The bald head, full beard, eyes in the shape of a lottery ball highlighted by thick glasses, a massive body, almost that of a rugby pillar, Scott Rudin can frighten. In the eyes of the public, and for all those who only meet him occasionally, this film producer, aged 62, impresses. There is something.
At a time when American producers became business editors, Scott Rudin always perfected the editorial part of his work. He shows taste, instinct, shows himself to be of a prodigious culture, and manages to make films better than they were originally.
Its track record attests to this: With an open tomb (1999), by Martin Scorsese; Sleepy hollow (1999), by Tim Burton; The Tenenbaum Family (2001), by Wes Anderson; The Social Network (2010), by David Fincher; Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), the Coen brothers; Lady Bird (2017), by Greta Gerwig. Honors naturally accompanied this extraordinary career: an Oscar for best film in 2008 for No Country for Old Men, of the Coen brothers, but also 17 Tony Awards for his productions on Broadway, not to mention an Emmy (the Oscars of television) and a Grammy, the most prestigious musical distinction.
Sent to emergency
Scott Rudin will never produce again, however, thrown into a black hole where he has just joined his former colleague Harvey Weinstein. Scott Rudin’s disappearance follows other motives. Sexual harassment is not the driving force this time around, but moral harassment, another blind spot in Hollywood work culture. A survey published on April 7 by the professional daily The Hollywood Reporter, under the overwhelming title ” Everyone just knows he’s an absolute monster “ (“Everyone knows perfectly well that it is an absolute monster”) – a sentence from one of Rudin’s collaborators – gave an overview of the producer’s behavior towards his trainees and secretaries.
An exhausted assistant had thus lost consciousness in the middle of a meeting. Rudin had contented himself with stepping over her body to demand that the young girl disappear when she returned from lunch.
Thus, an assistant whose order was to find a plane ticket at the last minute on a flight with seats reserved for a long time, had not been able to achieve the impossible. Mad with rage, the producer then took his computer to smash it on the hand of his assistant, immediately sent to the emergency room. In reaction, Rudin’s staff had preferred to leave the office and meet in a bar in Times Square, New York, for what was to become improvised group therapy.
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