Counterpunch Weekend Edition August 23-25, 2013 The Weinstein Treatment Hollywood and Black America by LOUIS PROYECT
Recently ‘ The Butler and Fruitvale Station, both Harvey Weinstein productions, arrived at my local “better” movie theater and settled down next to Woody Allen’s latest navel-gazing exercise. At the same time HBO was running The Help, a 2011 film that garnered BET’s Best Movie award. Harvey Weinstein was fresh on my mind from an article I had written on “How Commerce Trumped Art at Miramax” for the launch of the new journal Class, Race, and Corporate Power. Over the last decade or so Weinstein has turned into an old-time studio boss. That made me curious to see what influence he had on two very different films about the Black experience in racist America. Meanwhile, the Disney Corporation, the parent company of Miramax for 17 years, distributed The Help, a film that I suspected would have much in common with Lee Daniels’ The Butler. According to Peter Biskind, the author of Down and Dirty Pictures, a history of independent filmmaking in the 1990s, Miramax had become “Disneyfied” while Disney was being “Miramaxized”. As arbiters of mainstream politics and culture, it is hard to imagine anything that could surpass Disney and Weinstein. Of course, the wild card was Fruitvale Station, a film by a young Black director that dramatized the cop killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland on the night of December 31, 2008, hardly the sort of fare expected to run cheek-by-jowl to Woody Allen’s privileged, white, narcissistic, fantasy. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/23/hollywood-and-black-america/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
