It’s the End of Mean as We Knew It
Courtesy The Hollywood Reporter
Whenever a famous Hollywood bully is hounded from the stage, there’s a bit too much self-congratulation for my taste. You know the routine: tyrant exposed, tyrant condemned, ding-dong the wicked witch is dead. The problem with that framing is that it gives the rest of us a pass. This is troubling, because, as cathartic as it is to condemn bullies to oblivion, bullying itself is a rather mundane human trait, possessed by us all. Human beings tend to bully one another in ways that range from merely annoying to grotesquely spectacular with depressing regularity, which means we likely all have something we ought to apologize for. At least until recently, we have confused aggression with strength, and reward it lavishly, while at the same time misaligning niceness with weakness. In this regard, culpability for an overlord’s misdeeds oozes far beyond Mordor’s dark tower and sullies every hobbit in the Shire.
Which brings us to Scott Rudin. Awhile back, I learned that the New York Times was doing a story on Rudin, EGOT/Terror. Several people I knew were being called by reporters, and while they were all busy turning their ringers off, I reflected on my own dealings on the outer-rungs of the Rudin-verse over the years, inconsequential to him but of some significance to me. These were not unpleasant, and so I pondered that overused word complicity. We talk a big game, but most of us have the tendency to duck into the kitchenette when El Jefe starts screaming and throwing staplers.
While I was sorting things out, Rudin glowered on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter, with the word “Bully” stamped in red across his picture, and Vulture published an abbreviated list of 21 workplace atrocities. The producer gave a statement to the Washington Post, in which he apologized “for the pain my behavior has caused individuals, directly and indirectly,” and promised to take steps “I should have taken years ago to address this behavior.” Then came the Times piece itself, on Oscar weekend. “There’s always, with Scott, two sides of the coin, depending on what he wants,” Robert Fox, the English producer, told the paper. “He can treat people impeccably well, or disgracefully badly, and there’s not much in between.” Anybody who has been trapped in an abusive relationship knows that one-two punch—it’s the lavish arrangement from Mark’s Garden that spins your head around.
What was interesting was that this comeuppance was driven not by revelation but by excavation. For those who showed up in Hollywood yesterday, Swimming with Sharks, the movie about a horrendous exec widely assumed to be Rudin (though it could be a lot of other people), was made way back in 1994. The Wall Street Journal declared Rudin Boss-Zilla! (exclamation point theirs) sixteen years ago. Contrary to contemporary belief, that ancient time came fully stocked with Human Resources departments. The anecdotes related in this last wave of stories are widely known, at least in show business circles. If you were working in entertainment and paying attention, you had heard it all, but Rudin was powerful, with great taste and a golden touch. Dazzling success and a sledgehammer personality were inextricably linked.
When I started in media, it was widely understood to be a mean business, based in New York City, a notoriously aggro-mean town, with sprawling subsidiary operations in Los Angeles, a notoriously phony-mean town (there was also London, a notoriously chilly-mean town, at least until the first pint was drawn). A lot of the people in charge hailed from the dem, dese, dose sections of the urban Northeast, and exhibited a Scorsese movie brand of performative toughness. You may have noticed that getting things done in a creative business is very, very hard. So there has always been a mystique around those who acted like sociopathic mafia dons—they just crashed through the committee work, and got it done. Being called demanding, tough, a killer, was hardly a hurdle to success. If the chief disemboweled somebody at the office, it was because they had Olympian standards. Boss-Zilla! Wasn’t that the way moguls were supposed to be? That behavior was endured, absorbed, and emulated.
If you were less powerful, you weathered the crazy, and you came away with war stories. I was lucky to have good bosses, and at the beginning of my career one instructed me on how to deal with the bullies I’d run into in entertainment: Whatever you do, don’t get rattled, push back calmly, as if the eruption you are facing is ridiculous, always remember nobody gets to talk to you that way. If all else fails, match their energy. Don’t let them walk all over you, or it will get worse. Meanness was all around, and so you kept your head down, and tried to be decent, and maybe you succeeded and maybe you failed, but you never talked out of school.
There are some former assistants I know, all very important in PR now, who worked for a publicist who was an infamous screamer. After being eviscerated, they would skitter off in pairs, and one would stand guard by the elevator door while the other would ride the lift up and down alone, weeping. Another former assistant I know, now a studio executive, was asked to sit across from a rising star on a long private jet flight, and ordered to tend to her every need, while never looking her in the eye. (Being commanded to not look a famous person in the eye came up frighteningly often). Some other former assistants I know, now machers with henchpersons of their own, were forced to scrounge around on their hands and knees to recover the happy pills their then-boss, an infamous Hollywood titan, had cast all over the office in a fit of pique. Then there were the lackeys of the world-famous editor, who were told never to speak to her unless spoken to, because she was “shy.”
Those yarns got around, and they burnished myths. The appeal in a good Rudin tale was in the cartoonish villainy. He threw a potato at somebody. He kicked somebody out of a limo in the middle of nowhere. He scrubbed somebody else’s credits off his projects on IMDB. I really don’t know why we relished those terrible stories so much. Well, I do know. They were lurid and impossible not to share. If you have survived abusive treatment at some point in your life, which describes me and a lot of people in creative professions, sometimes your default coping tool is battlefield humor. It certainly is why I have tendency to reflexively joke about terrible things. When I started writing this column, I kept compulsively deflecting with jokes. But if you are the one (allegedly) getting a computer monitor smashed over your head, it isn’t so very funny. Calling somebody the managerial equivalent of the Wood Chipper in Fargo is a good line for a bit, and maybe that’s part of why it went on for so long.
I dealt with many people who had terrible reputations who were not at all terrible to me. I also treated people with those reputations differently because I heard they were capable of awful things and didn’t want trouble to blow my way. (Sometimes “or else,” is all you need). On some level, I thought it was my job to try understand the complicated person behind the bad behavior, to insert Yes but, in this instance, she was actually quite wonderful. That is at least misdemeanor enabling, which I regret. As somebody who is fond of a legendary producer once said to me, “he is so smart, but he engages in psychological torture.” Which is rather like saying Ted Bundy is super charismatic on first meeting.
It would be nice to believe that we are entering a different Hollywood age, where more people can produce great, massively complicated things without being called a killer. I’m not sure we have quite developed that model in creative work. Maybe a healed Scott Rudin will be among those leading the charge. He is an undeniable talent. In the meantime, we should ask ourselves what makes us look the other way in the first place.
