New film shows realities of working for a Weinstein-like boss

In The Assistant, a new movie written and directed by Kitty Green, we follow someone doing that job for a movie executive throughout their long day. A town car picks her up at home, so she will get to the Manhattan office well before the sun is up. She has a bowl of Froot Loops, turns the copier on, and gets the coffee started. The job of working at a major movie studio may sound glamorous, but the work — printing out headshots, unpacking boxes, making travel arrangements ­— definitely is not. 

And beyond just the rote, uninteresting tasks that many office workers do, we see her cleaning off the couch in her boss’s office and finding an earring on the floor. Later she deals with calls from her boss’s wife, who demands to know where her husband is.

Green, who made the documentaries Casting JonBenet and Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, started working on The Assistant after the news about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, now on trial in Manhattan for first-degree rape, third-degree rape, first-degree criminal sexual act, and predatory sexual assault, broke in 2017. Although he is never mentioned, the bullying and abuse of the boss in the film brings Weinstein to mind.

Along with not hearing his name, we never see the boss’s face, instead focusing on Jane, the assistant, and seeing her reactions on Julia Garner’s (of TV’s Ozark and The Americans) expressive face. Green knew from the beginning she wouldn’t show the boss.

“I never wanted that,” she said. “People have made enough movies about bad men. I wanted to center women.”

A friend of Green’s worked at The Weinstein Company, and he got her in touch with people there. She also went to London, Los Angeles, and Australia, in the end interviewing more than 100 women who worked or had worked at Weinstein’s former film studios, Miramax and The Weinstein Company, as well as talking to women at other studios and agencies. At the time she spoke with them, many of the women were still processing what had happened, Green says. Her intent was not to tell the story of someone like Weinstein, but those of the people who work around bullying, exploitive, and predatory men.

In the movie, after her boss berates her on the phone, Jane writes him an email telling him she appreciates the opportunity to work with him, with her two male colleagues giving her unasked-for advice. Part of her day includes going to pick up a young, pretty woman who has just arrived from Idaho, where she met the boss and he offered her a job as an assistant. Jane takes her to a fancy hotel, and the encounter so disturbs her that she decides to go to HR with her concerns. Rather than empathy or acknowledgment, she is met with more belittling and bullying, although it is clear that the HR person knows about the boss’s behavior, telling Jane she doesn’t need to worry because she’s not his type.

Green says she wanted to get into the details of how people feel who work for these men and how they question themselves and their own perceptions.

“The whole system is against them in a way,” she said. “It’s working towards and for white, powerful men.”

Women like Jane are constantly put in positions where they doubt themselves and what’s happening, Green said.

“She does not know if it’s consensual or not, and the questions around consent are really complicated,” she said. “There’s this culture of silence and people said maybe they would have spoken up, but there weren’t any avenues. Then when she does go to HR, she’s immediately struck down and almost forced to question what she’s saying.”

Things have gotten somewhat better since the #MeToo movement, founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral as a hashtag after the Weinstein allegations, Green believes.

“I definitely think if we experience something at work, now there are some avenues or pathways so you can voice your concerns,” she said. “The #MeToo movement is huge.”

But Green, who spoke with women in engineering and tech along with those working in the film industry and found they had similar stories, wants a more foundational change.

“The system is inherently gendered,” she said. “Men are given opportunities women aren’t. I heard a lot of stories where women were frustrated they weren’t being promoted, and a male would be allowed to sit in on a business meeting, and they were stuck at the copier.”

Green says many of the people she spoke with felt trapped in their positions, unable to find a way to move up. One woman told her she’d wanted to apply for a position as coordinator but was told she didn’t have any coordinating experience. The women replied that her whole job was coordinating. The perception is that an assistant doesn’t belong in that role, Green says.

In the movie, there’s a scene of Jane getting an email from the boss telling her he’s tough on her because he’s going to make her great. Green says she added it after sending out a draft and being told there was “too much stick, and there’s got to be some carrot.”

Alternating between praising and belittling and abuse is just another way that abusive bosses keep their assistants feeling tense and on edge and doubting themselves, Green observes. She hopes that The Assistant, opening January 31 in Los Angeles and New York, will help bring about conversations about the changes that need to happen for greater equity in workplaces — in the film industry and beyond. It’s not just the predatory men in power we need to be talking about, Green thinks — it’s what kind of jobs women are given to do at work. In an effort to help that shift, Green will donate a portion of the movie’s profits to the New York Women’s Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women in the workplace.