Remember #MeToo? Remember #TimesUp? It seems like a long time ago, after the interminable decade that was 2020, but all that Harvey Weinstein stuff happened just three and a half years ago. Weinstein’s plummet from grace in November 2017 set off an avalanche of accusations and recriminations in Hollywood, the effects of which can still be seen today. For example, right now on Netflix you can watch a blockbuster “zombie heist” movie in which one of the main characters was digitally replaced after filming wrapped, because the original actor was accused of creepy sex stuff.* That never would’ve happened back in the days when Weinstein was just a suspected pervert instead of a confirmed pervert. And if you grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, all I have to say is “Bill Cosby” and you don’t need to be told how much things have changed in the entertainment industry.
But once you’re exiled from showbiz, how long does it last? If you’re not in jail and you can still find somebody to hire you somewhere in the world, what’s anybody going to do about it?
Monica Escobedo and Meredith Deliso, ABC News:
Kevin Spacey has booked his first film role since sexual assault allegations surfaced nearly four years ago, filmmakers confirmed with ABC News.
The Italian film, called “L’uomo Che Disegno Dio” — or “The Man Who Drew God” — will be directed by Franco Nero. It will shoot in Italy and also star Nero’s wife, Vanessa Redgrave, sources said.
“I’m very happy Kevin agreed to participate in my film,” Nero told ABC News. “I consider him a great actor and I can’t wait to start the movie.”
Well, first of all, Spacey is a good actor, okay? He was always too hammy to ever be great, even before he was revealed to the world as a pedophile serial predator. But fine, he’s good, he’s great, whatever.
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And I’m not going to take this opportunity to slur the Italian people for their supposed licentiousness and repulsive moral depravity as they welcome this creep back into polite society. That’s just racism, plain and simple, and I would never say anything like that publicly.
It sounds like Spacey is making what amounts to a cameo appearance in some Italian movie most Americans will never see. Here’s the logline for L’uomo Che Disegno Dio from IMDb:
The rise and fall of a blind artist who has the extraordinary gift of making true-to-life portraits just by listening to human voices, and of becoming a TV-junk star. A fable on the need to rediscover the miraculous power of dignity in a world where media’s noise has solved the problem of man’s imperfection simply by removing the problem itself.
Yeah, sounds like a nonstop thrill-ride.
But you know what I say? Let Kevin Spacey work in boring Italian melodramas. There’s a long tradition of fading Hollywood actors hopping over to Italy to work, going back to Clint Eastwood in the ’60s. If those people want to hire Kevin Spacey, that’s their business. I don’t want to watch him onscreen ever again, but if they want to pay him to be on a film set, they can deal with whatever happens. Maybe he’s learned to control himself.
I just hope there are no child actors in that movie. Is pedophilia even illegal in Italy? Sorry, I promised no Italian jokes.
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*I saw Army of the Dead on May 14, my first time back in a movie theater in over a year, because I cancelled Netflix after the Cuties debacle but I still wanted to see super-zombies take over Vegas. And I had no idea that Tig Notaro had been digitally inserted into the movie, replacing accused sex-creep Chris D’Elia after the main filming had already wrapped. She hasn’t even met Dave Bautista, the lead in the film! But I wouldn’t have known about the cut-and-paste job if I hadn’t read about it a week later. It’s a remarkable technical achievement, but something about it just bothers me. First Christopher Plummer replaced Spacey in that movie nobody even remembers anymore, and now it’s happening in big-budget blockbusters. Is this now the norm in Hollywood? I just wonder what they’ll do if one of these last-minute replacements gets cancelled as well. Like, I enjoyed Notaro’s performance, but what if it turned out she was a serial killer, or a secret Republican, or something else that’s intolerable in Hollywood? Would Zack Snyder swap her out as well and replace her with yet another actor? When does it end? I wonder if maybe the audience can handle watching actors onscreen who may or may not have done bad things in real life. It’s not as if I depend on those scumbags for moral guidance. I just wanna watch them kill zombies, man.
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