In recent months dozens of women have come forward with terrible stories of the treatment they have received in the entertainment industry. We can now add Sandra Bullock to the list. Bullock has come forward to say that, early in her career, she had to deal with somebody in a situation that got so bad, she eventually asked to be fired from the movie. According to the actress...
Very early on in my career I had a situation on a film, which was hard. It came from a person of authority. I kept deflecting it with humor and it didn't work. Finally, I said, 'Please just fire me.'
Sandra Bullock doesn't elaborate at all on the project or the person so it's impossible to know what she is referring to. While Bullock was first noticed by most in the early 1990s, thanks to her supporting roles alongside Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man, and then Keanu Reeves in Speed, she had been working regularly in Hollywood for a few years before that. She also doesn't tell the Sunday Times whether or not she actually was fired from the project or not, so this is possibly regarding a movie she never completed.
The fact that this was a project early in her career makes the fact that things went so far that she requested to be fired all the more upsetting. It sounds like this all happened before she became the star that she is now. Jobs weren't necessarily bending over backward to find her and the ones she had were likely precious. And yet, she would have rather been let go than to continue being subjected to the treatment she was getting.
In the end, it doesn't really matter who this person was or what they did. If Bullock wanted to call him out, she would. What matters is that we have yet another case of a woman being severely mistreated by a person in power on a film set. Bullock also speaks about Harvey Weinstein, the powerful movie producer who saw a number of accusations come out against him several months ago, leading to his ouster from his studio, The Weinstein Company, as well as felony charges being filed against him. Bullock says that she was afraid of Weinstein and made a point to avoid being in "that world" so as not to make films with him.
We can only hope that by shining a light on these issues they have begun to be dealt with. The movements that have grown out of these scandals don't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. Hopefully, that's a good thing for actresses now as well as those who enter the profession for years to come.
