Harvey Weinstein hired Israeli agents to attack his victims

Ronan Farrow's New Yorker article on Weinstein hiring former Israeli Mossad agents to spy on and intimidate his victims:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies

It reports that Weinstein hired them through a law firm so their activities would be covered by attorney-client privilege. The same thing came up recently with the reports on how the DNC used an attorney to pay for the apparently phony Trump dossier because they wanted to keep the fact that they paid for it a secret.

You ever want to keep stuff secret, do it through a lawyer.

Anthony Weiner: We can all relax

Anthony Weiner arrives at prison.

A black Mercedes hatchback with Florida plates dropped sinewy Zionist pedophile Anthony Weiner off at prison at 10:45 eastern time. Who does he know from Florida? [It was his brother, Jason] The car drove away ten minutes later.

I guess they'll give him "treatment" for being a sex pervert. They should teach him a trade. He'll be unemployable in his current field when he gets out.

The New York Post reports that Weiner spent Sunday holed up in his apartment. His father went out for coffee and they spent five hours together.

Inmates in the prison include Peter Madoff who helped his brother, Bernie, steal billions. I wonder if the place has a gym.

Somewhere in the prison.

Dustin Hoffman: Worse than I ever dared imagine

I never liked his hair.

There's an article in The Express Tribune about Dustin Hoffman. It's a Pakistani newspaper, so, happily, this news is spreading world-wide.

"Graham Hunter’s account has prompted a new examination of Hoffman’s reputation within Hollywood," the article says. "The unsettling thing about his alleged brand of creepiness is that much of it was not even an open secret—it was simply open."

Graham Hunter was the woman who reported being sexually harassed and assaulted by Hoffman when she was a 17-year-old intern.

The article focuses on Meryl Streep's statements about Hoffman over the years.

The article quotes a 1979 Time magazine article in which Streep described her first meeting with Hoffman:

“He came up to me and said, ‘I’m Dustin—burp—Hoffman,’ and he put his hand on my breast,” Streep said. “What an obnoxious pig, I thought.” Hoffman doesn’t appear to have responded publicly to this claim from Streep in the years since the interview.

 Streep’s story echoes Hoffman’s own account of “very gently” pinching his Graduate co-star Katharine Ross’ rear end during their first screen test. He did it, he said in a 1992 interview, “as a way to help loosen us up.”

...
“I’m a flirt,” the actor told Peoplemagazine in a 1983 cover story. “I also have a lot of chauvinism, a lot of womanizing in my past. It’s hard for me to find a woman unattractive, unless she’s angry or down on herself.” 

He once told Playboy that he lost his virginity at 15 to a 20-year-old “nymphomaniac” when he pretended, in a darkened room, to be his older brother, Ronny. 

The hagiographic 1982 biography Dustin Hoffman: Hollywood’s Antihero rounds up several disturbing anecdotes as evidence that Hoffman is a known “womanizer”: 

Even Dustin has admitted on occasion that he loves to flirt, claiming that he does it as an involuntary reflex. He has supposedly cornered women in elevators to solicit sex and has even unzipped one woman reporter’s blouse to peek down her chest during an interview. He tries to catch himself, but finds it difficult to overcome the temptation. 

...

Just to be clear: Allegedly unzipping a reporter’s blouse during an interview, cornering presumably unwilling women to ask for sex, tricking a woman into having sex with you by pretending to be someone else, and grabbing your co-workers’ breasts and asses are not examples of “flirting.” 

I didn't especially like Dustin Hoffman before this. The more times I sat through Kramer vs Kramer the less I liked him. With the onset of middle age, I stopped liking The Graduate which was pretty much a standard romantic comedy/stalker film, but one in which the girl's entire family is left shattered. I liked Straw Dogs and I didn't hate Marathon Man, but not because of him.

Tootsie was overrated, my hatred of Tom Cruise distorted my perception of Rain Man, I didn't like Straight Time. Ishtar was good but I'll have to reassess my feelings about All the President's Men.

For years I didn't like Walter Brennan. I felt guilty about it. He couldn't help what he looked like or sounded like. Then I found out he backed George Wallace for president. I relaxed and freely hated him. I think it'll be the same with Dustin Hoffman now.
 

Anthony Weiner heads for prison in the morning

 
Today's the last day of freedom for Anthony Weiner. Tomorrow, he checks into Federal Medical Center in Massachusetts. They have treatment there for sex offenders.

There's still time. He can chicken out and make a run for it. But he has a rather distinctive appearance. You'd have to have pretty bad case of face blindness not to recognize him.

Director rushes to Dustin Hoffman's Defense

Volker Schlöndorff, a major figure in New German Cinema, has come to Dustin Hoffman's defense. Schlöndorff, 78, directed Hoffman in the made-for-TV version of Death if a Salesman. A woman who worked on that movie when she was seventeen-years-old reported that she was harassed by Hoffman. The director said he was just trying to help her relax.  

I welcome the #MeToo campaign and do not want to sound dismissive of what I consider a serious cause. However, one should not smear, tar and feather indistinctively every male around. Calling Dustin Hoffman a predator is simply going too far. I hope this fades away.  

It’s plain silly. Just watch Christian Blackwood’s wonderful documentary “Private Conversations” on the making of DOAS [“Death of a Salesman”] to check what a kidder Dustin was on the set, at all times, with everybody. Standard Monday morning question was indeed: “Did you have good sex over the weekend?” A joke, a running gag, everybody laughed at [it]. 

Foot massage? Yes indeed, he was 16 hours standing on the set (as he never sat down), so he was tired, and, besides, there is a line in the play about it: “These arch supports are killing me.” Dustin Hoffman, ever method acting, made it his own. Everybody gave him a foot massage now and then, on the set, amidst the chaos, nothing ambiguous about it. 

As to the joke who was going to get Warren Beatty, only a teenager in her unlimited fantasy could take it seriously. Slapping her butt on the way to the car, with driver, stage manager and PAs [production assistants] around, may have happened, but again in a funny way, nothing lecherous about it. He was a clown, it was part of the way we portrayed Willy Loman as well — but he never played the power play. He was teasing the young, nervous interns, mostly to make them feel included on the set, treating them as equals to all the senior technicians. She may have got it wrong, confiding it to her diary then, but as a grown-up 30 years later she should know that his was no “sexual harassment,” and not call him a “predator.” 

In her innermost, she must know that this teasing was not to put her down, but to make her relax with all these celebrities around. She had a self-assured playful way herself. If he knew that she would be upset when he was teasing her, he wouldn’t have done it. Not the sensitive man he was, and still is. I wish Arthur Miller was around, he would find the right words, but then he might get accused of sexually molesting Marilyn Monroe.

Why bring Arthur Miller into it? He was married to Marilyn Monroe. Why would he be accused of molesting her? I thought Miller was a jerk for insisting that she convert to Judaism. Why would anyone think they were entitled to tell their spouse what their religion was going to be?

So, maybe Dustin Hoffman was just a very nice man, a very nice man who later slapped Meryl Streep in the face and demanded a playwright sleep with him before he would adapt her play into a movie.

Jack Palance was a terrible actor

For him, this was a neutral expression.

This had to have been over thirty years ago. There was an article, probably in TV Guide, rating child actors. The author had a very simple formula. Child actors are cute. They know, at least unconsciously, that adults react positively when they smile. So, as actors, when they don't know what to do, they smile. The less they smile, the better they are as actors.

At the time, Wesley from Mr Belvedere, never smiled at all and was the best actor. The worst was, maybe that kid on Tony Danza's show that I never watched. I don't remember. 

But what about adults?

I'm sitting here with an old Israeli-made western on TV. Jack Palance is the villain. He smiles constantly. In every scene. Lief Garrett, who must have been twelve or thirteen, acts circles around him, smiling only when appropriate, which isn't very often.

As I write this, Lief walks into a place after stumbling through the desert. He might have gotten away with smiling when they give him water. But even then, he has the good sense to keep a straight face. 

There's Jack Palance again, giving some simple instructions to his henchmen. Nothing for him to be happy about. Nothing he needs to look evil for. But he's smiling. 

Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, et al

Anthony Rapp being carried around under happier circumstances when he was fourteen.

I know pretty much nothing about Kevin Spacey, but I knew, or I thought I knew that he was gay. And, back when Bryan Singer was being sued for sexually abusing a teenage boy, there were comments on articles about it online that hinted that Spacey was known for the same thing. I don't take anonymous comments on the internet at face value, but I took this to mean that there were at least rumors about him.

First Anthony Rapp said that Spacey had invited him to a party at his apartment when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26. It was all grown-ups at the party. Rapp got bored and wandered off to a bedroom and watched TV. After a time, Spacey appeared drunk in the door way. Rapp realized that the party had ended and everyone had left except him. Spacey picked him up like he was carrying a bride over the threshold, he lay the young fellow on the bed and clambered on top of him.

It took a few days, but now more people are speaking out about Spacey. They've all been adults.

Tony Montana, director of the documentary Overnight which I mentioned recently on this blog, said that Spacey groped him in a bar placing his hand on what Montana called his "whole package".

"I put my hand down and turned his thumb back to get his hand off it," he said. "I paid for my drink and got away from him."

But Spacey followed into the men's room. "I backed him out the door and I pushed him. One of his friends was in line and I said, It's time to take your boy home. They all ended up leaving."

According to Wikipedia, Spacey's estranged older brother has said that their father was physically and sexually abusive. Kevin Spacey says he's going into treatment and maybe he actually needs it.

Now it's reported that Dustin Hoffman molested a high school girl on the set of Death of a Salesman. She was working there as an assistant. He groped her and one morning, when she asked Hoffman what he wanted for breakfast. He said a "hard-boiled egg----and a soft-boiled clitoris."

What does that mean exactly? Is it a common expression I'm unfamiliar with? I googled it and found nothing but links to articles about Hoffman. His entourage thought it was hilarious.

Hoffman's now 80-years-old.

Dustin Hoffman and the high school girl he harassed and groped. 

More reports are coming out about Hoffman, how he demanded that playwright Riss Gatsiounis, who was in her 20's at the time, go to hotel with him when he was considering producing her play as a movie. She kept turning him down. Once he gave up, it became clear he had no intention of adapting the play in the first place. When she told her agent what happened, she said she had heard stories like that about Hoffman before.

After the stuff about Weinstein came out, a writer in the online Jewish magazine Tablet had to apologize for suggesting it was a Jewish thing, that Weinstein was like a character from a Philip Roth novel, targeting non-Jewish women for abuse. Since then, six women have accused Brett Ratner of sexual assault and rape, and Beverly Hills police are investigating James Toback. I don't buy it that being Jewish has anything to do with it, but being an especially devout Zionist like Ratner, Toback and Weinstein might.

Years ago, I was accused of anti-Semitism for not wanting to sit through Kramer vs. Kramer again. I had already seen it three or four times, but it was on network TV one evening about thirty years ago and I didn't want to see it again. It was well-regarded for a time, but it seems to have faded into obscurity.

As it happened, during the filming of the movie, Dustin Hoffman,without warning, slapped Meryl Streep in the face before an emotional scene to make her acting more convincing, like she needed his help with her acting. It was an anti-feminist movie in any case.