HOW THE ME-TOO MOVEMENT REALLY NEEDS TO WORK

In the series we will discuss the future of the film industry, which will involve fewer action movies and franchises, more work on smaller screens, more original stories, and better writing. Also we will discuss how women have always been the driving force in Hollywood and can be again, if we protect and empower them.

Me Too and survivors

Survivors of sexual violence, harassment and domestic violence need access to good toolkits.

For starters, they need to know the rules for harassment and retaliation.

Sexual harassment in California: don’t touch the girl, don’t look at her strike zone, don’t say anything sexual, no sexy pictures, don’t try to wrangle her into sex or retaliate against her.

Sexual discrimination: treating a woman or a group of women differently, hostile work environment, harassment, intimidation, using any pressure from the job to get sex. This includes demanding sex for employment, even when the messaging is not overt. And yes, office gossip counts, if the work environment is hostile.

Sexual assault: don’t touch the girl’s strike zone; don’t force her to touch your junk or hers, or touch her when she’s intoxicated or unconscious, or use threats.

In California the statute of limitations is a year for harassment and ten years for rape, although they’re changing the rape rule. The rules are better in places like New York and London. Someone needs to review the city and state laws on civil rights and human rights. And we need these laws enforced, not only against the perpetrators, but also the corporations who aid, abet, and look the other way.

Like it or not, the victims are the necessary first stage in the process. Dorothy Carvello, a staffer in the industry, said “we must come forward and name our abusers”. Claudia Eller at Variety said the same: “Victims can no longer stay quiet.”

Know the danger signs: i.e. an executive who doesn’t have a wife nearby, who sleeps where he works, who want lots of alone time with you, who pushes alcohol. Be a wingman, or bring a wingman, especially wherever people are drinking; these execs sometimes have the morals of inebriated frat boys. And always pour your own drink from the bottle. Don’t let anyone pressure you into signing anything, especially without legal advice. If you’re harassed, tell him to stop; write down what happened, tell the firm and HR, get a lawyer. If you want to sue, apparently you must go to the DFEH or EEOC within a year: it’s actually called a “right to sue” letter. Seriously. And if you hire a lawyer to sue, be careful: some unscrupulous dirtbags out there.

When women speak out, they need a reporting system that prevents retaliation, to include retaliation against witnesses and relatives. The includes the soft blacklist of “she’s in the news too much” or “her message interferes with our marketing”. We need women to know they can speak out and their voices are being heard, in meetings, on sets, when harassment happens. Anybody who doesn’t believe, ask yourself what these women gain by speaking out? The percentage of these women who are telling the truth is around 96-97 percent (although it is not 100 percent). Eradicate the idea that a woman’s harassment complaint is invalid if she is civil to the harasser afterward. Eliminate the idea that entering a man’s home, office or hotel room constitutes consent.

HOTLINES.

SAG-AFTRA, 844-SAFER-SET, 24/7 hotline for sexual crimes.

Women in Film, 323-545-0333, harassment help line, business hours.

Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, 800-656-HOPE.

Callisto, projectcallisto.org, database for rape incidents.

AllVoices, allows anonymous reporting of harassment.

IATSE Safety Hotline, 844 IA AWARE / 844-422-9273, for stage people.

There are some anonymous blacklists of creepy guys, fed by anonymous sources. This is a bit dangerous: there’s no accountability and it can easily be abused. However, Callisto is a system that allows victims to not only report assaults, but to find out whether he’s done it before. A system like that, with some accountability and due process, could revolutionize Hollywood.

Some larger Hollywood companies have “whisper networks” where women warn each other about the problematic men, which again poses a due-process problem: let’s (a) listen to those networks, but also (b) make them obsolete.

Should Hollywood have a harassment ombudsman?

Boycotts: we should distinguish between boycotting people for exercising their right of speech, which is a bad idea, and boycotting people for what they actually do. By that standard, the abusers and harassers have earned some boycott action. Can actresses band together and boycott misbehaving producers and financiers?

If you have nightmares, flashbacks, triggered panic attacks, that’s PTSD. Shame, isolating yourself, dissociating from your surroundings, fear of new trauma, self-medicating. PTSD isn’t just for soldiers: I’ve seen hundreds of cases in my work with survivors of domestic violence. Talk to a good therapist about cognitive behavioral therapy: it means finding someone who listens and believes you. A therapist is someone who can help you stop blaming yourself, and help you regain your own power. A therapist can walk you through your traumatic past and help you deal with it more calmly, and give you tools to make you stronger.

Make yourself strong and healthy because predators prey on the vulnerable. Tell yourself: it’s not your fault, you don’t deserve this, you’re not imagining it, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone. In addition to PTSD, look for the other bogeymen like depression and anxiety. And build yourself a support system: this is when you find out who your real friends are. 

Set up support groups where harassment survivors can hook up.

Me Too and corporations

Sexual harassment is a crime, and assault is a violent crime, so preventing it is a legitimate safety issue for every employer.

Studio chiefs, corporate directors, board members, producers, you own everything that happens under your corporate flag. Firms need a proactive processes, background checks, harassment training, rules, employee manuals, properly run legal departments, and they need to tell employees what their rights are and who to complain to, and transparency. Form a workplace environment committee. Every company needs a code of conduct, and all executives need contract clauses saying they’re fired if they violate the code, or the law. Beef up the rules on workplace romances. Apply workplace rules anywhere co-workers or potential co-workers meet: sets, trailers, hotels.

All six major studios need external audits: Amazon tried it. Try anonymous employee surveys and exit interviews, and see what turns up.

Incidentally, you can’t avoid assault and harassment problems by refusing to hire women, or refusing to involve them in in-house projects and meetings and trips and one-on-one mentoring: that is discrimination.

Everyone with control over hiring or careers needs vetting, training and oversight. If you have one problem, assume you have more than one. There are two kinds of men, those who respect women and those who don’t: have you hired any of the latter kind?

Firms need to follow up: if an abuser is caught inside the firm, the firm can’t just fling their hands in the air and say “we gave everybody the training and counseling” and then wash their hands of the case: they need to cut ties.

Don’t let abusers move laterally from company to company (the Catholic Church rule). Make all employees disclose any past harassment activity.

Find the other Weinsteins, and executives who encourage victims to shut up and go away, and fire them all. Fox and The Weinstein Company executives knew about Weinstein’s abuse and didn’t stop it, and they aren’t the only firms that need a clean-up. No firm should make a contractual promise never to fire an employee unless harassment charges are proven against him in court (the O’Reilly case).

Toughen up the laws for corporate negligence: ignorance is not an excuse; sue dirty companies for negligence along with everything else, and if you can get them into bankruptcy, you can force the appointment of a trustee who can investigate bad behavior.

HUMAN RESOURCES. HR departments must protect victims, not just the companies. Currently HR is very good at protecting the big money-making abusers from their victims, and protecting the firms themselves. They hide behind he-said-she-said and then warn the abuser that the complaint is coming, which is where the retaliation starts. HR people need to let employees know they’re safe to talk to, and then to follow up. Have HR report harassment problems, not just to the bosses, but to the board. And if HR can’t manage harassment issues, form a board that can.

 CONTRACTS. The National Labor Relations Act says employers can’t silence employees; state courts allow firms to violate this so we need better judges. All firms need to review their boilerplate contract language and remove language which illegally silences employees. Some firms claim that nondisparagement rules apply to all employees: that is illegal and employees need to know they have the right to speak out.

Instead of contract clauses that protect abusers, how about clauses that terminate the contract for bad behavior? Where are the morality clauses of yesteryear? The EEOC and other agencies need money to enforce all this, and state laws need to back this up. Protect female contractors too.

Every employee gets to keep full copies of every agreement they sign, including NDAs.

Settlements: the Civil Rights Act bans settlements which prohibit employees from filing harassment charges.

Contracts and settlements should not involve forced private arbitration, or ban public speech, or demand the destruction of documents or communications (the O’Reilly case).

 NDAs. The purpose of an NDA is to protect intellectual property, trade secrets and legitimate competitive advantage, not to conceal crimes. Weinstein staff people sought permission from TWC to toss their NDAs so they can speak out. How about all the studios and production companies do that? If someone breaks an NDA in reporting abuses, get a judge to rule that public interest overrides the abuser’s privacy, and absolutely hammer the abuser if he has the nerve to sue.

End, in particular, the use of abusive NDAs: NDAs that are used routinely across an entire firm, NDAs demanding the destruction of evidence, demanding the surrender of electronics with copies, demanding email passwords, demanding pre-signed statements saying he never groped her, NDAs that surrender right to sue. Most importantly, stop allowing NDAs that punish victims who speak out, even when the violation didn’t cause real damages: get a court to rule on that if need be.

Remember that once we all know an abuser is an abuser, there’s not much further damage that can be done to the abuser’s reputation anyway.

 THE INVESTORS. Investors in the corporations that own the big studios: you have a stake in all this.

Companies that don’t fix their cultural problems also have problems hiring and retaining personnel, making business deals, attracting investment and advertising, propping up stock prices. Investors are already beginning to steer funds away from firms that are bogged down in lawsuits, and even firms that have potential liabilities, which is one reason why companies like to keep things quiet. Fox’s failure to rein in O’Reilly jeopardized their effort to buy Sky News, and Prime Wave wanted to know whether its merger partner, IAM, covered up David Guillod’s assault problems before the Prime-IAM merger. TWC shareholders got slaughtered: don’t let this happen to you!

Investors should demand that corporate boards go beyond CYA and buzzwords like zero tolerance and truly change their cultures. Investors should demand that boards openly talk about ways to root out harassment, to hire more women and minorities, better risk management, women on the board, pay parity, work/life balance, external oversight and employee surveys, better governance, healthier culture. You investors can sue corporate board members if gross neglect of in-house crimes harms your financial interests. Find out if any of those executive employment contracts have suspicious clauses suggesting harassment problems, and follow the money trail for settlements: if you’re an investor, that settlement money may be coming out of your pocket.

Insurers: are you getting hit with settlement costs? Demand better governance or jack up the rates.

In the past, a lot of film business was conducted at film festivals: does anyone want to see Brett Ratner and the Weinsteins on la plage at Cannes again? And who else is breaking the rules at those festivals? Perhaps the people who run the festivals should be harassing the rapists more than they harass the women in flats.

Film buyers: Fox Searchlight took a bath on Birth Of A Nation, and Orchard will take a similar loss of Louis CK’s film, because they committed to films by these artists without knowing enough about the artists.

Me Too and movie sets

The Me Too movement isn’t happening in Hollywood, unless it’s happening on the sets.

End the era of directors who are abusive jerks. A lot of the abuse has been directed at women: just ask Katharine Ross what it was like shooting Butch Cassidy, or any actress who came within a mile of Hitchcock. In any other work environment, there would be strikes and lawsuits.

 Before Harvey Weinstein’s fall, the rule was that actors are supposed to be naked and brave; actors who ask for guidelines were made to feel unprofessional. Now they are starting to bring in intimacy coordinators.

Update SAG rules on auditioning and shooting nude scenes and sex scenes: no “improv surprises” on-set (the Last Tango rule). No hotel meetings, no bikini auditions, no private auditions, no private costume fittings, no naked police lineups, no “massage meetings”, no casting couches, no nude photography, no meetings behind closed doors, no “let’s meet for drinks”, no “hey, can you drop me at my hotel?”

Needless to state, gratuitous nudity includes “the producer wants a sex scene because he wants to see the actress naked”. An audition process that requires a safe word and leads to injuries isn’t being run properly. No abuse-as-art, Black-Swan-like manipulation of actresses who don’t want to play ball: “I need you to be brave, I need you to trust me” etc.

Production leaders are responsible for protecting the privacy of auditioning actors, with respect to any photos, statements or writings, even if the producer thinks such materials are his property. Crack down on conflicts of interest: if producers can no longer force directors to hire their girlfriends, then producers can’t dangle that quid pro quo in front of women anymore. Trying to buy or trade for sex takes many forms: Weinstein not only dangled job offers in front of young women, he sometimes hooked them up with agents they didn’t even want.

Fire any director or producer who measures a woman’s worth by whether she’s “f***able”. Break the habit of casting solely for looks: was it necessary for every deputy prosecutor on Law And Order to be a runway model?

 We need a process to stop on-set harassment: directors, DPs and actors with patty-fingers.

Directors: are you hiring department heads who are abusive jerks? If you’re the director, you’re responsible for everything anyone does on that set.

Everybody on set, cast and crew: are you aiding and abetting crimes by executives and directors? Did you see something and ignore it? Any big-name actors with your hands in the cookie jar?

When female crewmembers dress up or dress down for the set, remember that she’s not dressing for you and it’s not an invitation. That girl on the set with the big coat and the hat is probably tired of being bothered by a guy like you. A performer’s approval of sex scenes does not mean cancelling the harassment rules: a naked girl doesn’t become everybody’s property. When an actress is doing a sex scene, or anything potentially dangerous or uncomfortable, check in with her to see if she feels safe, so she can concentrate.

More on sex scenes:

ACTRA has a fact sheet here

federal, state and SAG-AFTRA guidelines 

newly released resource package 

We need a mechanism to protect child performers from predators. Like anywhere else you find young girls: gymnastics, fashion, pageants. More oversight whenever kids are anywhere near alcohol.

Me Too violators

Me Too doesn’t work in Hollywood, until the idiots get punished, with all the other idiots watching. To include:

THE STALKERS. The guy who totally doesn’t get the dividing line between flirting and stalking. Because these guys just don’t get the concept of boundaries or personal space. He flirts, but then he keeps at it and doesn’t go away even when he knows you’re busy. And then he’s flirting the next day and the day after that. He always knows where you are and he shows up unexpectedly; he calls, he texts, he sends notes and gifts and drinks. He indulges in little domination rituals, for control, like “Smile more, you have a nice smile” and “you didn’t answer my tweet”. He distracts you and makes you uncomfortable: he makes it harder to do your job.

Have you seen this behavior in your workplace, and what did you do? In the state of California, if he repeatedly harasses a woman, he’s violating the state stalking law. If your workplace doesn’t have rules against it, they should. And ideally a woman should only have to say “no” once, not five or six times. If she’s smiling and not saying anything, it’s not because she’s being coy: she’s afraid.

PS Sexting is harassment too.

PPS A “consensual” relationship with someone you have control or influence over, isn’t really consensual.

 THE ENABLERS. We still have questions for Weinstein’s pals: reporters and editors at the Enquirer and the Daily News, several CAA agents, Weinstein colleagues at Disney, Miramax and Goldman Sachs, his brother Bob, Weinstein’s lawyers and staffers like Steve Hutensky, and the detective firms, Kroll, Dietl and Black Cube. The Weinstein minders, the thugs who not only facilitate rape but manhandle anyone who gets close to Weinstein. The female TWC staffers who created a false sense of security, to lure Weinstein’s victims. Rick Schwarz, Weinstein’s staffer-turned-producer. Harvey used procurers to find women: who are they? If you help the Weinsteins commit or conceal their crimes, you go to jail.

And all across Hollywood: enablers, security guys, drivers, staffers, the lawyers who clean up the messes after the abuse is over. Handing out Kleenex, checks and nondisclosure agreements.

Everyone is entitled to a lawyer to defend him, but a lawyer who enables a client’s crimes should be disbarred.

The smear artists, the PR people and detectives who go after accusers and reporters. Reporters who played along with the attacks, sometimes in exchange for dirt on others (or even on the victims). Those “crisis PR firms” who help the abusers avoid accountability.

Agents and managers working for abusers: ride with an outlaw, die with an outlaw. And you agency chiefs, protect your agency staffers too.

 THE “PROTECTORS”. Agents, lawyers and managers representing the victims: you don’t represent the producers, you represent your client. Don’t protect the abusers when they assault your client. If you ever give the “it would be bad for your career” speech, do us a favor and quit. If you run an agency, and one of your agents is using the promise of your agency’s help, in order to coerce women into sex, they’re using your name and reputation to commit a crime. Also: is your agency pushing its female clients as hard as they push the men? And how are things over at CAA?

THE PEOPLE WHO LOOK THE OTHER WAY. Everyone has an obligation to report crime, and harassment is a crime. Let’s chat with the staff and security at the Ritz in Paris, the Savoy in London, the Peninsula in LA: a lot of this nonsense happened in hotels. Also, see how many hotel maids were harassed: get them panic buttons if needed.

Casting directors, you may be responsible for calling out executives and directors who assault actresses and who retaliate against actresses that don’t “cooperate”.

Cops and doctors: you’re required to report signs of abuse. Why aren’t you doing it? Who runs the rape cases for the LAPD and are they taking the issue seriously, for all women? How many rape kits remain unprocessed over at the LAPD? The LA District Attorney is setting up a task force for sexual abuse in Hollywood: have her start by looking at the LAPD itself. And are elected LA officials getting campaign donations from executives who may later be investigated by those officials?

Guild leaders and union heads, make sexual harassment a priority, and don’t forget the freelancers and contractors.

What if SAG launched a strike and demanded new harassment rules at the major production companies and studios?

 THE BROS. If you hear a guy making a disgusting sexist comment, and you laugh and bro along with it, you’ve given him the green light. Say something: protecting the career of his victims, and their safety, is more important than protecting the career of a toolbag who needs to be fired. Believe the victims, support the victims, speak out.

 “PUNISHMENT”. Eliminate the “rehab” dodge. Harassment is not like drug addiction: there is no therapeutic rehabilitation regime for life-long sociopathic jerks in their sixties. And curling up with a pillow in a five-star hotel for a month is not “punishment” or “atonement”. A golden-parachute package with two commas in the price tag isn’t punishment either. Crime means punishment.

However: we need to give positive feedback for positive behavior. If someone admits guilt and/or begins to take positive steps to improve, we need to acknowledge that. Otherwise, none of the guilty people or companies will step forward and try to change.

PS Anyone who is interested in top-notch low-budget screenplays with amazing female leads, I have 22 in all genres, although one is in production. Check out loglines and scripts at https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/ .