Harvey Weinstein was inescapable in that conversation, too: he had essentially invented the modern Oscar campaign. Weinstein ran his campaigns like guerrilla wars. A Miramax publicist once ghostwrote an op-ed praising the company’s movie Gangs of New York and passed it off as the work of Robert Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, who was, at the time, eighty-eight. Weinstein orchestrated an elaborate smear campaign against rival film A Beautiful Mind, planting press items claiming the protagonist, mathematician John Nash, was gay (and, when that didn’t work, that he was anti-Semitic).
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