Oct. 23, 2017 - Steve Pieczenik
07:00
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| Time | Text |
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| Hi, this is Dr. Steve Pachank, and this is Steve Talks. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Hooray for Hollywood! | |
| That screwy, valley, hooey, Hollywood Where any office boy or young mechanic Can be a panic With just a good-looking pan And any barmaid can be a starmaid, | |
| if she dances with or without a fan. | |
| Hooray for Hollywood, where you're terrific, if you're even good. | |
| Hello, I'm Dr. | |
| Pchenek. | |
| I want to talk about the Harvey Weinstein episode. | |
| I know something about it, but not a lot. | |
| I knew Harvey Weinstein. | |
| I knew him because I'd been in the film business for a couple of years, along with Tom Clancy. | |
| Harvey was interested in buying my franchise, the Obsentive franchise, but in turn, we weren't really interested in selling anything to Harvey. | |
| But he was good-natured about it. | |
| I didn't know very much about his personal history. | |
| All I knew is that together we could break bread and we sat down and had a very good lunch together. | |
| What I'm trying to get at is there's the good, the bad, and the ugly in Hollywood. | |
| It is not a pleasant place. | |
| It is a rapacious, greedy infestations of all kinds of deviance, sexual aberrations, and other abnormalities. | |
| I don't say this just as a psychiatrist. | |
| I say this as somebody who had to do business in the snake pit. | |
| To begin with, Tom Clancy and I came down and we had a contract with ABC and NBC. Eventually, we ended up with a gentleman at ABC named Bob Iger. | |
| We had given him a presentation of a series called The White House Secret Service and What Went On in the White House. | |
| He turned it down. | |
| I didn't know who he was. | |
| I wasn't very impressed by his intellect or by anything else. | |
| And then a year later, West Wing came in. | |
| We knew right away that there was a potential case of plagiarism, and we knew exactly how it came about through our lawyers. | |
| And we had the mutual lawyers with Arnold Sarkin and Tom Clancy. | |
| But that was just the beginning. | |
| To continue on, I had to force the people who were involved, including in my own agency, William Morris Agency, that was headed by a very nice man, Norman Brokaw, a deal that had to include Tom Clancy, myself, and one other producer. | |
| At that time, it was Brandon Tartikoff. | |
| Brandon, without having told us anything, sold off a third of his position for $9 million, which meant that we were already blocked. | |
| Tom and I had no idea what he did. | |
| Brandon had been lauded by Hollywood as one of the great men, and now there's the Brandon Tartikoff Award every year. | |
| Well, it turned out he wasn't a great man. | |
| It turned out he, from my point of view, he was petty, he was perfidious, and I told him so. | |
| Then, in order to get another film done, I had to sit down with my agents at William Morris and explain to them that I was just co-opted by a contract that I didn't agree with, and there was a loophole in it. | |
| And the agent said to me, well, you can sue us or we can sue you and go to court. | |
| I explained to them, I don't go to court. | |
| I explained to them there will be no suit. | |
| I explained to them there will be a million dollars in the next day. | |
| Otherwise, problems will occur for the William Morris Agency on Rodeo Drive. | |
| The following day, I received a million dollars. | |
| The point is that I could not be any better than the characters I had to deal with. | |
| Even in the world of intelligence and counter-terrorism, I've never encountered such vermin as I had. | |
| So for the women to explain that they were molested or in some way sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein in a town which by its very nature is a harassment, a den of iniquity, makes it sound disingenuous. | |
| For the Academy of Arts and Sciences to withdraw their Oscar nomination for Harvey and for the Producers Guild of America to throw him out of the association is both hypocritical and self-accusation. | |
| The Academy of Arts and Sciences is no more better or worse than the people who populate it. | |
| Walt Disney will probably have been found out to have a huge ring of pedophilia. | |
| There will be a whole case of pedophilia coming forth once Corey Feldman talks. | |
| But perhaps the greatest abuse that I'd ever seen was the fact that the Academy awarded a coward, a World War II draft dodger by the name of John Wayne, who deprecated every queer and every sissy like Tyrone Power, who had been a homosexual, but had volunteered to fly in the Marines in combat over Okinawa and Iwo Jima. | |
| That, to me, is the greatest travesty of Hollywood itself. | |
| It awards the weak, the crippled, and the crooked, but it never awards those who are silent and heroic. | |
| On that point, I will leave you with a quote from Thomas Paine. | |
| We need people to protect us from the insidious activities of a Hollywood and a government. | |
| I dare you goodnight. | |
| Hooray for Hollywood. . | |
| Hi, this is Dr. |
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