I had a bad day yesterday. The outside world got to me.
On the drive back from Colorado, I listened to some of Louis Theroux's podcast, Grounded. He interviews Rose McGowan, who talks about the complicity of Hollywood in Harvery Weinstein's crimes. How when she was called up to his hotel suite at Sundance, the two men who brought her up could have warned her. Even something small as a "watch out" when she went into the room. But the didn't say anything. Theroux had interviewed Jimmy Saville before he died and before that it had come out that he was systematically sexually abusing children. Theroux wondered aloud to McGowan if he had made a mistake in not digging that up in the interview. She thought he had. The rumors about both Saville and Weinstein were pervasive. People knew if they didn't know know. McGowan talked passionately about how if she had known anything, she wouldn't have been quiet about it. She wouldn't have let people get hurt, even if tanked her career. And I believed her.
Listened to an episode of Scriptnotes yesterday, for the first time in a while. Jon and Craig were talking about moral sticky spots that they run into in their careers as screenwriters. One of the questions was about a showrunner's behavior. It seemed like it wasn't criminal behavior, more along the lines of an abusive or toxic work environment. Like I imagine they shout a lot. Jon and Craig didn't clarify, but they did say that they had heard accounts about that person's behavior from multiple sources. They didn't feel like they were obliged to do anything about it. They weren't implicated in the behavior just by knowing about it. This might be a dumb question, but is there not an HR anywhere? Being an asshole is nowhere near as damaging as being a rapist, but people still get hurt. A person's quality of life has a lot to do with their job, with the people they work with.
My approach to getting into the industry is that I have to be undeniably excellent. That I need to have multiple strong and memorable samples, and that I need to get lucky. It's hard for me to fathom that someone can go on succeeding in the industry while exhibiting behaviors that would get you fired anywhere else. Why don't they say to that showrunner, you know a lot of people would love to have this job? TV is a collaborative medium. (Life is a collaborative medium.) Why are we putting up with this?
Craig talked about how everyone has weird stuff that they don't want going public. That's why you don't speak out against someone else's behavior unless you have good evidence. If you speak up, they'll just counter accuse you. It made me wonder, do we all have dark/weird shit buried? Is it, like Craig said, part of being human? And if we do have dark/weird shit, does that make other people's worse shit justifiable? Jon and Craig have taken a protective stance. They're going to get along to get along. (That's not the phrase, is it?) They're scared, but they're not even the ones likely to fall into the cross-hairs. That's going to be people with a lot less power, people who are young, not men, and not white. If weird/bad behaviors are dragged into the light, en masse, a lot of people will get hurt -- Craig's right. And I can't help but think that's intolerable because systematically, it's the wrong kinds of people. It's people like him.
I also listened to an Adam Buxton podcast where he's interviewing Louis Theroux (from a couple of years ago). They're talking about the Me Too movement. It was around the time where Aziz Ansari and Chris Hardwick were being called out. Buxton went the same place Craig did (I'm using first vs last names willy-nilly here); he thought about his own past coming to light in that way. How people could speak out against him when he really did nothing that bad. It's an instinct that bums me out. Like men and boys have this protected right to hurt people on their way to self-realization. It's an attitude that doesn't count the cost lost on the women's side at all. It's not even considered. It makes me realize that even figures I like and respect aren't people who would take my side if something happened to me. They'd worry about how accountability in one area might worm its way back around to affect them.
I don't think things are getting better.
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