Hollywood Producer Scott Rudin is Allegedly an Even Bigger Asshole Than Joss Whedon
Hollywood sexual misconduct has been very much in the news since Ronan Farrow’s expose on Harvey Weinstein started the #metoo movement, but there’s also a lot of misconduct of the non-sexual kind going on in Tinseltown. The Hollywood Reporter chronicled a number of allegations against Scott Rudin that aren’t sexual but make him seem like a caricature of an angry boss, like Bob Odenkirk’s ‘Artillery’ Arthur Hobbs on How I Met Your Mother.
At about 4:15 p.m. — more than 10 hours into a typical Rudin day that began at 6 and never wrapped before 8 — the Oscar-winning producer was enraged that one of his assistants failed to get him a seat on a sold-out flight. In a fit of fury, he allegedly smashed an Apple computer monitor on the assistant’s hand. The screen shattered, leaving the young man bleeding and in need of immediate medical attention. One person in the office at the time described the incident as sounding like a car crash: a cacophonous collision of metal, glass and limb. The wounded assistant headed to the emergency room, and Rudin called his lawyer, according to another staffer there that Halloween afternoon.
He hit a guy with a computer monitor. That would seem far-fetched in River City Ransom.
“He threw a laptop at the window in the conference room and then went into the kitchen and we could hear him beating on the napkin dispenser,” says [Caroline] Rugo. “Then another time he threw a glass bowl at [a colleague]. It’s hard to say if he threw it in the general direction or specifically at [the colleague], but the glass bowl hit the wall and smashed everywhere. The HR person left in an ambulance due to a panic attack. That was the environment.”
That sounds like the behavior of an abusive spouse or a toddler or both.
“I went into the kitchen, and I was like, ‘Hey, Scott, A24 is on the way up. I’m not sure what it’s concerning,’ ” he says. “And he flipped out, like, ‘Nobody told me A24 was on my schedule.’ He threw it at me, and I dodged a big potato. He was like, ‘Well, find out, and get me a new potato.’ “
He threw a potato at an assistant. That’s almost incredible like he’s just throwing whatever he can reach.
“He asked me to clean the kitchen. I told him, ‘That’s really not my job.’ I had to do a bunch of other stuff that was urgent,” the former assistant says. “The kitchen was not urgent. And then he flipped out, and he took his teacup, threw it, and it shattered and left a hole in the wall. I was like, ‘I’m a human. This is a physical act of aggression.’ “
That’s a lot worse.
How has Hollywood treated this alleged behavior, which, much like Harvey Weinstein’s abuses of power, everyone in town has supposedly know about for decades? They gave him an EGOT and over 100 Oscar nominations.
“When they ultimately quit — which they always do at some point — he vindictively goes on IMDb and takes away any credits they may have amassed while working for him,” says one producer who hired a traumatized assistant following a Rudin stint and saw the practice play out.
People don’t just abuse their power to get sex; power is naturally corrupting. Once everyone starts telling you that you can do no wrong, well, you start to believe them.