Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of MiraMax Films in the late 1970s and now co-owner of the Hollywood movie studio The Weinstein Company, told radio shock jock Howard Stern last Wednesday that he was going to produce a movie that would so damage the National Rifle Association (NRA) that “they’re going to wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them.” Stern asked Weinstein if he owned a gun. Weinstein replied: “I never want to have a gun. I don’t think we need guns in this country, and I hate [them].… I think the NRA is a disaster area.”
Stern then asked Weinstein about a movie he is currently producing about the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, based on Leon Uris’ novel Mila 18, and the obvious inconsistencies in his attack on the NRA. Weinstein said that was different, that gun ownership is justified “when you’re marching half a million people into Auschwitz.” He would use it, too, if he “found a gun, and if that was happening to my people.”
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Weinstein’s hypocrisy gained more traction when the NRA reported that some of Weinstein’s movies are so violent that providing links to them in its newsletter “would obviously not be appropriate” for its audience, which includes family members and young people. In fact, four of Weinstein’s productions have made the top (or bottom) 20 on CNN’s list of Hollywood’s Most Violent Films: Reservoir Dogs, Django Unchained, Kill Bill, and Rambo.
Rambo, made in 2008, “may well have the dubious distinction of containing the most over-the-top gun fight ever portrayed on screen,” according to the NRA. In the finale,
Rambo literally liquefies and dismembers wave after wave of human adversaries with a .50 caliber machine gun. Normally we would not make such claims without linking to primary sources, but that would obviously not be appropriate in this case.
Weinstein, an FOO (Friend of Obama) and a financial supporter of the Democratic Party and the president’s reelection campaign to the tune of some $500 million, supports the president’s war on gun ownership. Following the Aurora, Colorado, theatre shooting in July 2012, Weinstein said:
If we don’t get gun control laws in this country, we are full of beans. To have the National Rifle Association rule the United States is pathetic.
And I agree with [then-Mayor] Michael Bloomberg: It’s time to put up or shut up about gun control.
His hypocrisy extends across the board: His security guards carry guns. According to the New York Post, “The Weinsteins have always had intense security and been on high alert because of the movies they make.”
His planned production, tentatively entitled The Senator’s Wife, is likely to bear little if any fruit. Joe Concha, a long-time observer of the Hollywood scene, said:
You know how this [film] will turn out in the end: the movie will bomb despite much hype and controversy leading up to it….
Causes seen as liberal … just aren’t translating to success on the big screen in the past few years.
In the process of losing money, the film will only greatly enhance gun sales and NRA enrollment once Weinstein and Streep start to promote [it]. So instead of the NRA begging Weinstein for mercy, they’ll be sending him roses and a box of chocolates with a sincere thank-you card instead.
Hypocrisy and hubris, along with anti-gun propaganda, aren’t selling well these days, as Weinstein is about to find out.
A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
