From 6 years ago.....
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/03/weinstein-miramax-201103
Everyone in the entertainment world knows his story. A middle-class kid from Queens, a onetime concert promoter who emerged with his brother in the early 1990s as the leading maker and marketer of independent films, Weinstein made his name during an unprecedented streak, from 1992 to 2003, when his beloved Miramax studio produced at least one best-picture nominee every year. The contradiction that made him so fascinating was how a man who produced such wonderful films—Trainspotting, Cold Mountain, Good Will Hunting, to name a few—could produce such boorish behavior. In Hollywood, everyone seems to have a favorite Harvey tirade. The time he told The New York Observer he was “the fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” The time he screamed at Terry McAuliffe, then chairman of the Democratic Party, over some now forgotten bit of political trivia: “You motherfucker! I’ll rip your balls off!” (Weinstein denies this happened.)
That was Harvey Weinstein then and, though such outbursts seem rare these days, probably still is. An aide tells the story of a “slight” tantrum he recently threw on the set of a movie filming outside London, after which he apologized for “being an asshole,” at which point someone piped up, “Yeah, but you’re our asshole, and we’re glad you’re back.” Ask his peers about Weinstein these days and you hear that kind of thing a lot. Where once he was viewed as a spitting, cursing blowhard, today, at 58, Weinstein is often described in warmer terms, as a throwback to the passionate, sometimes vulgar studio heads of yore, such as Harry Cohn and Jack Warner. Having sold Miramax to the Disney Company in 1993, then leaving in a rancorous dispute with its C.E.O., Michael Eisner, in 2005, he was surprised to find much of Hollywood actually cheering him on when he tried to buy back Miramax last year.
“I think just about everybody was rooting for them,” says Tom Freston, the former Viacom C.E.O., “because, while Harvey is sort of the anti-Hollywood, underneath all the bluster people really do root for him because he is sort of emblematic of the Hollywood of yesteryear, the big, burly guy who steps on a lot of toes, who does it his own way. It harks back to the reasons many of us got into this business.”
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