The Hayek revelations

Good grief. I just read Salma Hayek’s piece in the New York Times. It’s a horror through and through — Harvey Weinstein is a terrible human being. There was the familiar constant pressure for sex, and his anger when denied, but what’s new here is how Weinstein, who had a reputation for sponsoring great art movies, was in active force in compromising the art. What he did to Hayek’s movie, Frida, was unconscionable.

Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s “unibrow.” He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me. He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.

Frida Kahlo did many self-portraits, and her striking appearance was part of her identity, and Weinstein wanted to reduce her looks to something more conventional? She was afflicted with polio as a child and severely injured in an accident in her teens, and lived her whole life with a disability and chronic pain, and Weinstein wanted to erase that in a biography? How clueless is he, and how many of the good Weinstein-produced movies were made in spite of his interference, and how much better would they have been if he’d never been allowed to say a word?

He offered me one option to continue. He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.

Christ. Hayek gave in on that demand, reluctantly, and with much anguish. But now you’ll need to keep this in mind next time you watch Game of Thrones or some cop show which features a stroll through a strip joint. The nudity isn’t some critical part of the story, or even a part of the atmosphere added for verisimilitude. It’s probably because some guy high up in the production likes the power of being able to compel the women acting in his show to expose themselves. It’s not that nudity and sex can’t be a natural part of a story, but that there’s so much of it, and it’s almost entirely gratuitous.

It sort of turns out well, with regard to the movie, at least…except for the part where Hayek’s success was added to the Weinstein luster, and that he then intentionally stunted her career.

Months later, in October 2002, this film, about my hero and inspiration — this Mexican artist who never truly got acknowledged in her time with her limp and her unibrow, this film that Harvey never wanted to do, gave him a box office success that no one could have predicted, and despite his lack of support, added six Academy Award nominations to his collection, including best actress.

Even though “Frida” eventually won him two Oscars, I still didn’t see any joy. He never offered me a starring role in a movie again. The films that I was obliged to do under my original deal with Miramax were all minor supporting roles.

It seems just to me that Weinstein’s reputation as a patron of the arts is going down in flames, along with his reputation as a decent person.

Oh, gosh, I made the Morris North Star!

Fortune and glory surely await me. Although I suspect they only include me because a mention on my blog gives them far more attention than their cheesy alternative campus newspaper would otherwise.

That’s what passes for intelligent discourse on the right. Sadly, all they have to offer is slurs and hate speech. Well, that and highlighting how adorable I can be.

The Great White Fuckups of America finally begin to lose

Last night, I stopped paying attention to the news when I heard, early in the returns, that Doug Jones was far behind Roy Moore in the Alabama election.

The last thing I read about it was Charles Pierce’s despairing description of a Moore rally.

You grow exhausted from the effort it takes to keep mockery at bay long enough to explain that what Moore and Bannon are selling is a dangerous blend of religious extremism and McCarthyite bombast, Roy Cohn in Torquemada drag. You grow exhausted by the effort it takes, over and over again, to remind yourself that there are good people in the crowd cheering this river of sludge and nonsense.

Finally, you give up. Roy Moore is a vehicle for collecting suckers, for liberating them from their responsibility as citizens in a self-governing republic, and anybody who thinks this waterheaded theocrat belongs in the United States Senate is a dupe and a fool. Finally, you don’t care if the people behind Roy Moore, and the people in the crowd in front of him, believe you are a member of the coastal elite or an agent of Lucifer. Finally, you grow weary of the smug condescension of religious bigots. Finally, you decide to put down the twin burdens of excusing deliberate ignorance and respecting the opinions of people who want to light the world on fire to kill their imaginary enemies. And you give up and tell the truth.

These people deserve what they get.

Then I went to bed.

I woke up to howling winds rattling the house, and I peeked out the window to see a bleak cold landscape to match my soul. So I resignedly opened up the news to this, Rosie Gray’s post-election wrap up.

Everything had to break exactly right for Doug Jones to win the Senate election in deep-red Alabama, and it did. Jones ran a disciplined campaign that hinged on black turnout, and it delivered for him.

WTF? Jones won? How could that happen? Moore had Bannon and Clarke and Gohmert and Trump all backing him — he had all the racist/nationalist/dumbshit fuckwits pulling for him in Alabama. That isn’t a recipe for success anymore? And then I read how Jones won. He had the black vote. Black citizens turned out in spite of all the obstacles put in front of them, all the voter suppression, all the dirty tricks, like all the stories I read of Alabama cops pulling over black drivers on the way to the polls to make them late, the weird games with demanding that they re-register, that they were listed as ‘inactive voters’ and had to jump through extra hoops to get the ballot. The white vote strongly favored Moore. Heck, the college-educated white demographic voted for the kiddie-diddling theocratic incompetent whose wife argued that he couldn’t be a racist because one of his attorneys was a Jew. He totally won the Bubba vote. This guy.

The white people of Alabama voted for the worst candidate…because he was white. If you want to complain about “identity politics”, fine, just keep in mind that the worst perpetrators are those fine light-skinned people of European descent that the neo-Nazis want to build an “ethnostate” for — the great white fuckups of America.

Black Alabama saved us.

And then I read that the state of Texas might be in play in the near future — that Republicans are facing a lot of competition and a lot of state races are going to be contested. Why? Shifting demographics as the Hispanic vote in Texas rises.

Brown Texas is going to save us.

The Republicans are playing against time, and have gambled everything against an inevitability — the US is going to become a majority minority nation within a generation, an environment in which bigotry will no longer be a viable political position. Further, the one white demographic that opposes the Republican status quo are the young people. It’s a rising tide that’s going to destroy the current conservative dominance. The only question is whether the Republicans will succeed in wrecking the nation before we bury them.

Stuporific!

Ted Crockett fails his saving throw against intelligence and is stunned by a fact from Jake Tapper! The stunned ox look is delightful.

I was also giggling at his sad, forlorn “Merry Christmas, Jake” as the clip ends. Sorry, Ted, that was a pathetic comeback.

Unfortunately, stupid might just be a winning strategy in the Alabama election.

Toughen up, Republicans!

A Republican insider giving advice to Democrats…are you going to trust him? Bruce Bartlett thinks Democrats need to toughen up, because we shouldn’t have asked for Franken’s resignation.

I’m torn about it, too — he was a good senator. But he was also flawed, and I’m glad that the issue of sexual harassment has become an important topic within the party I best identify with (but don’t wholly agree with, by a long shot).

However, can we just tell Republicans giving such advice to simply fuck off? Until they have enough fiber to repudiate the scumbags, who are far, far worse than Franken, I don’t think any of them have the privilege to give anyone advice. When you’re strong enough to strip your support from Roy Moore, and when you’ve got the moral integrity to reject King Asshole who’s occupying the presidency, then maybe your advice will be worth listening to.

Are you happy? Or delusional?

A poll has determined where to find the good life, state by state. Do you live in a madly grinning state, or a kind of glum state?

How nice, I thought, I live in Minnesota, where we’re very pleased with ourselves. But then I noticed that Texas is also pretty smug, and how could anyone bear to live there?

These results are from a self-assessment poll, which means it probably utterly meaningless. It’s kind of telling that there is a great band running up the center of the country, the Miserable Middle, but I don’t know what it’s telling me. Midwesterners are realistic? They’re mostly self-effacing and modest? Life really sucks in Ohio? Or maybe some of the Trump states are feeling kind of embarrassed?