Harvey Weinstein CBE (born March 19, 1952) is an American former film producer. He and his brother Bob Weinstein co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films, including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), The Crying Game (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), and Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love, and garnered seven Tony Awards for a variety of plays and musicals, including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company, a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017.
‘She Said’ Writer Spent Days With Harvey Weinstein Survivors and Received Book Chapters in Real Time to Pen Screenplay
variety.comManori Ravindran International Editor “She Said” screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz has said the New York Times journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in 2017 fed her chapters of their book as they were writing it in order to bring the novel to screen sooner.
Speaking as part of a Variety-sponsored London Film Festival panel on screenwriting, the British scribe of such films as the Keira Knightley-fronted “Colette” and Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” described working closely with reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey to write Universal’s film adaptation of their 2019 book.
The process took around four years, said Lenkiewicz. “I started working on it before I read the book,” said the Devon-born writer, who had six “freeing” weeks of writing on her own before even getting sight of a chapter. “I met the journalists and was writing it, and they were feeding me the chapters.
That was an interesting way of working because I almost sort of had to reverse. But I’m glad I did it because it felt like I got my foot in before it was under the umbrella of the book.” Lenkiewicz spent a whole day each with three women “who had survived Weinstein in various ways” in order to write the film. “That’s a huge responsibility because you want the film to reach out to every woman who’s ever had abuse, and for something to resonate and to give them a certain satisfaction or freedom rather than leaving the cinema absolutely blasted,” said Lenkiewicz. “It’s a very delicate balance.
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