Harvey’s Hellhole: Scandal

Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. This month, let’s go back 35 years ago to when Weinstein tried to turn a fact-based tale of sex and politics into a controversial hot ticket – something the cast and filmmakers surprisingly didn’t want any part of.

You could say Harvey Weinstein is one of the main reasons the Motion Picture Association replaced the disreputable X rating with the even more dreaded NC-17 back in 1990. A year before that decision, Weinstein went toe-to-toe with the ratings board over Scandal, a British import Miramax was bringing to American art houses.

The 1989 historical drama is a trip back to swinging London, circa late ‘50/early ‘60s, when a juicy sex scandal toppled an entire government. John Hurt stars as Stephen Ward, a hedonistic osteopath who introduces teenage burlesque dancer Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley) to a high society that consists of middle-aged, Conservative Party members getting butt-bald-nekkid and engaging in wild-but-proper orgies. (This is the British, after all.) Keeler has a brief, extramarital fling with Minister of War John “Jack” Profumo (Ian McKellen, rocking a bald cap); when she has a very public spat with a gun-wielding ex (former Fine Young Cannibals frontman Roland Gift, who can’t act a damn) that leads to a falling-out with Ward, the scorned Keeler alerts the hungry press of her dalliances with Profumo and other high-profile folk.

Since it’s a story full of sex, lies and old, hairy asses, Weinstein (who threw in $2.35 million for North-American distribution rights) wanted Scandal to be a tawdry affair. Impressed by how Alan Parker’s 1987 pulp thriller Angel Heart, which featured a blood-soaked love scene between star Mickey Rourke and then-Cosby Show regular Lisa Bonet, had the Classification and Rating Association (CARA) ready to give it an X unless cuts were made, Weinstein wanted Scandal to raise a similar ruckus. He even showed up on set, urging director Michael Caton-Jones and producer Stephen Woolley to get Whalley to take her clothes off on-camera. 

Of course, Caton-Jones and Woolley were in it for more than tits and giggles. Working from a script by Australian writer Michael Thomas (Ladyhawke), Scandal is really a doomed love story between platonic partners-in-crime Ward and Keeler. Both Hurt and Whalley play their historical figures as free-spirited BFFs, vilified for having the gall to reveal that well-respected ladies and gentlemen can be freakazoids too. 

Needless to say, that wasn’t enough for Weinstein’s pervy ass. When a fed-up Woolley told Weinstein to oversee a poolside nude scene with Whalley (who didn’t want to do it, at the demanding of then-husband Val Kilmer), Weinstein hired a body double. Apparently, the double’s shapely backside prompted Whalley to do most of the scene herself.

As expected, when Scandal was ready to hit stateside audiences, CARA wanted a couple seconds shaved off a libidinous-but-mostly-tame orgy scene attended by Keeler and fame-seeking gal pal Mandy Rice-Davies (a cheeky Bridget Fonda), both fully clothed. In that scene, you could see a couple making sweet love on top of a piano (as a woman played the keys) and a nude waiter handing out cocktails and wearing a sign demanding to be hit if he did an unsatisfactory job. (Rice-Davies smacks a thorny rose on his wooly rump.) 

After two appeals and three seconds of edits, Scandal was given its R rating. It turns out CARA was the least of the filmmakers’ worries. As always, Weinstein went into Harvey Scissorhands mode and wanted a more American-friendly theatrical cut. Both Caton-Jones and Woolley didn’t want to cut a frame, but they were overruled by their big, bad executive producer. Eventually, the 114-minute British version was trimmed for us Yanks to 108 minutes.

Although Scandal had its share of stateside admirers (“Scandal is very much an affair to remember,” Philadelphia Inquirer critic Desmond Ryan said in his four-star review), there were those who saw it as an ultimately empty tale of ribaldry and hypocrisy. San Francisco Examiner critic Michael Sragow deemed it “so paralyzingly silly, so emotionally weightless, that even the most risque material slips by with barely a tickle,” while LA Weekly’s Tom Carson said the R-rated U.S. cut is “just a respectable, strangely diffident, uninvolving movie” – although it’s far better than the unrated “shambles” he originally saw.

The $7 million movie made $8 million around these parts. Yes, Scandal was a scandal. However, in the annals of battles filmmakers and distributors had with American censors back in the day, Scandal seems like a minor footnote. Just the fact that you can’t find this naughty bit of nostalgia on a streaming or VOD platform tells you how much this movie really meant to Harvey and them.

Even though “Scandal” isn’t available to rent, buy or stream in the U.S., a slightly-edited, 111-minute unrated version can be found on YouTube.