James Cameron rebuffed Harvey Weinstein at the ’98 Academy Awards, resulting in the director almost walloping the producer with an Oscar.
So many people in Hollywood knew about industry warthog Harvey Weinstein’s disgusting, illegal behavior behind the scenes but so few actually confronted him about it. There is the famous story of Brad Pitt defending Gwyneth Paltrow when she was coming up but those are few and far between. But only one man has ever come close to bashing Harvey Weinstein over the head with an Oscar statue he so desperately wanted: the King of the World himself that year, James Cameron.
On Oscar night 1998, James Cameron and Harvey Weinstein found themselves competing at the Shrine Auditorium, with the director there with odds-on favorite Titanic and Weinstein supporting the Miramax-supported Good Will Hunting. Titanic got off to the strong start it would carry for the rest of the night, while Good Will Hunting would nab only two statues. With Titanic having just won Best Editing, Cameron was about to give Weinstein an iceberg-sized ljump on his head. “So I’m on my way back to my seat with my editing Oscar, and this guy’s jumping up to introduce himself, saying, ‘If you want to come to work at a place that’s a friend of the artist, a friend of the filmmaker’ — he’s holding his hand out, and I just blew him off. It was just an ugly little moment.”
So what caused the rift between James Cameron and Harvey Weinstein? Even though Cameron hadn’t yet had firsthand issues with the mega-producer, he did hear how he treated his friend Guillermo del Toro on Mimic. “He had told me the horrible shit that Miramax pulled on him when he made his first American commercial film, Mimic, and they fired him. The actors, led by Mira Sorvino, kind of revolted and wouldn’t work until they brought him back. Then, when the film was successful and well regarded, Harvey sort of jumped up to take praise for the movie.”
As James Cameron further explained, he just about used his very first Oscar to give Harvey Weinstein a good will blunting. “I did defend Guillermo and I called Harvey on his bullsh*t, and then he got very loud and verbally abusive and almost potentially physically violent. And he was about to get clocked by an Oscar — which would’ve been highly appropriate, I think. But I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms; it was just the weapon at hand. The hysterical thing about the whole moment was people around us were saying, ‘Not here! Not here!’ It was kind of like, ‘It’s OK if you boys fight out in the alley, but don’t do it here at the Academy Awards!’”
Harvey Weinstein’s bullying and faux-ass kissing was notorious, and if you were in with him you were in — until you pissed him off, so it’s refreshing to see James Cameron not even entertain the idea of being an ally. Loyalty can go a long way in Hollywood, so good on Cameron, whose career has already outlasted Weinstein’s.