Hollywood Ending by Ken Auletta — the rise and fall of Harvey Weinstein

While reporting a New Yorker profile of Harvey Weinstein in 2002, the veteran US journalist Ken Auletta received a disturbing tip: the Oscar-winning producer had sexually assaulted a young employee four years earlier at the Venice Film Festival.

Auletta had heard the whispers that Weinstein sexually abused women; here was his chance to prove them. But instead, Auletta ran into the wall of non-disclosure agreements that protected Weinstein for decades.

The resulting New Yorker article, “Beauty and the Beast”, included on-the-record accounts of all manner of bad behaviour from Weinstein. But Auletta couldn’t confirm the dark stories about the movie mogul’s predation.

“I believed Harvey was guilty of beastly sexual behaviour. But I lacked proof,” Auletta writes in his 13th book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence.

This deeply researched book — Auletta spoke to hundreds of sources about Weinstein — leaves the impression that he never quite got over watching the mogul slip through his fingers.

Weinstein’s secrets would come to light 15 years later when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times persuaded women to break their NDAs and go public with their stories, earning the journalists a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 and helping to launch #MeToo as a viral movement. Auletta aided Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on Weinstein for the New Yorker by handing over his old notes.

Auletta is perhaps most effective when describing the inner workings of Miramax, the film studio Weinstein launched in 1979 with his brother

Those reporters published their own books (She Said by Kantor and Twohey, Catch and Kill by Farrow) leaving Auletta, 80, with the challenge of finding fresh material. He found it in Weinstein’s 2020 trial — which ended with the one-time Hollywood power broker being sentenced to 23 years in prison — and by digging into his early life.

But Auletta is perhaps most effective when describing the inner workings of Miramax, the film studio Weinstein launched in 1979 with his brother, Bob, and the ill-fated Weinstein Co. This is natural territory for Auletta, who has written about the media industry for the New Yorker since 1992.

Miramax produced culture-shaping films such as Shakespeare in Love and Pulp Fiction and launched the careers of Gwyneth Paltrow and Quentin Tarantino. But Miramax also served as the vehicle that allowed Weinstein to ensnare his victims and cover up his crimes.

Miramax was always a family affair — the name is a mashup of Harvey and Bob’s parents, Miriam and Max — and Auletta draws a line between the mogul’s abuses and the boys’ early life in Flushing, Queens.

Miriam’s “ear-piercing screams” were common, he writes, noting that she “constantly berated Harvey and never seemed satisfied — with his grades, his eating habits, his weight”.

The brothers got their start in show business in Buffalo, New York, showing art house films and putting on rock concerts in the 1970s. Buffalo was also where the first credible accounts of Weinstein as a sexual predator begin, Auletta writes.

The Weinsteins moved to Manhattan in 1979 as “bottom feeders” in the movie industry, but by 1990 Miramax had emerged as the leader of the independent film revolution, thanks to its distribution of Sex, Lies and Videotape and backing of My Left Foot.

Behind Miramax’s indie image, however, was a more complicated picture. Bob produced popcorn movies on the cheap, such as the 1996 horror hit Scream, that often made most of the money. Harvey, however, was an “uncontrolled spender” whose prestige movies won prizes but were less profitable and often lossmaking.

Miramax had an entrepreneurial culture that attracted the young, talented and ambitious. But everything revolved around Weinstein’s volatile temperament and uncontrollable appetites. “His lack of impulse control . . . sometimes served him well in a negotiation, in getting movies made, in marketing them, in bulldozing actors and directors to succumb to his wishes,” Auletta writes.

The author succeeds in his goal of conveying that Weinstein had talent and was “more than a monster”. But Auletta’s attempt to discover the “hole in [Weinstein’s] psyche” that compelled him to such monstrous behaviour comes up short.

When Auletta asks Bob how his brother could have committed such foul acts, he reaches for a Hollywood reference for the answer. “You’re looking for a Rosebud clue why Harvey did all he did,” Bob says, in a nod to Citizen Kane. “You’ll never get that.”

Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence by Ken Auletta, Penguin Press $30, 480 pages

Christopher Grimes is the FT’s Los Angeles correspondent

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