Stephen Galloway

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“May I Confess That I’m Scared?”

November 6, 2017 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

In 2016, Stephen Galloway of the Hollywood Reporter wrote the most shockingly amoral take of the Nate Parker rape controversy. It’s understood that an industry trade journal addresses above all else the business of movies, but Galloway’s article on the Parker ugliness from the aspect of how the director and Fox Searchlight could best do damage control and own the narrative was bizarre and offensive. For a journalist to write from inside an imaginary public relations war room about the optimum tactics that could be employed to ensure a movie “can survive a rape-trial scandal” is just jaw-dropping, especially since the woman who charged Parker and his Birth of a Nation co-writer Jean Celestin didn’t survive, having committed suicide in 2012. It was the strangest set of priorities.

The title of Galloway’s latest article, about the Harvey Effect, “Harassment, Scandal and the Media: Is a Hollywood Witch Hunt Brewing?” is not promising, and the piece largely lives down to it, using the child-abuse hysteria of the bizarre McMartin Preschool Case of the 1980s to worry about the accusations currently directed at show business and media figures. 

I’d love to know how many pieces Galloway has written over the years about his fears that women and children and men were being sexually exploited in Hollywood. My bold guess is the number zero. So far, not one figure accused of misconduct or more—Weinstein, Toback, Spacey, etc.—has been wrongfully blamed. In fact, such behavior is highly recidivist, making it fairly easy to confirm now that the floodgates have opened. And it’s the tip of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to entertainment world abuses.

If Galloway had spent a little more time in his career addressing the very real wrongs he’d heard about—and he certainly did hear of them—instead of turning a deaf ear, perhaps we wouldn’t have reached this desperate moment.

The opening:

In the early 1980s, Los Angeles was engulfed in scandal. After the mother of a young child claimed her son had been sodomized by a staff member at his school, other parents came forward with increasingly lurid allegations. Not only had one kid been violated, it was said, but so had dozens of others. And it wasn’t just an isolated staffer who was responsible; rather, half a dozen teachers and administrators had perpetrated the most heinous sex acts, some involving small animals, others satanic rituals. There were tales of secret underground tunnels and witches on broomsticks. The revelations seemed endless and apocalyptic. And they were repeated ad nauseam by a too-willing press.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of reporters were assigned to cover the story, one tumbling over the other in the race to break news. Here in Southern California, in suburban Manhattan Beach — in the very place where children should have felt safest — they were in grave danger, we were told. And if these kids were in danger, how many others must be, too? We started looking around with a newfound fear. Friends became strangers, strangers became enemies, enemies became potential perverts lurking in our midst, ready to do inconceivable harm. Terror swept through middle-class families just as ferociously and devastatingly as the fires that have recently decimated Santa Rosa.

And yet none of it was true.

After years of investigations and multiple trials, not a single person connected to the McMartin preschool scandal (as the case was known) was ever found guilty, though many of the accused had their lives left in ruins. One alleged culprit, Ray Buckey, endured two separate trials, and both ended in hung juries, after he’d spent five years waiting in jail. David Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize writing about how rumor turned to revulsion for The Los Angeles Times; but even today, many of us question whether “not guilty” was the same as “innocent.”

The media didn’t cover itself in glory back then. Where were the reporters who stuck to that tried-and-true principle, that one is innocent until proven guilty? Where were the voices crying out that these fables of witches and warlocks, dungeons and devilish rites, didn’t pass the sniff test? They remained silent, almost without exception. In my three decades as a journalist, I’ve never experienced anything like it.

Until now.

Since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke three weeks ago, thanks to some stellar reporting by The New York Times and The New Yorker — bolstered by a cascade of reports from other publications, including this one — not a day has gone by without another mind-boggling story. From James Toback to Kevin Spacey, from Brett Ratner to Dustin Hoffman, from political commentator Mark Halperin to NPR news chief Michael Oreskes — there have been countless tales of horrendous behavior, the sort one had hoped to see vanish decades ago. In their zeal to ferret out the guilty, journalists are reacting to past errors, and to a time when our unwillingness to investigate allegations gave rise to the culture of secrecy in which Weinstein’s band of brothers could thrive.

And these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. Even now, my colleagues here and elsewhere are on the hunt, chasing hundreds of tips about harassment in many and varied forms — male upon male, male upon female, verbal, sexual, you name it. And I’m delighted. It’s wonderful to see reporters tackling a subject of real significance and society-changing potential. They’re doing what journalists are meant to do: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

That said, may I confess that I’m scared?

I’m terrified that, in our righteous quest to do good, we’re sweeping up the innocent as well as the guilty. We’re accepting allegations in the place of solid proof. We’re conflating those guilty of more minor crimes with perpetrators of egregious and even criminal behavior. •

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“So Far, Parker Has Handled The Crisis Shrewdly”

August 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

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It’s understood The Hollywood Reporter is an industry trade journal that addresses above all else the business of movies, but Stephen Galloway’s article on the Nate Parker ugliness from the aspect of how the director and Fox Searchlight can best do damage control is bizarre and offensive. For a journalist to write from inside an imaginary public relations war room about the optimum tactics to use to ensure a movie “can survive a rape-trial scandal” is just jaw-dropping, especially since the woman who charged Parker and his Birth of a Nation co-writer Jean Celestin didn’t survive, having committed suicide in 2012. It’s the strangest set of priorities.

An excerpt:

First, it’s crucial for the filmmaker to separate his life from the message of his film, about the horrific treatment of slaves — and by extension all African-Americans — in our society. That means Searchlight likely will have to abandon its plans to tie the movie’s marketing to him. The messenger may be flawed; the message isn’t. Now the message must be central to the movie’s campaign.

Second, Parker must demonstrate that he is a changed man. Penitence works far better than protests of innocence. The Birth of a Nation must be presented as his redemption story, a mea culpa rather than a personal triumph.

Third, Parker must deploy the men and women who know him and have worked with him to testify to his decency. That means not only his wife but also such luminaries as Denzel Washington, who gave him a break on The Great Debaters, and Oprah Winfrey, herself the victim of sexual abuse.

So far, Parker has handled the crisis shrewdly.•

In the New York Times, Roxane Gay has a deep and nuanced op-ed explaining why she can’t separate the art from the behavior of the artist, which would consign Pablo Picasso and Anne Sexton and Errol Flynn, among many others, to mothballs, but which is a very understandable reaction. An excerpt:

Mr. Parker is being forced to publicly reckon with his past, and he is doing a lousy job. I want to have empathy for him, but everything he says and does troubles me. You see, what happened in 1999 was a “painful moment” in his life. Most of what he has to say about that “painful moment” involves how he felt, how he was affected. The solipsism is staggering.

In an interview with Deadline.com, the entertainment news site, Mr. Parker said: “I’ve got five daughters and a lovely wife. My mom lives here with me; I brought her here. I’ve got four younger sisters.” He offers up the women in his life as incontrovertible evidence of goodness or, perhaps, redemption. But no matter how much he wishes it to be so, his women cannot erase his past. He went so far as to bring his 6-year-old daughter to an interview where he knew he would be questioned about the circumstances surrounding the rape trial — a strange, manipulative and even cynical choice. To this day, he believes he did nothing wrong, though he also says he has “grown” and is a “changed” man.•

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“He’s Not Really In Russia In His Mind”

March 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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I don’t trust the NSA or Oliver Stone with our information. 

It was clear long before Edward Snowden to any American paying attention that our government had overreached into our privacy in the aftermath of 9/11. It’s not that there aren’t real dangers that need to be investigated, but treating every citizen like a threat is another kind of threat.

Stone is a very gifted filmmaker whose work seems informed by chemicals he (over-)experimented with as a youth. It’s galling that so many took his overheated JFK hokum seriously for so long and that some still do. His films are interesting provided no one uses them as history lessons.

That means the director’s upcoming take on Snowden should be…interesting? Well, let’s not prejudge. 

Stephen Galloway of the Hollywood Reporter has an article about Stone’s paranoid approach to the making of the movie, which might be warranted in this case. He recently said this of the production: “We moved to Germany, because we did not feel comfortable in the U.S….we felt like we were at risk here.” An excerpt:

When Stone (whose films include Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street) was first approached to make the movie, he hesitated. He had been working on another controversial subject, about the last few years in the life of Martin Luther King Jr., and did not immediately wish to tackle something that incendiary again.

“Glenn Greenwald [the journalist who worked with Poitras to break the Snowden story] asked me some advice and I just wanted to stay away from controversy,” he said. “I didn’t want this. Be that as it may, a couple of months later, the Russian lawyer for Snowden contacts me via my producer. The Russian lawyer told me to come to Russia and wanted me to meet him. One thing led to another, and basically I got hooked.”

In Moscow, Stone met multiple times with Snowden, who has been living in exile in Russia since evading the U.S. government’s attempts to arrest him for espionage. “He’s articulate, smart, very much the same,” he said. “I’ve been seeing him off and on for a year — actually, more than that. I saw him last week or two weeks ago to show him the final film.”

He added: “He is consistent: he believes so thoroughly in reform of the Internet that he has devoted himself to this cause … Because of the Russian hours, he stays up all night. He’s a night owl, and he’s always in touch [with the outside world], and he’s working on some kind of constitution for the Internet with other people. So he’s very busy. And he stays in that 70-percent-computer world. He’s on another planet that way. His sense of humor has gotten bigger, his tolerance. He’s not really in Russia in his mind — he’s in some planetary position up there. And Lindsay Mills, the woman he’s loved for 10 years — really, it’s a serious affair — has moved there to be with him.”•

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“The Writer-Producer Always Was Considered Brilliant But Also Eccentric”

February 18, 2016 in Excerpts | Permalink

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Gifted television writer David Milch gambled and lost so much that he pretty much ruined schadenfreude for everyone.

The former Yale Literature professor, who co-created of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, had lavish homes, $100 million and the esteem of the industry, but a rabid racetrack habit has left him with only the latter. He continues working as he lives in shadows of his former life, subsisting on a $40-a-week allowance and hopelessly in arrears to the IRS. Milch is the subject of a jaw-dropping Hollywood Reporter story by Stephen Galloway with Scott Johnson, which could be called a cautionary tale, except it probably can only be fully understood by those drawn to wagering every last comfort on the nose of a horse. In other words, if you can see yourself in it, you probably won’t be able to see yourself out of it. 

An excerpt:

The writer-producer always was considered brilliant but also eccentric: His writing style consists of dictating his thoughts, sometimes while lying prone on the ground, often surrounded by other writers.

“He’s obviously a genius and extraordinarily talented, and he’s got a fire that burns in him brighter than anyone else,” says horse trainer Darrell Vienna, who helped Milch connect with real-life cowboys and horse wranglers while doing research forDeadwood. “But it can cause a lot of damage. He’s an extraordinary person. He’s insightful in everything he does — people, horses, everything — and he’s very insightful about himself, and therein lies the rub. He’s a person of extremes.”

A self-confessed former drug user in the ’80s (“I was a bitter heroin addict at the time,” he told an MIT communications forum in 2006) as well as a gambler, Milch is well-known at racetracks, where he once owned several horses. Racing and gambling were the themes of his HBO series Luck, canceled in 2012 after three horses died during filming.

“He was one of the most devoted gamblers,” says John Perrotta, an author and adviser on that show. “He was very serious about it, and he was a very good handicapper.”

Handicapping is the process by which odds are analyzed in a way that improves the chances of winning. You can, for instance, make what’s called an “exotic bet,” in which you guess which two or three or four horses will be the first to cross the finish line and in what order. The formation of these exotic bets was the subject of the first scenes of Luck, which Milch once described as his “love letter” to horse racing. Perrotta says they came directly from his experiences with the writer.

One acquaintance familiar with Milch’s gambling habits describes a man who couldn’t stop betting once he got started: “He was crazy. He’d bet thousands and thousands of dollars. He’d bet every race.”•

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“When Her Family Joined The Cult, Close Was Removed From Everything She Held Most Dear”

October 16, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Many great actors seem to me like they grew up in a cult, so oddly unique they are. Vanessa Redgrave, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, Daniel Day-Lewis and Ben Kingsley? Had to be a cult, right? But Glenn Close actually was raised in a cult, a right-wing, anti-intellectual one to boot. It caused some trust issues, as you might expect, even within herself. An excerpt from Stephen Galloway’s new Hollywood Reporter profile:

“Close was 7 years old when her dad, a Harvard-educated doctor from a long line of New England blue bloods, joined the religious group known as the Moral Re-Armament.

Founded during the late 1930s, the MRA held firmly to what it called ‘the four absolutes’: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. But these benevolent principles masked the all-consuming, all-controlling traits of any other cult — this particular one led by Rev. Frank Buchman, a violently anti-intellectual and possibly homophobic evangelical fundamentalist from Pennsylvania, who argued that only those with special guidance from God were without sin, and that they had a duty to change others. What began as an anti-war movement gradually turned into a possessive and exclusionary force.

It is unclear how many adherents the MRA had, though about 30,000 people gathered to hear Buchman speak at the Hollywood Bowl in the late 1930s, and the group was widely discussed in the press during and after World War II. Its post-war conferences were attended by several high-level diplomats and politicians — despite allegations that Buchman had been a Hitler supporter — and its cultlike nature appears to have emerged only slowly.

‘I haven’t made a study of groups like these,’ says Close, ‘but in order to have something like this coalesce, you have to have a leader. You have to have a leader who has some sort of ability to bring people together, and that’s interesting to me because my memory of the man who founded it was this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose, in a wheelchair.’

When her family joined the cult, Close was removed from everything she held most dear — above all, life in the ivy-covered, stone cottage on her grandfather’s Connecticut estate, where she ran wild over the rugged land with her Shetland pony, Brownie. While Dr. Close went to Congo as a surgeon, she lived with her brother and two sisters at the group’s headquarters in Caux, Switzerland.”

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