Sitting on the floor in the back of the theater was Ira Deutchman, a short, slight, good-natured young man with an open face who appeared altogether too young to have been one of the troika that had founded Cinecom. Just a few weeks earlier, in mid-December, Deutchman had been ignominiously forced out, and now he was at Sundance on his own dime trying to regain his footing. Coming in from the airport, he had asked the driver, “So what have you heard about that’s really good?” Without missing a beat, the young man replied, “There was a movie that screened last night that has everybody buzzing, called sex, lies, and videotape.” Deutchman made a beeline for the next screening. He noticed Newmyer, one of the producers, standing in the back of the theater. Deutchman knew that neither he nor video companies like RCA/Columbia that had gotten into production had any experience marketing movies. He saw a niche: he would help them find a distributor, then consult on the marketing. With that in mind, he went up to Newmyer and offered to work on sex, lies. Newmyer replied, “Great idea, really interesting.”
Soderbergh was a glass-half-empty kind of guy, and he discounted the favorable response as one from a “festival” audience, that is, one predisposed to be generous. He was worried that the good word of mouth his film was generating would backfire, raise the expectations of the audience so high that future viewers would inevitably be disappointed. But he could not have been insensible of the fact that strangers began to accost him on the street. One man asked, “Can my girlfriend kiss your feet?”
A week after Soderbergh arrived, sex, lies was finally screened at the Egyptian. The tickets were scalped, a first for the festival. The crush was so bad that Soderbergh felt like he’d been “flypapered.” He recalls, “It was the first time I really felt a concentrated kind of energy coming at me. I had to fight my way out. At one point, some woman handed me a business card saying, if I need a place to stay in L.A. I could stay with her. My agent, Pat Dollard, was standing right next to me. We exchanged a look as if to say, This is very, very weird.”
The appeal of sex, lies was so palpable, it was like a contagion. With the benefit of hindsight, it is not hard to understand. It was the paradigmatic indie film. Soderbergh not only directed it, he wrote the script as well, rendering him a genuine “filmmaker.” Moreover, the story was personal, based on aspects of his own life to which he darkly alluded. In 1987, at the age of twenty-four, he had an epiphany. He recalled, “I was involved in a relationship with a woman in which I was deceptive and mentally manipulative. I got involved with a number of other women simultaneously—I was just fucking up. Looking back on what happened, I was very intent on getting acceptance and approval from whatever woman I happened to pick out, and then as soon as I got it, I wasn’t interested anymore. . . . There was one point at which I was in a bar, and within a radius of about two feet there were three different women I was sleeping with. Another six months of this behavior—this went on for the better part of a year—and I would have been, bare minimum, alcoholic and, going on from there, mentally screwed up. . . . I just became somebody that, if I knew them, I would hate. Then one day it hit me that there was no bottom. It would just keep going until I drank myself into a grave or someone shot me.” He tried therapy, but it didn’t take. Had he been able, he would, he said, have joined a twelve-step program for recovering liars.
Coming at the end of the 1980s, sex, lies was the first Gen-X picture, taking shots at the predatory, suspender-wearing, Reagan-era yuppie (played with just the right degree of preening entitlement by Gallagher), in favor of Spader’s version of Soderbergh, a recovering liar who is withholding and impotent, to boot, yet soft and sensitive, a feminized man racked by the kind of guilt that was obviously a stranger to the freewheeling Oliver Norths of the decade about to be past. A premature slacker, aimless, and lacking money, career, or ambition, Spader’s character, Graham, can fit the entirety of his worldly possessions into the trunk of his car. Still, in Soderbergh’s hands, his preoccupation with moral issues ennobles him, particularly in contrast to the venality of Gallagher’s Me Generation avatar.
Despite its diagrammatic, audience-flattering Manichaeism (the good slacker versus the bad yuppie, complemented by good and bad sisters, played by MacDowell and San Giacomo), sex, lies hit a nerve. To Edward Norton, it was his generation’s The Graduate. Recalling the film’s impact, he says, “There’s a zeitgeist, there’s a generational energy being expressed in that movie. Spader has a hesitancy, a reluctance to engage, a shell-shockedness in the face of the collective cynicism of our parents about how messed up things were, that many of us connected with. It’s about a guy who’s just closed down from what he’s expected to engage in, a guy who just wants to keep things simple. I’ll always remember this line, ‘I just want one key.’ People just plugged right into that sentiment.”
If sex, lies was not a great film, it was a very good one. Characteristically, Soderbergh himself, always his own harshest critic, couldn’t or wouldn’t do it justice: “When I look at it now, it looks like something made by someone who wants to think he’s deep but really isn’t. To me the fact that it got the response it did was only indicative of the fact that there was so little else for people to latch onto out there.”
The festival was winding down, but still there were no offers. “It was different then,” the filmmaker continues. “There wasn’t that sense, on the part of the studios, like, If I don’t close this today, it’s gonna be gone. The sensation was more, We’ll see what happens after the festival.”
As award night approached, the buzz was that sex, lies was going to win the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic competition. Fearing the worst, as usual, Soderbergh didn’t want to hear about it, and this time he was right. The prize went to True Love, Nancy Savoca’s inspired homage to romance in the Bronx. Then Paul Mazursky, the master of ceremonies, dramatically announced, “I’ve seen it and I loved it: sex, lies, and videotape!” Soderbergh’s film won the Audience Prize. The director, his face flushed and his ears bright red, stumbled up to the podium and muttered a few words, thanked Marjorie Skouras, and went out to celebrate. The next day he caught the flight back to L.A.
To Soderbergh, back in L.A., the ten days in Sundance seemed like a dream. He was still broke, and he was still in dental hell. When he was growing up, his parents had never bothered to take him to the dentist. “I got a toothache when I was nine and went to the dentist essentially for the first time,” he recalls. “The guy just went, ‘Oh my God!’ During the period of sex, lies, the orthodontist said, ‘Your jaw’s out of alignment.’ They took tissue out of the roof of my mouth and grafted it along the portions of my gum line that needed shoring up. It was a disaster, a four-year process. I had to have braces for a year.”
Then a friend thrust into his hands five copies of the Variety review of sex, lies, written by Todd McCarthy, a rave. His agent got a call from Pollack. He had read the review and wanted to see the picture. Right on the heels of that call, Soderbergh heard from Barbara Maltby, a producer with a deal at Wildwood, Redford’s production company. Yerxa and Berger had alerted her to sex, lies and passed along King of the Hill. She told him that Redford wanted to be in business with him.
Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer’s office phoned. For someone like Soderbergh, the uber-producers represented everything that was toxic about the business, and he didn’t even bother returning their calls. “They’re slime, just barely passing for humans,” he told Rolling Stone’s Terri Minsky some months later. But he didn’t actually know Simpson and Bruckheimer, and subsequently had to issue an embarrassing apology.
Dollard, who took five hundred calls concerning Soderbergh in the course of a month, had to work into the small hours of the morning to find time for his other clients. “It’s like being the manager of the Doors in 1967,” he said at the time. Dollard raised Soderbergh’s asking fee from $35,000 to $250,000 to write, $100,000 for a rewrite, and $500,000 to direct.
Soderbergh knew he had to take advantage of the heat around him before he was
hit with a blast of arctic air, which he expected momentarily. On March 8, he met with Pollack. He was excited, thought, Wow, Sydney Pollack! Soderbergh suggested a book called The Last Ship, set among a handful of survivors of World War III, a sort of On the Beach on the water. Then he got a call from Mark Johnson who ran Baltimore Pictures, director Barry Levinson’s company. Soderbergh told him he was interested in Lem Dobbs’s Kafka script. Kafka had been circulating for years and enjoyed a considerable underground cachet, but no one would touch it because it had “uncommercial” written all over it. Meanwhile, Pollack had pitched The Last Ship to Casey Silver at Universal, who went for it in the third week of April. Soderbergh was suddenly juggling three projects. His brilliant career was getting complicated.
Meanwhile, the indie distributors were not idle. The sky over Larry Estes’s RCA/Columbia office in a spanking new building at the corner of Olive and Riverside in Burbank was dark with buyers circling overhead. The parlous finances of some of these companies just made them more eager; they grasped at sex, lies like a lifeline. Moreover, with their film almost incandescent with heat, Estes and Newmyer were in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose. The two producers, seated in the RCA/Columbia conference room with its imposing stone-topped table, slotted in every buyer in town and watched them perform their dog-and-pony shows at one-hour intervals. Barker and Bernard from Orion Classics, Janet Grillo from New Line, Lipsky from Skouras. Bingham Ray made an impassioned pitch for Alive Films: “We’re not as well-heeled as some of these other companies, but we’re hungrier, because it’s me, and I’m really, really hungry,” he pleaded. “This film, I’m drooling. I would chop my left arm to do it. I’ll make the best possible offer, but . . . ah . . . ah . . . I don’t have any money to offer you! Thank you very much.” Of course he didn’t get it.
New Line offered a couple of hundred thousand dollars but was deterred by the absence of video rights and regarded Savoca’s True Love as a better bet. Goldwyn, too, was breathing heavily. Like Tom Skouras, Sam Goldwyn was a scion of Hollywood royalty. He had a reputation for looking over his shoulder at the studios, worrying about their opinion, staying in the good graces of the Lew Wasserman crowd. Goldwyn was a gentleman—genteel, magnanimous, and gracious. His company had a policy against giving advances without video rights. But there was one small, struggling company that contacted Estes and Newmyer that was not genteel, magnanimous, or gracious. It was called Miramax.
IN THE BEGINNING, back in 1979, the Weinsteins were bottom-feeders, trolling for movies—anything on celluloid—that no one else would touch. Like many in the film business, they have soft-core skeletons rattling around their closet, movies with titles like I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight and A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. They understood that sex sells. If The 400 Blows changed Harvey’s life, as he claims, for Bob it was I Am Curious Yellow, rated X for full frontal nudity. The brothers noticed, as Bob wrote in Vanity Fair, “a packed audience of ‘art-lovers’ who never would have set foot in a movie with subtitles but for the fact that there was a little something extra added,” namely, sex. They took films, often British, X-rated, and priced so that they could afford them, altered them to make them more palatable to the U.S. audiences, then sold them to hungry home-video distributors and to the burgeoning cable networks like Showtime or Cinemax. When Harvey stumbled on Goodbye, Emmanuelle, the third of the endless (and profitable) series of soft-core movies starring Sylvia Krystal, he must have grinned broadly and helped himself to another tuna on rye.
The brothers drifted into distribution with a couple of concert films, including one that featured Genesis, and another Paul McCartney. On his way back from Cannes in June 1981, Harvey stopped off in London and acquired The Secret Policeman’s Ball (SPB), the film version of a benefit concert for Amnesty International that featured comic turns by members of Britain’s two biggest comedy groups, Beyond the Fringe and the Pythons, who were hot off The Life of Brian (1979), along with music by Pete Townshend, among others. The folks at Amnesty, which was nearly bankrupt, knew precious little about the movie business, did not have high expectations for the film, and did not expect an advance—a situation ready-made for the Weinsteins. They exploited it to the hilt.
The picture’s producer, Martin N. Lewis, a flamboyant, speed-rapping Brit and would-be stand-up comic, met Harvey at a hotel in Mayfair. Even though he hadn’t seen the picture, Harvey was wildly enthusiastic, gushed, in a raspy, Queens-inflected growl that rarely escaped the register of a tuba, “This is fantastic, we can really promote this, we’re gonna play this big, we did this for Paul McCartney!!!” Lewis was nonplussed but grateful that someone was showing interest in his baby, and after listening to Harvey spritz for thirty seconds, surprise turned to love, and he exclaimed, “OK, you gotta deal.” Years later, he recalls, “It was an impulsive gesture. There was something about the energy of the guy. I was not unaware that there were bullshit merchants in the world, but I felt he was a bullshit merchant who was gonna deliver.”
Lewis, however, made one mistake. He happened to mention to Harvey that he was working on a sequel. Harvey exclaimed, “Great, fantastic!” and then every week the call would come: “How’s the sequel going?”
“Well, we’re gonna do it—”
“When, when are you gonna do it?”
“In September. We may give you the sequel, but let’s see how you do with this one.”
“Martin, we need to make a few edits.”
“You need to edit?”
“Well, some of this stuff is not gonna play well with an American audience. You gotta trust me on this. We’re gonna have to cut it back.” Lewis demurred. After all, this was original Python material, never before seen. But Harvey cut and cut, and cut some more. Before long, a movie that had been about 110 minutes long was reduced almost by half, to about 65 minutes. Still, Lewis didn’t understand why Harvey was so anxious to get hold of the sequel. When it was finally ready, it contained more Python material, much more music—Sting, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Phil Collins—and it was made by a real director, Julian Temple, for about $120,000. It was called The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (SPOB). By this time Harvey was calling Lewis several times a day. Solicitously, he asked, “How’s everything doing, how’s the new show coming? Are the rights available?” Lewis’s first obligation was to Amnesty, and he had a duty to get the best deal that he could. He was confident The SPB would be a smash hit and was hoping to sell the sequel to an American major for a huge advance. So he always made the same reply: “Let’s see how you do with The Secret Policeman’s Ball.”
Lewis brought SPOB to Los Angeles’s film festival, Filmex, in March of 1982, hoping to find a buyer. Instead, he ran into Harvey, who again began the drumbeat: “We gotta get The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, we gotta have it, you gotta give it to us.” Worn down, Lewis agreed. Still in denial, Lewis asked, “It’s a double bill, isn’t that what you’re thinking about?” Harvey replied, “No, no, no, that would be three hours, people aren’t going to spend three hours watching two movies, you’ve got to boil it down to one film. You can make a lot more money if you can make one movie that plays like gangbusters.” That was his favorite phrase in those days, “plays like gangbusters.” After six weeks in the editing room, they succeeded in reducing two movies to one, 240 minutes to about 100 minutes. They called the combined version The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball and hoped it would play like gangbusters.
Harvey had sold Lewis on the basis of his experience with rock ’n’ roll concert films, McCartney and Genesis, but Lewis started looking at the marketing campaigns they’d done. He thought, Jesus, what the hell is this? Spaced Out? Goodbye, Emmanuelle? What have I got myself into here? “I discovered that they knew nothing about movie distribution,” he says. “They had the passion, but there was a lot of bluster there. I looked at the mocked-up ads, and I was appalled. They were terrible, tasteless. One of them involved quotes from various film critics on a roll of toilet paper.” Lewis told the
brothers, “Your campaign is shit, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Look, I may be fat, but I’m not stupid. You know better, do you?”
“Yeah, I think I do.” Lewis was aware that Jerry Falwell had recently campaigned against the Pythons’ Life of Brian when it was released in 1979. In an effort to create some controversy of his own by tweaking the Moral Majority, he designed a TV spot around Python Graham Chapman, dressed conservatively in a three-piece suit, seated at a desk with an American flag directly behind him. Chapman says something like, “My fellow Americans, I’m from the Oral Majority. I want to protest strongly against this disgusting new motion picture, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. It is without doubt the most lewd, lascivious, tasteless movie since The Sound of Music. This movie must be banned before it turns us all into a nation of perverts!” At which point he stands up, revealing a pink tutu and black fishnet stockings. Lewis presented his idea to the brothers, saying, “Let’s get the movie banned.” He recalls, “There was this blank look on Bob and Harvey’s faces. They didn’t understand publicity. They didn’t know about stories, angles, hypes, stunts. To them, publicity was just film reviews. Advertising, buying space. They were concert promoters.”
But the Weinsteins gave Lewis the green light. At most, he hoped to get lucky with a few column items. He didn’t bank on Donald Wildmon’s Coalition for Better Television, which at the time was on a rampage against the networks. The skittish NBC affiliate in New York turned down the ad, citing a 1941 joint resolution of Congress banning the use of the American flag in advertisements. Lewis promptly called Saturday Night Live, which, though a bit long in the tooth, was still flush with the success of its early years, and asked them to run the spot. They did, on Weekend Update. Recalls Lewis, “We had a huge story! Bob’s and Harvey’s eyes popped out on stalks. ‘Aha, aha, aha!’ They got it, they understood what publicity was: ‘Martin, we were going to spend $5,000 on a local TV spot, this is running nationally, this is worth $100,000.’ ” Suddenly, Lewis, whom the Weinsteins hadn’t entirely trusted, could do no wrong. “Harvey called me the third brother,” he continues. “It was like the fifth Beatle. There’s been a million since, but I was the first.”
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