Julianne Moore as Laura Brown.PARAMOUNT/EVERETT COLLECTION.
Weinstein and Rudin had feuded throughout a number of earlier tasks, so some headbutting was to be anticipated on The Hours. Rudin developed the script with Hare for a few 12 months, although, and had last reduce. He toyed with the mercurial Weinstein by displaying off the movie’s daring artistic choices—prosthetic included. “Scott gained a lot of the fights,” Cunningham says. Nonetheless, in accordance with New York journal on the time, Weinstein nixed a premiere for The Hours on the Venice Worldwide Movie Pageant, which Rudin interpreted as retaliation. He despatched Weinstein—a infamous chain-smoker—a crate of cigarettes, which rapidly turned legend. The enclosed be aware learn “Thanks as all the time in your assist.”
Weinstein was coming off of getting “caught” waging a smear marketing campaign towards the real-life topic of the earlier 12 months’s greatest image winner, A Lovely Thoughts, says Press: “That’s the 12 months that Harvey began to pay a worth within the press—he obtained caught actually being abusive and spreading that stuff about John Nash. The subsequent 12 months you’ll’ve seen a delicate shift as a result of the press was focusing extra on the soiled tips.”
Even so, the truth that Weinstein and Rudin had been firmly established as bullies made for good copy—which they didn’t appear to thoughts. “One of many causes filmmakers search to work with Harvey and me is they need that combative potential,” Rudin advised the Los Angeles Instances weeks earlier than the Oscars. “They don’t need you to be good and candy. They need you to go and kill for them. And that’s the job. You might be imagined to go on the market and mow down the opposition.”
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf.PARAMOUNT/PHOTOFEST.
The true extent of the 2 males’s alleged misconduct hadn’t but been reported, after all. Weinstein has since confronted dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct, and he’s presently serving a 23-year jail sentence after being discovered responsible of a prison sexual act and rape in New York. Allegations of abusive conduct towards Rudin, first printed by The Hollywood Reporter in 2021, detailed cases of bodily violence and bullying towards staff. His profession has since stalled.
Again of their glory days, nonetheless, they served as their very own hype machines. “You had them spending hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of {dollars},” Press says. Generally, as with Kidman, it labored; different instances, not a lot. “Completely all people advised me I used to be going to win,” Hare says of the perfect tailored screenplay class, which he misplaced to The Pianist’s Ronald Harwood. He spent months on the path with victory in thoughts. “After I didn’t win, I used to be fairly pissed off for about two and a half hours.” The subsequent day, he says, “I didn’t care anymore.”
Exterior of Kidman’s win, The Hours barely underperformed on the Oscars, at which Catherine Zeta-Jones gained greatest supporting actress; each Streep and Moore went residence empty-handed. A number of months earlier than, nonetheless, it gained greatest drama image and actress (Kidman) on the Golden Globes, which wound up being the height of its awards run. All three Hours actors had been nominated and in attendance; Streep even gained the supporting actress award for Adaptation, her first win since 1982’s Sophie’s Selection, which prompted the star to start her speech by saying, “I’ve simply been nominated 789 instances, and I used to be getting so settled over there for an extended winter’s nap!”
Cunningham attended the Globes as effectively. He remembers the “nice social gathering,” sitting in the identical room as Kidman, Streep, Moore, and Rudin, as a validation of The Hours’ most hotly debated (facial) characteristic. “In some parallel dimension, the film went down over Nicole Kidman’s plastic nostril,” he says. “It didn’t occur on this dimension.”
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