OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Keep tourism on
the North Coast
sustainable
H
ow much is too much of a good thing?
That’s the question being asked about tourism in
Cannon Beach and other areas along the North Coast,
and area leaders are looking for answers on how to better man-
age it. They have set a goal of making tourism sustainable with-
out sacrificing the area’s natural resources or residents’ quality of
life.
As we reported last week, the Cannon Beach Chamber of
Commerce and the Haystack Rock Awareness Program were
awarded a $20,000 grant from Travel Oregon, the state’s tourism
agency, to start that effort. The money will be used by Clatsop
and Tillamook counties to develop an ecotourism strategy to
incorporate in their master plans, and to conduct workshops that
will offer guidance on making tourism sustainable — economi-
cally and environmentally.
Given the region’s tourism numbers and the impact visitors
have, that’s crucial.
A study by Dean Runyan and Associates shows tourists spent
$779 million in 2016, nearly double from the year 2000, and
more than 100,000 people visited Haystack Rock just this year.
Those living here or visiting any of the region’s coastal commu-
nities know the impact well, routinely wrestling with daily park-
ing problems and traffic congestion.
Farther north, at Fort Stevens State Park, the volume of vis-
itors during the summer keeps the park constantly at capac-
ity, putting a strain on parking, maintenance and infrastructure,
according to Oregon State Parks North Coast District Manager
Teri Wing. Overuse of trails at some of the parks also leads to
additional hard-to-combat problems like erosion.
Achieving sustainable tourism won’t be an easy task and
will take time. The North Coast has developed into a destina-
tion spot, and tourism continues to grow. That’s a bell that won’t
be unrung so the impacts must be addressed before they become
overwhelming.
But the region’s leaders should be lauded for recognizing the
problem and taking initial steps to tackle it. As Court Carrier,
executive director of the Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce,
says, “This is our community. It’s too important to ignore.”
Timber is in vogue
in construction
T
hese are exciting times for the timber industry.
Government forest managers and their political bosses
finally appear to recognize that more effective manage-
ment of public forests is needed to help prevent future wildfires
and reduce their severity.
Beyond timber management, however, are innovations that
promise new uses for timber in construction. Among them is
“mass timber” that is used in “tallwood design.” As an example,
a credit union in Hillsboro is using glulam beams to construct its
new five-story, 150,000-square-foot headquarters building.
Another building planned for Portland will be 12 stories tall
and constructed of cross-laminated timber, called CLT. It will
dwarf the seven-story building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that
is currently the tallest mass timber structure in the nation.
To explore the uses and design possibilities of mass timber,
the University of Oregon architecture program is combining
efforts with Oregon State University’s forestry and engineering
programs to create the Tallwood Design Institute.
In other words, wood construction is sexy again. Once rel-
egated to home construction and one- or two-story projects,
lumber was seen as an excellent material for relatively small
structures.
Then came cutting-edge projects such as the Metropol Parasol
in Seville, Spain. It is among the largest wooden structures in the
world. Made of laminated lumber coated in polyurethane to pro-
tect it from the weather, the ethereal design of six interconnected
“mushrooms” soars 85 feet tall and covers an area that is 490
feet by 230 feet.
Built in 2011, it shades the entire city square and houses a
restaurant, museum, farmers’ market and a walkway that allows
visitors a bird’s-eye view of the historic city.
The future of mass timber is nearly unlimited. Larger mass
timber such as CLTs made by DR Johnson Lumber Co. in
Riddle, and mass plywood panels made by Freres Lumber Co.
in Lyons, offer architects and engineers possibilities that didn’t
even exist a few years ago.
Better-managed forests, combined with innovative products,
designs and structures demonstrate that the timber industry’s
future is brighter than it’s been in a long time.
Hollywood’s oldest horror story
By MAUREEN DOWD
The New York Times
I
n her autobiography, “Child Star,”
Shirley Temple described going
with her mother to see her new
bosses at Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer
after leaving Fox.
Louis B. Mayer
spirited away Ger-
trude Temple. The
curly-haired super-
star — hailed by
FDR for helping America get through
the Depression — was taken to the
office of Arthur Freed, an associate
producer on “The Wizard of Oz.”
After telling her that she would
have to get rid of her baby fat, Freed
abruptly stood up and pulled out his
penis. The 11-year-old had never
even seen one before. She gave a
nervous laugh, which offended the
producer.
“Get out!” he shouted.
When she rejoined her mother, an
affronted Gertrude told Shirley that
she had had to back out of Mayer’s
office when he lunged at her.
“Not for nothing was the MGM
lot known as the ‘factory,’ a studio
perfumed with sultry, busty creatures
with long legs and tight haunches,”
Temple wrote, “and more than its
quota of lecherous older men.”
Nearly 80 years later, that aroma
of perversion and maladroit du sei-
gneur clings to Hollywood. Now we
are inundated with grotesque tales
of Harvey Weinstein pulling out his
penis to show to appalled and fright-
ened young women, enlisting the
pimping help of agents and assis-
tants to have actresses delivered to
his hotel rooms, where he pestered
the women to watch him shower or
give him a massage or engage in inti-
mate acts.
“The ill will towards him for get-
ting away with it all for so long has
unleashed something so primitive,” a
prominent male Hollywood producer
told me. “If people could rip him
apart, they would. Literally everyone
in Hollywood is taking marshmal-
lows to roast at his burning corpse.”
Dana Calvo, creator of “Good
Girls Revolt,” noted: “We have been
saying, just get us in the room. But
we meant the pitch room or the edit-
ing room or the boardroom. Not Har-
vey Weinstein’s hotel room.
“I do know I will never look at
bathrobes the same way. It’s the bath-
robes versus the pussyhats.”
While not a victim of Weinstein’s,
Calvo worked for Amazon Studios,
which was headed by Roy Price until
he was suspended on Thursday for
sexual harassment allegations. He
had already come under scrutiny for
being culturally tone deaf, passing
on two of the biggest hits of the year,
“Big Little Lies” and “The Hand-
maid’s Tale,” both of which swept the
Emmys for their storytelling about
women. And he canceled the popu-
lar “Good Girls Revolt” after one sea-
son, admitting he had never watched
it.
Weinstein, 65, was the opposite,
one of the rare men in Hollywood
who didn’t care about pursuing an
audience of 15-year-old boys with
comic book movies. He was someone
with taste who was trying to make
movies with great roles for women of
all ages, a top Democratic fundraiser
who was pushing to make Hillary
Clinton the first woman president, a
man trusted by the Obamas to have
their daughter intern at his company.
But he had a diabolical side. He
would tantalize actresses with dreams
of stardom — in that dewy, fleeting
window such hothouse orchids have
to take Hollywood by storm. Often
the actresses scrambled, trying to fig-
ure out how to get out of the room
Melody Newcomb/The New York Times
Latest Hollywood sequel: men
preying on vulnerable young
women, a vile saga a century in
the making.
without having their futures shred-
ded by the vindictive satyr, who also
threatened to destroy actresses who
balked at wearing dresses designed
by his wife Georgina Chapman’s
fashion label on the red carpet.
He relished the nickname “Harvey
Scissorhands,” given to him by film-
makers who did not like his domina-
tion in the editing room. But the nick-
name could work just as well for his
octopus ways with women, which
resulted in lots of hush money being
paid out.
And some of his own assistants
say they were assailed. One ran out of
the room, crying and distraught, after
Weinstein pressed her into giving him
a massage.
Some who were importuned or
pawed, like Angelina Jolie, stalked
away and told studio executives that
she would never work with the pes-
tilent mogul. Others whom Wein-
stein asked to give him a massage in
his hotel suite refused but continued
to collaborate, like Gwyneth Paltrow,
who put aside qualms to became “the
first lady of Miramax.”
‘I hope it’s a
purge. There are
people we have
to get rid of in
our business.’
a top Hollywood woman
When David Carr wrote about
“The Emperor Miramaximus” in
2001 for New York magazine — sev-
eral years after the unpleasant expe-
rience Paltrow described for the first
time this past week to The New York
Times — he quoted her saying: “I
think that for every bad story you
hear about Harvey, there are three
great ones. People are complicated,
and nobody’s all good or all bad.”
Other victims, like Rose
McGowan, took settlements from
the mogul to stay quiet but contin-
ued to seethe, until her rage spilled
over Thursday when she tweeted —
after getting back on Twitter after an
absurd banishment by the company
— that Weinstein had raped her.
Once more we are in a sear-
ing national seminar on sexual mis-
behavior by men, just like the
Hill-Thomas hearings, the Clin-
ton impeachment hearings, the Bill
Cosby trial, the downfalls of Roger
Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and other harass-
ing big shots at Fox News, and Don-
ald Trump and the fallout from the
“Access Hollywood” tape.
How many times do we have to
go through this before things really
change?
“If you look at The Hollywood
Reporter’s powerful women list,”
said Janice Min, former editor of
that publication, “every single one of
those women still reports to a man.”
(By some estimates, there are only
six women who have first-look over-
head producing deals at the studios.)
Min recalled attending the
$400,000 speech Barack Obama
made as an ex-president to an A&E
Networks advertising upfront at the
Pierre hotel in New York in April.
“Afterwards, amid rapturous
applause, he walks right over to Har-
vey Weinstein and gives Harvey a
hug,” Min said. “You can see the
optics of it all. It makes your head
explode if you think of the inability to
explode the male network.”
Min said that although The Holly-
wood Reporter tried to get the goods
on “that looming, ominous, belli-
cose force” named Harvey for many
years — “we had whiteboards full of
names of women” — he was a mas-
ter at protecting himself, just as Hugh
Hefner was, by the veneer of power
he cultivated, by giving to liberal
causes and cultivating friends in the
media and politics.
“There probably needs to be some
introspection about how certain peo-
ple who engage in horrendous mis-
treatment of women can co-opt the
media,” she mused. “The funda-
mental predatory nature of Holly-
wood is young, attractive people —
largely females — putting themselves
in front of men to be judged and
appraised and chosen.
“It is a dark equation. From the
moment the proverbial girl gets off
the bus, the odds are stacked against
her. In Hollywood, unlike at other
Fortune 500 companies, the one-
on-one meetings take place in hotel
suites and bars. It’s an exploitative
and oddly personal process.”
Young actresses (and surely
actors, too, with other powerful pred-
ators), Min said, knew that “Holly-
wood is built on nothing but the pur-
suit of Oscar and Emmy. Harvey had
proven time and again he could get
you the Oscar that could make your
career. It’s the difference between
being in the reboot of ‘Saved by the
Bell’ or getting $15 million for your
next role.”
Hollywood is a culture that runs
on fear. And it is not like other pro-
fessions, one top entertainment exec-
utive said, because “no one comes
with a résumé. It’s about what you
look like and who sent you.”
There was resentment against
Weinstein in Hollywood, not only
for the stories bubbling around about
women, but the way he humiliated
men who worked with him. He even
berated a 15-year-old girl at a screen-
ing because her parents supported a
political candidate he opposed.
Like Trump, that other self-pro-
fessed predator, there were com-
plaints that in business deals he
stiffed people on bills (advertising
and public relations payments), and
he had a reputation for lying, cheat-
ing, taking advantage, acting like
a thug. Many in the film commu-
nity felt he besmirched the Oscars by
turning it into a marketing race rather
than a contest of quality.
I asked Tim Robbins, who had
some unpleasant business dealings
with Weinstein, what the moral of
this foul, revolting story should be.
“It’s not just in show business, it’s
every business,” he said. “It’s about
men who use power to get an advan-
tage over women. It’s gross, it’s unac-
ceptable, but unfortunately, it’s pretty
persistent.”
Women in Hollywood say social
media, plus the anger about Trump
getting into the Oval Office instead of
Hillary, were propelling forces in the
fire raining down on Weinstein.
“I hope it’s a witch hunt,” said a
top Hollywood woman. “I hope it’s
a purge. There are people we have to
get rid of in our business. Everyone
knows them.”