James Cameron rebuffed Harvey Weinstein on the ’98 Academy Awards, ensuing within the director virtually walloping the producer with an Oscar.
So many individuals in Hollywood knew about trade warthog Harvey Weinstein’s disgusting, unlawful habits behind the scenes however so few really confronted him about it. There may be the well-known story of Brad Pitt defending Gwyneth Paltrow when she was arising however these are few and much between. However just one man has ever come near bashing Harvey Weinstein over the top with an Oscar statue he so desperately needed: the King of the World himself that yr, James Cameron.
On Oscar evening 1998, James Cameron and Harvey Weinstein discovered themselves competing on the Shrine Auditorium, with the director there with odds-on favourite Titanic and Weinstein supporting the Miramax-supported Good Will Searching. Titanic obtained off to the robust begin it will carry for the remainder of the evening, whereas Good Will Searching would nab solely two statues. With Titanic having simply gained Finest Modifying, Cameron was about to provide Weinstein an iceberg-sized ljump on his head. “So I’m on my way back to my seat with my editing Oscar, and this guy’s jumping up to introduce himself, saying, ‘If you want to come to work at a place that’s a friend of the artist, a friend of the filmmaker’ — he’s holding his hand out, and I just blew him off. It was just an ugly little moment.”
So what triggered the rift between James Cameron and Harvey Weinstein? Regardless that Cameron hadn’t but had firsthand points with the mega-producer, he did hear how he handled his good friend Guillermo del Toro on Mimic. “He had told me the horrible shit that Miramax pulled on him when he made his first American commercial film, Mimic, and they fired him. The actors, led by Mira Sorvino, kind of revolted and wouldn’t work until they brought him back. Then, when the film was successful and well regarded, Harvey sort of jumped up to take praise for the movie.”
As James Cameron additional defined, he nearly used his very first Oscar to provide Harvey Weinstein a great will blunting. “I did defend Guillermo and I called Harvey on his bullsh*t, and then he got very loud and verbally abusive and almost potentially physically violent. And he was about to get clocked by an Oscar — which would’ve been highly appropriate, I think. But I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms; it was just the weapon at hand. The hysterical thing about the whole moment was people around us were saying, ‘Not here! Not here!’ It was kind of like, ‘It’s OK if you boys fight out in the alley, but don’t do it here at the Academy Awards!’”
Harvey Weinstein’s bullying and faux-ass kissing was infamous, and for those who have been in with him you have been in — till you pissed him off, so it’s refreshing to see James Cameron not even entertain the concept of being an ally. Loyalty can go a great distance in Hollywood, so good on Cameron, whose profession has already outlasted Weinstein’s.
