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Kris: [00:00:00] Welcome to REEL Film Reviewed the show that delivers short, spoiler free reviews of films, TV shows, and limited series, followed by a deep dive discussion brought to you by your host, Kris Chaney, here is REEL Film Reviewed.

Welcome back everyone. This episode, REEL Film Reviewed, She Said, out in theaters and streaming on Peacock right now, let’s get into the spoiler free review. New York Times Investigative Reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey break one of the most important stories in a generation. The story that helped ignite a global movement and shattered decades of silence around sexual assault in Hollywood.

[00:01:00] We all know the story, but maybe not as in depth as we may have been able to stomach upon first hearing the accusations of Harvey Weinstein. The film first begins briefly in 1992 on a film set of a film Harvey is producing and flashes forward to 2016 with Jodi and Megan working on different stories.

Megan was finishing up a piece exploring the accusations of former President Donald Trump and receiving her own threatening calls. Jodi received a tip about a sexual assault involving a famous actress Rose McGowen. And a well-known executive film producer, Harvey Weinstein. From there, the reporters embarked on an investigation, which at times felt like an investigation into a political coverup, complete with threatening phone calls, non-disclosure agreement, intimidation and fear, and terrified actress and employee victims.

This cast was sprinkled with some great talent, and the likenesses of the real people being portrayed in the film were decent. This includes those who merely lent to their voices or their body double to the people that they were portraying, such as former President Trump, Rose McGowan, and Harvey Weinstein.

Megan Twohey was played by Carrie Mulligan, who has done quite a variety of things following her biggest film An Education in 2009. I enjoyed her in this role because we got to see her inquisitive nature meet her anger as a woman and a new mother of a baby girl. Zoe Kaizen plays Jodi Kantor, who may be most known for her role as Emily in 2017’s The Big Sick, and as Pia Brewer in Netflix’s Clickbait in 2021.

She was great in this film as the initial reporter investigating the Harvey Weinstein accusations. One of the best things in this film was the sporadic use of the real actresses who came forward in 2016 and 2017 to include Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The REEL-View rating. 8 outta 10 stars. This film told the story well as the audience found out information and followed leads, just as the reporters were getting the tips and learning more. The film was tasteful, depicting no reenactments of any of the sexual assaults. Choosing instead to use recordings and actual stories as told by the survivors themselves.

I believe this film kept us informed throughout the film and made us feel like we were on the journey for the Truth Ride. Along with the reporters, one of my favorite things is to view a film and already have information from the public information that was shared prior to the film coming out. To include this story, we were also on the rollercoaster of roadblocks, shutouts possible leads, possible new victims, and so on as the story unfolded.

By the end, we were enraged just as the reporters and the New York Times staff were on the screen. She Said was released in 2022. It was directed by Maria Schrader. The writers of the screenplay include reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. It Stars Zoe Kaizen, Carrie Mulligan, Patricia Clarkson, Jennifer Ehle, and Andre Barrer.

It is rated R and has a runtime of two hours and nine minutes. It can be viewed in theaters, Peacock, and of course for rent or purchase on Prime video.

[00:04:00] All right. Here is the spoiler alert warning. Those new to REEL Film Reviewed, after this point, I will discuss this review further potentially, and likely revealing spoilers. Thank you for listening to the spoiler free review. I’ll be back after a word about my sponsors.

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Welcome back, everyone. Let’s dive into the REEL-View Hollywood comparison. The REEL-View rating was eight out of 10 stars. The meta score is 74. Collective audience opinion is 7.2 out of 10 Stars. Rotten Tomatoes gave it an 88% for their pros, and their audience gave it a 91%. There is not too much to elaborate on regarding the story of the film. It is following Jodi and Meghan as they listen to the harrowing stories told by the Weinstein survivors and their desperate attempts to get women to speak on the record about what happened.

This proves to be one of the most difficult things in the entire film because this, of course, was one of the most difficult parts in the real life story. Many of the women, the reporters initially found were actresses from the nineties who had all already dealt with career retaliation. And lost their careers or had their careers impacted severely.

But the challenge with them was the non-disclosure agreements that most of those survivors had signed. This presented the continuing challenge of corroborating evidence needed to be able to publish the story once news of the settlement started coming out. We knew that there were many that knew about the problem with Harvey, but this also could mean legal complications with non-disclosure agreements.

The women who would speak out couldn’t because of the NDAs, and for the ones who could speak out, wouldn’t out of fear for their own safety, humiliation, or fear of career retaliation. In the end, the reporter is finally caught a break by receiving a copy of the memo written by Weinstein victim, Lauren O’Connor.

Which gave them the corroborating evidence needed to publish the story. Lauren had sent the memo to the company and the board neglected to do anything about Harvey. Once again. The next break came from the women who decided to go on their record and be a name to source in the article, such as Ashley Judd, Lauren O’Connor, and Zelda Perkins, among others.

[00:07:00] The article is published and over the next month, over 80 women come forward with their own sexual assault stories, which sparked the movement. We all know now as the Me Too movement. Breaking down the real view. There were a few things that stood out to me, which I believe increased the power of the impact of this film and drove the message home with the audience and those who may not have been convinced of Weinstein’s guilt.

The first was Ashley Judd playing herself in the film. It began first with a phone call, as most of the other interviews were, and then an onscreen interview between Jody and her, where she recounts her own sexual harassment with Weinstein, the career retaliation that she dealt with, following her encounter with him and her personal thoughts on the whole thing.

This was very powerful because not only is Ashley appearing in the film as herself in a real situation, but having her tell her story on camera in the film as part of it was riveting. Another impactful piece to this film was the playing of the recording of Harvey Weinstein attempting to coerce model an actor Ambra Battilana Gutierrez into his hotel room.

The recording was actual evidence from a 2015 N Y P D sting operation where Gutierrez wore a wire following the allegations of Weinstein inappropriately touching her during a casting meeting. The recording played while scenes of empty halls of the Tribeca Grand Hotel ran on screen, and this was such an impactful scene because we hear his actual voice engaged in the behavior.

We’ve only heard about from third party sources, and we know that it is a real recording. It was placed in the film as almost a cited source, the way that you would cite a source used in a college paper. Another scene, which may have been overlooked by some was the scene where Jodi and Megan are meeting New York Times editor Rebecca Corbett in a restaurant or a bar it looks like.

It looks like both a guy comes up to them and he was fairly forceful in his attempt to hit on Megan before she got fed up and yelled at him to leave the scene was important to show the inappropriateness of men at times and how fed up women were with the disrespect. Lisa Bloom, one of my…more interesting pieces of the film that came out.

I was unaware that Lisa Bloom was defending Harvey Weinstein. For those of you that do not know, Lisa Bloom is the daughter of famous civil rights attorney and also feminist Gloria Allred. Lisa Bloom is also made quite a name for herself in representing the victims of Bill O’Reilly’s case and other situations like that.

So it was a little bit interesting to me that Lisa Bloom was defending Harvey Weinstein through all of this, and it kind of, in the beginning, they kind of use her as the, I don’t know, I guess the way that Harvey was gonna try and make himself better. So it was very interesting to see Lisa Bloom’s role in that whole thing.

Ashley Judd was not the only Weinstein survivor that appeared in this film. She was just the only one to appear as herself and deliver her story on screen. Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Judith Godreche are all famous actresses who were important sources for the New York Times. Journalists each played themselves in this film, Paltrow and Godreche only appear as off-camera voices on the telephone, but Judd plays herself on screen in a role that Variety’s Elizabeth Wag Meister called a key character who enables the reporters to break the bombshell story.

Two other real life Weinstein survivors and actresses, Sarah Ann Masse and Katherine Kendall also appeared in the film. Mass played Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Emily Steele, who broke the O’Reilly story shortly before the Weinstein story broke. And Kendall plays a former Miramax executive.

 All right, let’s get into some, “Did you know?” Facts.

She Said was filmed in the Real New York Times building and is the first film to ever use the real offices. This film was based on the 2019 book by Megan and Jodi titled, She Said, Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.

Actress Rose McGowan, another pivotal source for the real life story also appeared as an offscreen voice over the telephone, but McGowan ultimately chose not to play herself. McGowan’s voice is portrayed by Kelly McQuail. Carrie Mulligan and Zoe Kaizen had already been very close friends for 14 years before being cast as the leads in, She Said. Kaizen was a bridesmaid at Mulligan’s 2012 wedding to Marcus Mumford.

James Austin Johnson, who plays the voice of Donald Trump in this movie was in 2021, hired into the cast of Saturday Night Live largely to play the role of Trump. After videos of Johnson’s Trump impersonation went viral.

In this movie, Zelda Perkins describes how a non-disclosure agreement kept her from taking action against Harvey Weinstein’s behavior, or even talking about any aspect of it to family members, friends, or even doctors, including therapists in her real life. Perkins is drawn from the experience to co-found an organization called, Can’t buy my silence dedicated to greatly reducing the use and abuse of NDAs, especially as they were exploited in the Miramax context. Basically shielding abusers and maintaining dangerous working environments.

This film correctly depicts the obsession that Harvey Weinstein had with the question of whether Gwyneth Paltrow was a source for and or a subject of Jodi Kantor and Megan’s reporting. But it doesn’t ever specifically say why. Weinstein was so fixated on Paltrow, specifically. Well, during a September, 2019 interview with Terry Gross, Jody and Megan explained the story behind the preoccupation. “So to our surprise, as they said. “Gwyneth Paltrow had a really powerful story of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein and of being threatened when her first really important roles were on the line. And early on in the investigation when almost nobody in Hollywood would talk to us, she did. And she even tried to help us find other women, but she was very scared to go on the record. And it became clear in the course of this investigation that Harvey Weinstein was obsessed with the question of whether or not we were speaking to Paltrow. He showed up at a party at our house. Early. She called us from the bathroom, completely panicked in the sort of series of final confrontations about the story that had took place in the New York Times, Weinstein kept hammering us. Are you talking to Gwyneth? Is Gwyneth in the story? And at that point, she was still a totally secret source and we couldn’t figure out why he was so obsessed with something that wasn’t even part of the story.

The answer only became clear over a course of weeks and months after we broke the story. As more and more Weinstein victims came forward, they said publicly, they told us, and they even told Paltrow that what Weinstein had said to them in the course of harassing and assaulting them was essentially, don’t you want what Gwyneth has, meaning that he was implying to them that she had slept with him and that this was the bargain of sex for work, right?

So if, if you go along with this, You can have the Oscar, the wealth, the fame, the Golden Girl status. So essentially two things happened. First of all, Paltrow was very, very upset to learn this. Not only had she never sexually succumbed to Weinstein, but she was so horrified to find out that she had been used essentially as a tool of predation.

[00:14:00] She spent a long time on the phone in the fall of 2017 with other Weinstein victims coming to the terms with the way he had used her, and with feeling like she had somehow been used as an accessory in all this. But then the other thing that they finally realized, or that we finally realized is that this was probably why he had been so obsessed with whether or not we were talking to Paltrow, because as soon as the other women heard Palau’s story and heard that she had never given into him and that she had refused him, then they would understand so much more about the way his scheme worked and that it would fall apart in a sense.”

Well, that was a little bit of a heavier episode, everyone. I know that this topic can sometimes spark a little bit of emotion. I definitely recommend seeing this film. That’s probably my very first film recommendation I’ve ever given because usually my reviews are spoiler free. I just give you my account of how I felt after I watch the film.

Typically will just say, Hey. Do with it what you want. See the film, don’t see the film, but for this one, I definitely think it highlights some very important topics and calls out some very important practices, is just because there was a lot of awareness brought to this. I mean, this was in 2017. When’s the last time you heard me too before this review?

[00:15:00] Probably not very much. It was kind of a thing in 2017, 2018, and it’s kind of started to fizzle out. Yet women in Hollywood are still going through the same challenges that they were going through and that they have been going through maybe with one less predator out there, but there’s probably some other people that are doing the same things, not to mention how women in film are being discriminated against.

Anyway, that is all I have for you. Everyone. As always, please find me on Twitter @reelfilmpkc and let me know what you thought of the film. And if you watched the film after listening to the review, please let me know what you thought.

Thanks for listening, everyone. I’ll catch you next time.

[00:16:00] Thanks for listening to REEL Film Reviewed, before I go, show some love for your favorite podcast by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen. Check out the REEL Film Reviewed website, reel-film-reviewed.Productions to stay up to date on episode releases, podcast updates, episode transcriptions, and more. Follow REEL Film Reviewed on Twitter @reelfilmpkc. Check out the online store, REEL Merch to pick up some gear to represent. Happy watching everyone.