She Said | |
---|---|
Directed by | Maria Schrader |
Screenplay by | Rebecca Lenkiewicz |
Based on | She Said by Jodi Kantor Megan Twohey |
Produced by | |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Natasha Braier |
Edited by | Hansjörg Weißbrich |
Music by | Nicholas Britell |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release dates | |
Running time | 129 minutes [2] |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $32 million [3] |
Box office | $13.9 million [4] [5] |
She Said is a 2022 American drama film directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, based on the 2019 book by reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. The film stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Twohey and Kantor, respectively, and follows their New York Times investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein's history of abuse and sexual misconduct against women. The film also stars Patricia Clarkson, Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, and Andre Braugher, in his final film role before his death in 2023. Ashley Judd appears as herself.
The book was optioned in 2018, and the film was announced in 2021 as a co-production between Annapurna Pictures and Plan B Entertainment. Filming took place in New York with cinematographer Natasha Braier. During post-production, editing was completed by Hansjörg Weißbrich and the score was composed by Nicholas Britell.
She Said had its world premiere at the 60th New York Film Festival on October 13, 2022, and was released in the United States on November 18, 2022, by Universal Pictures. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the screenplay and the performances of Kazan and Mulligan. It was also named one of the best films of 2022 by the American Film Institute. However, it was a box-office bomb, grossing $13 million against a production budget of $32 million. [5] [6] The film was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mulligan and Best Adapted Screenplay for Lenkiewicz at the 76th British Academy Film Awards. It also earned Mulligan a Golden Globe Award nomination and Lenkiewicz a Critics' Choice Award nomination.
In 2017, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor receives a tip that actress Rose McGowan was sexually assaulted by Indiewood producer Harvey Weinstein. McGowan initially declines to comment, but later calls her back and describes an encounter in which Weinstein raped her when she was 23.
Kantor also speaks with actresses Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow, who describe their own experiences with Weinstein, but both ask not to be named in the article for fear of career blowback. Frustrated by a lack of progress in her ensuing investigation, she recruits Megan Twohey to help with the piece.
Twohey tracks down a woman who worked as an assistant to Weinstein at Miramax decades ago and disappeared; the woman fearfully declines to speak on the matter due to having signed an NDA. Kantor confronts the former CFO of Miramax about past settlement payouts by Weinstein against his accusers, but he is hesitant to divulge any information about it.
Twohey is similarly rejected by the EEOC after requesting more information about the settlements. She speaks to Linda Fairstein, a former member of the district attorney's office about why criminal complaints against Weinstein were dropped so quickly; she learns that Weinstein had social connections with Fairstein and the DA's office.
Kantor receives a tip about three former Weinstein assistants who may have been abused: Rowena Chiu, Zelda Perkins, and Laura Madden. She flies out to confront each of them individually. Unable to meet with Chiu, Perkins recounts an incident to Kantor in which Chiu had a breakdown after an encounter with Weinstein. Madden initially declines to speak with her, but changes her mind after a Weinstein representative reaches out to discourage her from speaking to reporters about her experience.
Weinstein learns of the investigation and sends a lawyer to attempt to appease reporters, but declines to go on the record and denies all wrongdoing. The lawyer acknowledges a number of past financial settlements, but declines to say how many. Kantor receives an anonymous tip to speak with Irwin Reiter, one of Weinstein's former accountants; he shows her an internal memo that circulated at Miramax in 2015 detailing abuse allegations from a former employee.
The Times notifies the Weinstein Company board of the impending article and asks for a statement. Weinstein denies the allegations and pressures the reporters to name their sources, threatening to talk to other publications to discredit the story. He eventually releases a statement acknowledging that he has caused pain to others in the past and that he is taking a leave of absence from The Weinstein Company. Kantor and Twohey attempt to convince their sources to go on the record; all initially decline, but Judd and Madden later agree to be named in the article, believing it is the right thing to do.
The Times publishes the story on October 5, 2017. After the article's publication, 82 women come forward with their own allegations against Weinstein, leading to workplace and legal reforms. Weinstein is currently serving a 23-year sentence for rape and sexual assault in New York. In April 2024, New York's highest appellate court reversed all of Weinstein's convictions.
On October 5, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey from The New York Times revealed substantial allegations of sexual misconduct by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, accusing him of three decades of sexually harassing actresses, female production assistants, temps and other employees at Miramax and The Weinstein Company. [12] The allegations served as a catalyst for the burgeoning #MeToo movement and eventually resulted in Weinstein being sentenced to 23 years of imprisonment. [13]
In 2019, Kantor and Twohey published She Said , a book detailing the different processes they employed to investigate and uncover Weinstein's sexual misconduct. The rights to the book were optioned in 2018 by Annapurna Pictures and Plan B Entertainment. In June 2021, Universal Pictures announced they were developing an adaptation with Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan in negotiations to star as Kantor and Twohey. [14] It was also reported Maria Schrader was attached to direct from a screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, with Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner set to produce. [15]
Schrader and Lenkiewicz said they wanted the film to be less focused on reenactments of Weinstein's abuse and harassment and more about the women who were silenced. [16] Said Lenkeiwicz, "Although there is such darkness in the story...there is a lot of beauty and light in women finding each other." [16]
In July 2021, filming began in New York City with cinematographer Natasha Braier. [17] [18] Filming took place at the Times' New York headquarters. [19] By August, Patricia Clarkson, [20] Andre Braugher, [21] Samantha Morton, [22] and Tom Pelphrey were announced as part of the cast. [23] Adam Shapiro was confirmed to star in October 2021. [24]
Pitt's involvement with the film has received scrutiny as he was made aware of Weinstein's behavior in 1996 by his then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow and later by his then-partner Angelina Jolie but continued to work with Weinstein after the fact, and because he was accused of abusing Jolie and their children in 2016. [25] [26] [27]
In August 2022, Weinstein and his attorneys tried to delay his trial from its October 10, 2022 start date by claiming that the film's marketing and publicity would prejudice any Los Angeles jury against him; Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench denied the request. [28]
The film was theatrically released in the United States on November 18, 2022, coinciding with the then on-going Weinstein trial in Los Angeles. [29] It premiered at the 60th New York Film Festival on October 13, 2022, [1] and at the 66th BFI London Film Festival on October 14, 2022. [30] It also screened at the TCL Chinese Theatre during the 2022 AFI Fest on November 4, 2022. [31]
The film was made available for VOD on December 6, 2022, followed by a Blu-ray and DVD release on January 10, 2023. [32] [33]
She Said grossed $5.8 million in the United States and Canada, and $8.1 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $13.9 million. [4] [5] In the United States and Canada, She Said was released alongside The Menu , and was projected to gross $3–5 million from 2,022 theaters in its opening weekend. [34] [3] The film made $830,000 on its first day, including $160,000 from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $2.2 million, finishing sixth. [35]
Deadline Hollywood called the opening total "a flop" and cited the "emotional exhaustion" of audiences, the perception of the film's "anticlimactic existence" since the Weinstein trials were still ongoing, and journalists "[not being] as interesting as they think they are" to the average person. They also noted that the trending lack of interest in awards season and auteur projects by the general public and the competition and overlapping demographics from holdovers Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and The Menu may have also played a role in the underperformance. [36]
The Hollywood Reporter , which listed the film's debut among the worst-ever for a film playing in over 2,000 theaters and also noting audiences may not want to "re-litigate recent and ongoing scandals", said that films about Hollywood don't tend to play well outside Los Angeles and New York City, citing that the film's top 10 grossing theaters were on the coasts. [37]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , 88% of 274 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.6/10.The website's consensus reads: "Although She Said struggles to add cinematic flair to its fact-based story, it remains a worthy, well-acted tribute to journalistic integrity." [39] Metacritic , which uses a weighted average , assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100, based on 51 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. [40] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, and those at PostTrak gave the film an 89% overall. [35]
Writing for AP News, Jocelyn Noveck described the film as not only "a worthy entry to a film genre that includes Spotlight and of course All the President's Men ", but also a testament to "the power of journalism... [and] courage, from the women who suffered sexual harassment or assault at Weinstein's hands and came forward at personal risk — to their careers, reputations or well-being." [41]
Critics praised the film for its sensitivity to sexual assault survivors and its non-sensationalist approach, with Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post , commenting: "Schrader films She Said with a bracing combination of straightforwardness and sensitivity, staging the most prurient details of Weinstein's cases with somber restraint rather than salacious literalism." [42] [16] [43] Kristy Puchko of Mashable wrote: "Sexual assault and harassment are not made a spectacle in She Said, as it was in the Fox News-centered docudrama Bombshell . Instead, the details of the allegations are shared, not shown... Schrader trusts we don't need to see what happened to believe these women's stories." [44]
Rolling Stone 's David Fear wrote there is "a genuine sense of how deep and how wide all of [Weinstein's] cover-ups went. It's a story about survivors, but also about systematic sexism, systematic abuse, systematic intimidation, systematic despair over anything changing. Only the last part gets partially redressed." [45] Fear also noted the film "doesn't pretend that wrongs have been righted once and for all. It just wants to pay tribute to two people who stood up to a Goliath and took him down not with one good shot but a million tiny cuts and a lot of hard work." [45]
Praise was given to Mulligan and Kazan, in addition to the ensemble cast. [46] [47] Kate Erbland of IndieWire wrote: "Megan may be the more outwardly cool, calm, and collected one, but Mulligan — always so good at playing women on the edge — brings obvious conflict to the role", [11] while Justin Chang of NPR wrote: "Kazan emphasizes Kantor's empathy, her skill at building trust and coaxing information out of even the most reluctant sources." [46] Entertainment Weekly 's Leah Greenblatt wrote: "The ever-reliable Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle bring a tensile fury and vulnerability to two of the film's most memorable accusers, and Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher have the built-in gravitas to play Kantor and Twohey's suffer-no-fools editors as they methodically track down the tramautized, the complicit, and the less-than-innocent bystanders who will eventually allow them to publish their bombshell report." [48]
Reviews also noted that the film marks a departure from previous journalism films by centering on the two women who broke the story. [46] [47] [49] [16] Stephanie Zacharek of Time wrote: "Instead of hardworking men in their shirtsleeves running around a newsroom, possibly making the occasional call home to check in on their wives and kids, in She Said we see Twohey... at home on maternity leave, struggling with postpartum depression, and Kantor thanking her preteen daughter for helping to pacify her younger, needier sister. As reporters, they're tireless. As moms, they're tired... That's what gives She Said its believable texture. That and the fact that, regardless of this story's ultimately explosive impact, She Said is simply a story of journalists at work." [50] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian commented: "I admire the way it takes the macho cliched nonsense out of journalism in movies: these are not boozy guys being adorable and chaotic, but smart, persistent people doggedly doing their job." [51] Others were more mixed about the film's depiction of the journalists' home lives, with Noveck saying "there just isn't time for enough backstory, so [the scenes] feel cursory." [41] Bloomberg News ' Esther Zuckerman felt the scenes' inclusion made for a narratively disjointed film. [52]
More critical reviews opined the film struggles to bring suspense or a sense of urgency to its story, since the events on which it is based on are public knowledge. [27] [52] Scout Tafoya of RogerEbert.com described it as an "artless Wikipedia entry of an Oscar competitor." [27] Though her review was generally positive, Greenblatt commented: "What the movie does to humanize both these women — and their skittish, often terrified witnesses — feels more fully realized than the procedural bits, which often tend to come off like a broad discourse on How Journalism Works." [48] Puchko wrote: "Where She Said trips up is in its ardent need to play like a prestige biopic, wallowing in the heroes' noble intentions and important contributions to the world but forgetting that these characters should also be exciting to watch." [44] Puchko added "Megan and Jodi [as characters] feel too polished to feel real", and concluded: "In short, She Said is good. But grubbiness could have made it great." [44]
Miramax, LLC, formerly known as Miramax Films, is an American independent film and television production and distribution company founded on December 19, 1979, by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, and based in Los Angeles, California. Today, it is owned by beIN Media Group and Paramount Global.
A ripple effect occurs when an initial disturbance to a system propagates outward to disturb an increasingly larger portion of the system, like ripples expanding across the water when an object is dropped into it.
Harvey Weinstein is an American former film producer and convicted sex offender. In 1979, Weinstein and his brother, Bob Weinstein, co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); The Crying Game (1992); Pulp Fiction (1994); Heavenly Creatures (1994); Flirting with Disaster (1996); and Shakespeare in Love (1998). Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love and also won seven Tony Awards for plays and musicals including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company (TWC), a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017.
The Weinstein Company, LLC was an American independent film studio, founded in New York City by Bob and Harvey Weinstein on March 10, 2005. TWC was one of the largest mini-major film studios in North America as well as in the United States. However, the firing of Harvey Weinstein following allegations of sexual harassment and rape against him, as well as financial troubles that followed, led to the company's decline. The studio eventually declared bankruptcy in February 2018, with independent studio Lantern Entertainment acquiring a majority of its film library and assets. Co-founder and chief executive Bob Weinstein previously owned a small stake in the company.
Robert Weinstein is an American film producer. He is the founder and head of Dimension Films, former co-chairman of Miramax Films and The Weinstein Company (TWC), all of which he co-founded with his older brother, Harvey. He has focused on making action and horror films.
Lisa Read Bloom is an American attorney known for advising Harvey Weinstein amid various sexual abuse allegations, and for representing women whose sexual harassment claims precipitated the firing of Bill O'Reilly from Fox News.
Carey Hannah Mulligan is an English actress. She has received various accolades, including a British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award.
Georgina Rose Chapman is an English fashion designer and actress. She was a regular cast member on Project Runway All Stars and, together with Keren Craig, is a co-founder of the fashion label Marchesa. Chapman was married to film producer Harvey Weinstein before leaving him in 2017 in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse against him.
Jodi Kantor is an American journalist. She is a New York Times correspondent whose work has covered the workplace, technology, and gender. She has been the paper's Arts & Leisure editor and covered two presidential campaigns, chronicling the transformation of Barack and Michelle Obama into the President and First Lady of the United States. Kantor was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her reporting on sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
Zoe Swicord Kazan is an American actress and writer. She made her acting debut in the film Swordswallowers and Thin Men (2003) and later acted in films such as The Savages (2007), Revolutionary Road (2008), and It's Complicated (2009). She starred in Happythankyoumoreplease (2010), Meek's Cutoff (2010), Ruby Sparks (2012), What If (2013), The Big Sick (2017), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), and She Said (2022). She also wrote Ruby Sparks and co-wrote Wildlife (2018) with her partner Paul Dano.
Rósa Arianna "Rose" McGowan is an American actress and activist. After her film debut in a brief role in the comedy Encino Man (1992), she achieved recognition for her performance in the dark comedy The Doom Generation (1995), receiving an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Debut Performance. She had her breakthrough in the horror film Scream (1996) and subsequently headlined the films Going All the Way (1997), Devil in the Flesh (1998) and Jawbreaker (1999).
Meryl Poster is the president and founder of Superb Entertainment. Until October 2014, she was president of television at The Weinstein Company. Poster was previously the co-president of production for Miramax Films, where she executive produced the Academy Award-winning Chicago (2002) and Academy Award-nominated Cider House Rules (1999) and Chocolat (2000). She is an executive producer of the Bravo drama The Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, which premiered in December 2014.
In October 2017, The New York Times and The New Yorker reported that dozens of women had accused the American film producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse over a period of at least 30 years. Over 80 women in the film industry eventually accused Weinstein of such acts. Weinstein himself denied "any non-consensual sex". Shortly after, he was dismissed from The Weinstein Company (TWC), expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other professional associations, and retired from public view.
Megan Twohey is an American journalist with The New York Times. She has written investigative reports for Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Twohey's investigative reports have exposed exploitative doctors, revealed untested rape kits, and uncovered a secret underground network of abandoned unwanted adopted children. Her investigative reports have led to criminal convictions and helped prompt new laws aimed at protecting vulnerable people and children.
Untouchable is a 2019 British documentary film about film producer Harvey Weinstein and the sexual abuse allegations that involve him. It was directed by Ursula Macfarlane.
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement is a 2019 nonfiction book written by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, two New York Times investigative reporters who exposed Harvey Weinstein's history of abuse and sexual misconduct against women, a catalyst for the burgeoning MeToo movement. The book was published on September 10, 2019 by Penguin Press.
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators is a 2019 book by the American journalist Ronan Farrow. He recounts the challenges he faced chasing the stories of Harvey Weinstein's decades of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse of women and the case against him. Farrow argues that Weinstein was able to use Black Cube, a private Israeli intelligence service, to successfully pressure executives at NBC News to kill the story there, leading him to take it to The New Yorker, where it was published and helped spark the international #MeToo movement exposing sexual abuse, mostly of women, in many industries.
Made Up Stories is a film and television development and production company founded in 2017 by producer Bruna Papandrea that claims to "[champion] women on and off the screen." The company has offices in Los Angeles and Sydney.
Thomas Ajamie is an American lawyer and the founder of the law firm Ajamie LLP.
She Said (Original Motion Picture Score) is the score album to the 2022 film of the same name, based on the 2019 book by reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, that stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Twohey and Kantor, respectively, following their New York Times investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein's history of abuse and sexual misconduct against women. The film features original score composed by Nicholas Britell and cello performances by his wife Caitlin Sullivan. The album was released by Back Lot Music on November 18, 2022.