Will Weinstein pay up on $1m bet?

Harvey Weinstein (pictured), the film producer, may have to pay $1m to charity after laying down a bet and then apparently losing it. The wager was made on Tuesday to journalist Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly, who had claimed that she had an email from fellow producer Scott Rudin accusing Weinstein of badgering the director Stephen Daldry to finish a film he's working on, The Reader, in time for the 2008 Oscar campaign. Weinstein denied any such email existed, and contacted the New York Post's Page Six gossip column, which had followed up the yarn, saying: "If Nikki Finke can produce that e-mail, I'll give $1 million to charity."

The blog that Finke originally posted on Monday was pretty strong stuff. In it, she accused Weinstein of "disgusting behavior" in his efforts to bulldoze Daldry. She also noted that two of the film's original producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, had both died before the film was completed. She then quoted from an e-mail she said was from Rudin, The Reader's producer, which said Weinstein had gone "to Minghella's widow and tried to insist the film be released this year [and] harassed Pollack on his deathbed until the family asked him to stop".

So Finke had a lot to prove. On Tuesday she not only posted Rudin's e-mail (the name of the recipient had been blacked out) on her blog, but said that Rudin had admitted to her that he was the author. She added that Rudin had told her that Weinstein's people had pestered him to "protect Harvey and deny the e-mail and lie to Page Six," which he did in hopes of protecting The Reader. Unless Weinstein can disprove all this, it looks like pay-up time.

Weinstein and his brother Bob are executive producers of the film which is set in postwar Germany and stars Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, with a script by David Hare.