Casting couch and #HOLLYWOOD

After priyanka chopra tweeted about casting couch and exploitation in hollywood.. ftt tried finding out more about it.
The chorus of condemnation against Harvey Weinstein, as dozens of women have come forward to accuse the producer of serial sexual assault and harassment, has often turned on a quaint-sounding show-business cliché: the “casting couch.”
GLEN CLOSE says the ‘casting couch’ phenomenon, so to speak, is still a reality in our business and in the world.”

The casting couch—where, as the story goes, aspiring actresses had to trade sexual favors in order to win roles—has been a familiar image in Hollywood since the advent of the studio system in the 1920s and ’30s. Over time, the phrase has become emblematic of the way that sexual aggression has been common in an industry dominated by powerful men.

How did this seemingly innocuous phrase become so ensconced as a standard show-business trope? The casting-couch tradition originated in theatrical productions on Broadway well before the Hollywood film industry became the new locus of the entertainment world.
Foster Hirsch details how Lee Shubert, the eldest of three brothers who helped establish Broadway’s theater district in the first two decades of the 20th century, kept “an elegantly furnished boudoir, reserved for leading ladies and promising ingenues, and a shabby, spartanly furnished room with a single couch where he met chorus girls and soubrettes.”
“If you didn’t sleep with them you didn’t get the part,” the dancer Agnes de Mille would later recall about the Shubert brothers. “The Shuberts ran a brothel: Let them sue me.”
The casting couch in Hollywood has long been known as the place where sexual favours are demanded by a powerful film producer or director from aspiring actors or actresses who want a role in their production.

The casting couch mentality has been around ever since the beginning of the film industry when powerful movie moguls would make sexual advances to young or vulnerable actors or actresses in return for a role in a film, to be ‘made a star’, or to be introduced to other powerful people who might be able to give their career a leg-up.

The allegations of assault surfacing about Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein have echoes of the many sexual harassment and casting couch horror stories that have emerged Hollywood’s chequered history.

One of the first and most historic cases of sexual assault was in 1921 when Hollywood first one million dollar star, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, was found beside actress Virginia Rappe who was screaming in pain on the bed. She accused him of raping her.

RECENTLY APA agent Tyler Grasham has been fired from the Hollywood agency following a sexual assault claim made against him, 
Originally, actor-turned-filmmaker Lipman (a.k.a. Blaise Embry) joined in on the movement to share his story of assault at the hands of a “prominent talent agent from the firm APA” when he was 17. Then, according to Lipman, after he came forward, he received a “poke” on FB from Grasham, which led Lipman to pen a SOCIAL MEDIA POST outing Grasham as the assaulter.

The allegations against Grasham come two weeks after the initial MEDIA detailing “decades” of sexual misconduct by producer Harvey Weinstein. GYWNETH, ANGENILA .J, KATE .B, HEATHER .G, ROSE. M, CARA .D, and MIRA.S are among the women who have come forward accusing Weinstein of assault, harassment, or rape. Last week in a statement through a representative, he denied claims of sexual assault: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.”

“The positive thing about the attention the Weinstein scandal has had, is it’s no longer about Harvey,” wrote lipman. “The conversation has moved on to the size of this epidemic and how to dismantle the system that protects these predators. And it’s given space and courage for victims to speak up, against their abuse. This is bigger than Weinstein.”