Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I think the idea that this was some longterm plot by Blake and Ryan, or even that they seized an opportunity to allege SH in order to take over the movie, is a sign that you've been thinking too much about this whole thing and your imagination is taking over. It does not make sense. This is every bit as fanciful and weird as a Lively supporter thinking that Baldoni cast Lively so that he could SH her. No. I sincerely believe both these people went into this situation with good intentions.
I think they had serious culture clash and it spiraled. I also think that Baldoni was tone deaf at times in a way that compounded problems that otherwise could have been addressed and moved on from. Like the whole thing with the birth scene. He shouldn't have asked her to be nude in that scene when it wasn't scripted that way, and he shouldn't have been pushy about it. But fine, they found a middle ground and it got filmed. Then the next day he's telling Heath to go show Lively Heath's wife's birth video? Dude, why? This is a sign of someone who can't bear to not win an argument and who lacks boundaries. I don't think it's SH, I just think it's super annoying. I think a lot of the stuff Blake alleges is in this category -- Baldoni doing something that is a little weird to people who don't know him, Blake reacting negatively, and then Baldoni doubling down like "no really, this is good, we *should* discuss our history with pornography more." He needed someone to rein him in and tell him to lay off and let some of this stuff go. He seems like a kind of intense guy who has very specific ideas about how people should interact (in line with his whole "male vulnerability" schtick from his podcast and books) and he needed to understand that not everyone likes that and not to force it on people.
Lively, for her part, just seems to have been in a sensitive, vulnerable place coming off the birth of her fourth child, and I think overreacted to certain things or viewed behavior that was simply tone deaf or dumb as intentional. I say this as someone who has been through PPD and knows it's hard. I actually have a lot of empathy for her.
Both people here needed to have people around them who cooled them off and encouraged them to be more understanding and to let stuff go. Instead the opposite seems to be true. I think Baldoni got spun up by Heath and the billionaire dude and also that Wayfarer might have a kind of insular culture because of the religion angle and that gave them an "us versus them" attitude. Meanwhile I think RR totally encouraged Lively to nuclear and not give an inch. And that was the problem. Then once Melissa Nathan and Bryan Freedman were involved, I think it got way worse because Nathan is extremely aggressive in her PR approach and we can all see that Freedman doesn't have a light touch.
Basically every choice either of them made after those first few weeks of filming with all the little issues, just ramped up the tensions and made things worse. This is why it's good to have people in your life who are like "yes I agree with you but do you really want to fight over this, or do you want to just get through it and move on?" Both of them needed a friend who would tell them to just suck it up, finish the movie and promotion, and then forget about the whole thing.
Nice attempt at a pivot. You must get paid by the word