Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Movies are collaborative art and there was a power struggle on the set of this movie."

LOL, nothing collaborative about having your husband make his own cut of the movie, and asking the studio to destroy the delays.

Are you saying movies are not a collaborative art form?

Go make a few movies with no other people involved, see how that works.

Power struggles and personality conflicts are common on film sets specifically because it is not possible to make a movie without the work and input of a bunch of different people. You would be shocked by the stuff people say about their colleagues on films on a daily basis on movies you liked and about which you never heard a negative word. A lot of the drama inherent in Hollywood exists because you need a bunch of different people to make movies, many of those people are the very best at their job and have egos to match their skill. Conflicts over which cut is released are common. Conflicts over what happens to footage that doesn't make the Final Cut are becoming more common because of the fight over AI and actors wanting the ability to control what happens to video footage of them after a movie is done (especially sensitive for actresses whose footage could be used to create AI that looks just like them engaging in lewd sex acts, a particular issue on a movie with romantic scenes and violence like IEWU).

But go off.

Keep up, I know it's hard. Blake was hired as an actress and Ryan had zero responsibility for the film. Yet he literally has been caught making his own cut of the film and trying to pass it off as Blake's. Add in that he asked the studio to destroy the dailies. No wonder they fought unsealing the documents -- they are going to lose this trial, and only work again if self financed. Well deserved for their antics.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Movies are collaborative art and there was a power struggle on the set of this movie."

LOL, nothing collaborative about having your husband make his own cut of the movie, and asking the studio to destroy the delays.

Are you saying movies are not a collaborative art form?

Go make a few movies with no other people involved, see how that works.

Power struggles and personality conflicts are common on film sets specifically because it is not possible to make a movie without the work and input of a bunch of different people. You would be shocked by the stuff people say about their colleagues on films on a daily basis on movies you liked and about which you never heard a negative word. A lot of the drama inherent in Hollywood exists because you need a bunch of different people to make movies, many of those people are the very best at their job and have egos to match their skill. Conflicts over which cut is released are common. Conflicts over what happens to footage that doesn't make the Final Cut are becoming more common because of the fight over AI and actors wanting the ability to control what happens to video footage of them after a movie is done (especially sensitive for actresses whose footage could be used to create AI that looks just like them engaging in lewd sex acts, a particular issue on a movie with romantic scenes and violence like IEWU).

But go off.

Anonymous wrote:"Movies are collaborative art and there was a power struggle on the set of this movie."

LOL, nothing collaborative about having your husband make his own cut of the movie, and asking the studio to destroy the delays.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The New York mag / Vulture has a new long piece on this case. I haven’t read it yet, but here’s a link to an archive (paywall workaround)

https://archive.ph/pQDab

https://www.vulture.com/article/justin-baldoni-blake-lively-hollywood-feud-taylor-swift-ryan-reynolds.html

Thank you for the article and the gift link. This kind of got buried amid the discussion but it was a pretty good read. I liked that it started from when they met, not with the lawsuit, and it's pretty fair.

Reading this is so embarrassing for these people. All of them behave like petty mean middle school girls, including Blake, Taylor, Ryan, Matt Damon's wife Lucy, etc. Justin is annoying, but at least he seems like a decent human being.

Anonymous wrote:"Movies are collaborative art and there was a power struggle on the set of this movie."

LOL, nothing collaborative about having your husband make his own cut of the movie, and asking the studio to destroy the delays.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree Justin will be fine. He made $35 million for this movie alone. It seems like he had no desire to be an actor again and wants to continue to be behind the scenes, which I think will continue to happen. Wayfarer is continuing to announce new projects.

I do think Ryan and Blake never thought that it would get this far and that he would simply fight back and that was a fatal error. You can’t convince me they wanted all these texts and emails released to the world. Or their friendship with Taylor destroyed.

Ryan’s good guy image is gone. A bunch of his projects have been canceled. If you go to his IMDB, it’s either canceled projects that haven’t been deleted yet and a lot of voice work. His latest movie was supposed to be released in 2025… it’s been delayed until 2027, never a good sign. He confirmed in the today show interview that Deadpool would never come back as a main character, implying that he would be a side character and appearing as cameos in other movies possibly. It’s been reported that they plan to move the family to London.

I do hope it comes out one day, exactly what happened. If they went against their team or if they just had no idea that some of this footage and texts and emails would come out? I truly do not get the strategy.

I think Justin is a bit of a weirdo but ultimately, yes he will be fine. He seems to operate more in the real world with real relationships. RR and BL will of course be 'fine' too, but they both seem like total narcissists so I think this entire episode hurts them a lot more given RR's nice guy veneer has come totally undone.

As far as why they did this, they seem to be surrounded by sycophants who never tell them the truth (even Taylor's texts to Blake were nauseating) or try to reign in their worst impulses, so I can only assume no one had the nerve to tell them this would blow up in their faces and they should let their little petty grievances lie and move on. Their lawyers should have stopped them - every single lawyer taking a sexual harassment case knows the blowback on their client will be intense no matter how clear the circumstances- but disgustingly these lawyers seemed more than happy to bleed Blake and Ryan dry moving this shaky case forward.

Anonymous wrote:I agree Justin will be fine. He made $35 million for this movie alone. It seems like he had no desire to be an actor again and wants to continue to be behind the scenes, which I think will continue to happen. Wayfarer is continuing to announce new projects.

I do think Ryan and Blake never thought that it would get this far and that he would simply fight back and that was a fatal error. You can’t convince me they wanted all these texts and emails released to the world. Or their friendship with Taylor destroyed.

Ryan’s good guy image is gone. A bunch of his projects have been canceled. If you go to his IMDB, it’s either canceled projects that haven’t been deleted yet and a lot of voice work. His latest movie was supposed to be released in 2025… it’s been delayed until 2027, never a good sign. He confirmed in the today show interview that Deadpool would never come back as a main character, implying that he would be a side character and appearing as cameos in other movies possibly. It’s been reported that they plan to move the family to London.

I do hope it comes out one day, exactly what happened. If they went against their team or if they just had no idea that some of this footage and texts and emails would come out? I truly do not get the strategy.

Anonymous wrote:This situation reminds me of the "Bad Art Friend" story by Robert Kolker in the NYT a few years ago.

One side is a neophyte and less talented person swimming in a pond with successful professionals. They are weird, cringe worthy and have inflated egos about their purpose in life.

The more successful people see them as losers yet use them for their own interests. They are pompous and arrogant and seem to hold the upper hand in the dispute. A not small part of this is because their opponent is in no way any kind of threat, not having their professional or social standing.

The more successful people involve their nasty friends in a takedown at some point and everything they wrote cones out in evidence. They look like a!sholes. They think that because the cringy person is a loser that they won't fight back. But they do and all it does is tarnish the more successful people's reputations.

You never know who is going to acquiesce or fight back. I think Baldoni is a weirdo but I think ultimately Lively and Reynolds come off worse.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She’s been caught in a million lies.

He never said you smell soooo good, he didnt improvise one kissing scene yet she improvised 2 and he was clearly caught off guard. She was not shown porn on set.

She said in her deposition that things started out amicably, and that it was only overtime that she realized how small things were making her uncomfortable. Yet we saw from the texts to Taylor that even before the movie started, she was talking horribly about Justin, scheming against him and calling him a doofus and a clown. She didn’t slowly start to become uncomfortable with him. She was out to get him from the start.

She told Matt Damon and his wife that he had complained about low bone density and they mocked him for that. That’s just mocking menopausal women but actually he never claimed that. He had a long standing back injury that’s been verified.

She went all over town saying that he was in a cult. He is not in fact in a cult.

So tiresome.

- She quoted his "you smell good line" fairly accurately from her own memory and corrected her complaint when a video was produced showing the exact phrasing. Do you remember everything someone said to you 18 months ago with perfect accuracy? Not a lie.

- He did improvise kissing, it's just she did as well. We literally see him improvising nuzzling/kissing in the dancing scene. She clearly thought her improvised kissing was more professional and didn't cross a line. Different interpretation but not a lie.

- She never alleged she was shown porn on set. She alleged she was shown a video of a naked woman with legs played with no warning and thought it was porn. Which is what happened. She also says porn, including Justin's porn addiction, were discussed on set, which he has admitted. Not a lie.

- You can be amicable while disliking a person privately. There is no allegation that Lively was unkind or rude to Justin before shooting or when it started. The fact that she mentioned not really liking him to a close friend at the time actually demonstrates that she was capable of setting those feelings aside, because she continued to work amicably with him despite her misgivings. Have you never made a negative comment about a boss it colleague to a friend and then gone to work and gotten along fine? I've done this plenty of times. Not a lie.

- He absolutely claimed that the reason he needed to know her weight is that he had low bone density leading to his back issues. Not a lie (just an incredibly stupid thing Justin once said). Also I'm menopausal and this doesn't offend me in the least, but Justin asking her trainer for her weight does offend me.

- I think he is in a cult. I'm not talking about his religion, but Wayfarer. Multiple people on that set referenced the cult-like vibes around how they conducted business, not just Blake. I happen to agree. Anyway, that's an opinion, not a lie.

These are not good faith arguments. You are actually doing exactly what Blake does, taking things that seem like facts and twisting them way out of context. Saying that she didn’t remember about the you smell sooo good comment 18 months later doesn’t make sense. We as women know what that would feel like - very sleazy. We also know that if he simply said in a very different way that he was talking about her body makeup, it would be different.

If Blake improvised kissing several times and he did, then she was implicitly implying that these kinds of improvised scenes were. Just like the sex jokes Jenny Slate made, it was OK for them to do it, but then they turned it on Justin when he went along with it.

You should reread the New York Times article. Because she absolutely did allege that she had been shown porn on set. It was part of the “no more” list. No more showing Miss lively porn on set. So yes, the public believed she had been shown that and then later we found out it was a birth video, which, by the way, she wants sealed at this point because she knows what it’s going to look like if people see it.

The bone density was not the main reason that he couldn’t lift her. He had had back surgery and a long-standing back injury the trainer. Don was designing the whole program around his back injury. It wasn’t a secret. Maybe an injury causes bone loss, but they were trying to insult him by making him look like an old woman. He actually just had a back injury and was concerned about lifting her. It was sexist and offensive of Reynolds to say that.

You can say his religion a cult - it is just actually not. It is rude to go around accusing people of different faiths of being in a cult and you know this. Lively does too, and that’s why she had asked the court to seal any talk about his religion. The judge ruled against that and that’s how we know they were constantly walking around disparaging his religious beliefs.

Like I said, straight out of the lively playbook, but no one is buying it anymore. We all look at what lively said and realize this could be us or our husband or sons. Things that they’ve done twisted out of context and because of a giant Karen, they lose their job. This is why the public has turned, and this is why I’m so glad Justin decided to fight back and actually tell his side of the story instead of completely crumbling, like Reynolds and lively expected he would.

I'm not "twisting" facts out of context. I am interpreting the facts differently than you are. This is why you keep accusing her of lying when she just had a different take on these situation than you (or Justin) did. That doesn't make her take a lie, it means different people can see situations differently.

I watched the video in which the "you smell good" comment happened. I think Blake looks visibly uncomfortable in most of that video, she is pulling away from him and trying to create physical distance between their faces, and suggesting a different way to do the scene in order to reinforce that space. I read the script pages for the scene -- it didn't indicate any nuzzling or him kissing her neck or shoulders, so this behavior was improvised. And when he says "you smell good," it did come off as sleazy to me. I read that interaction as the two of them having a bit of a power struggle and him using their characters to blur the lines and exert control over her. It made me uncomfortable and I believe that Blake felt that his behavior in that scene crossed a line because it was just b-roll to be used in montage. Had he wanted to get a few shots of them being more affectionate, as the director he could have said "okay we have enough of the two of them dancing and talking, but I'd like a few of the characters getting closer like they are about to kiss, to show their chemistry. Blake, you comfortable with that? Should we block through it a bit?" That is what I think a professional director with strong boundaries would do in that situation.

I think the improvising Justin does in that scene is functionally different from the "improvising" we've seen of Blake in other scenes where she added kissing or touching. In those scenes, she is either just adding an extra kiss to one that is already there (kissing a few times instead of once) or she is talking to him in a professional way to discuss the blocking of intimacy (as in the scene where she is describing how she'd like him to pull her into him and demonstrates -- they are having a conversation explicitly about the intimacy in the scene, it is very clear that she is not pulling him in because she personally wants to be close to him, but to demonstrate how that movement would look on camera). What Justin does in the dance scene feels different to me.

A agree that Slate's comments about sex on set were inappropriate and I think a well run set would actually have checked her on that. I also think a lot of Ryan Reynold's comments in texts/emails to Justin are gross and unprofessional. I do not think Blake crosses those lines though. But the stuff Justin and Jamey said on set or in meetings or private moments with Blake are also unprofessional and inappropriate to me. It sounds like the entire production had these issues, and I do hold Justin and Jamey more responsible for that because they were the director and co-producers.

I haven't read the New York Times article in ages, but it doesn't matter because it's not a court filing. The point is that in her court filing, Blake makes it clear that she does not think Jamey showed her porn, nor does she allege that anyone else showed her porn on set. The complaint makes it clear that she objected to being shown a video featuring a nude woman without her consent (but with the hindsight understanding that it wasn't pornography). It's also clear from her complaint that a major issue with pornography on the set was that Justin on multiple occasions discussed his porn addiction, and also made inappropriate comments about Blake not having watched porn before, including to other members of the cast and crew. If the NYT article blurs these issues or conveys otherwise, that's on the NYT. It is common for media outlets to fail to capture the nuance of court filings, this is a perpetual issue I have with how legal cases are covered in mainstream media. But I don't hold litigants responsible for the poor coverage of their cases. There have been lots of inaccurate things written about Justin's case by the media as well, I don't blame Justin for their shoddy journalism.

Regarding the bone density thing, I read the deposition of the trainer and found it persuasive. One thing the trainer said that stuck with me is that the question about Lively's weight was non-sensical because Justin was obviously doing exercises that required him to lift more than Lively weighed already. So the idea that Justin asked due to his back didn't make sense in that context. The trainer said that if Justin had framed the question that way (that he was worried about the lift) instead of asking directly about Lively's weight, it wouldn't have been an issue. Justin was asking for very sensitive info about the trainer's client. It's completely inappropriate.

I also have a lot of skepticism about Justin's back because of other behavior related to his back. He has a history of either exaggerating issues with his back or blaming back issues on things that are not the cause. For instance, he blamed Colleen Hoover for his back issues in the summer of 2024 to try and make her feel guilty. But his own team even made fun of him for this because they all knew that the real reason he was having problems is that he'd gone to Mexico and gotten stem cell treatment from some hack doctor who caused an infection. He'd done it because the doctor gave him free treatment in exchange for promoting the doc on Justin's social media, and then later Justin deleted the promotional posts. Sorry if I'm not deeply offended on behalf of this person when other people made fun of him privately for having "low bone density." Justin is one of those people who uses illness or injury for attention and you are never even sure if it's real because they exaggerate and lie about it.

No one is calling Wayfarer a cult because of their religious beliefs. They are calling it a cult because of cult-like behavior like: forcing a lot of physical contact that not everyone feels comfortable with in professional settings, making a point of discussing religious beliefs in professional settings, hiring incompetent people to do jobs simply because they belong to your church, etc. Rainn Wilson is a member of the same faith, and I've never heard of him doing any of that stuff on the set of the Office, for instance. Perhaps because that was a diverse workplace and it would not have been appropriate to impose his views or religious norms on his coworkers in that way. That Wayfarer thought this was appropriate is, IMO, cult-like.

But I know you will consider all of this just me "twisting" things. I'm not twisting anyone. This is my perspective and opinion. It's every bit as valid as yours. And I know Justin fans hate to think about this, but it's just as likely that people on the jury will wind up thinking the way I do as that they will think the way you do. I would not underestimate the ability of people to take in someone like Justin, or hear about the behavior of Justin and Jamey and the others, and recognize it for what I think it is: culty, weird, and yes, retaliatory.

Anonymous wrote:This situation reminds me of the "Bad Art Friend" story by Robert Kolker in the NYT a few years ago.

One side is a neophyte and less talented person swimming in a pond with successful professionals. They are weird, cringe worthy and have inflated egos about their purpose in life.

The more successful people see them as losers yet use them for their own interests. They are pompous and arrogant and seem to hold the upper hand in the dispute. A not small part of this is because their opponent is in no way any kind of threat, not having their professional or social standing.

The more successful people involve their nasty friends in a takedown at some point and everything they wrote cones out in evidence. They look like a!sholes. They think that because the cringy person is a loser that they won't fight back. But they do and all it does is tarnish the more successful people's reputations.

You never know who is going to acquiesce or fight back. I think Baldoni is a weirdo but I think ultimately Lively and Reynolds come off worse.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The New York mag / Vulture has a new long piece on this case. I haven’t read it yet, but here’s a link to an archive (paywall workaround)

https://archive.ph/pQDab

https://www.vulture.com/article/justin-baldoni-blake-lively-hollywood-feud-taylor-swift-ryan-reynolds.html

Thank you for the article and the gift link. This kind of got buried amid the discussion but it was a pretty good read. I liked that it started from when they met, not with the lawsuit, and it's pretty fair.

Reading this is so embarrassing for these people. All of them behave like petty mean middle school girls, including Blake, Taylor, Ryan, Matt Damon's wife Lucy, etc. Justin is annoying, but at least he seems like a decent human being.

And although there is some balance, this still feels like the writing tips towards being biased towards Blake. Ryan and Blake made a whole character openly mocking and humiliating Justin to the entire world, and they have the nerve to act offended that Justin inquired about her weight and other dumb misunderstandings. They are AWFUL people.