Harvey the Rabbit
I have heard for years about the famous Pulitzer Prize play by Mary Chase that was made into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart. The play was written in 1945 and the movie was made in 1950. What brings it to mind is a combination of issues starting with the image of Harvey Weinstein dragging his sorry ass into the NYC courthouse every day using a walker with two high-viz yellow tennis balls on the back legs, just like they do in Del Boca Vista condo down in Delray Beach. The tennis balls are presumably there to keep the back legs of the walker more stable than the mere rubber feet on them can. Wouldn’t you think that for all the years you have seen that old tennis ball trick that someone somewhere would have invented a better way of capping those legs for the desired friction or lack thereof? And while the Two-Fer set in Florida might need to save its nickels by using old discarded tennis balls, don’t you think that Harvey, surrounded by his $1,500 per hour legal eagles and wearing his $10,000 bespoke Seville Row suits, could afford that new little invention instead of looking like the humble and impoverished retiree he is portraying himself to be?
I’ve also thought of the movie Harvey with its 6’3.5” invisible rabbit (conveniently one half inch shorter than Jimmy Stewart) because that movie was about the delicate mental balance of an iconoclastic man who gravitates between Charlie’s Bar and the deep blue sea of institutionalization for mental illness. If you are Harvey Weinstein, your days must be filled with all manner of shock and awe over the state of your circumstances and the world at large. To begin with, in your own version of a Pulitzer Prize winning play, your antagonist is not your sister Veta Louis, but rather a woman by the name of Donna Rotunno, who has built her career out of defending men accused of sexual aggression and impropriety. She is as likely to smash your image as a powerful and virile man as she is to make you more sympathetic to the jury of seven men and five women.
And what about Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, Jes Staley of Barclays and J.P. Morgan fame, Lesley Wexler, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and, of course, the biggest sleezebag of them all (I feel it’s OK to use that term in regard to our president since he openly calls people that same name in tweets…so he is setting that particular bar nice and low), our beloved president Donald J. Trump? When someone asked Harvey if he had watched the Academy Awards this year he politely suggested that he had not and had more important things to do with his time. What could Oscar show him that he hadn’t already seen? The commentary in the Roger Ailes film Bombshell about all the pretty blondes at Fox News that had to twirl for the boss and more, was all about the contrast between the travails of the casting couch versus the “sleeping your way to the top” claims by the Not-Me-Too gang of men who are busy looking for any defense against the women of the working world.
Several articles about the legal odds facing Harvey Weinstein have noted that this is a landmark case that may set a whole new tone about sexual harassment and the prosecution thereof. Historically, the legal odds favor the accused over the accusers by about 2 to 1. Fully 65% of the accused abusers have gotten off more or less scott-free where only 35% have been taken to the woodshed. In general, this track record has probably added to the bravado of the accused in much the same way that the acquittal of Señor Trump has emboldened him to run around and wreak revenge on his accusers (Vindman and Sondland for starters) and to muck around further into the court cases of Stone, Flynn and who knows who else to come. With his able-bodied Attorney General, his Roy Cohn, William Barr, at his side, he is feeling all-powerful in the face of the law, or perhaps more like in the absence of the law. If Harvey Weinstein dreams these days (and there’s your scary thought for the day), he is probably dreaming of his acquittal and his vindication lap around the Daytona Speedway that he sees Uncle Donald taking. I wouldn’t even put it past him to dream of getting back to the power-stroke position with some young ingenue types.
Part of the evidentiary portion of this trial, or perhaps it was the voir dire of the jury, but a bunch of people (men and women) had to prove their ability to withstand the gross and unavoidable pictures of Harvey Weinstein’s supposedly deformed genitalia. It must have formed some body of evidence relating to accuser’s ability to describe the offending body parts to the jury and that description being a key bit of proof that they had indeed been in the great man’s presence. This is the stuff of horror stories. Phantom of the Bedroom, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Elephant Man. I can just hear Harvey yelling to the heavens that famous John Hurt line, “I am NOT an animal!”
Well, unfortunately for Harvey and perhaps more so for his fulsome array of aging accusers, he is not an imaginary white rabbit from Mary Chase’s play and not even the Quasimodo of Victor Hugo’s epic tale. There are no Myrtle Maes or Esmereldas to show sympathy for him and there does not appear to be much redemption available to him either. As a student of the movies, I could see Harvey trying to pull off a great scene in Lon Chaney form by grabbing some girl in the court gallery (maybe a next-generation cub reporter for Fox News) around the waists, twirling her this way and that and then swinging on a rope up to the cathedral (a little tough to pull off with that tennis ball walker to impede him) and lifting his misshapen form to the sky bellowing, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”
If the most accomplished casting director in Hollywood, say one like my namesake Mindy Marin, was hired by Miramax in the bad old days to cast the story of a deformed and vile producer who gets his comeuppance in the new and enlightened court systems of America, who would she cast in the role of the protagonist? I can think of no one more appropriately from central casting than a grizzled and hunched-over Harvey Weinstein, scooting his way into court with his tennis balls cut open for the whole world to see. This is the stuff of legendary filmmaking. This is every bit as imaginary as Harvey the Rabbit.