At first blush, my colleague Geoff Edgers's terrific profile of former late-night host David Letterman and the sexual harassment scandal currently tearing through Hollywood...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Actress Angelina Jolie arrives for a special Maleficent Costume Display at Kensington Palace in London in 2014. (Luke MacGregor/Reuters) | At first blush, my colleague Geoff Edgers’s terrific profile of former late-night host David Letterman and the sexual harassment scandal currently tearing through Hollywood wouldn’t appear to have much in common. But I’ve been thinking of both in tandem over the past few days because I think they both illustrate an important truth. Working in the entertainment industry may seem, at least from the outside, glamorous and exciting: At the top tier, people can make enormous amounts of money, they get to wear great clothes and travel to fun places, and they receive a lot of acclaim. Sometimes, that’s absolutely true, but not always. And even when it is, working in Hollywood is still a job. Take Edgers’s piece, for example. The most interesting thing Letterman says in it is that he just fundamentally doesn’t miss working at a job where I think most people would assume that he had an enormous amount of fun. It’s certainly true that Letterman made a lot of people very happy, but unsurprisingly, even this kind of work isn’t everything: It’s not the family life Letterman has now, and his job couldn’t do for Letterman what an antidepressant has done. In a much more consequential way, the allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein and former Amazon Studios executive Roy Price are visceral reminders of what women and some men in Hollywood have had to deal with as they’ve sought work and as they’ve tried to sell and produce shows. (Standard disclosure: Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The reason sexual harassment is such a consequential crime is that it isn’t merely disgusting and degrading; it has a direct impact on people’s ability to find jobs and to be able to focus on their work when they have it. It’s all too easy for the sparkle of Hollywood to convince people that they shouldn’t take employment issues in the industry seriously. What does pay equity for women matter when everyone’s making millions of dollars, for example? But that sparkle isn’t everyone’s experience, and it can become an excuse to not look carefully at the reality of Hollywood’s business practices. And if actresses like Jennifer Lawrence can be underpaid, and women like Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow can be sexually harassed, as they have alleged, then it ought to be very clear that no one is safe. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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