Harvey Weinstein Says Charlie Sheen is Playing a 'Losing Game'

Sometimes it takes one to know one, and if anyone knows a losing game, it's Harvey Weinstein.

He may be back up to the top with the Academy Award juggernaut "The King's Speech (assuming a pesky lawsuit doesn't drag him down), but it wasn't so long ago that Disney was throwing him out of his own company when they seized control of Miramax. Weinstein fought a long, hard battle to try to hold onto his company, but he found out what we all find out sooner or later - you can't fight The Man.

And now he's offering the same advice to embattled actor Charlie Sheen.

"I know Les Moonves," Weinstein said in an interview on "Piers Morgan Tonight," referring to the CBS CEO, "Charlie's playing a losing game."

The game he's referring to is not only Sheen's complete unwillingness to keep any thought that comes to his head to himself, but taking the attitude that because he's the highest-paid television actor on the most successful sitcom, CBS can't touch him. This includes publicly insulting "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre and glorifying his "epic" drug binges. And somewhere along the way demanding a 50 percent raise (though he retracted that one).

"[Moonves] is cool, he's smart, and he's wildly successful," Weinstein went on to say, "and not one show is going to make the difference to CBS. CBS, under Les Moonves, makes a billion dollars a year in a business that people say isn't working."

Yesterday, Moonves commented on the situation with exactly the kind of calm and collected energy of someone who's in complete control. In a speech before a Morgan Stanley Technology conference. He said that in the short term, having "Two and a Half Men" on hiatus actually makes the company more money, as it performs very well in repeats, and that he wished Sheen "would have worked this hard to promote himself for an Emmy."