Top Producers Vow to Combat Sexual Harassment: ‘We Have to Lead and Create a Culture’
The black cloud of the Harvey Weinstein scandal hung heavy over the Producers Guild of America’s third annual Produced By NY conference, held Saturday at Time Warner Center.
Discussions of mechanisms for allowing victims of sexual harassment to come forward, the drive for greater inclusion of women and persons of color, and the need for clear guidelines for behavior on film and TV sets were hot topics across the daylong series of panels.
Weinstein, the renowned producer and former co-chairman of Weinstein Co., has been accused of sexual assault and harassment by more than 60 women dating back more than 30 years. The deluge of accusations during the past few weeks has shaken the industry and spurred renewed efforts to combat the pernicious tradition of the casting couch that has been part of the fabric of Hollywood since the silent era.
“We all, as producers, have to stop and do something a little different,” said Lori McCreary, who heads Morgan Freeman’s Revelations Entertainment and is co-president of the PGA with Gary Lucchesi.
McCreary and other speakers throughout the day emphasized the importance of bringing more women and persons of color into the industry as a means of battling discrimination in all its forms.
“Once our film crews look more like our audience, our industry is going to be better for it,” McCreary said. “We’re going to know how to treat each other. We’re not going to let these kind of things to perpetuate for another 30 years.”
The PGA is working with the Directors Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Television Academy to develop a framework to encourage people who experience harassment and discrimination to lodge complaints without fear of reprisals. The PGA board has meetings set for Nov. 10 and Nov. 15 to discuss approaches to the creation of an industry-wide commission to monitor complaints as has been suggested by Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm chief and an AMPAS board member.
Such an effort would have to be an industry-wide effort to be effective, McCreary said. But producers should be a driving force because bringing people together to tackle specific projects is what producers do best.
William Horberg, VP of the PGA East and a veteran film producer, likened the challenge of addressing sexual harassment to the issue of on-set safety a generation ago. The responsibility should be on producers to ensure that those working on a production feel there is an open door to address problems.
“We have to lead and create a culture,” Horberg said. “As producers who have to be those people who say, this is our film, this is our crew, this is our set and this is the way it’s going to run.”
Lucchesi, president of Lakeshore Entertainment, added that producers need to bring the same level of attention to the reality of the workplace environment as they do to other aspects of a production. Before production begins on a movie, Lucchesi said he insists that the key creative team makes a point of “squinting” at the script in an effort to get ahead of potential problems.
“There are a lot of people — and I would include men especially — we don’t squint now” at the workplace environment, he said. “In the future, we’re all going to squint a lot more.”
(Pictured: PGA co-president Lori McCreary)
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