950: The Pantage Theater outside the Academy Awards honoring the films of 1949.

1942: Burgess Meredith watches Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine in a happier (maybe?) moment the night Fontaine bested her sister for Best Actress. When de Havilland passed away last year, you might have seen stories about their rivalry resurface.

1947: Samuel Goldwyn, Harold Russell and William Wyler celebrate eight awards for The Best Years of Our Lives.

1942: Bob Hope hosts for his third time. He hosted or co-hosted the event 19 times between 1940 and 1978.

Resources:

Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards by Anthony Holden (1993)

Oscars.org (including all photos)

“Oscar Hosts: Performers Who Have Hosted the Academy Awards,” GoldDerby.com (2020)

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allthefilmsiveseenforfree · 5 years ago

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Joker

It’s hard to write a movie review for a movie that everyone already has an opinion about (whether they’ve even seen the film or not). And I know that comes off as very “boo hoo, pity me, the poor movie reviewer who saw this movie for free and now has to WRITE WORDS about it for fun” but listen, there’s some real pressure here. Todd Phillips’ vision of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) and his descent into madness at the hands of a cruel and violent world is nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, and even though as a society it feels like we’re kind of over the Oscars, they are also somehow still Very Important all at the same time. So is this film a gritty, IMPORTANT, timely warning of the dangers of a man pushed too far? Or is it a sad power trip that encourages an all too common sense of entitlement and violence amongst the men who are presumably most likely to resonate with its message? Well...

Honestly? Fucking neither. It’s shot beautifully (how could it not be when Todd Phillips is just trying to do everything Martin Scorsese would do, but a little less well) and Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is truly, singularly committed and brilliant. But Phoenix is suffering from the same problem as Rami Malek and his incredible performance as Freddie Mercury last year - the movie each man is at the center of (in spite of their incredible acting) is not nearly as clever or interesting as it wants to be or could have been.

Some thoughts:

Arthur is certainly a man in pain in a world that doesn’t really care about him. Gotham is a tense, struggling city, and all the people Arthur encounters treat him with disdain or cruelty. To me, this is less an issue of the moral decay or lawless attitudes of the city, and more about the ways in which poverty poisons people’s lives and souls. This movie depicts class warfare in a way that feels garish and cartoonish, which would be appropriate and possibly kind of cool if it weren’t trying to take everything VeRy SeRiOuSlY.

He’s isolated, depressed, full of rage, and everyone thinks he’s creepy - sure, random coworker, hand him a gun, that checks out.

Also, the movie places us in a weird position almost from the start, because Arthur can’t help that he has brain damage and a disability (his laughter) that makes people uncomfortable. But we’re also supposed to...feel bad for him? understand his frustration? when he gets fired for bringing a gun to a children’s hospital. I don’t think the film necessarily positions us to sympathize with Arthur by the end of the film, but it doesn’t not do that either.

If a man you don’t know walks outside your gate with a clown nose on, you turn and run.

If a man you don’t know puts his thumbs in your mouth, you DEFINITELY turn and run.

One interesting thing that I did ruminate on for quite awhile - Arthur never harms any people of color. Zazie Beetz and Brian Tyree Henry both have interesting supporting roles and are true highlights of the film, and they manage to escape their encounters with Arthur relatively unscathed (albeit disturbed). Let it be said, Arthur only punches up, not down.

A big part of the reason why I say the movie isn’t as clever as it thinks is the lack of engagement with all of the big, nasty themes running through it. A lot of big thematic punchlines are left unexamined, and I’m sorry, just pointing out LOOK AT THIS THING THAT EXISTS is not the same as engaging with it. This is like the Ready Player One approach to social justice issues, or if that phrase is too triggering how about simple fucking human decency, and it rings hollow. For example, two police officers heavily imply that Arthur’s mother (Frances Conroy) is to blame for the violence she and Arthur suffered at the hands of an abusive boyfriend. Is Phillips’ script trying to comment on victim blaming and rape culture here? Based on Arthur’s reaction to the news, I would say no. Or how about the social worker Arthur goes to for counseling saying her department is being shut down due to budget cuts. Is Phillips trying to interrogate the lack of infrastructure in place for mental health support or any other social safety net meant to enhance the public welfare? Well, considering people who have a mental illness are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than to perpetrate one, I’d say again, no.

When this thing gets bloody, it gets REAL BLOODY. I was prepared, kind of, but it still turned my stomach.

I’m unsure how to feel about Arthur’s appearance on the talk show - the southern belle accent, the dancing, the makeup - it all feels very camp, very queer coded villainy in a way that feels regressive rather than a loving homage to theater and film history.

In fact, describing anything about this movie as loving feels impossible. Even the beautiful cinematography and the effective score - it all feels like it’s born out of spite and ugliness. Like someone dared Todd Phillips to make the most anti of antihero movies, and he wrote the script by fear pissing the words into a snow bank.

Did I Cry? Um yeah, no.

From a structural standpoint, the beats are solid and the tension is tight. It builds and builds until Arthur’s face-off against the late night talk show host (Robert De Niro) who was once his hero until he brutally mocked Arthur on his show. It’s the climax of the film, the pot that boils over, the match lighting the gasoline, and I was so tense I thought I was going to cry and then....I wasn’t. The balloon popped too early for me, the scene verged into something so over-the-top that I completely lost any sense of narrative tension for the rest of the movie.

Which brings us to the ending, that shit-eating-grin-ain’t-i-a-stinker ending. If it undermines everything that came before it, I feel like well what was the point? And if it doesn’t, I feel like well what was the point? You can only play with ambiguity so much before the audience either gets bored or gets mad. Also, I’m gonna have a real hard fucking time if this movie that ends like an episode of Scooby Doo wins a Best Picture Oscar.

The performances are all top notch, but I found this a deeply unpleasant movie watching experience that feels like a very expensive meal at a fancy restaurant. The ingredients are all there, but throwing them all together in very small quantities and dressing them up with pretty garnishes doesn’t necessarily leave anyone feeling satisfied or full of anything but the potential for what could have been.

If you liked this review, please consider reblogging or subscribing to my Patreon! For as low as $1, you can access bonus content and movie reviews, or even request that I review any movie of your choice.

#119in2019 #joker #joker review #joker 2019 #joaquin phoenix #robert de niro #zazie beetz #frances conroy #Brian Tyree Henry #movie reviews #film reviews

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kayla1993-world · 3 years ago

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In her roles, actor Sarah Polley was frequently cast as a fiery protagonist who veered straight into danger, whether it was a bus oncoming or an explosion.

However, she says she was afraid to confront certain things off-screen, such as a traumatic experience she had with Jian Ghomeshi.

The Oscar nominated screenwriter and filmmaker says a brain injury in 2015 prompted her to deal with some past trauma. Run Towards the Danger is the result, which Polley says took him years to write.

"I have been haunted by these stories,” Polley told host Matt Galloway of CBC Radio's The Current. She is sharing them because she believes that she is capable of handling them now.

She had her first film role at age four and was a Canadian TV staple by the 1990s. Her roles ranged from the strong-willed Sara Stanley in Road to Avonlea to a paralyzed teen in the Sweet Hereafter who was sexually abused by her parents. Away From Her (2006) and Stories We Tell (2012) were both nominated for Oscars.

While Polley's book is frank about her career in film and television, the most shocking essay is about a sexual assault Polley claims she experienced with Ghomeshi when she was 16. She describes how, during a sexual encounter at Ghomeshi’s apartment when she was 28, he hurt her and ignored her pleas to stop, in an essay entitled “The woman who stayed silent.”

Ghomeshi was a member of the folk-pop band Moxy Früvous and hosted the CBC Radio show Q. Several women accused him of sexual assault and harassment in 2014. Ghomeshi maintained that the behaviour was consensual. Three complainants accused him of sexual assault and one of choking but he was acquitted in 2016.

As a result of Polley’s allegations, CBC contacted Ghomeshi and former lawyer Marie Heinen several times. Polley considered speaking out when Ghomeshi was on trial.

She said she struggled with this quite a bit. Nevertheless, according to lawyers she talked to, she’d make a "terrible" witness due to her inconsistent story and how she interacted with Ghomeshi as a guest on his radio show after the alleged incident.

Polley was told, "your case will not lend credibility to those who are coming forward because you will suffer exactly the same evisceration as those women.”

“I knew a lot about the direction I was heading,” she said. "I had two young children and I knew I couldn't handle it." After Ghomeshi was acquitted of the charges in 2016, Ontario Judge William Horkins attacked the complainants, saying their "deceptive and manipulative" evidence cast doubt on his guilt.

Polley said that many people who have come forward with stories like this face an analysis. "It is not considered credible if you don't remember every detail perfectly, if you are unable to create an incontrovertible picture.

Polley supports the concept of innocent until proven guilty but believes that adversarial legal systems can end up re-traumatizing victims. "Do women need to be destroyed by looking for those shadows and looking for these inconsistencies?” She described how her own memory blots out things that were too damaging, and that makes it hard to remember details about traumatizing events.

"To make what happens after survivable, obliterates a lot of things as part of the brain’s defence mechanism. In addition to the trauma of losing her mother at 11, Polley also suffered on-set terrors while filming explosive scenes in Terry Gilliam's 1988 film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Her new book marks a new chapter in her life after a fire extinguisher fell on her head six years ago as she bent over a lost-and-found box at a Toronto community center.

She says it led to a three-and-a-half-year struggle. She says the first year following the accident was particularly tough for her because her brain could not cope with noise or light.

At the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a doctor named Michael Collins advised Polley to keep doing what was hard. "Whatever was causing my symptoms, I had to do more of. Whatever I avoided, my brain had a harder time handling,” she explained.

When the lights in the grocery store made it seem like her head would explode, forced herself to go to the store anyway. She says her brain feels fine now.

In her book, she examines other difficult parts of her life — memories she says she kept in a "dark cave." She says she was terrified to recount these experiences—even to herself.”

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jamesginortonblog · 7 years ago

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Twenty years from now, you might find yourself sitting by the fire, telling tall tales to young ’uns about the madness and the mayhem of this century’s teenage years, and you might find yourself thinking — if only there was some kind of, I don’t know, TV drama that accurately encapsulated almost everything that was going on in the world in 2017, one that also felt like James Bond meets The Godfather. My friend, the drama you would be looking for is McMafia.

The series is the BBC’s big-budget new-year crime drama. Starring James Norton, Juliet Rylance and David Strathairn, alongside a host of Russian, Israeli, Brazilian and Serbian stars playing mob bosses from their home territory, it blends the stylish globetrotting of The Night Manager and The Sopranos’ take on family values, with a dark underpinning in reality.

McMafia’s script began life as a 2008 book of the same name, an epic study of organised crime by the investigative journalist Misha Glenny; it was then wrestled into a drama by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Hossein Amini, best known for the Ryan Gosling thriller Drive. At first sight, this looks like another of those impossible-to-film tomes with which British TV is currently besotted. (The City & the City? The Patrick Melrose novels? Are you all insane?) Glenny’s tome details the rise of criminal empires from the dust of eastern Europe’s communist states and the globalisation of crime across continents, using free-market tropes. The term “McMafia”, for instance, is a reference to the Chechen gangs who franchise out the feared Chechen name to thugs across Europe, like a gun-toting Ronald McDonald.

Amini was hauled into the project by James Watkins, the director of Black Mirror and The Woman in Black, who had been trying to squeeze Glenny’s sprawling book into a feature film. “We sat in a little garden at the V&A — which, ironically, ended up in the series — and decided it could only be a TV series,” Watkins recalls as we squat on some antique furniture during a break in the filming of a violent chase in a country house. “It’s got whorls and tone, but no actual characters.”

Over the book’s fragmented vignettes, Amini lays an action thriller-cum-family-drama structure at whose heart is Alex Godman (Norton), the son of a Russian oligarch who was educated at an English boarding school, runs a successful hedge fund and is preparing to marry his ethical activist girlfriend, Rebecca, played by Rylance. When his dodgy uncle starts meddling in Moscow, Alex’s perfect life falls apart and he is thrown into the family business with increasing vigour.

“There are elements of Alex that are based on me,” Amini explains as he joins us. “I came to the UK from Iran in 1977. I was bullied at school for being foreign and found it hard to adjust. My parents can’t go back to Iran, although I could… All of this I put into Alex. So that notion of what it’s like to be Russian, but sometimes be ashamed of being Russian, and trying to work out if you’re British or Russian or something else — that’s very personal.”

Amini writes — or at least rewrites — roles once the lead actor has been cast. Drive’s sparse, moody script was as inspired by Gosling as by James Sallis’s original book. With Norton, he has done much the same thing, sculpting Alex to fit Norton’s natural sense of cool detachment as he boots up his inner Michael Corleone, against the backdrop of a violent global black economy that snakes its tentacles through everything from politics to the illegal deals smartphone makers rely on for their raw materials.

“We saw James playing the Russian aristocratic gentleman in War & Peace, a cultivated Englishman in Grantchester. Then there was Happy Valley, where he’s got this quiet, damaged fury — and it was obvious he would be perfect for a Russian bear inside a bowler hat,” Amini says.

“The thing about Alex is, he’s not a villain and he’s not a hero,” Norton tells me a few months later, as we sit by the Adriatic on Croatia’s Istria peninsula — which is doubling as the south of France and Tel Aviv. “He’s trying to do the right thing, but he’s being screwed up and twisted and turned, and he gets into this sort of spiralling, chaotic mess. They tell me they didn’t see anyone else for the role — I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. What did they see in me?”

Norton’s performance here will do nothing to dampen rumours that he’s the next Bond after Daniel Craig hangs up his Walther PPK. From the moment he steps out of a black cab in a tux onto the steps of the V&A — through spectacular assassination attempts, scenes of brutally trafficked young women, oblique references to the criminal machinations of the Russian government, high-speed chases through luxury mansions and dubious deals in pulsing Tel Aviv nightclubs, with some flashy high finance thrown in — his role has pretty much every ingredient necessary for 007, including the occasional raised eyebrow.

“To be honest, it’s mad, this crazy speculation,” Norton says with a quick laugh. “I think Daniel Craig’s going to do another two. I’m aware that James and Hoss putting me in a tux at the V&A couldn’t be more incendiary. I did say to them, ‘Are you just baiting me and stoking the fire?’”

Either way, he’s aware that this is a potentially career-changing role — not that he’s done badly so far. His elegantly foppish performances in Death Comes to Pemberley and Life in Squares led, unexpectedly, to Sally Wainwright picking him to play Royce, the dark, psychopathic nemesis to Sarah Lancashire’s troubled Catherine Cawood in two series of Happy Valley. The crime-solving vicar Sidney Chambers in Grantchester came shortly after, and he’s been in War & Peace, Flatliners and Black Mirror since then. As Alex, though, he has finally earned leading-man status.

“It’s terrifying in a way, because there’s nowhere to hide, really,” he says, giving a small smile. “Before, my agent was saying I should maybe move to a bit of theatre or a bit of film. Now he’s saying I need to decide how this is going to affect me and where I go next... It’s an AMC and BBC show, the budget is huge, we have Hoss, David Farr and James Watkins on the script, the supporting cast are all A-listers. Being the thread through all those people, I just hope I’m not the one to cock it up.”

The A-list cast, it’s fair to say, is not only impressive, but requires a little explanation. Every television drama project these days has to scream a little louder than the last just to get attention. In 2016, roughly 1,200 brand-new scripted shows were launched in the world’s main television markets, according to the industry number-cruncher the Wit — and estimates for 2017 suggest there will have been considerably more, as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat launched scripted streaming services and Netflix alone produced 90 shows just in Europe.

McMafia is effectively the BBC’s answer to this internationalisation of talent. The Leviathan star Aleksey Serebryakov and Mariya Shukshina, a Russian TV stalwart, play Alex’s dubious oligarch parents; the Georgian actor Merab Ninidze proves oddly charming as the Kremlin-connected mobster Vadim; the Czech actor and regular Hollywood heavy Karel Roden delivers a weary ex-cop turned crime lord; and the Bollywood star Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a corrupt Mumbai importer, Dilly Mahmood.

Russians, in other words, play Russians, Indians play Indians and Brazilians play Brazilians. When nationalities speak among themselves, they do so in their own tongue, rather than in the heavily accented pidgin English beloved of earlier shows. Sometimes there are subtitles, sometimes not. It’s a mark of how cosmopolitan the British viewer has become that a primetime drama on a mainstream channel can now drift seamlessly between languages.

“People in the UK don’t really know who these people are, but in their own world, they’re enormous superstar figures and have this immense skill set,” Watkins says. “Some of the Russian actors do so much with so little. Whenever anyone comes in to act with the Russians for the first time, we have to take them aside and say, ‘Look, this isn’t about you or your work, which we love — but before you act with them, watch what they’re doing and make sure you can match it, because they’re setting the tone for the whole piece.’”

Watkins is keen to stress that the tone is gritty, rather than glamorous. Each location is shot with different filters, and the dark, unsettling horror underpinning the action tends to be in the bleached-out bright sunlight of the Middle East. This is grimly true of the second episode, in which a young Russian beautician, Ludmilla, arrives in Egypt for a hotel job. She is picked up by a couple of cheerful locals, who drive her out of Cairo to a concrete shed where she’s beaten, tied up and shoved into the back of a van before being sold on to an armed gang — the first stop in a brutal series of events that leave Ludmilla in Israel, sold on yet again to a haughty brothel keeper.

It’s a shocking subplot, coming so soon after an exotic party at the Palace of Versailles thrown by Vadim — the Russian gangster with Kremlin links — and all the more so because it is the one story lifted directly from Glenny’s book, and is thus, effectively, a dramatised documentary. Indeed, all of the darkest elements in the series are echoes of real life — Amini based one early killing on the 1991 assassination of the former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar. And Dimitri Godman’s drunken decline echoes the last grim years of Boris Berezovsky’s life. “We’ve tried not to chase events, because real life is always going to move faster,” Watkins says. “But every fresh headline almost seems to confirm the thesis that the corporate is becoming criminal and the criminal is becoming corporate — the intersection between criminality, intelligence agencies, banking and government.”

“Like most people, I thought the mafia was compelling and exciting,” Norton adds. “There’s money and fast cars and yachts and beautiful women. I hope people see that while we tell that story, we also tell the story of the cost — from human trafficking to drug-dealing and poverty-stricken junkies in Mumbai whose habits pay for someone’s superyacht.” He pauses. “Though I’m now aware that there are things in this phone that are unethically sourced, and I’m still using it every single day. So this probably won’t make a significant difference.”

Which is part of the final trick that Watkins and Amini play — constantly taking us back to London parties and ethical business launches by semi-legal tycoons, making clear our complicity in all the sordid crime and violent murders the show depicts. The most chilling paragraph in Glenny’s book does exactly the same.

“Organised crime is such a rewarding industry,” he writes, “because ordinary Western Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; sticking €50 notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labour on subsistence wages; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; or purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.”

So, if you do end up in 20 years’ time using McMafia as a document of our fractured era — from Russian political meddling to dubious oil deals to corrupt hedge funds and ruined human lives — you might want to prepare yourself for the obvious question from your loving offspring: what did you do to try to stop it?

#james norton #McMafia #Hossein Amini #article #The Times

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miranda-pfeiffer · 4 years ago

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Move Over Oscars, It’s The Pawscars™!

Pauley Perrette and Lou Wegner Host Annual American Humane Association Awards revealing top creature stars of the year; See it today online!LOS ANGELES, CA February 18, 2015 -- Proceed, Oscars! Now, American Humane Association is showing the REAL champions of the year's top acting awards with all the PAWSCARS ?, honoring the very best animal stars in film and television. Hosted by TV superstar Pauley Perrette and Lou Wegner, the 2015 American Humane Association PAWSCARS are now available for viewing online at www.americanhumane.org.

And the 2015 PAWSCARS visit...Best Puppy Under Stress --"The Interview"

One of the most notorious movies from 2014 has been"The Interview," and its own most adorable star was certainly Wolfie, a King Charles spaniel who appeared in the film. American Humane Association always made sure Wolfie was kept secure, especially in the middle of all the chaos and action. He was not near any of the explosions, gunfire, or loud sound -- all that was added in post-production, or a stuffed double was used. In the boat scenes, Wolfie was always kept strapped-in for safety, while in between takes, he was kept warm with a hot water bottle.

Best Magical Cow -- "Into The Woods"

While"The Interview" didn’t receive any Oscar nominations, this PAWSCAR winner got three Oscar nominations too. "Into The Woods" is Disney’s variant of the Stephen Sondheim fairy tale mash-up musical. The award for Best Magical Cow belongs to “Milky White” played by animal actor Tug. In the film, Jack trades his household ’s white cow for magic beans. From the scene where Jack milks her, American Humane Association Certified Animal Safety Representatives ? proved just off camera ensuring she stood still and Jack was taught the way to milk the cow before trying it . In the scene where Tug is eating strange things like hair and old shoes, she was actually fed edible replacements and at the scene where she awakens it was not her at all, it was a fake squirt bunny.

Greatest Speeches Performance --"Dolphin Tale 2"

In this sequel to"Dolphin Tale," Winter’s companion Savannah, dies of old age and the aquarium has only 30 days to find Winter a new mate. Once an injured baby dolphin can be found stranded on a sandbar, they name her Hope from the “hope” which she'll become Winter’s new companion. American Humane Association assessed all swimming places for potential hazards and saw that the dolphins never worked over an hour without a break. When audiences watched Savannah lying at the base of the tank, it was not a true dolphin, but an animatronic prop.

Best Chase Sequence --"Sex Tape"

In this movie, Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz attempt to track down their personal sex tape which has inadvertently been sent to their pals. As Segal is looking one buddy ’s residence, he encounters a German shepherd -- performed by both Nicki and King -- and the chase is on; American Humane Association Certified Animal Safety Representatives were on set for those scenes. At the treadmill gag, the machine was never running as soon as the dog was on it; stuffed animals and CGI were used for all of the dangerous parts and the full scene was assembled in post-production.

Best Supporting Equine -- "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"

"Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" is part of a hugely successful franchise that frequently gets awards for its visual effects. It wins a PAWSCAR, not for its apes, but for a horse called Dale ridden from the apes' leader, Caesar. It looks like he -- and another Apes -- are riding bareback but that is just another example of movie magic. The actors playing the apes on horseback used saddles, so Dale and the other horses had been dotted with particular effects markers which allowed the saddles to be eliminated in post-production. American Humane Association made sure those markers were non-toxic and they also had the horses fitted with rubber hooves for scenes if they were on sidewalk. In scenes in which there was gunfire, flames, or explosions, the horses were filmed separately from this action. Even when they jumped over"fire," the horses were only leaping over a 1 foot high bar with flickering lights.

Greatest Young Animal Performer(s ) ) --"The Fall"

"The Fall" is a stressed cop play notable for being James Gandolfini’s closing film. At the heart of its story is a pit bull pup named Rocco. Since puppies grow up so quickly, the production had to use three individual dogs, Puppers, and Ice -- to maintain age continuity. Because different dogs were utilized to perform the exact same character, some make-up was required to make them all match. American Humane Association made sure that the makeup utilized was nontoxic. Certified Animal Safety Representatives ensured that none of the pups were overworked, asked to do anything outside of their capabilities, and that they had a secure and comfortable surroundings in place and off.

Finest Ensemble --"Wild"

This award may appear to be an odd choice considering that the film is about Reese Witherspoon’s personality hiking the Pacific Crest Trail . But she’s not alone, and across the way she encounters a horse played by Muffet, a fox played by Dharma, a rattlesnake played with Fred, a puppy played by Tess, a bunny played with Sport, and even a llama played by Taiga. American Humane Association Certified Animal Safety Representatives assessed every place where the animals worked and supervised the scenes to be sure none were placed in damage ’s way. In the scene where frogs are released on to Witherspoon, the region was surrounded with an individual foot-high barrier so that none of them got away and 40 hens were kept safe.

This season, American Humane Association's"No Animals Were Harmed " program celebrates 75 years since the sole official film-industry sanctioned group ensuring that the humane protection, safety and welfare of animal actors on the sets of movies, tv shows, and commercial shoots. Each year the program manages the protection of over 100,000 animal actors on more than 2,000 places from the U.S. and around the globe. In honor of this special anniversary, American Humane Association represented on the history of animal actors and requested America who its favorite cat and dog celebrities of all time were. With 2,527 votes, the results have been....

Best Dog Star of all Time -- Lassie

This lovable collie's been around for at least 75 years. Her first movie was"Lassie Come Home" with Elizabeth Taylor in her first starring role. Taylor was paid $100 per week, but Lassie got $250. There have been many more films since then in addition to a very successful television set. Lassie was the very first monster celebrity to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the first inductee to the Animal Actors Hall of Fame. She's a long relationship with American Humane Association, winning 11 of its Animal Television Star Awards, the PATSYs.

Top Cat Star of Time -- Sassy

This Himalayan kitty starred in Disney’s"Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey" and the sequel,"Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco." In both films, Sassy was played by a cat named Tiki and voiced by Oscar winner Sally Field.

Finally, a very special Lifetime Achievement Award was given to....

Lifetime Diva Achievement Winner -- Crystal

This cherished capuchin monkey was a creature star for 18 years starring in over 25 movies such as the"Night At The Museum" series,"The Hangover: Part two,""American Pie," and the"Dr. Doolittle" movies, in addition to tv shows, and advertisements. 1 amazing truth about Crystal is that she is a rescue animal. Crystal is far from the only rescue creature working now: roughly 80 percent of the dogs and cats that you see on the large and small screen are rescues or adopted from predators. This fighter is so beloved that the late Robin Williams called her"his favourite leading lady."

"Our 2015 Pawscars champions are truly worthy of the honor for all they've done to entertain us not only over the last year, but indeed, in Lassie's instance, for decades and decades," said Dr. Robin Ganzert, American Humane Association's president and CEO. "Animal stars really are such an significant part the movies and TV shows we see every day and this year's PAWSCARS are our distinctive way of paying tribute to the rich history of animal actors. Our deepest thanks to Pauley Perrette and Lou Wegner for co-hosting this year's series and to everybody who voted for their favourite cat and dog stars of all time."

To give audiences the inside scoop on even more of the Garbos and Gables of animal actors, a brand new publication was published together with the 75th anniversary of the"No Animals Were Harmed" app. American Humane Association President and CEO Dr. Robin Ganzert composed and published the book"Animal Stars: Behind the Scenes with Your Favorite Animal Actors," with Allen and Linda Anderson, the husband-and-wife founders of the Angel Animals Network. Featuring a foreword by"America's Veterinarian," Dr. Marty Becker,"Animal Stars" provides a peek at the fascinating world of animals and animal trainers in today's movie and television industry -- along with the celebrities with whom they operate. Proceeds from the sale of this publication support American Humane Association's lifesaving work and programs protecting America's kids and animals. Dr. Ganzert traveled the country on a book registering for"Animal Stars" last autumn. To watch the full 2015 PAWSCARS, please visit www.americanhumane.org, see them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/americanhumane or @americanhumane on Twitter. Media can acquire broadcast-quality footage in https://bit.ly/2015pawscars-video. To learn more concerning the"No Animals Were Harmed " program, including reviews of the films it has tracked through time, please visit www.humanehollywood.org.

About American Humane Association

American Humane Association is the country's first national humanist organization and the only one dedicated to protecting both children and animals. Since 1877, American Humane Association has been at the forefront of virtually every major advance in protecting our most vulnerable by cruelty, neglect and abuse. Now we are also leading the way in understanding the human-animal bond and also its role in therapy, medicine and society. American Humane Association reaches millions of people daily through groundbreaking research, instruction, training and services which span a wide network of associations, agencies and businesses. You can help make a difference, too. Visit American Humane Association atwww.americanhumane.org now.

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asctx · 8 years ago

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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hollywoods-evil-secret-mxsb5f3zl Sunday Times (London, England). (May 22, 2016) ================== Oliver Thring met Elijah Wood to talk about his latest film, but the Lord of the Rings star and former child actor had other ideas. Out poured revelations about convicted paedophiles working openly in Hollywood — and deep relief that he had escaped unscathed ================== Elijah Wood was just eight when he arrived in Hollywood, the blue-eyed son of Iowa delicatessen owners. He had been modelling in Midwestern shopping centres for four years when his mother brought him to California to launch his career in show business. Long before Peter Jackson cast him as Frodo Baggins, the hobbit protagonist of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Wood was a child star. He took the lead in a remake of the dolphin film Flipper and before that shared top billing with Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son. Now he knows he was lucky to escape childhood unharmed. Allegations that powerful figures in Hollywood have been sheltering child abusers have become impossible to ignore in recent years. During the past decade several convictions have been secured — and far more accusations levelled — against wealthy and important people in the industry. Some of these criminals have left prison, returned to Hollywood and begun working again with children. Sitting in a Los Angeles restaurant to promote his latest film, The Trust, Wood compares revelations of child abuse in Hollywood to those that surfaced in Britain after the death of Jimmy Savile. "You all grew up with Savile — Jesus, it must have been devastating. Clearly something major was going on in Hollywood. It was all organised. There are a lot of vipers in this industry, people who only have their own interests in mind. There is darkness in the underbelly — if you can imagine it, it's probably happened. "What upsets me about these situations is that the victims can't speak as loudly as the people in power," he adds. "That's the tragedy of attempting to reveal what is happening to innocent people: they can be squashed, but their lives have been irreparably damaged." Wood says his mother, Debra, protected him: "She was far more concerned with raising me to be a good human than facilitating my career. I never went to parties where that kind of thing was going on. This bizarre industry presents so many paths to temptation. If you don't have some kind of foundation, typically from family, then it will be difficult to deal with." Other child actors did not have his luck. Corey Feldman was perhaps the biggest child star of the 1980s, a hero in such hits as Gremlins, The Goonies, Stand by Me and The Lost Boys. In 2011 Feldman decided to speak out about the abuse he had suffered as a young actor. "The No 1 problem in Hollywood was and is — and always will be — paedophilia," he said, adding that by the time he was 14 he was "surrounded" by molesters. Feldman met another child actor, Corey Haim, on a film set in the mid-1980s. They became best friends, starring in numerous movies together and sharing their own television show. Describing their first meeting in his memoir, Feldman wrote: "An adult male had convinced Corey that it was perfectly normal for older men and younger boys in the business to have sexual relations ... So they walked off to a secluded area between two trailers ... and Haim allowed himself to be sodomised." Haim asked Feldman: "So I guess we should play around like that too?" He replied: "No, that's not what kids do, man." In 2012 Feldman told a British tabloid: "When I was 14 and 15, things were happening to me. These older men were leching around like vultures. It was basically me lying there pretending I was asleep and them going about their business." Both actors went on to suffer mental health problems, alcoholism and addiction to drugs including crack and heroin. In 2010, aged 38, Haim died of pneumonia, having reportedly entered rehab 15 times. Feldman said a "Hollywood mogul" was to blame for his friend's death, adding: "The people who did this to me are still out there and still working — some of the richest, most powerful people in this business." "PEOPLE look at Corey Feldman and think he's a drug addict, so why should they listen to him?" says Anne Henry, cofounder of the BizParentz Foundation, an organisation established to protect child actors. "But that plays into the predators' hands. They don't want victims to be believed. We estimate that about 75% of the child actors who 'went off the rails' suffered earlier abuse. Drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide attempts, wandering through life without a purpose — they can all be symptoms." In the mid-2000s Henry was the proud mother of an 11-year-old child actor when she spotted shirtless photographs of him trading on eBay for up to $400 each. "My kid wasn't famous," she says. "But pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio when he was 11 were only selling for 10 bucks so I was worried." She realised that a number of eBay users were trading photographs of young boys, who were often semi-naked and staring up into the camera in positions that mimicked child abuse. Henry says her research led her "to websites where men boasted about following these kids, where they 'screencapped' little boys on the TV every night. We found fetish sites: one still exists that is focused on little boys working in the entertainment industry, full of pictures of them in wet swimsuits. We eventually learnt that our kids' photographs were being used as gateways to child pornography sites." Bob Villard, an agent who managed the young DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, was convicted of selling images of children on eBay. As far back as 1987 Villard had been found in possession of child pornography and in 2005 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for committing a "lewd act" on a 13-year-old boy who had asked him for acting lessons. There is no suggestion that DiCaprio or Maguire was ever a victim of abuse. Henry felt ill at what she had discovered. She began educating other parents of child actors — including several famous ones — about what was taking place. And then, she says, the stories of sexual assault began to pour in. In the past 10 years Henry claims she has heard hundreds of episodes of alleged abuse of child actors in Hollywood, ranging from inappropriate comments to sexual violence and rape. "We believe Hollywood is currently sheltering about 100 active abusers," she says at home in Los Angeles. "The tsunami of claims has begun. This problem has been endemic in Hollywood for a long time and it's finally coming to light." WHAT should have brought the issue even greater attention is a documentary called An Open Secret by the Oscar-nominated director Amy Berg. The film, which is not easy to watch, either in practical terms or because of its content, tells the stories of five former child actors who claim to be victims of serious abuse. Some of their attackers have gone to jail. Evan Henzi, 22, tells me by email that "sexual abuse is a huge problem in Hollywood and there is absolutely no support system". He was molested dozens of times over several years from the age of 11 by his agent, a paedophile named Martin Weiss. In home-movie footage recorded at a birthday party in the Henzi family home, one young boy turns to the camera and says: "I'm getting a massage and it feels great, and I don't care whether or not it looks bad." "It's above the waist," says Weiss, who is touching the boy. "It's not bad." Henzi eventually helped to secure Weiss's conviction after, he writes, "a moment of truth for myself. I secretly recorded an hour-long conversation in which my abuser admitted he sexually abused me. I decided to beat fear with truth." But Weiss spent just six months in prison. "I was worried that he could try to harm me because he threatened me when I was younger," Henzi once said. Weiss is now rumoured to be working again in the entertainment industry. The most explosive allegations of Hollywood paedophilia surround "pool parties" at a Los Angeles mansion in the late 1990s. These were hosted primarily by one man, Marc Collins-Rector. He had cofounded Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a precursor to YouTube and Netflix, which generated its own content — some of it with overtly pederastic tones — for online release. DEN attracted almost $100m of investment from Hollywood giants, including David Geffen and Michael Huffington, as well as Bryan Singer, now one of the most feted directors in Hollywood, and the film maker behind The Usual Suspects and the billion dollar-grossing X-Men franchise. Geffen, Huffington and Singer are all alleged to have been at the parties but none is accused of any wrongdoing. At these parties, Collins-Rector and other men are said to have sexually assaulted at least six teenage boys, according to lawsuits filed in 2000 and 2014. Michael Egan, who was a teenager at the time of the alleged abuse in 1999, sued Singer and two other men, alleging serious sexual abuse. He had to drop this suit after he was found to have been contradicting himself. A federal judge also accused him of lying in court. Singer has denied all claims of child abuse and said the accusations against him were a "sick, twisted shakedown". Another convicted paedophile, Brian Peck, was also a guest at the parties. Singer had given him cameo roles in two of the X-Men films and asked him to join him for the director's commentary on one of the movies' DVDs. In 2004 Peck was found guilty of abusing a famous young actor on the Nickelodeon network. After prison Peck returned to Hollywood, where he accepted a role as a dialogue coach on the sitcom Anger Management, starring Charlie Sheen. Peck later went on to play, of all things, a sex education teacher in a film. Henry is outraged that Peck still works in Hollywood: "I'm disgusted with the people who continue to hire him. I hope audiences will vote with their wallets. Don't watch these films: make it clear to the studios that you won't have anything to do with organisations that re-employ convicted predators." And if you were considering seeing An Open Secret, that may not be easy. Matthew Valentinas, its executive producer, has said: "There was major interest at Cannes [in 2014]. They'd say, 'We love it, don't show it to anyone else.' But then someone on the business side would step in and all of a sudden there was no longer interest." The film failed to find a distributor and apparently never will, though online message boards suggest viewers are keen to see it and it can be found on YouTube. To make matters worse, its other executive producer, Gabe Hoffman, apparently fell out with its director and was last year reported to be taking her to court for not "cooperating" in the film's promotion. Valentinas referred me to Hoffman when I asked to speak to him about child abuse in Hollywood; neither Hoffman nor Berg returned my emails. HOLLYWOOD'S reluctance to promote An Open Secret can be contrasted with its enthusiasm for films dealing with child abuse that took place elsewhere. As Henzi says: "In recent years, the movie industry has done a great job bringing these issues to the fore, but when it comes to sex crimes committed by its own, everyone is more hush-hush." Spotlight, the account of an American newspaper's dogged investigation into child rapists in the Catholic church, won the best picture at the Oscars in March. Berg herself was previously nominated for an Academy Award for her 2006 documentary into a similar scandal, Deliver Us From Evil. Consequently, questions of a cover-up have surfaced. "I don't believe that the most powerful people in Hollywood are sitting in a darkened room plotting to spread paedophilia," says Henry. "But very bad people are still working here, protected by their friends. Worse, the media and entertainment industries have a cosy relationship in this country — and we've already had one Hollywood actor become president. This is why we've been relying on British media to report this story much more than American media." Hoffman has said An Open Secret "makes it clear that Hollywood is not adequately policing itself". And Wood told me that having seen An Open Secret, he believes the film "only scratches the surface. I feel there was much more to this story than it articulates." Roman Polanski was charged in 1977 with five offences, including rape, drugging and sodomising, against a 13-year-old girl. He did a plea bargain and was convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Fearing a jail sentence, Polanski fled the US and has never returned. He continues to make films in Europe and has received an Oscar while being the subject of an Interpol "red notice" for absconding. "Everyone wants to f*** young girls," he once opined in an interview. The tragedy of that gruesome Hollywood trope, the "casting couch", is its victims: young actors of both sexes forced to grant sexual favours to directors and producers, and damaged as a result. Henry says she and her family have received numerous death threats from "emissaries of people accused of abuse ... We've had to move home twice, increase our security. People have parked outside our house and watched us. We're tired and weary — but with the evidence we have, we could have made 10 films like An Open Secret." Henzi writes in an email: "The thing about Hollywood is that there is not some secret 'illuminati' or top agenda. Just because someone is a famous director or actor does not give them immunity from the law. My dream is to see an established presence in Hollywood advocating against child sexual abuse, rape, sexual harassment and all sex crimes." He may have some time to wait. I ask Wood whether he believes this is still a problem for Hollywood. "From my reading and research," he says, "I've been led down dark paths to realise that these things probably still are happening. If you're innocent, you have very little knowledge of the world and you want to succeed, people with parasitic interests will see you as their prey."

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biofunmy · 6 years ago

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“Romeo and Juliet” director Franco Zeffirelli dies at 96

Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who delighted audiences around the world with his romantic vision and often extravagant productions, most famously captured in his cinematic “Romeo and Juliet,” has died in Rome at 96.

While Zeffirelli was most popularly known for his films, his name was also inextricably linked to the theater and opera. Showing great flexibility, he produced classics for the world’s most famous opera houses, from Milan’s venerable La Scala to the Metropolitan in New York, and plays for London and Italian stages.

Zeffirelli’s son Luciano said his father died at home on Saturday.

“He had suffered for a while, but he left in a peaceful way,” he said.

Zeffirelli made it his mission to make culture accessible to the masses, often seeking inspiration in Shakespeare and other literary greats for his films, and producing operas aimed at TV audiences.

Claiming no favorites, Zeffirelli once likened himself to a sultan with a harem of three: film, theater and opera.

“I am not a film director. I am a director who uses different instruments to express his dreams and his stories – to make people dream,” Zeffirelli told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview.

From his out-of-wedlock birth on the outskirts of Florence on Feb. 12, 1923, Zeffirelli rose to be one of Italy’s most prolific directors, working with such opera greats as Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and his beloved Maria Callas, as well Hollywood stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Mel Gibson, Cher and Judi Dench.

Throughout his career, Zeffirelli took risks — and his audacity paid off at the box office. His screen success in America was a rarity among Italian filmmakers, and he prided himself on knowing the tastes of modern moviegoers.

He was one of the few Italian directors close to the Vatican, and the church turned to Zeffirelli’s theatrical touch for live telecasts of the 1978 papal installation and the 1983 Holy Year opening ceremonies in St. Peter’s Basilica. Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi also tapped him to direct a few high-profile events.

But Zeffirelli was best known outside Italy for his colorful, softly-focused romantic films. His 1968 “Romeo and Juliet” brought Shakespeare”s story to a new and appreciative generation, and his “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” told the life of St. Francis in parables involving modern and 13th-century youth.

“Romeo and Juliet” set box-office records in the United States, though it was made with two unknown actors, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. The film, which cost $1.5 million, grossed $52 million and became the most successful Shakespearian movie ever.

In the 1970s, Zeffirelli’s focus shifted from the romantic to the spiritual. His 1977 made-for-television “Life of Jesus” became an instant classic with its portrayal of a Christ who seemed authentic and relevant. Shown around the world, the film earned more than $300 million.

Where Zeffirelli worked, however, controversy was never far away. In 1978, he threatened to leave Italy for good because of harsh attacks against him and his art by leftist groups in his country, who saw Zeffirelli as an exponent of Hollywood.

On the other hand, piqued by American criticism of his 1981 movie “Endless Love,” starring Brooke Shields, Zeffirelli said he might never make another film in the U.S. The movie, as he predicted, was a box office success.

Zeffirelli wrote about the then-scandalous circumstances of his birth in his 2006 autobiography, recounting how his mother attended her husband’s funeral pregnant with another man’s child. Unable to give the baby either her or his father’s names, she intended to name him Zeffiretti, after an aria in Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutti,” but a typographical error made it Zeffirelli, making him “the only person in the world with Zeffirelli as a name, thanks to my mother’s folly.”

His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 6, and Zeffirelli went to live with his father’s cousin, whom he affectionately called Zia (Aunt) Lide.

It was during this period of his childhood, living in Zia Lide’s house with weekly visits from his father, that Zeffirelli developed passions that would shape his life. The first was for opera, after seeing Wagner’s “Walkuere” at age 8 or 9 in Florence. The second was a love of English culture and literature, after his father started him on thrice weekly English lessons with a British expatriate living in Florence.

His experiences with the British expatriate community under fascism, and their staunch disbelief that they would be victimized by Benito Mussolini’s regime, were at the heart of the semi-autobiographical 1991 film “Tea with Mussolini.”

He remained ever an Anglophile, and was particularly proud when Britain conferred on him an honorary knighthood in 2004 — the only Italian citizen to have received the honor.

As a youth, Zeffirelli served with the partisans during World War II. He later acted as an interpreter for British troops.

The lifelong bachelor turned from architecture to acting at the age of 20 when he joined an experimental troupe in his native city.

After a short-lived acting career, Zeffirelli worked with Luchino Visconti’s theatrical company in Rome, where he showed a flair for dramatic staging techniques in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Troilus and Cressida.” He later served as assistant director under Italian film masters Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica.

In 1950, he began a long and fruitful association with lyric theater, working as a director, set designer and costumist, and bringing new life to works by his personal favorites — Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi.

Over the next decade, he staged dozens of operas, romantic melodramas and contemporary works in Italian and other European theaters, eventually earning a reputation as one of the world’s best directors of musical theater.

Both La Scala and New York’s Metropolitan Opera later played host to Zeffirelli’s classic staging of “La Boheme,” which was shown nationally on American television in 1982.

Zeffirelli returned to prose theater in 1961 with an innovative interpretation of “Romeo and Juliet” at London’s Old Vic. British critics immediately termed it “revolutionary,” and the director used it as the basis of frequent later productions and the 1968 film.

His first film effort in 1958, a comedy he wrote called “Camping,” had limited success. But eight years later, he directed Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and made his distinctive mark on world cinema.

When Zeffirelli decided to do “La Traviata” on film, he had already worked his stage version of the opera into a classic, performed at Milan’s La Scala with soprano Maria Callas. He had been planning the film since 1950, he said.

“In the last 30 years, I’ve done everything a lyric theater artist can do,” Zeffirelli wrote in an article for Italy’s Corriere della Sera as the film was released in 1983. “This work is the one that crowns all my hopes and gratifies all my ambitions.”

The film, with Teresa Stratas and Placido Domingo in the lead roles, found near-unanimous critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic — a rarity for Zeffirelli — and received Oscar nominations for costuming, scenography and artistic direction.

Zeffirelli worked on a new staging of La Traviata as his last project, which will open the 2019 Opera Festival on June 21 at the Verona Arena. “We’ll pay him a final tribute with one of his most loved operas,” said artistic director Cecilia Gasdia. “He’ll be with us.”

Zeffirelli often turned his talents toward his native city. In 1983, he wrote a historical portrait of Florence during the 15th and 16th centuries, what he called the “political utopia.” During the disastrous 1966 Florence floods, Zeffirelli produced a well-received documentary on the damage done to the city and its art.

“I feel more like a Florentine than an Italian,” Zeffirelli once said. “A citizen of a Florence that was once the capital of Western civilization.”

Accused by some of heavy-handedness in his staging techniques, Zeffirelli fought frequent verbal battles with others in Italian theater.

“Zeffirelli doesn’t realize that an empty stage can be more dramatic than a stage full of junk,” Carmelo Bene, an avant-garde Italian director and actor and frequent Zeffirelli critic, once said.

It was a criticism that some reserved for his lavish production of “Aida” to open La Scala’s 2006-7 season — his first return to the Milan opera house in a dozen years and the fifth “Aida” of his career. The production was a popular success, but may be remembered more for the turbulent exit of the lead tenor, Roberto Alagna, after being booed from the loggia.

“I’m 83 and I’ve really been working like mad since I was a kid. I’ve done everything, but I never really feel that I have said everything I have to say,” Zeffirelli told The Associated Press shortly before the opening of “Aida.”

Zeffirelli had trouble with his balance after contracting a life-threatening infection during hip surgery in 1999, but didn’t let that slow him down. “I always have to cling on this or that to walk … but the mind is absolutely intact,” he said in the AP interview.

———

Giada Zampano contributed from Rome.

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recentnews18-blog · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/jonah-hill-joins-the-five-timers-club-on-a-uniformly-funny-saturday-night-live/

Jonah Hill joins the Five-Timers Club on a uniformly funny Saturday Night Live

Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Candice Bergen, Drew BarrymoreScreenshot: Saturday Night Live

“I guess the worst part of the play was their confidence in it.”

“I’m not an actor, I’m a [movie, Netflix, directing] star!

It’s be nice to think that Jonah Hill has fully stepped out of his pigeonhole at this point. A couple of Oscar nominations, co-lead in an hit Netflix series, writer-director of a promising new coming-of-age movie, Hill has emerged from the Apatow star factory still straddling the line between serious artist and broad comedy movie star. (Sort of like James Franco, except that people actually seem to like Hill’s directorial debut and no one—as of this writing—has accused Hill of being a sex creep.)

That dichotomy showed up in Hill’s monologue, as SNL legend Tina Fey ushered new Five-Timers Club member Hill into the selective lounge set, where fellow FTC members Candice Bergen and Drew Barrymore celebrated his entry by showing an old sketch where Hill’s character admits to doing some serious damage to a toilet. Protesting that he does more than toilet humor now (“But that’s where you shined!,” enthuses Bergen), the disappointed Hill can only endure an all-ladies Five-Timers welcome, since, according to Fey, Bergen, and Barrymore, all the male members have turned out to be, well, sex creeps. (Steve Martin will just play his banjo “without consent.”)

Saturday Night LiveSeason 44

Fitted with the coveted FTC smoking jacket, Hill is disappointed to find that the new female leadership has refashioned it into something like a kicky boldero number. It’s a neat little way to incorporate Hill’s evolving comic persona while still trading on the downtrodden victim vibe he carries with him, especially once Kenan pops in to remind everyone that his record-breaking seniority carries its own privileges. “This is my show. I let you in here sometimes,” he responds to Hill questioning his presence in the Five-Timers lounge.

Over at Vulture, AV Clubber Jesse Hassenger recently did a ranking of the relatively rare phenomenon of SNL hosts’ recurring characters, and placed Hill’s Borscht Belt six-year-old Adam Grossman near the top. I get it. For one, the field isn’t exactly littered with gold (glad I’m not the only one sick of the Omletteville guy), with most of the bits weathering even faster than those done by the actual cast. But Grossman keeps working as well as he does because of a character throughline, as the garrulous little guy keeps tossing out his inexplicable Catskills schtick to his unlikely Benihana co-diners alongside a series of guardians indicating the unstable family life that’s somehow spawned such a weird creature. Here it’s forbearing nanny Leslie Jones, sighing deeply as she weathers Adam’s insult comic “I’m just kidding” one-liners as Grossman attempts to puncture any tension his borderline racist material generates by proclaiming his age (complete with specific and funny awkward hand gestures). It’s never been my favorite sketch, but Hill (who created the bit alongside Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, based on a bafflingly tracksuited child diner Hader once sat with) is into it, and he suggests the merest hints of the defensive mechanisms that are powering Adam’s transformation into a hacky joke machine, which always lends just enough shadings to the idea. Leslie kept breaking, but, then again, so did I.

Weekend Update update

There was a certain elegance to the way SNL kept weaving themes through its political material tonight, with jokes about Trump’s “caravan of scary brown people” terror tactics, and the importance of voting on Tuesday reinforcing each other throughout. Jost and Che were on, each landing their material confidently. On the caravan (of desperate asylum seekers that are a thousand miles away), Jost noted how Trump’s sweatily named “Operation Faithful Patriot” (where American troops are needlessly stringing barbed wire for a piece of election eve fear-mongering theater) sounds like a company that makes “reverse mortgages and catheters.” (Fox News commercial viewers get that.) Che followed up on the race-baiting scare tactics by urging that the old white people being hyped about the looming but nonexistent threat should be more worried about the less-easily-scapegoated specter of their grandkids stealing their pain pills.

On the election front, Che continued his role as Update’s resident “slow your roll” skeptic, confessing that, while he does intend to vote (on Tuesday, November 6, kids), he’s not going to buy into any “final notice for democracy” panic. Joking that, if final notices were actually final, his college debts would actually be paid, Che, as ever, positions himself for the long view, an edgy place to be in a time of national crisis (see, there’s that panic), but one consistent with his stance as a (black) guy who’s been living in a dangerous situation his entire life. For Jost (white guy), the jokes were less pointed, but not bad, as he noted that things are pretty dire when ice cream is taking a side, and that it has to be a complicated feeling when Oprah knocks on your door, only to present you with a pamphlet about Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams instead of a new car.

Pete Davidson has become such a strange star on SNL, his very public statements about his battles with mental health and substance abuse and the recent ongoing saga of his tabloid-fodder relationship with now-ex Ariana Grande have made Davidson more of a personality star than anyone I can think of in SNL history. Pete’s never been the most polished sketch guy (although he’s improved), and his Update pieces as himself have always been his best showcase, especially since he’s sharpened up his material beyond the adorable stoner little brother schtick he started out with. Here, with newly-dyed hair and the elephant of his recent, much-publicized breakup hanging over his head, Davidson delivered a solid series of political takedowns in advance of the Tuesday midterm elections. Sure, they were all cheeky appearance smack (NY Republican Peter King looks like “a cigar came to life,” Florida candidate Rick Scott looks like “if someone tried to whittle Bruce Willis out of a penis”), but, for a young comic staking out political material for the first time in his life, it’s funny stuff. And since SNL has made hay all season long about Davidson’s rising media profile, his genuinely sweet and decent-sounding appraisal of ex Grande was both de rigeur and unexpectedly touching.

Melissa Villaseñor made the leap to the main cast this year, but hasn’t had much opportunity to show off her mimicry skills or her comic chops much on the young season. So, taking a page out of Heidi Gardner’s playbook, she debuted a specifically targeted character piece on Update, with her “Every Teen Girl Murder Suspect on Law & Order.” Honestly, it’s such a specific Gardner niche at this point that I was surprised to see Villaseñor in the chair, but Melissa did fine, as her Brittany—ostensibly there to talk about young adult literature—squirmed and equivocated about what happened to her friend Logan at that “big alcohol party.” Not to harp on the comparison, but Brittany wasn’t as immediately memorable as any of Gardner’s similar turns, even if Villaseñor delivered on the premise with a uniformly strong performance.

Just when I think I’m tired of Kenan Thompson’s Big Papi, he pulls me back in. It helps that there’s a reason for his appearance tonight, as, you know, the Red Sox won the World Series again. (That’s, like, what, four in 15 years, right? Huh. Cool.) Petty sports partisanship aside, Kenan’s performance as retired and beloved Boston slugger David Ortiz has never been the problem. Kenan’s Ortiz, with his nonsensical endorsements, gap-toothed ebullience, and food obsession, is an all-time belly laugh, his infectious enthusiasm for baseball, food, his spokesman deal for the concept of spokes, and simply being Big Papi is impossible to hate. (Presumably even for Yankees fans, whose team got clobbered in the ALDS 3-1, including a humiliating 61-1 loss on their home diamond.) But the jokes don’t change much (as in, at all). Thankfully, it’s been a while, the Sox won the series, and it was nice to see the big lug again. Mofongo all around.

Best/worst sketch of the night

Look, some of you are going to clamor for a “worst” tag on Kate McKinnon’s teacher sketch. You’ll point to both its unexplained weirdness and its languorous pace, and how it never quite announces its authority as something that should appear as early in the show as it did. Well, shush. This was great stuff, not as much for the sketch itself (it really could have used more writing punch to match McKinnon’s performance), as for how it represents the sort of oddball conceptual idea Saturday Night Live desperately needs to encourage. The premise of someone acting weird while other people comment on it is hardly new SNL territory, but, as McKinnon’s overly dramatic drivers ed teacher sprawls on the classroom floor and rambles on about her predicament and its meaning, it was like a cool drink to realize that the sketch wasn’t going to go out of its way to hammer the premise home with explanations for the slowest possible viewer. It was just weird for weird’s sake, and McKinnon, accusing her charges at laughing at her “like this was some episode of Friend,” worked within the framework of the sketch to craft an enigmatically loopy character whose comic integrity isn’t over-explained. There is room on SNL for a lot more shades of humor than its current template generally allows.

This week’s branded content sketch, on the other hand, was pretty unnecessary, even if some of the performances livened it up a little, as another NBC property got some free advertising. Not watching interminably long-running televised talent shows as a rule, I’m not particularly invested in how the celebrity judges were impersonated here (although Kyle Mooney’s perpetually amazed Howie Mandel got a laugh). But at least the joke that there are only a very few possible narratives to every contestant’s journey on such shows took the piss a bit, and Cecily Strong, Kenan and Leslie, and Jonah Hill all sang their hearts out as the contestants who are probably terrible—but then are shockingly not terrible!

Also not terrible but not that surprising was the newscast sketch, where Cecily Strong’s weatherperson is nonplussed by boyfriend Hill’s decidedly unwelcome on-air proposal. Hill manages to create a nicely realized character is his unimpressive suitor, unwisely wearing a green shirt in front of Strong’s green screen and even more unwisely busting out a proposal rap. And the bit even has a decent turn, when Strong reveals that her refusal was only because she’d planned an elaborate on-air proposal of her own. I kept waiting for the reveal that Strong’s too-perfect twist was only in the downtrodden Hill’s head, but the sketch decided to let the improbable duo have their happy ending, so that’s nice.

“What do you call that act?” “The Californians!”—Recurring sketch report

Adam Grossman, Big Papi.

“It was my understanding there would be no math”—Political comedy report

With SNL’s resident guest Trump Alec Baldwin otherwise occupied (and pointedly joked about), the show opened with the always more-profitable tack of doing Trump without Trump. With Kate McKinnon adding Fox News talking head and smirking white supremacist Laura Ingraham’s glint-eyed provocation to her long list of current right-wing a-holes (“No, you’re an a-hole,” McKinnon’s Ingraham responds to her viewer mail), the sketch ran through the usual roster of weekly outrages. Finding ways to satirize the news at this point is a thankless task since reality is so far beyond satire that our pals at The Onion can essentially just transcribe stuff. Here, the jokes leant on hyperbole to make comedy out of Fox and friends’ (and Fox And Friends’) daily klaxon blare of racist bullshit designed to make white parents vote against their self-interest. Like Trump’s ginned-up, racist, Hail Mary, pre-midterms caravan, which Cecily Strong’s appropriately wild-eyed Jeanine Pirro’s claims contains such terrifying, non-white figures as “Guatemalans, Mexicans, the Menendez brothers, the 1990 Detroit Pistons, Thanos, and several Babadooks.” Similarly, Kenan Thompson’s cowboy-hat-wearing disgraced former Sheriff David Clarke showed footage of the caravan in the form of a swarm of migrating crabs. “And those are humans?,” gently presses McKinnon’s Ingraham, to which Clarke replies, “Basically, yeah.”

Unlike Baldwin’s uninspired Trump, which serves as a crutch for some very one-dimensional writing as a rule, the satire here is more layered. There are the performances, which are uniformly great. (McKinnon and Strong don’t need more praise at this point, but they are both outstanding, nuanced comic actresses). And the sketch casts a wider net, encompassing Ingraham’s fleeing sponsors (and the reason why), leaving her thanking warm ice cream, nurse’s sneakers, and White Castle. (“A castle for whites? Yes please.”) And, divorced for now by Baldwin/Trump’s absence, the cold open works to lay the groundwork for some recurring satirical themes for the rest of the show. There’s GOP voter suppression, here prodded along by Ingraham giving non-white voters the wrong advice. There’s Fox’s feverish efforts to mock the very idea that Donald Trump is a bigot. (“Except for his words and actions throughout his life how is he racist?”) And there’s the transparent propaganda of Trump’s latest “brown people are coming at you from below” propaganda, with McKinnon claiming that Trump’s try-hard gung-ho operation is actually named “Operation Eagle With A Huge Dong” and bragging that there will be “five armed soldiers for every shoeless immigrant child.”

Hey, there’s a midterm election coming up on Tuesday, so vote in that. Pete Davidson ended his amiably goofy Update stint by urging everyone to vote, as did musical guest Maggie Rogers (via T-shirt), and, in the Vote Blue campaign ad, so did a roster of very fucking nervous Democrats. While polling shows that maybe, perhaps, enough Americans are motivated, pissed, and goddamned terrified enough to actually go out and vote on Tuesday (yes, this coming Tuesday, you) to put some checks in place against Donald Trump and his GOP accomplices in dismantling democratic norms, environmental regulations, and civil rights of any kind, well, we’ve seen sweaty Democratic overconfidence explode in our faces before. That’s the message here, as the person-on-the-street interviews parroting optimistic election messages all veer into a series of forced grins, shaking hands, binge-drinking, eyes-averted mumbling, and, in the case of Heidi Gardner’s tremble-voiced suburban mom, hair-trigger panic. “Get inside until Tuesday!,” she snaps at her frolicking children, while Hill’s anxious doctor tries to take comfort in the fact that Nancy Pelosi predicted a big victory on Colbert, and Leslie Jones grits her teeth in her stated faith that “white women are going to the right thing this time.” Pitch perfect stuff, right down to Aidy Bryant hauling off to slap teenaged son Pete Davidson when he jokes about forgetting when Election Day is. (It’s Tuesday. November 6. Check here for all the necessary info you need to vote. On Tuesday.)

“HuckaPM” continued SNL’s baffling comedy position that literally every woman involved in the Trump administration is secretly ashamed of her role in, well, every shitty thing Trump and the Republican Party does. You know, despite the fact that there is no evidence to that in the public or private actions of any of them, including (or especially) the sketch’s target, White House Press Secretary and sneering daily mouthpiece for whatever bigoted nonsense dribbles out of Trump’s Twitter account in the middle of the night, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Still, this sketch works because of Aidy. Good god, is Aidy Bryant great at physical comedy. Even if one can’t follow the show’s premise that there is some glimmer of humanity in Sanders’ soul somewhere, Aidy sells the hell out of the idea that only a sleeping pill loaded with quaaludes and “what Michael Jackson’s doctor called ‘one-and-dones’” can knock Sanders out after a day of claiming that “CNN spelled backward is ISIS” and that Trump’s caravan boogeymen includes ravenous chupacabras with a trio of outstandingly timed and committed falls. Sometimes performance overcomes everything else.

The off-Broadway show short film trafficked in a sort of joke that never doesn’t work on me, so I’m going to allow myself to be pandered to. The main joke—that an actor-written topical revue is not very well written—is fine. (I loved how at least two of the numbers shamelessly aped Hamilton). But I’m just a sucker for jokes where scathing review blurbs are read out as if they’re raves by an enthusiastic voice-over guy, and these had me laughing. “This is helping no one,” and “Whose parents paid for this?” were good, but the New York Times critic’s economical “Jesus Christ!” got me out loud.

I am hip to the musics of today

Maggie Rogers came out flat in her SNL debut. Like, vocally, very flat for her first song of lilting, pretty pop. It was the sort of wobbly beginning that could knock a fledgeling performer right off her pins, but, to her credit, Rogers came back stronger in the second number. It helped that that song was more uptempo and didn’t highlight a delicate introductory vocal, but, still, props to Rogers for pulling it together. As Adam Grossman might bellow, “Redemption song!”

Most/Least Valuable (Not Ready For Prime Time) Player

Ego Nwodim got a line. Keep plugging, new kid.

Otherwise, in an exceptionally strong night for the female cast, Kate wins it by a whisker, edging out Cecily and Aidy.

“What the hell is that thing?”—The Ten-To-Oneland Report

While it’s no “Whiskers R We,” “Wigs For Pugs” ably carried on the ten-to-one tradition of doing adorably weird stuff with animals, as Hill and Cecily Strong played a couple of clearly mobbed-up entrepreneurs whose pug toupee business is in no way “a front for something.” Mainly, it’s just pugs in wigs, with a succession of very chill pugs getting carried out in their hairy finery, but sometimes that’s enough. And Hill, Strong, Aidy, Mooney, and Kenan (as a guy making pug beards) are thoroughly committed to their characters in a broad yet deadpan way that adds another level to the premise. Pugs in wigs. What more do you need, people?

Stray observations

Kenan’s Clarke cites his caravan sources as “the crows from Dumbo,” echoing Clarke’s description of his current state as “unpopular with my own people.”

McKinnon’s Ingraham refers to Baldwin as “disgraced former actor Alec Baldwin” and shows a clip from “Canteen Boy” to explain.

Che claims that the country would be doing better if red state parents would stop “sending all their liberal kids to coastal cities to do improv.”

Pete Davidson, addressing his new blue hair, claims he looks like “a guy who makes vape juice in a bathtub,” and “a Dr. Seuss character who went to prison.”

Melissa Villaseñor’s teen suspect finally breaks down, telling Jost that she only stabbed her dead friend as a joke, “but Logan took it the wrong way and started bleeding.”

Big Papi for Apple Watch: “You gotta watch your apples or a monkey’s gonna steal them, man!”

Vote on Tuesday.

The Red Sox won the World Series.

Source: https://tv.avclub.com/jonah-hill-joins-the-five-timers-club-on-a-uniformly-fu-1830206395

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theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

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It’s been less than a year since the post-Weinstein Time’s Up movement kicked off. But some of the men who left their jobs or stopped appearing in public after being accused of sexual misconduct are already beginning to make noises about a comeback.

Bill O’Reilly was forced to resign from Fox News last year after being accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment — accusations he denies. Now he is reportedly in talks to host a new TV show. Garrison Keillor is touring. Charlie Rose is shopping a new show. Mario Lopez, accused of groping multiple women, is reportedly thinking about starting a new company.

All of this may seem overly optimistic on the part of the accused men — Rose, let’s recall, was accused of sexually harassing eight women (he apologized but also claimed that not all of the accusations against him were accurate), and his plan is reportedly to just go around interviewing other accused men.

But history suggests that it’s not overly optimistic at all. All these men have a walking, talking reminder in front of them that the post-public disgrace comeback can be done. That you can be the most reviled man in Hollywood one minute and sitting pretty in the A-list section of the Oscars as a major nominee the next. That reminder’s name is Mel Gibson.

Gibson became persona non grata in Hollywood in 2006, after first spewing a string of anti-Semitic comments while he was being arrested on DUI charges and then pleading no contest to hitting the mother of his child.

“I don’t think I want to see any more Mel Gibson movies,” Barbara Walters announced on The View after that anti-Semitism scandal in 2006. Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel called for the entire entertainment industry to boycott Gibson.

But in 2017, Gibson appeared at the Oscars as a nominee for Best Director, grinning happily in the front section. He’s back in now.

Looking at how Mel Gibson has managed his comeback shows us how the men accused of sexual misconduct over the past year might plan to manage their own. Gibson is a case study in how a man who by his own admission did monstrous things can convince people that disappearing from the public eye for a few years makes up for those monstrous things, and how he can find his way back into polite society.

Please note that the following article contains excerpts from Gibson’s tapes, including graphic discussion of rape and domestic violence and the use of slurs.

By the early 2000s, Mel Gibson was a bona fide movie star/auteur at the top of his game.

He was hot, and he had industry clout: People magazine’s first Sexiest Man Alive in 1985; Forbes’s most powerful celebrity in 2004. He had prestige: 1995’s Braveheart, which he starred in and directed, won him two Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Director. And he could open a movie. Between 1989 and 2002, 10 of his movies brought in $100 million or more domestically. When he directed and produced The Passion of the Christ in 2004, he raked in $600 million on a budget of $30 million.

In our current post–movie star age, there’s no real equivalent to what Gibson was at the peak of his fame, but imagine that Chris Hemsworth decided to moonlight as a director and was successful at it, or that Christopher Nolan had a thriving side career as an action star, or that George Clooney was less polished and had more consistent box office clout. Mel Gibson was that big and that powerful.

Then in 2006, he was pulled over by a police officer for drunk driving and launched into an anti-Semitic tirade. “Fucking Jews … the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” he said. “Are you a Jew?” he asked his arresting officer, before addressing another (female) officer as “Sugar Tits.” The arresting officer recorded the entire encounter, and the tape was later leaked to the internet.

The DUI incident was damaging for Gibson, especially because it wasn’t the first time he’d flirted publicly with anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. The Passion of the Christ had been deeply controversial in 2004 for its depiction of Jews as bloodthirsty hordes calling for the death of Christ. “At every single opportunity, Mr. Gibson’s film reinforces the notion that the Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob are the ones ultimately responsible for the Crucifixion,” the Anti-Defamation League concluded.

In the wake of the DUI incident, more stories of anti-Semitism surfaced. Winona Ryder recalled that Gibson once called her an “oven-dodger.”

Other types of troubling comments from the past reemerged too. There was the homophobia. In 1991, Gibson infamously mocked gay men in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais (“Do I look like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?”), and when GLAAD recommended that he apologize, he responded, “I’ll apologize when hell freezes over. They can fuck off.”

Gibson has also repeatedly said that women were not equal to men, telling Playboy in 1995 that women should not become priests because “men and women are just different. They’re not equal.” When the interviewer asked for an example of the difference between men and women, Gibson elaborated, “I had a female business partner once. Didn’t work. … She was a cunt.”

An entire career’s worth of bigoted quotes — decades of them — were suddenly in the news, and the enormous machine that was Mel Gibson, movie star and successful director, began to falter.

Amy Pascal, then the head of Sony, disavowed him; so did former Universal president Sidney Sheinberg and Ari Emanuel. (Emanuel was head of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, where Gibson’s agent Ed Limato worked, but Emanuel wasn’t able to get Gibson off the agency’s roster until just before Limato’s death in 2010.) ABC scrapped a miniseries Gibson was developing on the Holocaust.

Gibson announced that he was going into rehab and publicly apologized twice. “I acted like a person completely out of control … and said things I do not believe to be true and which are despicable,” he said.

“His career is over,” an insider told People magazine anonymously. “He’s going to become toxic.”

The negative press didn’t hurt Gibson’s ability to score at the box office too badly — Apocalypto, which he directed and released in 2006, grossed more than $50 million domestically on a $40 million budget. But the movie got middling reviews, and it turned out to be the last Gibson film to see a theatrical release for five years.

Then in 2010, Gibson’s girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, with whom he had a child, accused him of hitting her so hard that he broke her teeth while she was carrying their infant daughter. Tapes leaked of their confrontation:

Oksana Grigorieva: You almost killed us, did you forget?

Mel Gibson: (making fake crying noises) The last three years have been a fucking gravy train for you.

O: (angry) You were hitting a woman with a child in her hands. You. What kind of a man is that? Hitting a woman when she’s holding a child in her hands? Breaking her teeth, twice, in the face, what kind of man is that?

M: (sarcastically) Mmm, ooh, you’re all angry now …

O: You’re going to get to, you know what?

M: You fucking deserved it.

O: You’re going to answer, one day, boy, you’re going to answer.

M: Huh?

O: There.

M: What, what? What are you threatening me?

O: Nothing, nothing. I’m not the one to threaten.

M: I’m threatening, I’ll put you in a fucking rose garden, you cunt. You understand that? ’Cause I’m capable of it. You understand that? Get a fucking restraining order. For what? What are you going to get a restraining order for? For me being drunk and disorderly? For hitting you? For what?

Elsewhere in the tapes, Gibson informs Grigorieva that “if you get raped by a pack of ni**ers it’ll be your fault,” and threatens to burn down the house with her in it, instructing her to “blow [him] first.”

Gibson later pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor battery charge for hitting Grigorieva; he served probation, underwent court-ordered counseling, and paid $600 in fines.

But if the legal consequences Gibson faced for his treatment of Grigorieva were minimal, the consequences in Hollywood were slightly splashier. His agency dropped him the day the tapes were released. (Emanuel finally had his opening to enact the boycott of Gibson he’d called for in 2006.) Leonardo DiCaprio pulled out of a movie Gibson was set to direct. A planned Gibson cameo in The Hangover 2 was scrapped after protests from the cast and crew. Get the Gringo, which Gibson produced, co-wrote, and starred in, never made it to a theatrical release in the US, instead languishing in video on demand upon its release in 2012.

There seemed to be a general consensus in Hollywood: No one wanted to see Mel Gibson’s face or have anything to do with him.

And so for years, he was silent.

But in 2016, the Gibson-directed Hacksaw Ridge grossed $175 million worldwide and $67 million domestically. It racked up six Oscar nominations, including one for Best Director. In 2017, Gibson headlined the family comedy Daddy’s Home 2, which grossed $180 million worldwide.

Gibson, the New York Times concluded, “has found himself back in Tinseltown’s warm embrace.” He has successfully managed a comeback.

So how did he get here from there?

There are four major tentpoles to Gibson’s comeback. It’s impossible to say that this four-part strategy is intentional on Gibson’s part — his publicist did not respond to a request for comment from Vox — but here’s what it looks like from the outside in.

First, Gibson rarely discusses either the DUI incident or the Grigorieva tapes in the press. Most of the interviews he grants are with friendly outlets — or, as Gibson friend and entertainment journalist Allison Hope Weiner phrased it in 2011 when she released Gibson’s first interview in years, with outlets where the editors are not “inclined to use this story to pursue their own agendas.” When he has to give an interview at a less friendly venue, he tends to do so with an associate who can run interference if the conversation seems to be trending toward any of Gibson’s scandals.

When Gibson does talk about his scandals, he suggests that if you really think about it, he was the wronged party, because his private moments of weakness were made public.

“Who anticipates being recorded? Who anticipates that?” he asked Deadline in 2011. “Who could anticipate such a personal betrayal?”

“Imagine the worst moment you have even had being recorded and broadcast to the world and it wasn’t meant to be public,” he said in 2016. “You didn’t stand on a soapbox and do it, but that’s what happens, you know.”

Gibson does not apologize. He does not express good wishes for the people he’s hurt. He maintains that he is the one who was really hurt. But mostly, he doesn’t say anything at all.

And he mostly doesn’t have to say anything. That’s the second tentpole of his comeback: He leaves the talking to his friends and allies, of which he has many, both in Hollywood and in the press.

“The fact that [Gibson] won’t jump to his own defense is part of his problem, but also part of why I have grown to respect him,” wrote Weiner for Deadline in 2014. (After publication, Weiner disclosed that Gibson was an investor in the media company at which she hosts two shows, but she maintained that “the suggestion that Mr. Gibson, or any third party, exercises influence over me or my shows is false.” Weiner did not respond to a request for comment from Vox.)

In her 2014 article, Weiner goes on to explain that she had become close with Gibson after covering him for years, and believed that he was not a bigot. He was just an alcoholic “with a frightening temper, capable of saying whatever will most offend the target of his anger.”

She cites the money Gibson had anonymously donated to Jewish charities, specifically lauding his secrecy, which, she says, was “in keeping with one of the highest forms of Tzedakah in the Jewish faith, giving when the recipient doesn’t know your identity.” (How secret those donations could possibly be when they’re being reported on in Deadline is not something Weiner discusses in the piece.)

As for the domestic violence charge? “From my own investigation of the incident, I am persuaded Gibson did not beat [Grigorieva] or give her a black eye,” Weiner writes. “I base this on interviews with her lawyer and the deputy district attorney who handled the case.”

She allows that Gibson has admitted to “tapping” Grigorieva, but argues that he was only reacting to Grigorieva shaking their infant daughter. The section of the leaked tape in which Grigorieva accuses Gibson of hitting her and he responds, “You fucking deserved it,” Weiner does not discuss.

Instead, she says, it was Grigorieva who was extorting Gibson for money. And anyway, she adds, Gibson was going through a really hard time back then, so it doesn’t even count. “He was depressed and lonely, his career in shambles as he apologized to anyone who’d listen,” she writes. “Those recordings revealed a man in personal turmoil.”

This general narrative — Gibson didn’t do it, and if he did, it doesn’t count, and if you think about it, he’s the real victim, and he’s actually very sorry and I’ll tell you all about it but you’d never know otherwise because he’d never say so himself — is one that has been repeated again and again by Gibson’s allies. When Peter Biskind profiled Gibson for Vanity Fair in 2011, he spoke to dozens of sources who were willing to spout the same talking points that Weiner trotted out in 2014 — including one anonymous friend who argued that the infamous DUI incident was secretly Gibson’s attempt at suicide by cop.

“I don’t think this was about being anti-Semitic,” the friend says. “I think he was trying to rile that guy into pulling out a gun and shooting him. Before he left the restaurant that night, he went to every single table and said good-bye. Why would you say good-bye to every table unless you think you’re never going to see them again? I believe that what was going on that night was a farewell.”

Even the friends of Gibson’s who aren’t willing to discuss his controversies will still come to his defense. Jodi Foster gave Gibson his first starring role after his DUI in 2011’s The Beaver, and then fought for the movie to be released after the Grigorieva tapes went public.

“God, I love that man,” Foster said of Gibson on the film’s publicity tour. “The performance he gave in this movie, I will always be grateful for. He brought a lifetime of pain to the character that we’ve been talking about for years, that I knew was part of his psyche and who he is. It’s part of him that is beautiful and that I want people to know, too. I can’t ever regret that.”

And Robert Downey Jr. pleaded with Hollywood to forgive Gibson. “Unless you are without sin — and if you are, you are in the wrong [expletive] industry, you should forgive him and let him work,” Downey said in 2011.

But the testimony of Gibson’s allies could only do so much. The comeback strategy needed a third tentpole: time. Gibson kept his head down and worked quietly in small genre movies for a few years, so that when he made his big push back into the mainstream with Hacksaw Ridge in 2016, 10 years after his DUI and six years after the domestic violence accusations, he could argue that he’d been out of play for a decade and that it was enough time.

“I’ve done a lot of work on myself these last 10 years,” he told Deadline. “I’ve deliberately kept a low profile. I didn’t want to just do the celebrity rehab thing for two weeks, declare myself cured and then screw up again. I think the best way somebody can show they’re sorry is to fix themselves and that’s what I’ve been doing and I’m just happy to be here. He who tries, gets.”

Hacksaw Ridge also added a fourth tentpole to Gibson’s comeback strategy. He was able to successfully break back into the mainstream as a director, not an actor, which meant he could keep his face out of the public eye while people got used to the idea of him being back in Hollywood. It was only after Hacksaw Ridge’s success legitimized Mel Gibson the director again that Mel Gibson the actor was able to make his triumphant reappearance in polite society with Daddy’s Home 2.

There was pushback to Gibson’s rearrival. “Hold on, how is Mel Gibson still a thing?” protested the feminist entertainment blog the Mary Sue.

“Is Mel Gibson really such an invaluable cultural figure that we should forgive or tolerate or willfully ignore this pattern of behavior?” demanded GQ in an article on Gibson’s “unearned” comeback. “Is anyone?”

The Daily Beast called for shame on Hollywood for allowing Gibson his comeback.

“Mel Gibson is unworthy of a ‘comeback,’ but he’s getting one anyway,” concluded Jezebel.

But Gibson seems to have gotten his comeback, regardless of any number of outraged think pieces. He’s doing fine. The four strategies worked.

Together, these four strategies create a kind of blurriness around exactly what Gibson did, and a mist of nebulous remorse around his subsequent behavior: Something happened, but it really wasn’t that big a deal, and now he feels bad, and anyway, it was all a long time ago. It gives his comeback a sense of vagueness — and that’s exactly what the men tarred by #MeToo will most likely try to create as they plot their own comebacks.

After all, Gibson’s career appears to be in full flower. He has signed on to direct the World War II drama Destroyer. He stars with Sean Penn in The Professor and the Madman, set to be released this fall. Reportedly, he is being eyed to star opposite Mark Wahlberg in Warner Bros.’ The Six Billion Dollar Man. If your goal is to convince the world to forget that you have been credibly accused of doing terrible things, and to find a way to once again work in the uppermost echelons of Hollywood, then Gibson is an admirable role model.

So as those disgraced men begin to put the pieces in motion to plot the next steps of their careers, the question that remains is whether the collective we are capable of holding on to the specific details of the dozens and dozens of horrific cases of sexual misconduct that came out last fall — or whether we’ll shrug and say that sure, something bad happened. But it was a long time ago and it really wasn’t that big a deal.

Original Source -> Mel Gibson has set the blueprint for a #MeToo comeback. Expect other men to follow it.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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kartiavelino · 7 years ago

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How Robin Williams was being torn apart and couldn’t fight back

Robin Williams struggled to recollect his strains. This was uncommon for the hyperverbal, Oscar-winning actor, and it hit him laborious in Vancouver in 2014 through the filming of “Evening on the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,” the third film within the profitable household franchise. “He was sobbing in my arms on the finish of each day. It was horrible. Horrible,” make-up artist Cheri Minns recalled. “I mentioned to his individuals, ‘I’m a make-up artist. I don’t have the capability to cope with what’s taking place to him.’ ” Minns steered to Robin that he return to stand-up to get out of his rut and reclaim a few of his misplaced confidence. However Robin refused. “He simply cried and mentioned, ‘I can’t, Cheri. I don’t understand how anymore. I don’t know easy methods to be humorous.’ ” How may this be the identical lovable weirdo who coined the greeting “nanu nanu” as Mork from Ork; the radio DJ who famously brayed, “GOOOOOOD MORNING, VIETNAM!”; the widower therapist who broke our hearts in “Good Will Looking”? The fact — although Robin didn’t realize it — was that he was affected by a pernicious neurodegenerative illness that was within the means of robbing him of his abilities, his mind and his very self. This heartbreaking interplay is recounted within the biography “Robin” (Henry Holt & Co.) by Dave Itzkoff, out this month, which gives new particulars concerning the comedian nice’s ultimate days and the tough actuality of what it’s prefer to lose a once-in-a-generation thoughts. Robin McLaurin Williams, born in Chicago on July 21, 1951, had a privileged however lonely childhood, spending hours enjoying with toy troopers in his attic. He attended Juilliard, then headed out West to explode the Los Angeles and San Francisco comedy scenes. American comic and actor Robin Williams, carrying a girl’s bathrobe, furry hat, and sun shades, being hugged by American actor Pam Dawber, in a nonetheless from the tv sequence, ‘Mork and Mindy’.Getty Photos Longtime good friend Billy Crystal described seeing Robin kill on stage: “It was electrical, and all of us simply sat there and went, ‘Oh, my god, what is that this?’ It was like attempting to catch a comet with a baseball glove.” Robin landed the visitor function of Mork from Ork on the hit present “Glad Days” in February 1978. The character was so indelible it led to a spin-off present, “Mork & Mindy,” which, by the next spring in 1979, reached 60 million viewers. Robin Williams was now a family title. Regardless of rampant drug and alcohol habit (he famously mentioned cocaine was “God’s method of telling you you’re making an excessive amount of cash”), Robin simply discovered big-screen stardom. He earned an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of the verbose Vietnam radio host in 1987’s “Good Morning, Vietnam.” Different critically acclaimed roles adopted, together with 1989’s “Lifeless Poets Society,” 1991’s “The Fisher King,” and 1997’s “Good Will Looking,” which landed him an Oscar for his portrayal of a caring therapist to Matt Damon’s angsty genius. ‘He was sobbing in my arms on the finish of each day. It was horrible. Horrible.’ Robin additionally piggybacked from one moneymaker to the following because the face of comedy. He voiced the spastic, singing Genie in Disney’s 1992 movie “Aladdin” and performed a cross-dressing nanny in 1993’s “Mrs. Doubtfire” and a person trapped in a board sport in 1995’s “Jumanji.” Robin Williams may evidently do no unsuitable. However a sequence of business and crucial flops adopted — from the maudlin (1998’s “Patch Adams”) to the darkish (2002’s “Dying to Smoochy”) to the plain unwatchable (2009’s “Outdated Canines”). In the meantime, his long-running points with medication and alcohol resurfaced, and after his household staged an intervention, he checked himself right into a rehab facility in 2006. In restoration, he met his third spouse, Susan Schneider, whom he wed in 2011. (He married first spouse, Valerie Velardi, in 1978, and the 2 had a son, Zachary, now 35. They divorced in 1988, and the following yr, he wed his son’s nanny, Marsha Garces. The 2 have been married for 19 years and had daughter Zelda, 28, and son Cody, 26.) He was a “stimulus junkie,” whose anxieties got here from his work. “The road of labor he was in bred anxiousness and self-centered issues. He would at all times say, ‘You’re solely nearly as good as your final efficiency,’ ” Susan says within the e book. The magical 1990s success eluded him as he jumped from one low-budget mission to the following till CBS introduced his return to the small display screen in “The Loopy Ones,” which premiered September 2013. He performed Simon Roberts, an getting old ad-agency founder, who should cede management of his enterprise to his daughter. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Robin Williams converse onstage throughout “The Loopy Ones” panel.Getty Photos However the magic wasn’t there. “Williams appears exhausted,” one evaluation learn. “So is that this present.” That’s the place the difficulty started. Robin started to complain about an array of signs: indigestion, bother urinating, insomnia, lack of his sense of scent and heartburn. A slight tremor cropped up in his left hand, which was attributed to a shoulder damage. Susan describes the avalanche of signs: “It was like enjoying whack-a-mole. Which symptom is it this month? I assumed, is my husband a hypochondriac? We’re chasing it and there’s no solutions, and by now we’d tried every little thing.” He dropped weight, his as soon as booming voice grew to become tremulous, and he stooped. Producers and colleagues observed the change. Pam Dawber, Robin’s co-star from “Mork & Mindy,” joined the solid of “The Loopy Ones” to lift scores. On set, Dawber noticed a deeply modified man from the riotous and typically inappropriate (she says Robin groped and flashed her on set) man she had labored with a long time earlier than. “I might come house and say to my husband, ‘One thing is unsuitable. He’s flat. He’s misplaced the spark. I don’t know what it’s,’ ” Dawber says within the e book. CBS canceled the present after one season as scores dropped from a excessive of 15.5 million to simply about 5 million by the finale. Associates thought Robin was depressed over the cancellation, however different unusual behaviors began to emerge that couldn’t be so simply defined. He grew paranoid over a perception that folks have been stealing from him. On the set of “Evening on the Museum,” he suffered a extreme panic assault and was positioned on antipsychotic treatment. Billy Crystal described seeing his previous good friend after a four-month absence, discovering him frail, skinny, and, most disconcerting, “uncharacteristically quiet.” After they mentioned their goodbyes after dinner, Robin burst into tears. “What’s the matter?” Crystal requested. “Oh, I’m simply so joyful to see you. It’s been too lengthy. You already know I really like you,” Robin mentioned. Billy Crystal (proper) and Robin WilliamsGetty Photos On Could 28, 2014, Robin was recognized with Parkinson’s illness, a degenerative dysfunction that impairs motor functioning. Medical doctors assured him that they’d medication that would management the tremors and that he seemingly would have one other “10 good years.” Robin stored his prognosis near the vest, sharing it solely along with his kids, relations and inside circle. “I by no means heard him afraid like that earlier than,” Crystal mentioned. “This was the boldest comic I ever met — the boldest artist I ever met. However this was only a scared man.” To Robin, “it was the conclusion of certainly one of his most deeply felt and lifelong fears,” Itzkoff writes. In a 1991 interview with Playboy through the publicity tour for “The Fisher King,” Robin mentioned that latent worry 20 years earlier than it could contact him personally. “There’s that worry — if I felt like I was turning into not simply boring however a rock, that I nonetheless couldn’t spark, nonetheless hearth off or discuss issues, if I’d begin to fear or obtained too afraid to say one thing . . . If I cease attempting, I’d get afraid,” Robin mentioned. 20 years after he spoke these phrases, Robin was clearly afraid. Robin went on an apology tour, begging for forgiveness (the place none was demanded) from his three kids for the way in which he handled them when he was within the throes of a drug habit. He requested comic Dana Carvey to forgive him for stealing bits (an allegation that dogged Robin earlier in his profession), although Carvey insisted that he hadn’t. Robin checked himself right into a the Dan Anderson Renewal Heart, a rehab facility in Minnesota, to be “cloistered on a campus the place he may obtain shut supervision, and the place he may meditate, do yoga and concentrate on additional 12-step work that, it was hoped, would assist him handle his sickness.” However this wasn’t sufficient — this was not a drug habit, it was a degenerating mind sickness. He didn’t realize it then, however there was little to be carried out. In an article she later wrote for the journal Neurology titled “The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Mind,” Susan described what Robin was like: “He had a sluggish, shuffling gait. He hated that he couldn’t discover the phrases he wished in conversations. He would thrash at evening and nonetheless had horrible insomnia. At instances, he would discover himself caught in a frozen stance, unable to maneuver, and annoyed when he got here out of it. He was starting to have bother with visible and spatial talents in the way in which of judging distance and depth. His lack of fundamental reasoning simply added to his rising confusion.” Nonetheless, typically Robin’s gentle would shine. Robin Williams entertains the troops through the United Service Organizations tour at Baghdad Worldwide Airport in 2003.Getty Photos Comic Mark Pitta recollects the shock of seeing Robin on the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, Calif., in July 2014. “He had a thousand-yard stare going,” he mentioned. However then within the inexperienced room, Pitta introduced up service animals and advised the story of a comic whose canine would wake her up when she choked in her sleep. With out lacking a beat, Robin mentioned, “Oh, a Heimlich retriever.” “It obtained an enormous giggle. He simply sat there and had a bit of smile on his face,” Pitta mentioned. Two weeks later, Robin settled down for the evening at his San Francisco Bay-area house. It had been a tough day. Robin had fixated on his assortment of classic wristwatches, which he wished to relocate for worry that they’d be stolen. However that evening he appeared calm and even supplied his spouse a foot therapeutic massage earlier than retiring to his personal room. “As we at all times did, we mentioned to one another, ‘Good evening, my love,’ ” Susan recalled. “He appeared like he was doing higher, like he was on the trail of one thing,” she later mentioned. “I’m pondering, ‘OK, stuff is working. The treatment, he’s getting sleep.’ ” When Susan woke the following morning, she observed the door to Robin’s bed room was nonetheless shut. She advised Itzkoff she was relieved he was lastly getting some wanted sleep. When Rebecca, his assistant, requested how he was doing, Susan optimistically answered, “I feel he’s getting higher.” By 11 a.m., Robin had nonetheless not left his room, and his 20-year assistant, Rebecca Erwin Spencer, grew to become involved. She used a paper clip to open his bed room door and discovered a grisly scene: Robin had hanged himself along with his belt. Whereas the world mourned the lack of the comedy legend, within the absence of any suicide notice, questions surfaced: Had Robin been utilizing medication once more? Was he depressed? Three months later, the post-mortem outcomes got here in. His mind had left its personal suicide notice. The neuropathologist’s prognosis was: “diffuse Lewy physique dementia.” The comic didn’t have Parkinson’s, he had not fallen off the wagon and he was not severely depressed. It was one thing even graver: He suffered from an incurable mind illness that happens when proteins construct up within the mind’s nerve cells, impairing its operate. It begins with reminiscence issues and bodily stiffness and graduates to excessive persona modifications, psychiatric signs and finally demise. Lewy physique is the second commonest progressive dementia after Alzheimer’s illness. In contrast to Alzheimer’s, the place victims have points forming new recollections, individuals with Lewy physique dementia can type new recollections however have a tough time retrieving them. It’s as if the very essence of Robin was nonetheless there — he simply may now not entry it. Nobody can really perceive what Robin confronted throughout these ultimate days, however Crystal gives some perception into what it will need to have been like for such a high-functioning thoughts to unravel so violently. “I put myself in his place. Consider it this fashion: The velocity at which the comedy got here is the velocity at which the terrors got here,” Crystal mentioned. “And all that they described that may occur with this psychosis, if that’s the fitting phrase — the hallucinations, the photographs, the fear — coming on the velocity his comedy got here at, possibly even quicker, I can’t think about dwelling like that.” Share this: https://nypost.com/2018/05/05/how-an-incurable-brain-disease-haunted-robin-williams-final-days/ The post How Robin Williams was being torn apart and couldn’t fight back appeared first on My style by Kartia. http://www.kartiavelino.com/2018/05/how-robin-williams-was-being-torn-apart-and-couldnt-fight-back.html

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trendingnewsb · 8 years ago

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Why It’s Harder To Take Down Sex Abusers In Washington Than In Hollywood

Over the last month, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey and other influential men in the entertainment industry have seen their careers all but destroyed because of reports detailing serial sexual predation.

While it took years to corroborate what had been open secrets, once the stories of those men went public, the consequences were swift: movies and television shows canceled, awards and honors rescinded.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the voting body for the Oscars, held an emergency meeting to expel Weinstein — striking action from an institution that usually moves at a glacial pace.

Yet as politicians (of both political parties) face accusations of sexual misconduct, it has been much rarer for them to face such dramatic consequences, if any at all.

Perhaps the starkest example of this discrepancy came after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape last October: Host Billy Bush was fired from his job at NBC’s “Today” show, while reality TV star-turned-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump — who boasted on the tape that “when you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything” — was elected president of the United States.

Voters are not going to the ballot thinking that the problem of sexual predatory behavior is one that should influence their vote, and that’s where our real work lies.” Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates

So why has the political realm proved less willing to hand out moral payback? In part because political and ideological stakes are involved.

Voters who choose to overlook moral transgressions do so out of “political calculus” and “expediency,” according to Ellen Bravo, a longtime activist for policies helping women in the workplace.

“Even it it’s true, we have too much to gain by having that person in, and so we’ll put up with it,” she said of voters weighing sexual harassment allegations against their favored candidates.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) recently admitted that politics was the key factor in her decision on how handle the scandal that’s erupted in her state’s U.S. Senate election. Even though candidate Roy Moore has faced accusations of sexual misconduct from nearly 10 women, Ivey said she still backs him because ultimately, it’s important that he is a member of the Republican Party.

“I believe in the Republican Party, what we stand for, and most important, we need to have a Republican in the United States Senate to vote on things like Supreme Court justices, other appointments the Senate has to confirm, and make major decisions,” Ivey said.

Jonathan Bachman via Getty Images

GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore has denied multiple allegations that he preyed on teenage girls by portraying those accusations as a partisan attack.

People are also more likely to dismiss sexual assault survivors if they see their accusations as partisan, said Caroline Heldman, professor of politics at Occidental College. And that is much easier if the accused is already a partisan figure, like a politician.

The accusers are assessed “through the lens of partisanship,” Heldman said, “as in, ‘Oh, maybe this is just a woman from the Republican Party who’s going after a Democrat.’”

Moore has played on this tendency, characterizing the allegations against him as a conspiracy.

“For many of his supporters, they view it as just being a partisan attack, which allows complete dismissal of multiple survivors coming forward, from different periods of time, telling the exact same story or similar stories,” Heldman said.

There are fewer means for holding lawmakers accountable.

Other dynamics that make it harder to punish alleged sexual harassers in politics go beyond the voters’ immediate considerations.

For one, there are more individual entities in private industry with the power to take decisive action.

“The pressure points there come from employees, come from customers, and should come from a board and from shareholders,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “There are a range of people who have a vested interest in a company getting it right.”

In the case of Weinstein, the board of his production company removed him from his post and sold off or shelved the company’s upcoming movies. The distributors of Louis C.K.’s latest movie scrapped plans for its release, and HBO removed his comedy specials from its website.

If the powers that be within Hollywood see these dynamics hurting their investments and/or causing them some very serious liability issues, then people will get fired. Vanessa Tyson, assistant professor of politics at Scripps College

“The burden just isn’t as steep when it comes to toppling a sexual predator in Hollywood,” said Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, a legal organization focusing on gender equality. “Bad PR generated by a few complaints can be enough to damage a celebrity permanently. And the industry has other tools to oust sexual predators, and justice can be served by the few in charge of those tools, like the producer of a show cancels it rather than feature a predator or the academy, which has control over its membership.”

Contrast that with the options for punishing lawmakers.

“The rules are very, very limited for holding members of the House or the Senate accountable and non-existent for the presidency, essentially, unless there’s some criminal investigation or charges,” Heldman said.

To report sexual harassment on Capitol Hill, lawmakers and staffers must go through a byzantine system that offers little transparency or recourse for accusers.

“Congress right now is in the business of policing itself,” Goss Graves said. “There isn’t really another body that’s an effective counter to what’s happening.”

Farrell said it isn’t a coincidence that “politicians make it hard for people to complain about them.”

“It’s made arduous by design,” she said. “This is the fox guarding the henhouse.”

The fear of economic consequences can push a private company to take quick action against harassers.

“If the powers that be within Hollywood see these dynamics hurting their investments and/or causing them some very serious liability issues, then people will get fired and can get fired,” said Vanessa Tyson, assistant professor of politics at Scripps College. “I don’t know that this, for instance, changes the hearts or minds of any number of executives that may have misogynist tendencies, but a lot of social movements have been able to demonstrate over time that speaking with your pocketbook, that hitting power with your pocketbook can achieve certain gains.”

By contrast, with lawmakers, the only concrete action that individuals outside Congress can take is through elections, which Heldman pointed out is an “imperfect mechanism” because it “doesn’t lend itself to immediate response.”

In other words, if Trump had faced accusations of sexual assault while he was still the host of “The Apprentice,” he might have faced swifter and harsher punishment than he did as a presidential candidate.

Famous accusers can expedite the process of taking claims seriously.

Farrell referred to Weinstein as “a convenient fall guy when it comes to talking about sexual predators,” because the number and nature of his accusers, who included A-list actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, “helped elevate the issue” and “move beyond the question of whether it happened to why it happened and the broader system.”

Of the accusations, Farrell said, “it was very clear that many knew them to be true, and his board knew them to be true,” in part because of the level of fame involved.

Bravo similarly noted that celebrity status can reduce attacks on accusers’ credibility. “They have a high-profile, visible position and a fan base that makes it hard to discredit them,” she said.

Bob Riha Jr. via Getty Images

Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow celebrated at the Oscars in 1999, when “Shakespeare in Love” took Best Picture and Paltrow took Best Actress.

As a group, the women accusing politicians of sexual assault and harassment are simply not as famous as movie stars, and many had no significant public profile before they came forward.

“I actually think if famous white actresses had come forward and accused Donald Trump, that things would have gone differently,” Heldman said. “If Gwyneth Paltrow comes forward, I think most Americans are more likely to believe that it happened than if a nobody comes forward.”

In one key aspect, however, the situations in entertainment and politics may not be that different.

“Both in Congress and in Hollywood, you see processes where institutions are protecting the institutions themselves, certainly not protecting those who have been victimized by sexual predators and predatory behavior,” Tyson said.

While men like Weinstein have suffered direct consequences, they may yet make career comebacks, as society tends to be forgiving of men’s transgressions.

The men being punished now might just be “sacrificial lambs,” Heldman cautioned, rather than catalysts for significant, long-term change in Hollywood.

“There’s some action being taken, although my guess is that these men will work in the industry again,” she said. “Woody Allen and Roman Polanski have been working in the industry for decades, with very serious allegations, so I’m not entirely sure if there’s a big difference.”

Mike Blake/Reuters

Less than a decade after going on an anti-Semitic rant at a police officer, and later being caught abusing his then-girlfriend, actor and director Mel Gibson received an Oscar nomination.

A common theme in sexual harassment stories across industries is women being forced out of their jobs and denied opportunities for advancement, which Tyson said is “part of the economic oppression of women.”

“That is such a massive amount of human capital that is essentially leaving these industries where they could make a profound difference, but they are being driven out in various ways, either by misogynists or by people who are unwilling to stand up to [the misogynists],” she said.

Farrell described the fact that politicians face relatively few consequences for sexual misconduct as “a really good barometer on how far we have to go” in raising awareness of the broader issue.

“We’ve seen really good progress, really great outrage, in response to complaints, but the fact that politicians march on is an indication of how far we have to go in this country to really have the cultural shift we need to oust predators,” she said. “Voters are not going to the ballot thinking that the problem of sexual predatory behavior is one that should influence their vote, and that’s where our real work lies.”

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