The disturbing trend of powerful Hollywood men masturbating in front of less powerful women isn’t so new at all. Songwriter Diane Warren, 61, tells THR about an incident that happened during the mid-1970s.
“I was 18 or 19 years old, and I met with a producer,” she says. “I was playing a song with my eyes closed, but when I opened them, he was jerking off. I just looked at him and said, ‘I guess you really like the song.’ ” Warren, who went on to team with Lady Gaga to co-write the Oscar-nominated song “Til It Happens to You” for the 2015 Weinstein-produced campus rape doc The Hunting Ground, never reported the incident.
“I just left,” she says. But she does think the recent scandals have been changing Hollywood attitudes. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” she says. “Or the dick back in the pants.”
On Tuesday, Warren celebrated some positive personal news: The legendary wordsmith landed a Grammy nomination for best song written for visual media for her track “Stand Up for Something,” performed by Andra Day featuring Common, from the film Marshall.
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A version of this story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
