I never worked for a guy like Harvey Weinstein, Jeff Fager, or Les Moonves.
I worked for bullies, but that didn't bother me. One editor yelled at me a lot, but it was OK if I yelled back at him. And the fact I was willing to yell back at him probably endeared me to him.
And he probably terrorized some of my co-workers. Some of them were nervous, some of them took Prozac. All of us regarded ourselves as writers, creative types with unique and precious voices. Some of us didn't last. When I got there there were two offices vacant. I was advised not to take the one closest to the editor's office because it had had four occupants in the past year. The most recent occupant had lasted only a month before heading back to Utah, where she got her old job back. (And later was part of a team that won a Pulitzer.)
I took an office around the corner, out of his line of sight. It seemed prudent.
In those days we had boisterous discussions. We had Darwinian staff meetings--there was only so much room in each week's book, and we were all competing for that real estate. You didn't throw out vague "what if" ideas in the staff meeting. You came in with a premise, a source, maybe a meaty on-the-record quote. Half-formed ideas got slapped down. Sometimes profanely. By the editor. By peers.
You didn't get in the publication for a couple of weeks in a row and you didn't work there anymore. We were always overstaffed. Someone was always on the way out. Second place was a set of steak knives. Third place was "you're fired."
I had more stories in the newspaper during the time I was there than anyone else. I won more awards.
But I was white, male, physically competent, someone the editor would talk basketball with in the second-floor gym. I was heterosexual. I fit in with what was the company's meritocracy.
That editor has had his problems in recent years. I don't know anything about the stuff that happened after I left. All I know is what I saw, and that you couldn't run a place of business like that today.
My business has a way of romanticizing bullies. Lots of us like to talk about the way we were abused by rough-talking men--it was inevitably men--who somehow made us better with their strutting and swearing.
And it is just possible that they made me push myself a little harder. But I understood it as performance; I never thought any old man would actually dare put his hands on me. So maybe they did make me better.
But here's what else they did.
They hurt people, they suppressed talent. They robbed our culture of what might have been vital voices. I saw good writers paralyzed, afraid to speak up in those staff meetings, unable (or unwilling) to play the game. One left to be a carpenter. One left to write books and ended up killing herself in a lonely cabin in South Carolina. Some stayed and flourished. Some left and flourished.
Some people are simply too precious and sensitive to function in a pragmatic world. Some people expect too much of others. There are people who could solve a lot of their problems simply by working harder. There are people who should take their work more seriously.
But we are due this reckoning.
For a lot of my career, I was the youngest one in the office. I wanted only to fit in well enough to be left alone to do my work. I didn't care much about the power dynamics, or who might or might not be sleeping with the boss. Because I didn't have to worry about that. Because I benefited from things that I had nothing to with -- because I looked the way I looked and had conventional appetites.
There was a piece in the Hollywood Reporter last week written by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who has had a lot of success in a lucrative industry, about her history with Moonves, the CBS executive who finally lost his job. It was an account of how he murdered her career at CBS, because ... well, who knows?
Maybe because, as he told my colleague Michael Storey in the 1990s, a few years after Bloodworth-Thomason's run of hit TV shows on the network (Designing Women, Evening Shade), he thought the era of "hick" sitcoms had come to an end.
Bloodworth-Thomason thinks it was something more basic. She remembers pitching him a pilot in 1995, soon after he'd taken over as president of CBS.
"He sat and stared at me," she writes. "... I had not experienced such a menacing look since Charles Manson tried to stare me down on a daily basis when I was a young reporter covering that trial. As soon as the pilot was completed, Moonves informed me that it would not be picked up. I was at the pinnacle of my career. I would not work again for seven years.
"I continued trying to win over Moonves. And he continued turning down every pilot I wrote. Often, if he would catch me in the parking lot, he would make sure to tell me that my script was one of the best he'd read but that he had decided, in the end, not to do it. It always seemed that he enjoyed telling me this. Just enough to keep me in the game. I was told he refused to give my scripts to any of the stars he had under contract. Then I began to hear from female CBS employees about his mercurial, misogynist behavior, with actresses being ushered in and out of his office. His mantra, I was told, was, 'Why would I wanna cast 'em if I don't wanna f*** 'em?'"
I never worked for a guy like Moonves. That's what I tell myself.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 09/16/2018