The highly controversial exposé on indie film mogul Harvey Weinstein penned by New York Times writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey is in the stages of being adapted for film.
Plan B, the production company behind Oscar Best Picture films 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight, with Annapurna have teamed to pick up the adaptation rights from Kantor and Twohey.
Deadline reports the film will focus less on Weinstein's scandals and more on the all-women team of journalists who endured threats of litigation and intimidation amid their search for the truth. It will be told in a procedural style, the report adds, much like Oscar-winning films Spotlight and All the President's Men.
Harvey Weinstein Scandal
Kantor and Twohey's bombshell story first ran in October 2017, revealing a series of sexual allegations targeted at Weinstein by multiple women that dated back decades, along with the exhaustive efforts to bury them, including by paying hush money to cover up accusations of sexual assault and even rape.
The reaction was swift. At once, Hollywood seemed to unravel its darker underbelly filled with people who might have known what was going on but were too scared to say anything. More stories started coming out shortly, including Ronan Farrow's The New Yorker report on Weinstein, which details even more of the producer's sexual indiscretions and actresses' accounts of their relationship with Weinstein. Kantor, Twohey, and Farrow all won Pulitzer Prizes for their work.
Weinstein has since been booted out of his own company, The Weinstein Company. To this day, Weinstein denies all allegations. He's now being investigated by law enforcement in New York, Los Angeles, and the UK — along with dozens of other high-profile men, from directors to executives to comedians to actors — as women slowly gathered enough courage to reveal their own assault stories.
#MeToo Movement
Suffice it to say that the Weinstein story was the catalyst for the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, which, in retrospect, were probably already imminent given the sexual assault scandals surrounding Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, and Bill O'Reilly. The Weinstein allegations, however, simply pushed it forward and hard.
Now, Hollywood is in a sort of resuscitation period, with men and women all working together to prevent sexual assault from ever becoming commonplace in show business again. Beyond cleaning Hollywood up, there are also efforts to create job opportunities for minorities and members of the LGBTQ community.
