Brad Pitt Compared the Impact of the Manson Murders to That of the Harvey Weinstein Allegations

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Quentin Tarantino’s supposed penultimate film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, opened on Friday to rave reviews from critics and viewers alike. Given its focus on the final years of the movie industry’s so-called “Golden Age,” Hollywood touches on the tragedy that changed everything: the gruesome Manson family murders, which are most commonly associated with the death of actress Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie in the film).

In an interview with the Sunday Times, star Brad Pitt compared the impact the 1969 murder spate had on Hollywood to the shock waves generated by Harvey Weinstein’s 2017 sexual misconduct allegations. “Can I say that?” he asked, explaining that the Weinstein scandal functioned as less of a loss of innocence and more of a healthy adjustment. “It’s more that I think we’re getting recalibrated. But [this time] in a good way.”

Interestingly, Hollywood is the first of Tarantino’s nine films that wasn’t produced by Weinstein. Following the New York Times’s exposé in Oct. 2017, the director admitted that he’d known about some of Weinstein’s indiscretions firsthand. "I knew enough to do more than I did,” he said. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”

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Pitt, too, was aware of some of Weinstein’s misdeeds. He confronted and threatened the producer in 1995 soon after then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow told him Weinstein had made a pass at her. “It was like the equivalent of throwing him against the wall, energetically,” Paltrow told Howard Stern in 2018. “He said, ‘If you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I’ll kill you’—or something like that.”