Gossip Girl Left Harvey Weinstein Furious - Here's Why

Disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, who is currently serving a prison sentence that spans multiple decades for a variety of horrific crimes, apparently once went after the creators of a popular teen primetime soap.

In an interview in Rolling Stone with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage meant to promote Alan Sepinwall's upcoming book "Welcome to the O.C.," the two talked about their time on "Gossip Girl," which they created afterward. Schwartz and Savage shared how Weinstein was irate because of one specific character – Willa Weinstein, who appears in a handful of episodes in Season 3 and is clearly supposed to be a relative of the producer.

"Stephanie got a very angry call from Harvey Weinstein. He's in jail now. You can talk about it. He can't hurt you," Schwartz revealed to interviewer Marlow Stern, comforting an apparently stressed-looking Savage.

Savage then clarified a few things. "This was the jumping-off point for Harvey Weinstein to call me because he had a bone to pick with the show," she said. "We never even said the character was his daughter, but she did have his last name."

Apparently, Stephanie Savage never really intended Willa Weinstein's fictional existence to be any sort of slight towards Harvey Weinstein's real daughter — whom she didn't even know existed at the time. "I didn't even know that he had a daughter and that, to him, felt like an overstep and 'who do we think we were' and all that," she went on. "We did some ADR to fix that."

As Savage told it, though, this presented a much larger problem: "But it meant that Harvey Weinstein had my cell phone number, and that Harvey Weinstein would call me anytime he needed anything. The man does not take 'no' for an answer, as we have found out," she said.

Perhaps the most ridiculous part of this whole thing is that Willa Weinstein is sort of a dud — and she's incredibly unimportant when it comes to the overall narrative of "Gossip Girl." While the characters "attend" New York University in Season 3 — "attend" being a strong word since they never actually go to class or complete any assignments — characters like Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), and Vanessa Abrams (Jessica Szohr) tangle with the artsy Tisch kids, including Willa. Aside from a brief dalliance with Dan, she's utterly unimportant and disappears without a trace after just four episodes. Clearly, raging about this was a good use of the real Weinstein's time.

"Gossip Girl" saw its fair share of celebrity cameos throughout its six-season run, from former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to model Karlie Kloss to singers like Cyndi Lauper and Robyn. One cameo that's aged somewhat poorly, though, is the one jointly made by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who appear as themselves in a party in Season 4 and find themselves warmly greeted by Lily van der Woodsen (Kelly Rutherford) and Rufus Humphrey (Matthew Settle). This cameo, aside from the politics that followed, is particularly amusing because Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage also said they based the character of Nate Archibald, played by future "The Boys" star Chace Crawford, on Kushner himself.

"It was for sure an inspiration," Savage confirmed in this interview. "It's literally like, his dad went to jail for financial crimes, and he bought an Upper East Side newspaper to try to do positive stories about his family. We were like, 'Let's do that!' Jared and Ivanka were also on the show when they were just normal New York City socialites, and the crazy thing is the life that they had after that."

"Gossip Girl," with all its intended and unintended celebrity cameos, is streaming on Max now.