Can Rudin Be More Polite-in?
On Scott Rudin's return to Broadway
For decades Scott Rudin was renowned for his good taste in writers and poor taste in human behavior. I mean throwing things at assistants. Bullying. Screaming. “Volatile and vengeful,” as Michael Paulson and Cara Buckley write in this 2021 New York Times feature, which explores this “EGOT who won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and 17 Tony Awards while developing a reputation as one of the vilest bosses in the industry.”
I’ve had some interactions with Scott over the years - all positive ones. He was interested in a musical I produced Off Off Broadway very early in my career, I interviewed him while I was an arts reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and he read and admired a pilot I wrote. Like everyone in the arts, I knew he had a reputation for abuse. I one-billion-percent believe the victims who reported his abuse. Period. Full stop.
Exposed, he retreated, and is now making his return to Broadway behind a new play, Little Bear Ridge Road, by Sam Hunter, a writer whose work I have long admired and wrote about here, and a lovely person I have known for 25 years.
I’m lucky that the people who have backed my work over the years have been super respectful. I do believe that people can change - I know an awful lot of people who are recovered alcoholics and addicts, who have made amends and changed their behavior and whose entire lives are dedicated to service. But most people don’t change.
Still, honestly speaking, if Scott Rudin wanted to finance one of my TV and film projects, I would agree - in large part because opportunities for writers have never in my lifetime been more scant. I would need for certain criteria to be met: a public apology (which he has made), and a series of gut checks to suss out how it actually feels to have conversations with him about the project. I can’t work with someone whose vibe, communication style, creepy treatment of others - even subtly creepy - shuts me down.
And - just fessing up to the grey areas - there are types of abuse I can forgive more easily than others - I don’t think I could work with a former sexual predator, even if they professed guilt, regret and change. I don’t think I could work with someone whose abuse focused on people of color. If a close friend had had their career wrecked by a former asshole, I couldn’t collaborate, no matter the level or quality of contrition, unless I had the complete green light from that friend.
What about you? In the comments, please share your perspective, and feel free to replace “producer” with an equivalent person in your industry. And obviously no need to name names, but you can if you want:
Would you allow a financier and producer to attach themselves to your work if that person had abused people in your community? What if they abused people you were very close to?
Have you ever collaborated with a respectful producer who had once been an abusive producer - how did that work out?
What criteria would you need to see met to believe that an abusive producer was now a respectful producer?
Is there a kind of abuse that you could forgive more easily than others?
All paintings by Allison Krajcik, whose work is on view until July 25 at the Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet.
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I will leave you with this gem. No can do, both Hall and Oates say.
xo Lizzie