THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 166 FEBRUARY 28, 2018
PREVIOUS SPREAD: WEINSTEIN: SETH POPPEL/YEARBOOK LIBRARY. THIS SPREAD: EXTERIOR: REBECCA SMEYNE. M. WEINSTEIN: CATHERINE MCGANN/GETTY IMAGES. B. WEINSTEIN: BARBARA ALPER/GETTY IMAGES.weigh criminal charges. In February, the New
York Attorney General stalled TWC’s sale with
a lawsuit alleging that Weinstein had sub-
jected his employees to physical intimidation
and emotional abuse and required them to
“facilitate his sexual encounters,” all with the
“effective acquiescence” of his brother.
Sources tell THR that Harvey has had little
or no contact with his children, and one of
his daughters, Remy (from his first marriage
to Eve Chilton), has stayed out of the public
view, absent for weeks from the L.A. gym
where she once was a constant presence. Even
Bob’s daughter, Sara, well-regarded for her
philanthropic endeavors, has severed ties with
the man she considered a second father. As
for Bob, 63, he hasn’t spoken to Harvey in
months, except for a call that lasted “literally a
minute,” according to a well-placed source.
Much has been written about Weinstein’s
behavior at TWC and his earlier company,
Miramax Films. Now, in an effort to under-
stand what shaped this man before he moved
to New York City and launched a film empire,
THR has interviewed more than two dozen
people who knew him from his early childhood
in Queens through his first film forays in
Buffalo, New York, before he became “Harvey.”
Nearly all of them describe a young man of
extremes: charming and coarse, brilliant and
belligerent, but always fiercely competitive.
While he remains a paradoxical figure, this
much emerges: It was not simply power that
twisted his moral compass; long before he was
a mogul, he was a bully and a predator.
Several of his old friends attribute this in
part to a hectoring mother and ineffectual
father, though both Harvey and Bob have
described their parents as loving; others say
it’s compensation for his rough looks. “I think
he has a very bad self-image because of the way
he feels about his physical appearance,” says
Robin Robinson, 63, who worked for him in
Buffalo in the early ’80s, where he first arrived
as a student in 1969 and remained until he
moved to New York City more than a decade
later. In his relationships with the opposite sex,
“He always has to have another, and another
— all to compensate, to say, ‘Look, I really am
successful with women.’ ”
It’s tempting to look for a smoking gun.
But the origins of Weinstein’s behavior are as
complex and opaque as the man himself.T
he ship was enormous and solid
as a rock. Built in 1897 and capable of
traveling at a speed of 13 knots, it
was nearly 600 feet long and weighed 13,000
tons. But none of that must have mat-
tered to Joe Weinstein as he boarded the SS
Pretoria in Hamburg in late 1909 and set
forth on the weekslong voyage to America.
At 20, Joe (whose family took its name from
the “Weinsteins” they peddled, crystals of
potassium bitartrate used for cooking and
cleaning) was well on his way to the New
World, having journeyed 600 miles from
his native Galicia in Eastern Europe to thisGerman port, joining thousands of other
Jews fleeing rampant anti-Semitism.
What happened upon Joe’s arrival in America
is unknown, and he vanishes from the records
until 1918, when he married another Galician
Jew, Pauline Fischman, a petite 22-year-old
who was working as a dress finisher. With Joe
now employed as a fishmonger and Pauline
in the laundry business, the couple hunkered
down to a working-class life, producing 10
children in rapid succession (one died days
after being born), including their fourth, Bob
and Harvey’s father, Max.
Born in New York City in 1924, Max grew
up in a family that was distant and remote,
according to a 2011 piece Bob wrote for Vanit y
Fair. Bob marveled that his father could be
such a family man, given how little love hegot at home. In his mid-20s, on a visit to the
Catskills after serving in World War II, he
met a woman named Miriam Postal and asked
if she’d like to dance. She turned him down
flat, only to relent. They married in 1950 and
remained together until Max’s death from
cardiac arrest in 1976 at age 51.
Unlike the flamboyant Miriam, Max had
a low-key personality, a trait inherited by Bob,
though not Harvey. Peter Adler, a close child-
hood friend of Harvey’s, remembers Max as a
quiet, reserved figure who preferred to stay on
the sidelines, watching TV or reading.
Finding work as a diamond-cutter in New
York’s jewelry district, Max moved with his
wife into a two-bedroom, lower-middle-class
apartment in the Electchester housing project,
a series of squat brick buildings in Flushing,1 Younger brother Bob in 1989. “Harvey seemed resentful that he had to bring him on,” a longtime friend says of the
brothers’ business partnership. 2 Signs in the Electchester Housing Complex in Flushing, Queens, where the Weinstein
boys grew up. 3 Weinstein and his mother, Miriam, at the 1996 Obie Awards in NYC. “They were terrified of their mom,”
says an associate. 4 Joe Postal, the father of Harvey’s mother, Miriam, was a butter-and-egg merchant.1 24