Whether producing “The Artist,” “Shakespeare in Love” or “The English Patient,” Queens-born serial predator Harvey Weinstein has always had a knack for making powerful period pictures. Maybe, between the best picture Oscars that those movies scored, he should have brushed up on his Hollywood history. His penchant for the casting couch — the practice of powerful white men exploiting young actresses trying to break into the movie business — has a historical precedent as old as the movie business itself.

“The perils for women in Hollywood are embedded, like land mines, from an actress’s debut to her swan song,” says film critic and historian Carrie Rickey, “where moguls like Harry Cohn reputedly wouldn’t cast starlets like Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak unless they auditioned in bed.”

Long before Weinstein there was Louis B. Mayer, who co-founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in 1924. Mayer, the ground zero of this kind of abuse, had means, motive, opportunity...