Yep, I’m talking about the old movie with Demi Moore and Michael Douglas.
I get the sexual harassment part; but I don’t get the side story part where Demi Moore and Donald Sutherland want to get Michael Douglas fired. Why?
Does getting him fired somehow help the merger that they’re all working on?
Or is the firing just something that came about because of ill fated sexual harassment?
The company tried to transfer Douglas when it was though he harassed Moore. But he won’t because if he leaves the devision he is in before it is spun off he does not get stock options worth millions. So he will not accept the transfer. When Douglas brings the suit it pisses off both Sutherland and Moore. But they can’t fire him or let the suit go to court so the other company can find out. That is why it goes to mediation.
So basically they do not want him fired.
Also remember that Donald Sutherland wanted a woman to head that area, not necessarily the most qualified “person.” Unfortunately, the woman he picked, Demi Moore, made some really bad business decisions. Part of giving Douglas the shaft was to protect Moore. (Sutherland was showing his foreward thinking in helping to break the glass ceiling, and the death of his daughter was weighing heavily on his mind, yadda, yadda, yadda).
Wasn’t Demi Moore trying to get him fired to get back at him for breaking up with her in the past? That’s how I remembered it, I think. But I saw it a long time ago…
That was another part of it: one thing that the movie didn’t seem to convey as well as the book (because it *was *originally a Michael Crichton book) was that Demi Moore’s character was a Class A, sociopathic, crazy f—ing bitch. There was this whole side story about how she had plastic surgery to make herself look like her boss’s deceased daughter, and so forth. She wasn’t that balanced to begin with, and when she kept pursuing her vendetta against Michael Douglas her superiors tended to side with her over him. When Michael Douglas ended up beating them in court, she bugged her bosses into assuring her that he would still get the axe.
However, the axe was already on it’s way. One of the big subplots of the book involved Michael Douglas trying to diagnose some weird technical problems with one of their products on top of the sexual harassment stuff. He ends up tracking the problem to its source, which ends up being their production facilities: the big factories were built in a foreign country to save costs (I think it was South Africa in the book), and in order to get the foreign government to approve their project, whomever negotiated the factories agreed to use human labor on the assembly lines, rather than the extremely precise robotics needed to assemble the electronics. This was a huge fuckup that essentially rendered the entire factory useless for their project, and Demi Moore was going to pin it on Michael Douglas to keep from getting in trouble.
I kind of remember something about D Sutherland losing his daughter. I forgot about that, and didn’t see that part on the tv version I just watched (although I wasn’t paying 100% attention either).
So if I’m understanding you guys correctly, the whole thing really does stem from the Sexual harassment thing. This is because m douglas counter sues Demi Moore and the company it pisses off d sutherland and d moore because if that went public it would hurt the merger. Therefore their solution is not to fire m douglas(bad press) but to either run him off or transfer him to oblivion. Does that sum it up accurately?
I don’t think it ever went to court.
Also, the big winner was this other woman that worked at the company that had her son feeding information to Douglas. She ended up getting Moore’s job after Moore was fired.
Douglas does not counter sue. He brings the original action.
Douglas does not counter sue. He brings the original action.
I may not be using the correct terminology. But Douglas wants to forget the entire sexual harassment thing, and only decides to press the issue when he goes to work the next morning only to find that Demi Moore is asserting that he sexually harassed her; his response was to say “no, it was her that sexually harassed ME.” It then goes to mediation, right?
That sounds right, but it’s been a long time since I read it so my memory may not be reliable.