Redford knew that Aspen, Colorado, had become the seat of the Aspen Institute, transforming the sleepy town into a Mecca for coneheads with a taste for skiing and a winter getaway de rigueur for Hollywood stars and investment bankers. By building an Aspen-like infrastructure on his land, he hoped to turn a white elephant into an arts colony that at best might enhance the value of the for-profit ski resort and at worst could do a whole lot of good. It was a brilliant stroke, allowing Redford to kill a multiplicity of birds with one not-for-profit stone.
The purpose of Redford’s conference was to lay the groundwork for a novel organization that would nurture indie filmmakers. It would be called the Sundance Institute, after the bank robber Redford had played in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The whiff of outlawry that came with the name flattered his sense of himself as a Hollywood maverick. Or better, the new enterprise suggested a movie like The Magnificent Seven, with Redford like Steve McQueen, the golden-haired Hollywood star with his band of outlaws protecting the powerless farmers (read, indies) against the depredations of vandals and looters (read, the studios), so they could raise their crops (read, films) in peace.
The Redford name attracted an impressive array of brain power, but this convocation of like-minded souls was all very informal. The participants—many bearded, sporting the down jackets, plaid wool shirts, Levi’s, and shit-kicker boots that later would become de rigueur at Sundance—stayed at the nearby resort. It was an idyllic spot. Rough-hewn cabins played peekaboo among the spiky stands of mountain pine and aspen that covered the slopes, while a bubbling brook meandered downhill, paused for a moment to form Bob’s Pond, and continued on its way. On a clear day, the air was so crystalline it felt like you could raise your hand and touch the heavens.
Self-effacing as always, Redford, surrounded by his collection of Kachina dolls, diffidently served beer to his guests from behind the bar. His modest posture—“I’m here to listen and learn”—along with his Oscar-winning turn as director of Ordinary People a year later, would earn him the fond sobriquet, “Ordinary Bob,” but in fact, it was all a bit much, teetering on the edge of kitsch, an Eddie Bauer theme park, Bobworld. (Later, the gift shop at his resort would be stocked with “Sundance” coolers.) Still, Redford had charisma and passion to spare, and they created a powerful gravitational field.
Explaining the lure of Redford’s dream, Liz Manne, who would work for him many years later at the Sundance Channel, speaks for many when she says, “It was a combination of politics and aesthetics. He would talk a lot about the independent vision, and diversity, and the importance of unique voices. You wanted to believe in the shining city over the horizon. There aren’t many opportunities in this world to do good work that you really believe in. So to be able to work for a guy who stands for what he stands for, who puts his money where his mouth is, and uses his power and his celebrity in a way that is not ignorant, but very informed, that’s fuckin’ great. At the beginning, I just felt honored to be a part of the mission. I was one of the true believers, I was a moonie.”
At the end of the three days the participants, framed by the snow-capped peaks rising picturesquely behind them, posed for pictures in front of a split-rail fence below his home. When the photo op was over, Redford extended his arm to receive a golden eagle that had been nursed back to health after an injury. He removed its hood and thrust it into the air. As the great bird spread its mighty wings and took flight, catching the updraft and soaring high above them, none of the conferees could have been oblivious to the symbolism—Redford wasn’t a movie star-cum-director for nothing—and even the most cynical among them could hardly help blinking back a tear. They were present at the creation. Like the eagle, Sundance was going to fly.
THAT SAME YEAR, across the country in Buffalo, two frizzy-haired, unprepossessing brothers from Queens named Weinstein, more at home with pigeons than with eagles, were preparing to move their tiny film company, Miramax, named after their parents, Miriam and Max, down to New York City where the action was. The brothers were anomalies in the world of indie distribution. In contrast to many of their peers, the distributors who began their careers running college film societies in the 1970s, the Weinsteins had come up through the rough-and-tumble world of rock and roll promotion. Says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Classics, “We all reflect where we came from. The rock promotion business is cutthroat. You’re fighting for your territory and using intimidating tactics.”
In the late 1970s, Harvey Weinstein had acquired the Century Theater in downtown Buffalo, and to keep the seats warm when it was not being used for concerts, he and Bobby, as his brother was then known, began showing movies. When they moved their act to New York City, Bobby became president. But despite his lofty title, he was still Harvey’s kid brother. Harvey always stuck up for him, saying things like, “You might not think Bobby’s valuable to this company, but he is. And if you don’t believe it, you can get the hell out. Don’t fuck with my brother.” But Bobby wanted to be his own man. One day he announced, “My name is Bob. Call me Bob.” The two small-time music promoters set up an office in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment at 211 West 56th St., on the corner of Broadway. It was not a distinguished address. There was a madam working out of the building.
Harvey Weinstein, born in 1952, was a paler, doughier version of Bob, who was two years younger. He looked like what he was, the first pancake off the griddle, before it’s quite hot enough. At six feet, 300 pounds and counting, he was larger in every respect than Bob, with eyes like olive pits staring out of a round, pasty face, neck like a fireplug, and hands as big as lamb chops. Someone, in other words, it might be prudent to cross the street to avoid. With his collar open, shirttails out, and dark crescents of sweat under his armpits, he looked like Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men.
Harvey could always be found with a Diet Coke in one hand and a True Blue in the other, chain-smoking, not so much inhaling as vacuuming up the entire cigarette, smoke, paper, tobacco, and all, one after another, pack after pack. The assistants learned to buy Coke by the case, cigarettes by the carton, candy bars by the gross, or at least it seemed that way, as if Harvey were a founding member of Sam’s Club. He was a man of large appetites. Watching him feed was an experience not easily forgotten. It brought to mind the great scenes of movie gluttony—anything from La Grande Bouffe or the spectacular sequence in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where a ravenous diner explodes like an overblown balloon. Always working on his weight, Harvey in the early days ate lunches that consisted of a tunafish salad sandwich on rye, toasted, a slice of American cheese, and the inevitable Diet Coke. But then he would chase it with a side or two of french fries as if to reward himself for his restraint. As Bingham Ray, a founding partner of October Films and now head of United Artists, once put it, bending over to mime a close look at an imaginary chest, “ ‘So Harvey, what did you have for lunch today? Let’s see, pea soup, pizza, salad, custard.’ That’s why Harvey has started wearing black shirts.”
Rather than trying to smooth the rough edges, Harvey flaunted them, tried to turn them into pluses. Even though he was known as someone whose word at times meant nothing, he fashioned a reputation for truth telling. He knew that the sweat, the food stains, the slovenly dress, the inner demons writ large on his battered face could be made to send a message, one that went, to quote Popeye, “I yam what I yam.” And in the world of appearances—of Armani suits and 500SLs—in which he operated, as often as not, it worked. People admired his fidelity to his nature and often forgave him his sins. As Matt Damon puts it, “It’s the old tale of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion’s sitting on the bank of a river, and a frog walks by, and the scorpion says, ‘Take me to the other side.’ The frog replies, ‘No, because when we get to the other side, you’re gonna sting me, you’re gonna kill me.’ The scorpion says, ‘I would never do that, please, I’m asking you for a favor, I can’t swim, I need your help to get me to the other side of the river.’ The frog finally agrees, takes hi
m across on his back, and just as they get to the other side, the scorpion stings the frog. As the frog is dying, he says, ‘Why did you do that?’ The scorpion just looks down at him and says, ‘Because I’m a scorpion, it’s my nature.’ It’s the same with Harvey. It’s his nature.”
Harvey loved the limelight and could make himself extremely appealing. He liked, in fact, to be liked. He was funny, wielding a wicked, slashing wit that he could use on himself when he wanted to or just as easily turn against others, reducing grown men to tears. When he was on a roll, no one was funnier. Speaking of somebody or other, he once said, “He’s the kinda guy, you gotta hold his hand when you’re chopping off his head!”
And dwelling somewhere within Harvey’s breast was the heart of—if not a poet, at least a cinéaste. He genuinely loved movies, A movies, B movies, horror, sci-fi, comedy, musicals, kung-fu, all kinds of movies, but particularly he adored foreign films, art films, “specialty” films. He loved to tell the story about going to see The 400 Blows when he was fourteen, which he believed, for reasons best known to himself, to be a sex film, but during the course of the hour and a half he spent in the theater, he was transported by the magic of François Truffaut. Says Mark Lipsky, Miramax head of distribution in the late 1980s, “I’ve heard that story—‘I saw 400 Blows, it changed my life’—a zillion times. It’s significant that Harvey tells that story, not Bob.”
Bob, dressed in black, always seemed a little off, uncomfortable in his own skin, as if he were not in the right place, but in some world of his own. If Harvey was bigger than life, Bob was smaller, more intense, a reduction, l’essence d’Herve. If Harvey was the outside guy, Bob was the inside guy. He was quieter, preferred to stay in the shadows. It didn’t matter to Bob if he were liked or not.
Despite what Bob told the press—“We’re artists. We’re not interested in money”—he didn’t much care about Truffaut. As former Miramax executive Patrick McDarrah succinctly put it, “This business is about ego and greed. Harvey is ego, Bob is greed.” Bob liked exploitation flicks, commercial product that could go direct to video. He was focused on the bottom line. Whatever the movie, he always wanted to know, “Are we gonna make money on it, Harve?”
If Harvey wore his heart on his sleeve, Bob was opaque, subject to extreme mood swings. “You can’t really tell what’s going on in Bob’s mind,” says Mark Tusk, who would become one of the most effective of the acquisitions shock troops in the mid-1990s. “He will turn on a dime.”
SUNDANCE AND MIRAMAX, the twin towers of the indie world, will cast long shadows across this tale. But in 1979, they were no more than dreams. Around the same time that Redford’s eagle had taken wing and the Weinsteins had come to ground in New York, three modest indie features opened quietly to respectful reviews and decent business. None had the seismic impact of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s not-just-a-biker-movie, and all wore their earnestness conspicuously on their sleeves, but for those who hungered for an alternative to the slick, overproduced, and empty studio fare, they were cause for rejoicing. One was called Alambrista! (1978), directed by Robert M. Young, and produced by Michael Hausman; the second was Northern Lights (1978), written and directed by Rob Nilsson and John Hanson; and the third was Heartland (1979), directed by Richard Pearce and produced by Annick Smith. Alambrista! told the story of the struggles of a Mexican illegal to find work in the United States. Northern Lights paid tribute to the hardscrabble radicalism of the immigrant farmers who settled North Dakota and formed the Non-Partisan League to protect themselves against the big banks, granaries, and railroads. Heartland focused on the trials and tribulations of a stouthearted widow who braves the harshness of the turn-of-the-century West to homestead on her own. Whereas the twitchy, paranoid Easy Rider regarded the vast expanse of country between the two coasts as a redneck free-fire zone, Nilsson and Hanson, Pearce and Smith, celebrated it as, precisely, the heartland. All three films were made by Vietnam generation filmmakers, and all were marbled by a residue of its politics. Later, in the 1980s, the kind of salt-of-the-earth regionalism these films celebrated would degenerate into mindless boosterism for barnyards and square dancing, Garrison Keillor-style, but in the beginning they stood out like lonely sentries against the Hollywood hordes.
In 1978, Sandra Schulberg, the associate producer of Northern Lights, helped found the Independent Feature Project, the first institutional brick in the indie infrastructure. IFP conducted a series of seminars about working outside the system—how to raise money, how to produce, how to distribute yourself—it was like inventing the wheel. The goal was simple—to plug American indies into the distribution system already in place for foreign films—but the execution was anything but. Still, in 1980, the indies’ Easy Rider finally appeared in the modest guise of John Sayles’s The Return of the Secaucus 7, which, championed by the New York Times’s Vincent Canby, played to surprisingly strong box office—an extraordinary $2-million gross. Despite their obvious differences, the two films were strikingly similar, with the autumnal Secaucus 7 mourning a revolution that failed, a gloss on Fonda’s famous line, “We blew it.” Unlike Rocky, Superman, and Porky’s et al., Sayles’s film dealt with a serious subject—the post-war exhaustion of the peace movement—that affected and might conceivably interest real people. “Financing really didn’t exist when we started,” says Sayles. “It was hard to get an independent script to an actor, and you didn’t bother going to a studio unless your script was commercial. And even then if you weren’t connected through an agent, they wouldn’t read it. Independent films were truly on the outside.” The Secaucus 7 cost a mere $60,000 out of pocket, was entirely financed by Sayles himself, and could never have been made at a studio—although, in a preview of things to come, it was appropriated by Columbia and morphed into The Big Chill.
The Secaucus 7 was followed by films like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André (1981) that grossed $1.9 million; Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing (1982) that did $1 million; Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul (1982) that did $4.7 million; Greg Nava’s El Norte (1984) that took in $2.2 million; and a string of John Waters’ pictures featuring Divine, Mink Stole, and the rest of his patented menagerie of weirdos. In 1984, Jim Jarmusch made Stranger Than Paradise, which cost almost nothing and grossed $2.5 million. The same year, the Coen brothers, Joel, who had gone to NYU film school, and Ethan, who did not, made a wonderfully nasty film noir called Blood Simple for next to nothing that grossed $2.1 million. And another NYU graduate, Spike Lee, broke through with She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 that grossed a phenomenal $7.1 million. David Lynch made his mark with Eraserhead (1977), and then Blue Velvet in 1986. It soon became clear that where before there had been a trickle of poorly funded documentaries, supplemented by the occasional underfinanced grainy feature, there was now a comparative flood of slick, reasonably well-produced theatrical pictures, some of which benefited from the unprecedented level of public support by the National Endowments during the Jimmy Carter years. Suddenly, there seemed to be an indie movement that had people who care about film practically dancing in the streets. For the organizers of Sundance, the hope was that these home-grown filmmakers would generate the energy, excitement, and box office that Ingmar Bergman, the Italians, and the French New Wave had enjoyed in the 1960s.
But the few distributors with enough clout to command decent screens, like UA Classics, where Ira Deutchman, Tom Bernard, and Michael Barker cut their teeth, still primarily dealt in foreign films, which were successful enough that by the early 1980s, almost every studio had its own classics division. For the most part, American indies were still a curiosity, without a demonstrable audience. In 1982, Deutchman left UA Classics to team up with Amir Malin and John Ives to form a new company called Cinecom. “The studios were bidding up the price on the name-brand foreign films, the Truffauts, Fellinis, Bergmans, way out of proportion to what they could earn,” he recalls. “As a startup, we said, ‘We can’t compete with what all these other people are doing. What can we do that’s different?’ We st
arted tapping into what was just beginning to be called American independent films. It wasn’t, ‘This is the next big thing,’ it was really just running away from what we knew we couldn’t afford.” As former Miramax distribution VP Eamonn Bowles puts it, “Specialized film was a rarefied little field. If a film did a couple of million dollars, ‘Wow, that was great!’ You could manage your assets, make sure you didn’t get hurt, and eke out a modest profit.”
But indie films had one advantage that would turn out to be decisive. Cinecom had the good fortune to open its doors right at the beginning of the video boom. “Many of these startup video companies were so hungry for product to put on their shelves that anything with sprocket holes was worth a certain amount of money to them,” explains Deutchman. “Those folks had no interest whatsoever in foreign language films because people didn’t want to read subtitles. These American films, despite the fact that they didn’t reach a large audience theatrically, were worth something on video.”
Video wiped out the foreign film market overnight and, along with cable and European public television, fueled the explosion of American indies with a gusher of money. Companies like Vestron, RCA/Columbia Home Video, and Live Entertainment began funneling cash directly into the production pipeline. Meanwhile, with Deutchman in charge of acquisitions, Cinecom released a string of hits, including Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, which took in $5.5 million; Spalding Gray’s monologue film, Swimming to Cambodia, which did $1 million; and Sayles’s third film, Brother from Another Planet (1986), which only cost Cinecom $400,000 and grossed $3.7 million.
Older distributors, like New Yorker Films, New Line, and the Samuel Goldwyn Company, also fattened themselves at the video trough, while litters of newbies scampered between their legs. UA Classics had been started by Arthur Krim’s United Artists, a company known for its good taste and talent-friendly attitude. When Krim walked out to start Orion Pictures in 1978, UA Classics’s Barker and Bernard went with him to form Orion Classics. Says Bernard, “We followed the same theory that Krim did when we had our first job at UA. Once the script and the director were set and it was clear the movie could be made for the budget they wanted, then we stepped aside and let the artists do their work. We didn’t interfere in the creative process, like, ‘We’re going to fix it for you, recut it for you.’ The last thing we wanted to do is influence the director’s vision.” The other indie distributors shared the same attitude. Unlike the studios where, before and after the 1970s, fiddling with films was de rigueur, these companies served the directors.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 3
