In a conventional publicity campaign for a Hollywood film, every aspect is precision-engineered for maximum impact. The teasers begin early. The rumours from early screenings glow with positivity. The cast stay inseparable from both one another and their two core messages: that the film is tremendous and, boy, did we have a nice time making it.
Last summer, as he prepared to open the romantic drama It Ends with Us, Justin Baldoni took a radically different approach. Rather than go for unity, he and his co-stars appeared to have split. Rather than insist they had a nice time, they demurred. And rather than glow with positivity, he hired the same crisis PR expert as Johnny Depp to allegedly dismantle the reputation of his leading actress.
Baldoni is now the subject of an extraordinary legal complaint filed by Blake Lively, that leading lady, against Baldoni, his film studio, his publicist, and the aforementioned crisis PR team, led by Melissa Nathan, a veteran whose preferred approach could best be described as “attack is the best form of defence”.
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In a way, the most remarkable aspect of the whole sorry saga is that Justin Baldoni thought he could take on the might of Hollywood’s most wholesome and powerful cartel and win. In Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’s Hollywood, it always ends with them.
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Imagine trying to outplay Ryan Reynolds in the PR game
Dude got a full-ass billion dollar movie franchise going by “accidentally” leaking test footage
Nothing about the sexual harassment?
Plenty:
On Saturday, more than four months after the film’s release, the New York Times published an 80-page complaint filed in California that made a range of allegations against Baldoni – including sexual harassment on set and a co-ordinated PR campaign to damage Lively’s reputation afterwards.
At one point during production, the complaint alleges, things were so bad that a meeting was held to address the actress’s claims of a hostile work environment, which Reynolds also attended. One demand was that there be “no more showing nude videos or images of women to Lively, no more mention of Baldoni’s alleged previous ‘pornography addiction’, and no more discussions about sexual conquests in front of Lively”.
Other allegations made in the complaint include Baldoni and the film’s lead producer, Jamey Heath, repeatedly violating physical boundaries and making sexual or inappropriate comments to Lively; Baldoni improvising unwanted kissing during acting scenes; Heath showing Lively a video of his wife naked; and both men entering her trailer uninvited while she was in a state of undress.
Thanks couldn’t open it
