Trivia

The first movie to be shot in The New York Times building on Eighth Avenue and the first movie to use its real offices. According to former Times journalist Gay Talese's book "The Kingdom and the Power," it was common for Times journalists to place nude photographs of their girlfriends and sexual conquests in their offices and on news desks. This practice continued until the 1990s.

In this movie, Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton) describes how a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) kept her from taking action against Harvey Weinstein's behavior or even talking about any aspect of it to family members, friends, or even doctors (including therapists). In her real life, Perkins has drawn from that experience to cofound an organization called Can't Buy My Silence dedicated to greatly reducing the use and abuse of NDAs, especially as they were exploited in the Miramax context (to shield abusers and maintain dangerous working environments).

This movie correctly depicts the obsession that Harvey Weinstein had with the question of whether Gwyneth Paltrow was a source for and/or a subject of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's reporting, but it doesn't ever specify why Weinstein was so fixated on Paltrow specifically. During a September 2019 interview with Terry Gross on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air," Twohey and Kantor explained the story behind this preoccupation: "So to our surprise, Gwyneth Paltrow had a really powerful story of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein and of being threatened when her first really important roles were on the line. And early on in the investigation, when almost nobody in Hollywood would talk to us, she did. And she even tried to help us find other women. But she was very scared to go on the record. And it became clear, in the course of the investigation, that Harvey Weinstein was obsessed with the question of whether or not we were speaking to Paltrow. He showed up at a party at her house early. She called us from the bathroom completely panicked. In the sort of series of final confrontations about the story that took place at the New York Times, Weinstein kept hammering us. 'Are you talking to Gwyneth? Is Gwyneth in the story?' And at that point, she was still a totally secret source. And we couldn't figure out why he was so obsessed with something that wasn't even part of the story. The answer only became clear over a course of weeks and months after we broke the story. As more and more Weinstein victims came forward, they said publicly, they told us and they even told Paltrow that what Weinstein had said to them, in the course of harassing or assaulting them, was essentially, 'don't you want what Gwyneth has?' Meaning, he was implying to them that she had slept with him and that this was the bargain of sex to - sex for work, right? If you go along with this, you can have the Oscar, the wealth, the fame, the golden girl status. So essentially, what we --two things happened. First of all, Paltrow was very, very upset to learn this. Not only had she never sexually succumbed to Weinstein, but she was so horrified to find out that she had been used, essentially, as a tool of predation. She spent a long time on the phone in the fall of 2017 with other Weinstein victims coming to terms with the way he had used her and with feeling like she had somehow been used as an accessory in this. But then the other thing we finally realized is that this was probably why he had been so obsessed with whether or not we were talking to Paltrow--because as soon as other women heard Paltrow's story and heard that she had never given in to him and that she had refused him, then they would understand so much more about the way his scheme worked and that it would all fall apart, in a sense."

Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Judith Godrèche, all famous actresses who were important sources for New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's investigations into Harvey Weinstein, each play themselves in this film. Paltrow and Godrèche only appear as off-camera voices on the telephone, but Judd plays herself onscreen in a role that Variety's Elizabeth Wagmeister called "a key character who enables the reporters to break the bombshell story." Actress Rose McGowan, another pivotal source for the real-life story, also appears as an off-screen voice over the telephone, but McGowan ultimately chose not to play herself (McGowan's voice is portrayed by Kelly McQuail). Two other real-life Weinstein survivors and actresses, Sarah Ann Masse and Katherine Kendall, also appear in the film. Masse plays Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Emily Steel, who broke the O'Reilly story shortly before the Weinstein story broke, and Kendall plays a former Miramax executive.

In the immediate weeks after the #MeToo scandal broke, former New York Times journalist Sharon Waxman alleged that The Times had been aware of Harvey Weinstein's sexual assaults of actresses since 2004, but the newspaper had declined to report the assaults following a personal visit to The Times' building by Harvey Weinstein. Sharon Waxman does not appear in the film.