TOM:  Were you ever in a room with Harvey?

CAROL:  Nope.  Never.

TOM:  You were in rooms alone with a boss who was a known womanizer.

CAROL:   I was in elevators with him when he was inappropriate.

TOM:  Did he ever hit on you?

CAROL:  He’d flirt.  He’d touch your hair.  But none of us thought that was crossing a line.

TOM:  He wasn’t exactly a predator.

CAROL:  Well, he made the receptionist find models he saw in magazines for an afternoon quickie.  She came to me and asked, “What do I do?”  And I said “You can quit.”

TOM:  Did she quit?

CAROL:  No, I quit.  Not because of the borderline behavior.  Because he was so abusive.  The next rung on the ladder of horror is the verbal abuse.  I had to conduct therapy sessions with the staff he brutalized.

TOM:  The way all this sexual stuff was taken for granted.  That scene in Sullivan’s Travels, where Veronica Lake meets Joel McCrea in the diner…She’s given up on Hollywood…talking about having to be nice to casting directors…”Yes, Mr. Smearkase…No, Mr. Smearkase…Really, Mr. Smearkase…Oo, Mr. Smearkase, that’s my knee.”  And that scene in The Deer Park, where a studio chief is getting a blowjob under his desk…Mailer couldn’t call it that, he had to resort to a dick metaphor: “Serving at the thumb of power.”

CAROL:  It only got worse.

TOM:  I remember what Don Ohlmeyer said to me…The Anita Hill hearings were on TV… He goes, ”The workplace is going to be very lonely from now on.”  He used to walk down a hall with his arm around a woman’s shoulders…and knead their necks… I never heard that anybody complained.

CAROL:  The workplace didn’t change all that much, did it?

TOM:  Maybe at the margins.  The consensus seems to be things will change.  A “watershed moment.”  From “player” to “predator,” overnight.

CAROL:  I guess we’ll see.  It does seem to be changing already.

TOM:  But predatory behavior is as old as the caves.  Men were supposed to have as much sex with as many women as possible, according to the ev psych guys.  Rape wasn’t rape in the cave days.  Stalking wasn’t stalking.  It was just what men did.  Greek gods were rapists.  A lot of preliterate tribes condoned rape.

CAROL:  We can rise above our DNA.

TOM:  Most people do.  But men who have sex with a lot of women are admired.

CAROL:  By men.

TOM:  By women too.  Maybe “predator envy” will phase out.  I do think there’ll be less sexual harassment now in Hollywood.  People will be watching themselves.  I wonder about the other forms of abuse.  Will people stop throwing chairs and garbage cans?

CAROL:  I worked for Edgar Scherick for many years.  He reduced people to puddles of tears.  And nobody did anything.  Yes, you can always quit your job, but people don’t quit these glamour jobs.  Unless you’re asked to murder somebody.  I had lots of good jobs, working for bad people.  Meanwhile I was flying first class, staying at the St. Regis.  And the work is fun.  It’s a trade-off.  But wrath like Edgar Scherick’s—you never knew what would set him off.

TOM:  It’s emotional abuse.

CAROL:  It’s emotional abuse.  If you had a parent like that, I guess they could be reported to social services, if things got crazy enough.  But with a boss you can’t do anything.

TOM:  And that kind of abuse—“Swimming with Sharks” abuse—screaming…belittling…it’s  probably more widespread than sexual harassment.  Or at least as widespread.  It’s coin of the realm.  “If you can’t take the heat,” etc.  And it’s all a function of power.  If the mailroom guy starts screaming at people, they call Security.

CAROL:  If you’re in a work situation, with a screamer, you don’t realize what toll it takes, sometimes, until you leave.  Like women who get out of a bad marriage, and look back, “I didn’t realize at the time how horrible I felt, how depressed I was.”  And you start to believe, if you’re yelled at and told you’re worthless, you start to believe it, and then it’s even harder to leave.  I saw one employee turn into an alcoholic, he was so belittled.

TOM:  Again, the power factor.  Somebody gets belittled, they think, well, I couldn’t abuse people the way he does, but that’s what it takes, that’s why he’s the boss and I’m the underling.  They rationalize being abused.

CAROL:  The behavior is valued.

TOM:  Exactly.

CAROL:  They create drama.  They’re big personalities.  People are attracted to that.  How many times have we heard writers say, “I want to be with that agent.  He’s a killer.”  “I’m a nice guy, he’s an asshole, but he’s my asshole.”

TOM:  What about ass-kissing?  Did these guys require their asses to be kissed, like Trump?

CAROL:  Not that I saw.  But is Harvey Weinstein a surrogate for Trump?  Is all the outrage at Trump being redirected?  I think that’s a commonly held view.  And Harvey will never be able to make a comeback, unlike Mel Gibson or Roman Polanski or Woody.

TOM:  Woody never went away.

CAROL:  Some people stopped going to his movies.

TOM:  Well, the movies got worse.  The pitchforks are definitely out now.

CAROL:  There is a danger.  People may go after anybody who says, “Boo.”  Somebody who says something objectionable in a casual or humorous way, and suddenly it blows up on social media and out they go.  Or people are afraid to talk, to say anything or do anything, censoring themselves all over the place.

TOM:  There is something faintly Stalinist in the air.  All these ritual apologies.

CAROL:  They’ll start to come out of the woodwork, people with old grievances.  Or point a finger at someone, just to get rid of him.

TOM:  What sort of friendly behavior will be OK?  Will women be allowed to touch men, but not vice versa?

CAROL:  And will these enablers be held accountable?  The 150 people at Miramax, who knew what was going on, and they don’t say anything, should they be brought up on charges?  What about the agents who set the actresses up with Harvey?  Will they be charged?

TOM:  No.

CAROL:  Why not?  If they were complicit in a crime.  The ones who knew they were pimping for Harvey…telling the girls to go up to his hotel room…when they knew what was going to happen…is what they did illegal?

TOM: Well, if they ran Harvey’s bath…

CAROL:  Or say if they delivered some manuscripts to the hotel room, and he answered the door in his robe, with the girl due any minute…they could have warned the girl…

TOM:  “Duty to warn.”  I don’t know if it applies.  How much of what Harvey did is illegal?  Rape is one thing, but what about exposing yourself to a person in a hotel room?  You open a raincoat on a subway, it’s indecent exposure…what about when nobody else is around?  I guess the prosecutors can threaten the enablers with legal action to get them to testify…if Harvey pleads not guilty to this or that charge.

CAROL:  A lot of people think he’ll kill himself.

TOM:  David Begelman killed himself.

CAROL:  But not right away.  After that business forging Cliff Robertson’s name on a check, he still had a lot of support from his friends.  People liked Begelman.  Nobody seems to like Harvey.  Nobody has come forward, if you don’t count Donna Karan, and she recanted her support.  Though I know women who say they won’t wear her clothes anymore.

TOM:  O.J.—he had friends.

CAROL:  And he threatened to kill himself at one point.

TOM:  Begelman went bankrupt.  Will Harvey?  Somebody told me his net worth is a quarter of a billion.

CAROL:  But if you’ve lost your company, your wife, you’ve been tossed out of the Academy, the Producers’ Guild…even your award from Harvard is taken away.  You’re a national joke, a worldwide joke…attacked every day in the media…totally disgraced.  And he was the king.

TOM:  Well, yes and no.  I mean you look at his IMDb.  There’s Quentin, and David O. Russell, and Beautiful Girls, but not that many more that I loved, anyway.

CAROL:  Are you saying he was overrated?

TOM:  It’s not really the point, is it.  But yeah.  When Richard Rushfield asked people to send the Ankler their list of the five worst Oscar winners, Shakespeare in Love appeared on almost all of them.

CAROL:  I hear Harvey was a joke in the theater world.  He produced Finding Neverland, didn’t know what he was doing.  The production was a mess because he didn’t take care of business.

TOM:  I wonder how many girls had normal sex with him.

CAROL:  I don’t expect we’ll hear much from them.  This whole thing has kind of united Hollywood…in a way we’ve never seen before.  Which is a good thing, I guess, but there’s a lot of sanctimony here.  Everybody’s better than Harvey.  But what nobody talks about is, there are a lot of abusive women in Hollywood.

TOM:  I don’t know if they’re raping anybody.

CAROL:  But the way it’s being painted…the men are pigs, and the women can do no wrong.  All the women are preyed upon by these horrible men.

TOM:  Without agency.

CAROL:  With the help of their agents.  Ha ha.  Harvey supposedly went to an institution for sex addicts.  In Arizona.  Is he a sex addict?

TOM:  Well, the definition of any addiction…or personality disorder…one of the criteria is it has to disrupt your life.  If it doesn’t, it’s not pathological.  There are successful narcissists and unsuccessful narcissists.  Functioning alcoholics and winos.

CAROL:  It interfered with Harvey’s functioning.

TOM:  Not at the time.  But there does seem to be something compulsive about his behavior.  Very risky.

CAROL:  Not so risky if he got away with it.  For thirty years.

TOM:  Because everybody else was getting away with it.

CAROL:  Until the movies started to tank.

TOM:  If he’d been thinking ahead…”I’m not always gonna be making Oscar movies.”

CAROL:  People don’t think that way.

TOM:  Not if they’re compelled to do this kind of stuff.  Did he do it all the time?  Every project, zero in on some woman?  Could he go for months without?

CAROL:  All good questions.

TOM:  We’ll wait for his memoir.