Title : Why didn't Maureen Dowd's article on Uma Thurman explain what happened to Thurman's legal claim over the car crash (which is portrayed as Quentin Tarantino's fault)?
link : Why didn't Maureen Dowd's article on Uma Thurman explain what happened to Thurman's legal claim over the car crash (which is portrayed as Quentin Tarantino's fault)?
Why didn't Maureen Dowd's article on Uma Thurman explain what happened to Thurman's legal claim over the car crash (which is portrayed as Quentin Tarantino's fault)?
Yesterday afternoon, I put up a post about the first half of Maureen Dowd's article about Uma Thurman, which is about Thurman's accusations against Harvey Weinstein, but I only flagged "the strange story about the car crash."Dowd has an amusing way of writing, but sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information. This article is especially puzzling. First, why didn't Dowd stick with the Harvey Weinstein story? Dowd mentions at one point that she's talking to Thurman at 3 a.m. on the second day of the interview. What didn't make the cut? In yesterday's post, I highlighted quotes from Thurman that showed — even though the headline called Thurman "angry" — that Thurman had "complicated" feelings that included what sounded to me like guilt over allowing other women to fall into Weinstein's clutches. Where is the depth of analysis on this subject?
Halfway through, the article switches to the topic of a car crash that occurred in the making of the movie "Kill Bill." Here, the villain is Quentin Tarantino (whose name does not appear in the article title or subtitle, which promise to give us the story of Thurman's outrage at Weinstein). The problem with Tarantino has nothing to do with sexual harassment or even anything personal. It's completely professional: Tarantino the director was a taskmaster who talked her into driving a car down a dirt road at 40 miles per hour when she wanted a stuntperson to do it:
“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)There is embedded video at the link — film shot from the back of the car — showing Thurman attempting to control the car and driving it into a palm tree.
“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”Clearly, Thurman had grounds for a lawsuit, and we're not told when Thurman got a lawyer and how the lawyer initially interacted with the production company Miramax. Dowd employs a jump cut, straight to this:
Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.So there's already a lawyer. It's 2 weeks later, and they'd like the footage, but everyone knows of the potential for an expensive lawsuit (and the need to keep Thurman on board finishing the movie and promoting it).
Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.Signing a document and paying a settlement? Obviously, the footage is evidence in the lawsuit, so if the lawsuit is not settled, the footage will come out in discovery, so what happened? Dowd says absolutely nothing and just makes it sound as though Thurman and Tarantino had a long personal struggle:
Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”Her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled??? There was a lawyer in the picture. When you're suing somebody or threatening to sue somebody it's not a matter of a rattling mind meld! Rattled mind meld sounds funny, and tort lawyers in car-crash cases sound dull. It's like Dowd is swerving us into a palm tree because continuing to drive at 40 miles an hour down the dirt road isn't interesting. But what the hell happened? A lawyer dropped in, but get that guy out of here! Bring back Tarantino! Here's an exciting sceen: Soho House, shouting, a fateful fight!
Lest you think about the boring lawyer, here's a very long sentence. See if you can read it. It may cause you not to think about the other question that could be nagging you — why does Thurman's old grievance about a moviemaking car accident and a mysterious settled/not-settled lawsuit belong in an article about what Thurman knows about the sexual harassment reckoning and Harvey Weinstein? Here, read:
Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.Dowd's answer to my question is: The Reckoning reminded Thurman of this other dispute she has with Miramax. It can be portrayed as similar because it happened to her body, but one story is about a man who (she says) intentionally imposed sexual violence on her body, and the other is about a different man who (at most) meant no harm but was a link in a causal chain that ended with her crashing a car into a tree.
I would add that the stories are also similar in that evidence remained suppressed for years, but one involves Thurman herself declining to go public with accusations (and herself becoming causally connected to the sexual abuse of other women), and the other involves film footage that was relevant to a subject that Maureen Dowd is hiding from us: the at-least-threatened lawsuit over the crash.
“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”Atoned? I'm assuming Miramax suppressed it as the lawsuit progressed — "permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees" means, in lawyer talk, very high damages. Thurman had a lawyer, threatening a lawsuit, so it wasn't a personal relationship anymore.
And I wonder what's going on now. Is Thurman still trying to collect damages and using Dowd and the NYT? Is there a pending lawsuit? Why didn't her lawyer get the footage years ago in the normal (and very boring!) process of discovery?
This drama about Tarantino atoning himself — unrattling the mind meld — by turning over the footage is offered for our amusement, but to me it's ridiculous, because I'm seeing this phantom lawsuit and wondering whether that's the main thing going on now.
As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.So there's Dowd, lured into Thurman's "elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side" by the promise of a story about Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse (and, perhaps, Thurman's complicity in the abuse of other women), and what Thurman wants is something else entirely — to go on about a tort case.
“When they turned on me after the accident,” she says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”
“Harvey assaulted me but that didn’t kill me,” she says. “What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?” She says she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.
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