Accused Serial Rapist Max Landis Gets Dropped By Agents

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | June 19, 2019 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | June 19, 2019 |

Accused serial rapist Max Landis, a man who has multiple allegations of rape, assault, bullying, manipulation, and gaslighting to his name, was fired by Writ Large, his personal managers. This news comes after The Daily Beast released their article detailing extensive allegations by eight women who said that Landis had abused them, including descriptions of sexual assault, choking, public bullying, and verbal abuse. Britton Rizzio, his former manager, said, ‘Writ Large does not represent Max Landis. As soon as we heard about the Daily Beast article, we parted company.’

Following the article, it was also revealed that MGM had chosen to not move forward with Deeper, a drama written by Landis that was set to star Idris Elba. Shadow in the Cloud, an action horror originally written by Landis that stars Chloe Grace Moretz, went into production this month, but Landis’s name is no longer attached to the project after extensive rewrites.

Typically, when stories like this come out that detail an abusive man in the entertainment industry’s crimes, we see a lot of people proudly declare that they never liked said abuser’s work to begin with or always thought they were mediocre, and usually I’m annoyed by that. Come on, we don’t need that self-aggrandizing crap right now, and we certainly don’t need this pointless hogging of the moral high-ground, as if we’re giving out cookies to people with spotless taste. It also further muddies the waters of how our society fetishizes talent and ‘genius’ and how that is used to shield abusers while denying the pain of their victims.

But here’s the thing: Max Landis is and always has been a f*cking hack, and it matters that he was able to garner so much power to hurt countless women while contributing absolutely nothing to the world. His work is bad, it almost never made money, and critics disliked most of it, but he still got chance after chance to build up his reputation as ‘the great geek of screenwriting’. He used that to build up a cult-like inner circle and get himself invited onto popular YouTube shows and podcasts where he could further bolster his profitable persona. He cultivated a fervent Reddit fan-base that he frequently weaponized to attack critics (particularly women writers). He spent YEARS being an unambiguous creep throughout his industry, to the point where seemingly everyone I know in this business has a Max Landis story, and he did all that while being actively bad at his job, and he STILL got chance after chance. John Landis’s kid was untouchable for so long, even though we all knew the rumours. He lost people money, he got kicked off sets, he became the biggest kind of liability but he still got money to write bad movies that would fail to recoup their costs. He still had people willing to manage him, even after the initial talk of his crimes lit up social media in late 2017. And studios were still picking up his ‘feminist #MeToo movie’ screenplays as recently as February.

I want nothing but the absolute worst for Max Landis. I don’t want to see him give a sob statement to a sympathetic trade publication about needing help or going to rehab. I don’t want to hear stories six months down the line about him still getting work. I don’t want to see any bro on YouTube inviting him on as a guest to talk about Superman. I don’t want some newspaper writing the sad white boy comeback profile. He probably won’t face true justice. His daddy knows all about how to avoid such annoyances. I’m sad that it took this long and this number of women going on and off the record for Hollywood to be embarrassed into action. Why was he ever worth all this hassle?

Maybe they saw him as a worthy investment because he was a violent sociopath, not in spite of it.