Mel Gibson isn’t involved in sexual assault AFAIK but some years ago he acted absolutely atrociously harassing that poor woman, verbally, that he was involved with. Now he is oozing quietly back into show biz after shutting his big fat ugly mouth for a bit. I bet the same thing will happen with Mr. Spacey and several others mentioned here. Let everything quiet down, simmer down, and ‘make a comeback’ or ooze quietly back into show biz. I know sexual assault is not the same as verbal assault, but…short memories. People let things slide after a while. Look at tRump! he has millions of fans, even though he wants to kill people and has sexually harassed and maybe more, dozens of women.
Add Danny Masterson to the list. He still has a job, for now, but who knows what will happen down the line.
FWIW, it appears that this is a Scientology problem, rather than a showbiz problem. What I’ve read is appalling in and of itself, but in the context of Cof$, nothing that I would have thought a Clam wouldn’t stoop to. I wouldn’t put anything past those…clowns.
Spaceys always been best playing a creep anyway.
Who knew it would take an outsider to take down Spacey? Kudos to Anthony Rapp for speaking up and starting the ball rolling. Netflix and the production company finally did the right thing by canning Spacey, but who knows how much they knew earlier. At the same time, it’s hard to do something when employees don’t speak up because they are too afraid. I’m not sure what the HR departments and companies can do to break through the culture of fear to report. Spacey wasn’t just the star, he was also an executive producer on HoC, so I’m sure there was added fear there. Plus, he targeted men, who probably are more afraid to come forward, plus there was likely the reluctance to out him as gay
Jeffrey Jones’ movies haven’t done so. I’m not sure if they were taken out of rotation for a time after his conviction, but they certainly didn’t ‘disappear for a generation’. I’ve very recently watched Beetlejuice (on TV), Ferris Bueller and Howard the Duck (both on Netflix), just for some quick examples. (Hell, he was even working again less than a year after the conviction, though he’s gotten work far more sporadically, since.)
Woody Allen and Roman Polanski haven’t suffered much in this respect, either. (Other respects, yes, but not having their work disappear off the face of the earth.)
So…I wouldn’t expect Spacey’s work to disappear for very long, if at all, although he’ll probably be toxic for new work for a bit.
He’s definitely damned, by that kind of accusation followed by other ones (albeit sexual harassment of adults it seems in the other cases). Whether he’d have taken as much add-on heat by not explicitly talking about his sexuality, letting it be implicit in ‘if the accuser says that happened I’m sorry’, I’m not sure.
One might compare to other incidents though further back in the general social evolution of coming out. When George Michael came out after being arrested for soliciting sex in public with a man, it helped him IMO. He was arrested for something inappropriate, but not all that terrible: the main bad publicity traditionally in such a cases was just that the arrested guy was identified as gay. He embraced it, and helped himself I think.
A somewhat contrasting case was Jim McGreevey (former gov of NJ). As a married man he hired his unqualified lover for a high paying govt job. The fact that the lover was male was basically irrelevant. Many people saw McG’s simultaneous coming out as trying to curry favor and distract attention from the wrong; many mocked his silly ‘gay American’ self label. Though some, knuckleheadedly IMO, fell for it and praised him.
The Spacey case seems to me like McG but even worse: a wrong which is not only serious but suggests an extremely sensitive stereotype about gay men. And we’re further down the line in people coming out generally. By definition Spacey’s at least bisexual if he essentially admits coming on sexually to a another male. How relevant is the rest of it (that he now ‘chooses to live as a gay man’) really? Sounded like trying to curry offsetting favor.
It’s hugely ironic that all the big studios insisted on morality clauses in the 40s and 50s while their heads (Louis B Mayer, Harry Cohn, Daryll Zanuck et al) were at the same time busily harassing, molesting and worse any female employee who worked for them. Of course, in those days when the police in Hollywood were literally in the pay of the studios no woman would have had a chance to take any of the bosses or anyone under their protection to court. The fixer Eddie Mannix could make any crime go away up to and including murder. Times have certainly changed although it’s taken a hell of a long time.
What really stinks is that since Spacey’s series has been axed, the people who he allegedly abused are now out of work. Talk about winning the battle but losing the war.
There may be some settlements in their future though.
No it hasn’t axed; production has been suspended until they decide what they want to do. A good possibility is that Frank will be assassinated or die of AIDS.
Jones wasn’t a two-time Oscar winner and as big a star as Spacey. Also, he only got in trouble once whereas the scandal involving Spacey has been getting bigger and uglier since it broke.
Plus, he never really headlined a movie. The closest he came to top billing, he was second banana to either Jon Lovitz or a dwarf in a duck suit.
I don’t think I’ll ever watch American Beauty again.
It turns out that they had only filmed two episodes and a few more totally written. It’s early enough for a Spacy-less season which I am sure that they are trying to figure out now.
Out of curiosity, were you planning on it before?
Se7en was on last week, it’s one of those movies I always have to watch when I flip thru the channels and see that it’s on, and Spacey’s line when he says he picked one of his victims because the man was “a drug-dealing pederast” made me cringe.
There was a good six years or so (1995-2001) when I considered Spacey to be my absolute favorite actor, I sought out *everything *he had been in up til that point, and saw him onstage in New York multiple times. LA Confidential, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty & **Se7en **are classics and I still would rank them in my all-time favorite films. In the mid-2000s his movie choices began to deteriorate and I stopped following him as closely as I had until House of Cards kind of made him cool again. I still want to see All the Money in the World.
I will say though, that living in NYC and being very close with the theatre community, these allegations don’t *really *surprise me (except for the underage ones. *That *I had no idea!) I remember hearing back in 2000 that when Spacey was on Broadway the year before he liked to pick up young men in some West Village parks, but that was just rumors and even if true they were still of legal age. All the sexual assault stuff though, ugh. So disappointing.
You have to be kidding. Roman Polanski’s movies, including the ones he had a part in, are all available on Netflix. Movies where OJ Simpson and Mike Tyson had prominent roles are available.
And of course notoriety can even increase demand for a movie with many people wanting to see the actor who’s at the center of all the scandal.
Whoa.
Has something like that happened before where a role was recast so close to a film’s release date? (Dec 22)