We’re all familiar with David O. Russell‘s reputation for being high-strung and occasionally abusive on film sets, and I wish it were otherwise. And I can’t for the life of me understand how or why the 2011 feel-up incident with his transgender niece Nicole Peloquin occured, or why it resulted in Peloquin filing a police report. (A fair-minded person would at least consider Russell’s statement to the police that Peloquin was “acting very provocative toward him” and invited him to feel her breasts.)
The other side of the consideration coin is that Russell is a genius-level filmmaker — the director of five and arguably six classics of the ’90s and aughts — Flirting with Disaster (’96), Three Kings (’99), I Heart Huckabees (’04), The Fighter (’10), the masterful Silver Linings Playbook (’12) and American Hustle (’13).
We all understand that mentioning artistic accomplishment (i.e., the “some geniuses behave like assholes” argument) doesn’t matter to Twitter jackals and woke accusers. Right now they’re firing their opening salvos at Russell for being, they’re claiming, an all-around abuser and deserving of career death and industry expulsion a la Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. (Here’s a Twitter thread from yesterday, and a Reddit one.)
The feel-up incident was revealed by the 2014 Sony hack, so why wasn’t Russell raked over the coals for this when Joy, a biographical comedy-drama that he directed and wrote, was being promoted seven years ago? Because reputational takedowns and cancel culture weren’t a thing in ’15 — they didn’t manifest until the #MeToo ignition in late ’17.
This is the world in which we now live — if a famous film-industry person had been accused of sexual misconduct and especially if he/she has an unfortunate, years-long pattern of having been abusive to coworkers (which Russell definitely was on the sets of Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees and American Hustle), that person must be sent to the gallows.
And that’s what the jackals are going to try to make happen, apparently, when Russell’s Amsterdam opens on 11.4.22, or during the promotional build-up, I should say.
Abusive film-set behavior will never be excused away by this column. It’s highly unfortunate and, if you ask me, adolescent and inexplicable. Making a film come out right is hard enough without explosive tempers screwing things up.
Then again you could describe the aforementioned incidents as the kind of behavior that unfortunately goes along with high-strung temperaments. Research the Otto Preminger stories. It happens. Hollywood dealings and the world of grade-A filmmaking (and high-end music producing and performing for that matter) have occasionally been punctuated by bizarre outbursts. Some directors and actors haven’t gotten along in decades past and have even come to blows or near-blows.
Examples abound but off the top of my head there was (a) Henry Fonda being hit by John Ford during filming of Mister Roberts, (b) William Wellman crossing swords with Robert Mitchum on Blood Alley, (c) Val Kilmer vs. John Frankenheimer and Marlon Brando on The Island of Dr. Moreau, (d) Stanley Kubrick fuming at Shelley Duvall while making The Shining, (e) Marlon Brando vs. Frank “Miss Piggy” Oz while making The Score.