I’m not talking about the alleged sexual harassment.
The main point of the story had something to do with Demi Moore’s character basically authorizing a crappy product to be sold, and trying to hang it on the hapless Michael Douglas.
What was the point of the crappy product? Just to torpedoe Douglas, or was he just supposed to be the scapegoat since her bad decisions were going to cause someone to get nailed?
Whoa, weird; I just saw the last half of this flick on TV last week.
Okay, the product they were making was a CD drive that was apparently “50 times faster than those currently on the market”, or something like that.
The product itself wasn’t crappy, but the production of it was: it was supposed to have level 7 air in the factory but only had level 5, they didn’t bring in their own people but hired the Malasians to handle the government (even though they didn’t have a contract with their government), and there were a bunch of other problems. The production was Douglas’s job, and he didn’t know anything about it (and finally figured it out to actually set-up Moore at that meeting at the end).
Basically, from what I can remember, she authorized the changes so that when the merger was about to go through (the meeting at the end was for the benefit of the company that was merging with their company) the company merging wouldn’t want to merge. I think what Moore & their boss (the guy from Happiness) planned to have this come forward, ruin the merger, and then they could buy the company up cheap. Douglas was meant to be the scapegoat for the problems and the sexual harassment thing was to have him looking the other way when it came down to the merger.
I hope this helps. Though, it might not have been a merger. It might have been another company buying them, now that I think of it.
IIRC, the production problems weren’t part of any plot, but the result of Moore’s managerial incompetence. She was too concerned with advancement and being a big shot to care about trivial details like making something work. Also, the CEO was obsessed with having a women in his company break ‘the glass ceiling’. So when the problems became so big that they threatened a planned IPO, she decided to blame them on a former lover(Douglas) and the CEO signed off on it to protect his ‘star’.
This is what happens when I’m up all night and the Dodgers lose.
The sexual harrassment claim was to draw attention onto Douglas and away from from her involvement in the Malaysia fiasco. That’s what I meant to say.
I’ve read this book and it’s a little clearer about Meredith’s motives. Essentially Meredith altered her appearance over time in order to appear more like the CEO’s daughter (who had died). Meredith got on the corporate fast track and rose quickly through the ranks. One of her semi-recent assignments (say a year or so prior to the start of the book/movie) was to mediate a dispute with the Malaysian government. Malaysia wanted the chip plant to be less automated so that more workers could be employed. Meredith compromised the quality of the chips by agreeing to replace some of the automatic procedures with manual (and therefore much more susceptible to error) work. She was able to present this as a successful completion of her task to the company even though the Malaysian government didn’t get everything they asked for (in fact Malaysia had a backwards attitude towards women and work and considered Meredith to be part of the problem and not the solution).
She knew that her decisions were screwing up the production so she planned to come on to the Douglas character in order to force him to transfer to another dept/resign/etc. under the accusation that he harrassed her. Once he was gone she could blame the production problems on him (especially since he’s not there to defend himself) and then continue on up the corporate ladder. So to summarize…
She replaced automatic processes with manual workers at the plant and used cheaper materials knowing full well that it would screw things up in the future but that it would give her a “win” in the present.
She made a sexual advance on the Douglas character in order to claim harassment with the hope that he would resign/transfer to another dept/whatever which would allow her to blame the production problems on him since he wouldn’t be able to defend himself.
Grim
It was typical Crichton illogic. Ya know how difficult it is to prove that a subordinate (which Michael Douglas was) sexually harrassed a superior (Demi Moore)?
Sua