Emma Thompson put a lot of careful thought into her decision to drop out of Skydance Animation's Luck,Watch In the Cut (2003) it seems.
The two-time Academy Award winner confirmed earlier in February that her decision to exit the 2021 movie stems from Skydance's controversial decision to hire John Lasseter in a leadership role. The disgraced former Pixar chief left Disney in 2018 under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations.
SEE ALSO: Rashida Jones calls out Pixar's poor track record with female directorsJust days into 2019 -- Lasseter's exit from Disney was formalized at the end of 2018 -- Skydance Media announced its surprise hire. Lasseter would join the company in a repeat of his former Disney role, taking his place as the head of Skydance Animation.
The news wasn't well-received at all. Although the allegations surrounding Lasseter first surfaced in 2017, he spent most of the subsequent year on a (presumably forced) sabbatical. By the middle of 2018, he had shifted into a consulting role with Disney -- an arrangement that the company said would continue until Dec. 31, 2018.
Skydance's move to announce his hiring less than two weeks later was widely viewed as insensitive and tone deaf. The company acknowledged his history and told employees in an internal memo that it had investigated the allegations, but many on the outside rightly felt that the hiring sent an awful message to women.
Thompson's exit from Luckwas confirmed through a spokesperson on Feb. 19, little more than a month after Lasseter's hiring. She didn't say anything at the time, but she did let the studio know of her decision in a letter, and that letter has now been shared with the Los Angeles Times.
Thompson starts by expressing her appreciation for Luck director Alessandro Carloni. But in the same sentence, she also voices her confusion. No one in Hollywood can claim ignorance of the cultural shifts prompted by #MeToo and Time's Up at this point. So why would Skydance voluntarily empower someone with Lasseter's "pattern of misconduct," she wonders.
The bulk of Thompson's letter focuses on a series of pointed questions directed at Skydance. She'd like to know why the studio thinks Lasseter's contractual obligation to behave "professionally" would ease anyone's minds, given the history.
She also wonders what behaving professionally even means for someone like him; is the good behavior simply performative, and the product of an employment agreement? Is he just jumping through hoops so he can keep his job while he just thinks about the alleged stuff that got him in trouble instead of acting on it?
And really, in that context, what does a second chance even mean with someone like Lasseter? He's getting his second chance from Skydance, but that decision shifts the power over who does and doesn't work with him in the wrong direction.
If John Lasseter started his own company, then every employee would have been given the opportunity to choose whether or not to give him a second chance. But any Skydance employees who don't want to give him a second chance have to stay and be uncomfortable or lose their jobs. Shouldn’t it be John Lasseter who has to lose HIS job if the employees don’t want to give him a second chance?
Questions like these have been asked before, but Thompson's letter takes them out of the hypothetical and grounds them in a very real, and extremely unfortunate, situation. Reading the entire thing is well worth your time.
Topics Film
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