The Weinsteins have been quick to sue or threaten to sue people who cross them. When a key staffer leaves the company, or when the brothers settle a lawsuit, the severance or settlement terms, like those that Sundance imposes, often contain gag clauses, prohibiting people from speaking out. And when the Weinsteins get wind of a critical article in the offing, or hear that someone has broken the code of omertà, Miramax publicists rise from their desks like a swarm of locusts, and have been known to employ intimidation before the fact and/or spin control after. They are particularly skilled in turning bad news into good. Talk magazine failed? Lost the company $27 million? It allowed Harvey to “return to [his] roots.” Gangs of New York hemorrhaged money? Miramax can’t lose; its exposure is limited to $15 million. MGM, partnered with Miramax on Cold Mountain, suddenly pulls out because it fears the budget is heading north, leaving the already hard-pressed mini-major with a $90 million hot potato? No problem. As sole owner, Miramax will make more money. The Lizzie Grubman of the movie business, Harvey is like a drunk driver who jumps the curb, maims a few pedestrians, swerves crazily back into traffic, and screeches to a halt inches from a stroller, whereupon he leaps out, grabs the baby and holds it up for everyone to see as he takes credit for saving its life.
The Weinsteins’ complaints about unattributed quotes are disingenuous at best. Their early career was built crusading against censorship, but their attitude now seems to be free speech for themselves, silence for everyone else. Despite Harvey’s close identification with the Democratic Party, or the liberal message movies the brothers produce that preach abortion rights, like The Cider House Rules, or tolerance, like Chocolat, free speech seems to stop at the Miramax door.
But the Weinsteins are too smart to rely solely on the stick. They dangle the carrot as well, occasionally flying favored editors about in the Miramax jet, winning hearts and minds with elaborate parties, flattering journalists with early screenings and courting their opinions. Over the last decade, the brothers have become adept at having their way with the press. In 1991, when I was working at Premiere magazine, I was asked to write an investigative piece about the brothers, who even then were notorious for their outré behavior. Before I had made a single phone call, Miramax had agitated the publisher by threatening to withdraw its advertising from the magazine, and the next thing I knew, Harvey was writing columns for Premiere and I was his editor. The hard-hitting exposé? Forgotten.
When I was in the middle of this book—happily laboring away, I thought, under the radar—I received a call summoning me to the third floor of 375 Greenwich—the Miramax office—for a meeting with the brothers. Harvey was unhappy. I had told him that I wasn’t going to pry into his private life—the 1990s were not, after all, the 1970s; drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll were not creative stimulants or career busters as they were then—but he had received word from his network of informants who curry favor with him by picking up the phone and conveying what they’ve heard that I was nosing about.
The Miramax offices are a disconcerting place. There are plenty of smart, good-hearted people there, like Matthew Hiltzik, VP of corporate publicity, and some of them have been associated with Miramax for years, like marketing maven Arthur Manson, a distinguished-looking man with a mane of white hair who is beloved in the industry, or Irwin Reiter, a CPA and fifteen-year veteran of the company, whose shy smile and open face make him instantly likable. I found myself thinking, If these guys work here, it can’t be as bad as legend has it. But then there are the others, the ones with heads bowed over their desks who look up long enough to shoot furtive glances full of mute appeal like messages stuffed in bottles thrown into the sea. The place reminded me of those old movies, like The Desperate Hours, where a psycho holds a family hostage, and when the cops finally show up at the door and ask the quaking mother, “Everything okay, ma’am?” she plasters a smile on her face and hisses through clenched teeth, “Everything’s fine, officer,” while her eyes scream otherwise.
Harvey was seated behind a vast desk made out of some kind of polished wood with a high red gloss. Although it has taken a long time, he has finally found his look: a black golf shirt open at the neck—revealing the tracheotomy scar from his Christmas 1999 illness—and dark pants held up by wide suspenders. I couldn’t help noticing the baseball bat in the corner, leaning against the wall. Reading my mind, he quickly moved to disarm with the self-deprecating humor that’s become his trademark, shouting, “Matthew, get in here! It’s time for your flogging!” Bob, dark and brooding, sat slumped in a chair to the left in front of the desk, playing Caliban to Harvey’s Prospero, while I sank into a bottomless black leather couch so low it had me staring up at him, all too aware of the mini-Mussolini-ness of it all. The odor of menace hung in the air like the smell of burning tires. I felt like the guy from one of those bomb-in-the-building pictures, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, perhaps, careful not to cut the wrong wire, the red one instead of the yellow, for fear of setting them off.
To spend even a little time with Harvey is to become acquainted with a preternaturally charming man who is nevertheless a roiling cauldron of insecurities, in which self-love and self-hatred contend like two demons, equal in strength, canniness, and resolve. To listen to him for any length of time is to be continuously entertained, but battered as well by relentless waves of hubris, and drowned by apologia, false humility, and self-pity, reminiscent of Richard Nixon.
Harvey, donning his publisher hat—he also runs Miramax Books—began by deprecating my project, explaining, as if for my own good, that books like this one don’t make any money. It was fine if I was satisfied with a pat on the back at cocktail parties, but essentially it was a loser and so was I. By way of contrast, he mentioned several Miramax books, then on the New York Times best-seller list, and asked, “What do you really want to write?” As he guessed—he’s eerily skilled at finding the right buttons and pushing them—I did have a project that I was secretly nursing, and I told him what it was, all the while feeling like a schmuck for letting him play me. What I said seemed to excite him. His face lit up, and he bellowed, “That’s a terrific idea, that could make millions. We’ll do it, won’t we, Bob? Why don’t you just give up the book you’re writing now and do this one.” I declined, and he seemed genuinely sorry for me as I confirmed for him that I was indeed a loser.
Sundance and Miramax are by no means anomalous. Everyone in the movie business tries desperately to get his or her way, in this case to control their press. But at least in part because of his publishing holdings—at that time, Talk magazine was still limping along, and he has an interest in Gotham magazine and Los Angeles Confidential as well—Harvey’s carrot patch is large. In the end Harvey, smarter than Redford, and a believer in Don Corleone’s dictum—“Hold your friends close and your enemies closer”—decided to sit for a series of interviews, for which I am grateful. Ditto the small army of former staffers who have passed through the Miramax doors. Since I was not in a position to promise them haven in the Witness Protection Program, some people I approached were too fearful to talk, but many more agreed, either on the record or off, or both, and I thank them as well.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Lynda Obst, one of the sharpest participant-observers of the Hollywood scene I know, and a gifted writer, who urged me to embark on this book, and when I was on the edge, unsure if I could get the story, shoved me over. I would also like to thank friends and colleagues to whom I turned for help, the old Premiere gang, now scattered to the four winds, Susan Lyne, Rachel Abramowitz, Corie Brown, John Clark, Nancy Griffin, Holly Millea, Howard Karren, Kim Masters, Christine Spines, and Mark Malkin, as well as Carl Bromley, James Greenberg, Michael Cieply, Charles Lyons, Dana Harris, David Carr, and researcher Stephen Hyde. Many players on the indie scene, who fled from these acknowledgments, as if they were on fire, went out of their way to connect me with their contacts, but it must be stressed that the opinions expressed here are my own, not theirs.
Sara Bershtel and Lisa Chase rea
d the manuscript and gave me the benefit of their editorial advice, as did my editor at Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy.
As they have done in the past, Bob Bender, my editor at Simon & Schuster, and my agent, Kris Dahl at ICM, both helped enormously. And I must thank my wife, Elizabeth Hess, and my daughter, Kate, for leaving cookies and milk in front of my office door.
Introduction: The Story Till Now
“In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the studios didn’t know how to market films for the youth culture, and they turned to new young filmmakers to figure it out for them. The exact same thing happened across the ’90s, and when this generation came of age, it put out very original, distinctive, mature work. They revitalized American films after a decade of it being pretty fuckin’ flat. It was the first real American New Wave since the late ’60s.”
—EDWARD NORTON
On a crisp November morning in 1979, Robert Redford, one of the 1970s brightest stars, inaugurated a three-day conference of filmmakers and arts professionals at his home, a big-beamed ski lodge high up on the slopes of Mount Timpanogos, in the North Fork of Provo Canyon, Utah. It was only a decade since Easy Rider had exploded across the screens of America and kicked off the new Hollywood revolution of the 1970s, changing everything forever—or so it seemed. As that extraordinary era was drawing to a close, Kramer vs. Kramer became the number one grosser of the year, breaking $100 million; Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz was a hit, and so was Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. One of that generation’s greatest pictures was still in the pipeline, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, but so was Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which is to say, the palace of wisdom to which that decade’s road of excess had led would soon come crashing down. In a preview of things to come, the kids who went to the movies that year also lined up to see the first Star Trek, and the second Rocky, The Amityville Horror, 10, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Hurricane, and Meteor.
The new Hollywood had ended, more or less, by 1975, when Ho Chi Minh’s armies marched into Saigon, Mike Ovitz—to go from the sublime to the ridiculous—founded CAA, Robert Evans vacated the executive suite at Paramount, and Universal released Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the first mega-blockbuster. By the second half of the decade, the rising tide of the civil rights and anti-war movements that had floated the films of the new Hollywood had receded, exposing a muddy expanse of shallows littered with studio junk. When the Ronald Reagan tsunami swept everything before it, the market replaced Mao, the Wall Street Journal trumped The Little Red Book, and supply-side economics supplanted the power of the people. The boomers who fought the war against the war were staring at the face of middle age, getting ready to move aside for the next demographic wave, the grasping, me-generationists of the 1980s to be followed by the “Gen-Xers” or “Slackers” of the early 1990s, who couldn’t be bothered with either the Yippies of the 1960s or the yuppies of the 1980s.
In Hollywood, the new television regime at Paramount reclaimed the asylum from the movie brat inmates who, like Jack Nicholson’s Randle Mc-Murphy in Cuckoo’s Nest, had disappeared with the medication cart. Studio heads, sitting happily astride bags of cash labeled Saturday Night Fever and Superman, had raised the drawbridge, stranding marginally commercial directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafelson, Billy Friedkin, Hal Ashby, and even, eventually, Scorsese and Coppola, on the far side of the moat. When E.T. burned through the summer of 1982, finishing what Star Wars started, the studios went off on a trip of their own, fueled by cash, not drugs.
In the perennial tug-of-war between art and commerce that is Hollywood, muscular producers were dragging skinny, coked-out directors through the wreckage of the 1970s onto their own turf, which is to say, commerce had won. In the coming decade, Hollywood would fly first class on the Simpson/Bruckheimer Gulfstream. Genres that used to be studio staples—like the family film—migrated to TV, pushing the majors in the direction of “event” pictures in an attempt to cash in.
Roger Corman, who produced B movies in the 1960s and early 1970s, used to complain that he’d had a hard time in the 1980s because the B movies had become A movies, with bigger budgets and real stars. Hollywood abandoned the experimentation of the previous decade, losing interest in how-we-live-now small films about real people—The Last Picture Show, Carnal Knowledge, Five Easy Pieces—in favor of megabuck fantasies. Everything that had been turned upside down in the 1970s was set right side up again. Cops regained their glow, even if they were black and therefore fish out of water like Eddie Murphy in the Beverly Hills Cop cycle. G.I.s were top guns again, and comic strip characters like Rambo, pumped up like balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, got a shot at winning the Vietnam War, while Superman and Batman refought battles that Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey (Death Wish) had won a decade earlier—sans capes. With the bland leading the bland, Spielberg’s suburban fantasies replaced Scorsese’s mean streets. The utopian attempts to defy the system launched by the most visionary of the new Hollywood directors—Coppola and George Lucas—had either failed, in Coppola’s case, or succeeded all too well, like Lucas’s Skywalker empire. You couldn’t really blame people like Redford for just turning their backs on the whole sorry mess.
Redford was not your garden-variety celebrity. Even though he was virtually synonymous with Hollywood glamour, he saw himself as an outsider. Too straight and conservative in his personal habits, and too much the prisoner of the star vehicles crafted by George Roy Hill and Sydney Pollack, Redford was not about to volunteer for the next Dennis Hopper flick, which is to say, he was not going to hop aboard the New Hollywood’s sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll express. He remained married to the same woman, Lola Van Wagenen, for many years and was a stranger to the gossip columns. On the other hand, he was too liberal to embrace the old Hollywood establishment, and throughout his career, he devoted himself to deploying the power that celebrity confers to effect progressive social change, showing a particular affinity for environmentalism and Native American rights.
Still, despite his contempt for Hollywood and disregard for the trappings of celebrity, and despite the noises he made about being a regular Joe, he remained very much the star. Although soft-spoken and courteous, he was notorious for keeping people waiting, breaking appointments, and failing to follow through on commitments. In Hollywood, it was widely known that to make a deal with Redford was to fall into development hell—script notes, rewrites, and more rewrites—often going nowhere. Used to being flattered, deferred to, and yessed, he mistrusted the people around him. He valued loyalty, and gave it back—sometimes. He refused to delegate power to others but was indecisive and slow to act himself. Cautious by nature and almost paralyzed by perfectionism, he continually second-guessed the people around him. He could be charming and entertaining but, as one former employee put it, “He’s not a people person.”
Although Redford had been one of Hollywood’s leading box-office earners for a decade, when he looked around him at the end of the 1970s, he didn’t like what he saw. A decade earlier, the studios had been so desperate that directors like Scorsese and Robert Altman, who would have been—and virtually were—indies in the 1980s, could work inside the system, so that an institution such as Redford contemplated would have been superfluous. But the landscape had changed so dramatically since then that now it was a necessity. Redford understood that the most creative filmmakers were being increasingly shut out of the system. He also recognized that if a would-be filmmaker were brown, black, red, or female—forget it; his or her chances of getting a project produced were virtually nil. He knew that indie filmmaking was generally a trust-fund enterprise, because outside of a few federal grants and cash from the proverbial family friends, orthodontists, eye doctors, and so on, there was precious little money available to produce them. Raising money, not to mention writing, casting, shooting, and editing, was brutal, teeth-grinding work that could take years, and if by some miracle it all somehow came together, directors often found, pace the thimblefull of tiny, struggling distributors, that
they had to release their films themselves, leaving them broke, exhausted, and disillusioned. In short, indies needed help.
Redford believed that American film culture could contribute more than stale sequels and retreads, that historically, before the renewed hegemony of the studios, film had been a medium for genuine artists and could be again if only they could be sheltered from the marketplace long enough to nurture their skills and find their voices. Oddly enough, he had or thought he had some firsthand experience with the problems they encountered. As he has said repeatedly, “I knew what it was like to distribute a film that you produced. In 1969, I carried Downhill Racer under my arm, fighting the battles that most people face.” He came to understand, as he puts it, the dilemma of the “filmmaker who spends two years making his film, and then another two years distributing it, only to find out he can’t make any money on it, and four years of his life are gone. I thought, that’s who needs help.”
In the mid-1960s, Redford had bought some land, semiwilderness nestled in a deep gorge some 6,000 feet up in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Then he bought the lot next door, and the lot next door, and after he made some money on his big hit, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, on August 1, 1968, he and his partners bought the Timp Haven ski and recreation area. He must have thought, Build a ski resort and they will come. What he didn’t know was that because of its comparatively low elevation, his resort got less snow and therefore enjoyed a shorter ski season than its competitors. Despite the money he poured into it, nobody, or almost nobody came. In fact, the no-snow zone he had purchased would become a running joke. But the hemorrhage of red ink wasn’t funny.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 2
