A portrait of a toxic workplace.
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Like Harvey Weinstein before him, Scott Rudin has been called an open secret throughout the entertainment industry.
Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing NDAs, vindictiveness, and the influence he still wields.
There was a permanence to what he did, one assistant said.
Theres something you carry with you in your life after that.
The Rudin Files
I.
But many wondered:Could he really be that bad?
It was a $55,000 salary, which for assistants is actually good.
I know exactly how to make this culture work for me.
Everyone is proven wrong eventually.
Rudin lives to break people with very few exceptions.Intern and phones assistant, 201516
II.
(According to a spokesperson, Bush left SRP last week.)
The schedule was grueling.
Despite the scope of Scott Rudin Productions, it was a tiny operation.
I was shocked by how small the office was.
I was picturing a 30- or 40-person office, an assistant said.
.The Horror Stories Youre Told on Day One
.
Really, it was to prepare them mentally for what might happen.
I think from pure exhaustion.
The other one is the dishes.
This ones pretty famous.
He takes all of the dishes out, and he starts slamming them on the floor.
He breaks every dish in the kitchen.
Then he silently walks out of the office and leaves.
You have to see to it the doors always closed when youre in it.
What would that be?
5.His phone cord is nine feet long.
Dont get up topee or eatin front of him.
8.Youre not allowed to take the subway because youcant lose cell receptionat any point while youre working for him.
I would have to take these hourlong Ubers [paid for by the company].
There was a binder of all of Scotts preferences and what needs to be ready for him in meetings.
What not to do and why not to do it.
And there are little stories in there.
Its all prepared by interns.
I think he indulges and enjoys the abuse.
A cast list must be inalphabetical order by first nameand not last name.
A photocopy must beperfectly centered.
A document must be inGaramond font size 12.
He did not like emailing or texting on the iPhone keyboard.
There was a closet full oflater-model BlackBerrys,the ones with the external keyboard.
Because he would so often smash them.
I had put a littleSign Here stickerwith an arrow right above a line where he needed to sign.
(He was going through a big legal situation withShuffle Along.)
He was frustrated because he felt it should have been on the line instead of above it.
He worked himself into a tizzy.
He tried to pick up the chair he had been sitting in to throw it at me.
He did not succeed in doing that.
He ended up just shoving the chair at me.
7.I remember the routine and the intensity around makinghole-punched scripts.They had these little brads.
If there was a mistake, it didnt slip by him.
It had to fit into a mail crate, and a lot of times it couldnt.
Hell start listing names at rapid fire.
The point is that everyone owes Scott a call, so Scotts always in control, explains an assistant.
Only he can decide to take the call or say hes not available.
Sometimes that person would call right back and say, I dont know how I missed the call.
Ive been waiting for a callback for months, recalled an assistant.
We would say, Let me see if I have him.
Then he would decline the call, and you would say, Sorry, I dont have him.
.The Food System
There was a world of stress around Rudins food and drink preferences.
Assistants said his requests were very particular.
He liked his bagels perfectly burnt.
Only a certain jot down of Oreo was stocked.
I will never look at M&Ms the same, said one assistant.
If the cream wasnt this particular shade, it would infuriate him.
And you had to get it to him fast.
One day, Scott barges in and is like, I want food.
Give me the hummus salad from Sweetgreen with no greens.
I thought he said no grains.
So I confirm: No grains?
And he was like, Yeah, go get it.
Ten minutes later, Im getting calls from the assistants, and theyre like, Where are you?
Listen, the line is out the door.
Im going as fast as I can, I said.
Five more minutes go by.
They call me again: Scott is pissed, he has to leave.
They call again: Where the hell are you?
Youre going to be in huge trouble.
I was like, Shit, hey give me a couple more minutes.
I order the food, and I am sprinting back.
When I run in, all the doors are open.
They opened the doors so I could sprint into his office.
I set it down, and he goes,What the fuck is this?
This isnt my order.
I asked for no greens.I was like, Scott, I misheard you.
I wrote it down.
And he was like, No, you didnt write it down.
I said, Heres my piece of paper.
I pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.
He was like, Get out of my office.
He threw the salad onto the tray that I was holding.
I heard all of that.
And I was like, Yeah, this guy is literally crazy.
I took his order down.
I even confirmed it with him.
I didnt realize Scott was right behind me.
You had to get him a menu every morning at 10:30 a.m. Then I would microwave the soup and have it there in five seconds like a fucking magician.
Hed be like, How did you do this?
Id be like, I guessed which one you wanted.
He was like, Well, I didnt want this one.
I want another one.
Then wed play that game.
But as described by his assistants, patterns begin to emerge.
When he walks in, its like a fear you feel through your arms, one assistant said.
The impending doom pulses through your veins.
Rudins physicality was a key factor in this fear.
In addition to being a bully, Scott Rudin is a large man in all senses of the word.
Hes a very intimidating presence, said Sam Laskey, an intern and paid reader from 2008 to 2011.
He can be charming.
Whats alarming about Scott Rudin is that hes really fucking charming and funny.
When hes verbally abusing people, sometimes its zingers.
You almost want to forgive him.
Then itll make someone cry and itll ruin their life, and thats when you realize its not funny.
Development intern, 2019
And unpredictable.
A hallmark of an abusive dynamic is not just that the perpetrator overtly mistreats you.
She was completely devastated by whatever he had said to her.
And this was somebody he had bought a several-thousand-dollar pashmina for.
Laskey
He can make you question your reality.
He talks in shorthand, and he emails in shorthand.
Sometimes it doesnt make sense at all, and he will play off of that.
When you dont know what hes talking about, itll send him over the edge.
Documents assistant, 2019
And humiliate you.
He had a hot-seat assistant who could take Scotts shit like nobody else.
He was great at his job, but Scott eventually starts looking for something about you that bothers him.
For this particular assistant, it was that he ended every conversation and phone call with Got it.
Scott normally has no problem tearing assistants a new asshole with everyone around.
Then we all heard a glass shatter, and the assistant ran out and never came back.
I went into the kitchen and cleaned up the pieces of a wineglass off the ground.
And he started screaming about the fact that his desk hadnt been properly wiped down with a Clorox wipe.
He wasnt yelling at anybody in particular.
He was just yelling because he was pissed off about this cologne.
That was the first time that I was like,Oh my gosh, something dangerous could happen.
Kiera Wilson, documents assistant, 2017
And make you freeze up.
When hes yelling at you, youre in fight-or-flight mode.
He calls me a piece of shit and Ill just be like, Yep, I am.
Ill do better next time.
So I physically had a stack of things in my arm.
I couldnt carry anything else.
And he starts chucking pens at my head.
I literally backtracked out of the conference room.
You get so afraid, your brain gets cloudy and youre operating off fear.
Documents assistant, 2017
Sometimes he tries to make you emulate his anger.
He would attempt to get me to yell at people on the phone.
I remember once I was talking to the office, relaying some piece of information he didnt like.
And he was like, You tell him this!
One of the assistants kept a book of things Rudin had said to insult people.
He often said, Do you think what you did today would make your parents proud of you?
But you were supposed to react immediately, and you were not supposed to ask questions.
There was one time where I didnt understand what he said.
So I said, Could you repeat that?
And he came out of his office and asked me in this mocking tone if I was deaf.
Multiple assistants described physical scenes happening behind closed doors:
My co-worker and I were at the office super-late.
He said or did something wrong, and Scott got pissed.
He was like, Fuck you.
But he didnt get out.
All of a sudden, we hear this huge crash.
And immediately the air in the room changed.
My shoulders were up by my ears.
We heard this blood-curdling scream.
Someone yelled, Youre so fucking crazy.
Youre insane, man.
And then Scott goes off, screaming.
He had taken his empty glass bowl of cashews that he always had to have and threw it.
It hit the credenza and shattered on the wall.
We had to go in and clean up all the broken glass and cashew bits.
Theres something visceral about being in an environment that suddenly becomes violent.
But you have to act like its normal.
When things did escalate to the point of violence, assistants described lasting effects.
They cited one incident in particular in which Kevin was thrown out of Rudins car.
But that time was memorable because Kevin said the car was still moving when he was thrown out.
Kevin was humiliated and hurt.
Thats not good, right?
The reaction that happened afterwards, I had never seen anything like it, he said.
Not at a wall; at the assistants.
We were all dodging them.
At which point he fires everybody.
There was a permanence to what he did, he continued.
Theres something you carry with you in your life after that, a distrust of people, maybe.
When you know what a person will really treat another person like, and you see it …
I dont know, it changed me.
I had a fairly decent relationship with him.
Im gay, and I think he took a liking to me in part for that reason.
He liked to mentor me.
I felt I received unfairly better treatment than a lot of the women in particular in the office.
I bore more witness to other people being abused.
I saw him shove a printer off a desk towards someone.
Theyd say, Of course he takes to you, this well-groomed, well-dressed, nice white Jewish boy.
That was an opportunity that was given to me because I was pretty; he could trust me.
The Black women, especially, he would never trust.
He doesnt invest in them.
My jaw would drop every time some poor girl got in his viewfinder.
He stops for a second and sees me, smiles, and he goes, Hi.
Nice to meet you.
And he was so friendly and warm.
Then literally went back to screaming at this poor girl.
Intern, 200809
VII.
CelebrityAppearances
Famous people regularly cycled through the office to do business with Rudin.
Theres an overwhelming energy of stress and dread that hangs over that room, said one.
Others felt that Rudin flipped a switch, putting on a different face when talent was in the office.
One time, he was literally chewing us out.
And then his executive assistant was like, Timothee Chalamets coming up the elevator.
As soon as the door opens, he literally turns from berating us and is like, Buddy!
He walked past the front bullpen of the office andjokedto all the assistants and the interns, Its okay.
you’re free to relax.
But there is a difference between how he treats his underlings and how he treats talent.
Theres no way they didntits open to the rest of the officeand they keep coming back.Assistant, 201516
VIII.
This was often the result of perceived slights or minor mistakes.
The only institutional knowledge thatdidexist was the fact that Rudin constantly fired people.
Maybe youll get in a car crash.
Scott had been mad at me previously in the day because I had not properly wiped down his table.
He completely lost his mind on me.
It was one of those days where he was in a really bad way.
He was screaming at people left and right for every single thing.
As he was leaving, someone said, Have a good weekend, Scott.
Then he looked at me and said, You live in Westchester, right?
I said, Yes.
He was like, Well, its gonna snow this weekend.
And I bet you drive, so maybe youll get in a car crash.
And like, literally, I was looking at Aziz Ansari as he said it.
I dont ever want to see you again.
I had been soft fired four or five times before it stuck.
He snaps at you and says something like, Youre done, youre finished.
I dont ever want to see you again.
He was mad that the volumes were at different levels based on the initial sources.
He was upset he would have to use this remote to turn up and down the volume accordingly.
Junior creative executive, 201214
What thefuck?
I saw a guy get fired before 7 a.m. on his first day.
The phone rings at probably 6:45, and he picks it up and says ScottRubinsoffice.
You just hear through the phonesomany expletives: What thefuck?!
Get the fuck outta here!
He packed his stuff up, and he was gone by like 6:58.
Assistant, 1990s
My bad?
What is this, fucking high school?
Scott confronted me and said, Where is this?
I didnt know about the meeting.
I can print it for you now.
Do you want me to or not?
He looked at me and said, My bad?
What is this, fucking high school?
He was like, Youre done here, and then he started kicking and throwing things.
He went into the kitchen at one point, and we just heard stuff breaking.
You dont see him, but you imagine this tiny dinosaur-arms toy being let out of control.
On his way out, he kicked the wall and slammed the door.
I eventually quit because it got to be too much of an emotional toll.
I was the first one in that day, and he said, Hey, good morning.
All right, what the fuck is going on with this list of calls?
God, you havent set a single one of them.
Youre really fucking it up.
I looked at him and I was like, Im not here for this.
And he was like, What do you mean youre not here for this?
I started going into my rehearsed speech of Thank you so much for this opportunity.
Ive learned so much from you, and he goes, I dont care.
Youre fucking up something that could have been really good for you.
I said, I know.
He went into me for 45 minutes, trying to break me down.
I was just staring at him his empty eyes, his empty face.
Eventually he turned back to his computer and was like, Im done with you.
I went to walk out, and he turned and said, Youre really doing this, arent you?
Like Youre really, really, really fucking this up, arent you?
I said, Im not going to be verbally abused by you on a daily basis.
He said, This isnt verbal abuse.
This is me trying to push you to be better, to be tougher, to be stronger.
I said, I am tough.
Im out.Max Hoffman, intern and executive assistant, 2020
IX.
TheMental-HealthToll
Former assistants described the symptoms they experienced working for Rudin in disturbingly similar ways.
Some of them manifested in physical ways while they worked there.
Much of the suffering was compounded by how isolating it felt to work for Rudin.
Youre basically chained to email all day and night, said one assistant.
So youre going to sleep reading these crazed, invective-filled messages from him and waking up to them.
There is something clever in a diabolical way about how he works.
I had my firstpanic attackin a toilet.
Myskin broke out constantlybecause of the stress, which was not a regular occurrence for me before or after.
I hadterrible diarrheabecause my stomach was constantly in knots.
I struggled to eat due to nerves.
I was so afraid of going to workI would wake up every morning with hives all over my body.
8.I had abad kidney infectionbecause I could not pee.
Its the worst feeling in the world.
I talked to my aunt, whos a nurse practitioner, and I have stress-induced bladder spasms.
Now I get to go to a physical therapist and learn how to control it.
9.I had nightmares about it for a long time, and it affected my sleep.
I was like,Wow, I havent slept for this whole year.
Its funny seeing photos of us when we worked there because weve all had such glow-ups.
It permanently fuckedmy nerves.
Not that I think that Im any stronger than the others everyone who works for him is strong.
But the day I eventually I cried, I was like,Fuck, he got to me.
Were all like, Oh my God, hey Scott!
Like so excitedly waving.
And you know he didnt give a shit about any of us.
We all wanted acknowledgment from him even though he was so terrible to us.
Everybody looked at me like I was a different human.
They were like, The light is back in your eyes.
You look like youve gained ten pounds back on your face.
He called me back in and said, I need to ask you something.
Why are you like a rescue puppy?
You dont need to run into my office.
He was trying to say, Am I being rude to you?
Do you feel nervous?Kiera Wilson, documents assistant, 2017
X.
She felt that Schericks actions signaled to Rudin that this throw in of behavior was acceptable.
I burst out laughing.
I said, Let me tell you some stories.
He was very charming during the job interview.
Very nice to me.
I was about ten years older than him.
I remember him asking if it bothered me that I was older than him.
I said, No, youre a producer.
Im happy to learn what you know.
I worked for him for about nine months and then I moved up to working for Edgar.
I found much more anger and eruption from Edgar.
He was so volatile.
I had never seen people behave like that.
And that was happening all the time.
Scott, it seems to me, kind of got permission.
These people are not alone in the motion-picture industry of being screamers.
We all did that for each other in various ways.
Others noted how quickly Rudins behavior became normalized in the office.
She ducked, and it did not hit her, but he was aiming for her head.
Which is not how human beings should react.
It was weird to me that the attitude was, At least you got it out of the way.
That it was just kind of a hazing thing.
Eli is an amazing survivalist.
Nobody does that job with that much proximity to that ruthlessness without a sense of cynicism.
He really fucked over a lot of assistants that just were kind of in his way.
I should go.Its another thing if you really make this your brand.
(Through a spokesperson, Bush declined to comment.)
Theres the idea that it looks good on a resume, said one assistant who worked there in 2018.
It catches eyes, and that is still true.
Every interview Ive done since then, people bring it up.
Theyre all aware of the reputation of that place and what it means.
Theres a little bit of like, Well, you survivedthat.
Im embarrassed about the extent to which I wore this whole experience as a badge of honor for years.
What was that like?
I bragged about it rather than stopping to reflect and say, No, this is awful.
This is not an environment anybody should be asked to work in.Laskey
Theres an implied social contract.
Greta Gerwig has done many movies with him.
But shes also a champion of people.
Beanie Feldstein how progressive are you?
It never got that far because the pitch was apparently met with silence.
Theres a weird way you internalize it.
Are we going to decide this behavior is archaic?
BreakingFreeofScott
I tried very hard to never become Scott.
I started as an assistant in 1994 at 22.
I got promoted to story editor.
I was director of development at age 24, and he offered me the VP job.
I had to make a choice:Do I want to keep going down this path and become Scott?
On my last day, I spent hours locked in his office.
He was trying to turn the thumbscrews to get me to sign an NDA.
And I said, Man, Ive already made my choice not to be in this world with you.
I am not signing an NDA.
I was literally the last employee to leave that office without signing one.
He started with the whole Youre an ant, youre a nothing.
Youre a glob of spit.
I will crush you.
Youll never work in this town again.
Youre 24, and youre like,Oh, I have just pissed off a titan.
And there is nothing I can do about this.
I ran into Scott one other time after that.
I was Rollerblading through Central Park.
And you know what happened?
He was charming as hell because I was no longer someone he had any power over.
The power dynamic was no longer there.
It was sickening to see him have absolutely no guts outside of that office space.
I want it in the biggest goddamn font you’ve got the option to find.
I want him to know whos saying this, because I have the ability to say it.
