Make Better Choices

I would imagine that it is a deeply sickening feeling for those in the entertainment industry to discover that someone they’ve worked with and care about to be a terrible person. Finding out, for example, that your mentor was drugging and assaulting women. That your good friend was assaulting his nannies. That you’d done multiple movies with someone who was in a toxic relationship and then hired a PR firm to make it look as though the abuse was one-sided. That the woman who started your career was a transphobe and assorted other kinds of bigot. That must feel truly awful. For those people, I have deep sympathy.

Then, there’s the people who choose to do work with or for terrible people when there’s no excuse not to know. There is a certain irony to the fact that Louis C.K. is performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival; a terrible person in a terrible place. Jim Jeffries, who will be there, has said that the human rights records of the US and Saudi Arabia are comparable, and it’s true that the US is not currently the country we here at Media Magpies want it to be. But given one of the comedians, Jessica Kirson, has had to defend agreeing to perform in a country where her sexual orientation is punishable by death, I think he may be off by a little.

At least Pete Davidson was willing to be open about why he’s there—he’s in a Krusty the Klown situation wherein they drove a dump truck of money up to his house and he’s not made of stone. But, uh, maybe he should be? The amount of money it would take for me to overcome my morals and, say, work with Tom Cruise should be a heck of a lot lower than it would be for someone with Pete Davidson’s money, but I’m not sure how much you’d have to pay me. It’s a lot, I know that. Probably more than he was paid.

I can imagine that Richard Kind had imagined being in a Woody Allen movie for ages, since he started as an actor, but to be in one in the Year of Our Lord 2020 was a poor choice. John Lithgow—who was actually my mental casting for a role that didn’t appear in the movies—may not have known about the toxicity of J.K. Rowling when he agreed to be in the new Harry Potter show, but he does now and has no excuse. These are men I’ve long respected, and they lose a little of that from me for making the choices they’ve made. I admit Richard Kind appears to take any role he’s offered—he’s in Sharknado 2, after all—but Lithgow doesn’t need the money, does he?

We’re not talking things where there’s any doubt, either. We’re not talking getting into the weeds of someone’s personal relationships and wondering if it’s really such a big deal that all their girlfriends are under twenty-five. We’re talking “they have spouted bigotry with their whole chest on public platforms.” We’re talking a country where women who cannot identify their rapists are deemed to be guilty of adultery and flogged. It’s one thing to still own books by a known serial sexual criminal and another to buy their new stuff—or agree to be in a show based on it.

Sure, a lot of people in the past were known to be awful. But H.P. Lovecraft is dead. You’re not supporting his bigotry, because it’s been dead and buried in Providence, Rhode Island, since 1937. He’s not going to take your Lovecraft Country dollars and get another cat with a name you can’t say, whereas I can’t imagine being John Cleese or Mickey Rourke and being in a Roman Polanski movie in 2023, knowing full well that you’re helping him remain a fugitive from justice.

I have removed people from my schedule for Celebrating the Living because I discover a toxic aspect to them. You defend a known industry pedophile, I’m swapping you out with someone I don’t know to be terrible, you know? And my reach is much smaller than, say, Francis Ford Coppola’s. I can say, “Support the pedophile, don’t get covered.” Instead, he chose to, well, support the pedophile. That’s a choice he made, and we get to judge him for it.

I will admit that we here at Magpies are in a bit of a Terminally Online situation. I’ve known whisperings that someone was sketchy before the story broke, leaving all the people in the group to wonder why we knew before the people at Marvel who were theoretically doing background research before expecting actors to be the next Big Bad for an upcoming story arc. I wouldn’t have been in a room alone with Louis C.K. long before it became common knowledge that women shouldn’t be in rooms alone with Louis C.K., and I freely admit that.

So I asked a few people I know in a group that has nothing to do with movies how they react on learning about this kind of thing. Universally, they said they were disappointed and less likely to consume the person’s work in the future, especially to pay money for it. One of them specifically called out Bill Burr without my naming any names involved in the Riyadh Comedy Festival. So, yeah, I’ll name and shame Aziz Ansari and Wayne Brady. Whitney Cummings and Gabriel Iglesias should know better. Jimmy Carr’s going to end up dealing with jokes about this on the Big Fat Quiz of the Year this year, I’m sure, possibly ditto Jack Whitehall. Hannibal Buress should be doing real self reflection, as should Chris Tucker. Dave Chapelle . . . well, I’m less surprised.