The various sexual-harassment scandals that have roiled the entertainment industry over the past several years have largely focused on female victims of men.
Few and far between are the men who have spoken up about being put in similar positions, but now the former Saturday Night Live star Chris Kattan claims in a new book, Baby Don’t Hurt Me, that Lorne Michaels, the show’s iconic producer, encouraged him to have sex with Amy Heckerling, the director of Clueless, so she would stay attached to the 1990s comedy film A Night at the Roxbury.
Kattan claims he gave in to the demands placed on him, although, in the end, Heckerling served as only a producer on the movie, based on a recurring SNL sketch performed by Kattan and Will Ferrell. John Fortenberry ended up directing.
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At the time, Kattan says, he was dating actress Jennifer Coolidge. Page Six reports Kattan says in the memoir that his subsequent encounter with Heckerling put pressure on that “fraying” relationship.
While Kattan says that his one-off sexual encounter with Heckerling was “consensual,” he admits to being “afraid” of the power that Michaels and Heckerling had over him.
In his memoir, Kattan says that the director first came on to him while she was slated to helm the 1998 movie in which he was due to star.
Kattan was 27 at the time and rebuffed the 43-year-old’s advances, Page Six reports.
The next day, he says he got a call from a “furious” Michaels, who allegedly told him Heckerling was considering backing out of the project.
Michaels allegedly told him “Paramount would only do the movie if Amy signed on as a director, not as a producer,” and if he “wanted to make sure the movie happened, then [he] had to keep Amy happy.”
“Chris, I’m not saying you have to fuck her, but it wouldn’t hurt,” Michaels allegedly said.
An SNL spokesperson denied Kattan’s claims to Page Six, saying, “This did not happen.”
Kattan alleged that ultimately he and Heckerling had a consensual sexual encounter on the couch in her office.
“She thought it would be fun to have sex on Lorne’s desk,” he writes. “Wow, what a great idea! Jesus Christ. I said a polite ‘Fuck, no!’ to that, so we ended up going to her office and having sex on… yep, you guessed it, the ‘casting couch.’”
Kattan writes that he was attracted to Heckerling, but at the same time “was very afraid of the power she and Lorne wielded over my career.”
