by Harvey Weinstein

A Small Excerpt from Harvey Weinstein's Message to the American People about the Importance of Building a Movie Studio in Brooklyn.

...or a wet/dry vac run by Casey Affleck (I offered to pay him scale), but Tina is priggish. Even for a British person. So despite what she tells you, that was the first time we met.

But what does Tina Brown have to do with building 12 movie soundstages, complete with on-line and off-line editing facilities, on the site of a 169-acre former World War II naval ship-building yard located on the moldering and ferrite-barnacled shores of Brooklyn? What does Tina Brown know about 221 films being shot in New York last year and the $2.58 BILLION it generated for the fine and generally sharply dressed, often thin to a fault, taxpaying citizens of New York City? Nothing. I wear the goddamn cowboy hat around here, not Tina Brown. Tina Brown has never even been to Brooklyn, not even for a massage.

Rudy Giuliani, on the other hand, has been to Brooklyn. Oliver Peoples himself once told me he saw Rudolph shopping for a monocle (but I think that was in L.A., not Brooklyn). Why does Rudy, who at one point agreed to subsidize this project with a $25 million low-interest loan, now thwart the will of the people? Does he dislike, or perhaps even fear, actors with gazelle-like necks updating classic literature so it appeals to the culture-starved taxpaying citizens of America? I do not know. It has something to with his father, surely. But I will battle him, people, for you I do this, alone, save Rachel and Sarah and a few other assistants if need be. Where the fuck is Bobby De Niro when you need him? Bobby (my theoretical partner in this little studio deal) talks a nice game for an old guy who wears facial hair well, but what does he do when a tiny-toothed crypto-Nazi like Rudy steps in the room and talks of dashing the hopes and dreams, the primal needs really, of hundreds of millions of taxpaying Americans? Or at the least of hundreds of partygoing millionaires? Bobby pretends to mumble something into his StarTac and scampers off for a massage.

People of America, please listen. Listen to me. Hear what I am saying. I am a simple man. Just like you, I like cheese. Just like you, I dream of owning West Hollywood (but not living there), of coming home at night after a hard day's work, kicking off my shoes, and, glass of Jarvis cab clutched tightly in my proportionally undersized fist, relaxing my feet before the fire on my Eisner-skin rug...

Read the rest of "Building the Dream" in Talk, on newsstands soon!