Harvey Weinstein

Film producer

• Born: March 19, 1952
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Significance: Harvey Weinstein is a legendary but controversial Hollywood film distributor and producer known for discovering, marketing, and producing independent films that became award-winning financial successes. He also became infamous as a sexual abuser in the entertainment industry after multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault against him became public beginning in 2017.

Background

Harvey Weinstein was born on March 19, 1952, in Queens, New York. The elder son of Max Weinstein, a diamond cutter, and Miriam Weinstein, a homemaker and secretary, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family in Flushing, Queens. Both he and his brother, Bob, were sports fans and movie buffs. By their teens they had graduated from Westerns, war, and sports movies to art films and spent many afternoons watching foreign-language and independent films at a local cinema.

In 1969, Weinstein enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He joined the university’s arts council and helped bring rock concerts to town. After leaving the arts council, he and fellow student Corky Burger persuaded singer Stephens Stills to perform in Buffalo. That launched Weinstein’s career as a concert promoter, as he and Burger formed Harvey & Corky Presents.

Film Career

Weinstein dropped out of college in 1973, his senior year, and worked at Harvey & Corky Presents. His brother Bob, who had enrolled at SUNY Fredonia, also left school and joined the business. The company purchased Century, a small theater in Buffalo, and used it for concerts and to show art films.

In the late 1970s, Weinstein sold his share in the company. He and Bob formed the company Miramax Film Corp. (named after their parents, Miriam and Max) in 1979. Their goal was to distribute and release low-budget independent and foreign films and bring well-done films overlooked by Hollywood to the public. They scoured art festivals and screenings for unique films and purchased the rights to them. Early releases included Goodbye, Emmanuelle (1981) and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (1982).

In 1988, they had their first major success, Steven Soderbergh’s controversial Sex, Lies, and Videotape; they purchased the rights for $1 million and it went on to gross $25 million. The following year, they released My Left Foot, which won two Academy Awards in 1990. Around this time, they hit upon a marketing technique that boosted their success and forever changed the way independent films were distributed to mainstream theaters. Noticing that major motion pictures only stayed in theaters for a few weeks, with huge initial sales that then dropped off sharply, the Weinstein brothers opted to take their independent films out of the art houses and into mainstream theaters, but for longer runs. These films did not do well initially, but brought in a steady viewership over time, based on word of mouth. The theaters made money in the long run, and so did Miramax.

Financial investors provided an infusion of cash in the late 1980s that allowed Miramax to expand into producing movies. Weinstein coproduced Scandal (1989), Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), and Reservoir Dogs (1992), among other films. In 1994, he was the co-executive producer for Quentin Tarantino’s highly successful Pulp Fiction. By the late 1990s, Miramax was the leading distributor of blockbuster foreign-language films in the United States.

Disney purchased Miramax in 1993 in a deal that gave the Weinstein brothers at least $60 million and allowed them to continue to make and distribute films as co-chairmen of the company. During the next few years, they released several Academy Award–winning films, including The English Patient (1996), Good Will Hunting (1997), Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Cider House Rules (1999), Chicago (2002), The Hours (2002), Frida (2002), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Aviator (2004).

By 2005, the Weinsteins and Disney ended their relationship due to conflicts between them, and the brothers left Miramax, founding the Weinstein Company later that year. They had a series of successes with films such as Grindhouse (2007), The Reader (2008), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Inglourious Basterds (2009), The King’s Speech (2010), Django Unchained (2012), and The Imitation Game (2014).

Long known for his aggressive, flamboyant style, many people considered Weinstein crude but excused his behavior because of his brilliance in discovering and producing films. This changed in 2017 after dozens of women, including famous actors, publicly reported Weinstein had groped, raped, or sexually harassed them. Prosecutors in both the United States and England investigated, and in 2018 US prosecutors in Manhattan filed charges of rape and other sex crimes against Weinstein. In October 2017, Weinstein was fired from the Weinstein Company. That same month, the Producers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expelled him. The following month, the Television Academy expelled him too. The Weinstein Company filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and following his arrest that May, Weinstein was freed on bail pending trial.

In February 2020, he was found guilty in Manhattan of criminal sexual assault in the first degree and rape in the third degree but was found not guilty of two counts of predatory sexual assault. The following month, he was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. That same month, he tested positive for COVID-19, though he was asymptomatic, and was isolated from other prisoners at Wende Correctional Facility, where he was then serving his sentence. He recovered the following month.

During Weinstein's Manhattan trial and sentencing, he was charged in Los Angeles with further counts of sexual assault. In January 2020, Los Angeles prosecutors charged him with sexually assaulting two women in 2013. In April 2020, he was charged with sexually assaulting a woman in Beverly Hills in May 2010. In October 2020, prosecutors added six additional counts of forcible sexual assault to the charges he faced. By the time of the start of his Los Angeles trial in October 2022, the number of charges against him, involving five women, had reached eleven. Meanwhile, this second trial had gained an even greater sense of significance when, in August of that year, the New York Court of Appeals granted Weinstein's request for an appeal hearing regarding his 2020 conviction.

While the charges in the Los Angeles trial were reduced to seven in November 2022, in December jurors reached a verdict that Weinstein was guilty of three of the counts against him, all of which applied to a single woman's case and included rape and sexual assault. After receiving another prison sentence in February 2023, this time of sixteen years, for that conviction, Weinstein proved successful in his appeal of the New York conviction, which the appeals court overturned while ordering a new trial in April 2024. By June, Weinstein and his legal team had also filed an appeal of the Los Angeles conviction.

Impact

Harvey Weinstein’s achievements in bringing high-quality independent films to mainstream audiences in the United States and around the world were overshadowed later in his career by the revelations of his decades-long history of sexual predation on the women whose careers he had the power to make or break. The reports of sexual misconduct against Weinstein opened a floodgate among women who had been sexually abused by men in positions of authority and contributed to the growth of the Me Too movement, which encouraged women to speak up about sexual violence. For many women, reporting Weinstein’s behavior at the time had been a futile act, and the sheer volume of women who spoke up about Weinstein’s actions led to a large number of celebrities calling for change in how Hollywood listened to women and how it responded to sexual abuse when it was known to exist.

Personal Life

Weinstein has three daughters, Emma, Lily, and Rose, with Eve Chilton, to whom he was married from 1987 to 2004, and a daughter, India, and a son, Dashiell, with Georgina Chapman, whom he married in 2007. Chapman filed for divorce in 2018 after the sexual assault allegations against Weinstein became public. The divorce was finalized in 2021.

Bibliography

Albeck-Ripka, Livia, and Lauren Herstik. "Opening Statements Begin in Harvey Weinstein's Los Angeles Trial." The New York Times, 24 Oct. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/us/harvey-weinstein-trial-los-angeles.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2022.

Auletta, Ken. “Beauty and the Beast.” The New Yorker, 8 Dec. 2002, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/16/beauty-and-the-beast-2. Accessed 21 May 2019.

Burrough, Bryan. “How Harvey Got His Groove Back.” Vanity Fair, 3 Feb. 2011, www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/10/susan-sarandon-200910. Accessed 21 May 2019.

“Harvey Weinstein Timeline: How the Scandal Unfolded.” BBC, 10 Jan. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41594672. Accessed 21 May 2019.

Hesse, Monica, and Dan Zak. “Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein’s 30-Year Pattern of Abuse in Hollywood.” The Washington Post, 14 Oct. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/violence-threats-begging-harvey-weinsteins-30-year-pattern-of-abuse-in-hollywood/2017/10/14/2638b1fc-aeab-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb‗story.html. Accessed 21 May 2019.

Levenson, Michael. "Harvey Weinstein Faces Six Additional Sexual Assault Charges in Los Angeles." The New York Times, 2 Oct. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/us/harvey-weinstein-sexual-assault-charges.html. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.

Me Too, metoomvmt.org. Accessed 20 June 2024.

Melas, Chloe, and Rebecca Cohen. "Harvey Weinstein Appeals L.A. Rape Conviction Weeks after N.Y. Conviction Was Overturned." NBC News, 7 June 2024, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/harvey-weinstein-appeals-l-rape-conviction-weeks-ny-conviction-was-ove-rcna155943. Accessed 20 June 2024.

Reiss, Adam, et al. "More Than Two Years after His Rape Conviction, Harvey Weinstein Is Granted an Appeal." NBC News, 24 Aug. 2022, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-years-rape-conviction-harvey-weinstein-granted-appeal-rcna44709. Accessed 3 Nov. 2022.

Weinstein, Bob. “Bob Weinstein’s Love Letter to Brother Harvey: ‘Some Would Say I Deserve a Lifetime Achievement Award.’” The Hollywood Reporter, 18 Feb. 2015, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bob-weinsteins-love-letter-brother-773532. Accessed 21 May 2019.