The SPOB premiered in New York on May 21, 1982. According to an ad the brothers later ran in The Hollywood Reporter, the film grossed $6 million. Amnesty apparently saw very little of that money. Says Lewis, “We didn’t make much money on the theatrical, is my memory. Did Amnesty get every single penny they probably should have had? I don’t know. It was like the six million Jews, ‘Pay no attention to the six million. Prints are very expensive here!’ There was a fair amount that came off in expenses, and they probably were high, but we [at Amnesty] didn’t know how to gauge them. Do I think Harvey and Bob baldfaced stole $4 million from a human rights organization, that they ripped off Amnesty International? No, I do not. What they’d said to us was that the theatrical was going to generate more publicity and heat for the home video and TV. Was Amnesty unhappy? Our expectations on this were minimal, zero. Amnesty was thrilled beyond words.”
Thinking he was being smart, Lewis had held on to the TV and video rights, imagining he could sell them for more money after the film opened. Harvey wanted them desperately, and he wouldn’t give up. He was like a hair in the back of your throat that swallowing won’t get rid of. He bellowed, “You’re going to sell me the rights—”
“I’m not going to sell you the rights. I want to wait till the movie opens.”
“But they belong to me . . .”
“That wasn’t the deal we did.”
“We’ve put so much effort into this, we’ve been a team.” Continues Lewis, “He browbeat me and guilt-tripped me. At the end of it I was completely drenched with sweat. I thought, That was like the most intense sex I’ve ever had in my life. It felt horrible and pleasurable at the same time. My girlfriend will kill me.” By the time Lewis got off the phone, he had agreed to sell Harvey the TV and video rights.
Harvey and Bob squeezed blood out of every frame of film, shuffling and reshuffling The Secret Policeman/Other Ball deck, recycling and resectioning the material like the Plains Indians of grade-school fame who were commended for making use of every part of the buffalo, the flesh for food, the skin for clothing, the hooves for whatever. In 1983, the Weinsteins apparently acquired theatrical rights to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which was then eight or nine years old, put it on a double bill with SPOB, which had already been out for a year, distributed buttons that read, “Get Pythonized,” and made even more money. Feeding the hungry video maw, they took the outtakes from the two Secret Policeman pictures and edited them into a 90-minute straight-to-video film called The Secret Policeman’s Private Parts that they sold to Media Home Entertainment. Harvey and Bob even resliced The Secret Policeman pie into two best-of films (comedy and music), The Secret Policeman’s Private Party and The Secret Policeman’s Rock Concert and sold them to a company in Japan.
Unlike most distributors who started like the Weinsteins, picking over the refuse discarded by their betters, Harvey aspired to intellectual and aesthetic respectability, and when in Cannes he stumbled across Eréndira (1983), a Brazilian film directed by Ruy Guerra based on a Gabriel García Márquez short story, he snapped it up. Explains Robert Newman, now an agent at ICM, but then a kid fresh out of NYU film school gofering for Miramax at $3.50 an hour, “While they were still trying to acquire a film, they would already have sold the home video rights to somebody, and they would already be preselling it to the movie theaters. It was very much buying the cow with her own milk.” Eréndira featured the legendary Greek actress Irene Papas and an unknown but sexy newcomer named Cláudia Ohana. Newman asked, skeptically, “How do you sell it?”
“Easy!” Harvey responded. “You got a Nobel prize winner and you got sex. You work both ends.”
Harvey knew that García Márquez, an outspoken left-wing critic of the United States, had been denied an entry visa by the American government, and he used it to his advantage, creating a stink about the fact that the State Department wouldn’t let the Nobel prize winner visit the U.S. for the premiere of his own film. Says Newman, the idea was to “get the message out without necessarily having to write checks.” Playing the Papas card, he managed to get Eréndira into the New York Film Festival, at the same time that he slipped Ohana into Playboy. Says veteran indie publicist Reid Rosefelt, whom Harvey hired to work on the film, Miramax “retouched Ohana’s chest to give her cleavage! I thought, This is different. They just had an unabashed willingness to sell that I had not seen within the specialty markets.”
Eréndira became a modest hit. But more important, with the mix of sex, controversy, and prestige that accompanied the Márquez imprimatur, it became a model for the kinds of films Miramax wanted to distribute and the kinds of marketing campaigns they would use to launch them.
From the beginning, it was clear that the Weinsteins would not be satisfied with merely distributing other people’s movies. These two cinema-besotted young men, like many who labored in the vineyards of indie distribution, were frustrated filmmakers. Bob, who fancied himself a screenwriter, wrote a baseball script called Grand Slam, with Harvey’s help, that went nowhere. In 1980, the brothers made a knockoff of John Carpenter’s Halloween series starring Jamie Lee Curtis, a slasher movie called The Burning, which features a summer camp caretaker slicing and dicing horny teens with pruning shears. Harvey produced, and Bob took co-writing credit.
In the late ’70s, Harvey had bought a getaway cottage up at Crystal Beach, in Canada, just north of Buffalo, and it was there that the brothers started writing the script for the film they hoped would launch their filmmaking careers. The film was part John Hughes movie, part musical. As the story evolved—teenagers inherit a dilapidated, white elephant of a house in a small town and turn it into a rock and roll hotel—it became more autobiographical, loosely based on the Weinsteins’ days and nights at the Century Theater in Buffalo. The boys’ friends considered Playing for Keeps a kind of Freudian Rosetta Stone for parsing the puzzle of the brothers’ perplexing emotional development.
Neither of them had ever directed, so they shot a twenty-minute promo reel, which they took to Cannes in an effort to raise money. Recalls Harvey’s childhood friend Alan Brewer, who supervised the picture’s music and was supposed to get a producer credit, “People said that they were crazy for trying to do this with the limited experience they had, yet that just motivated them, especially Harvey. ‘You think I’m crazy? Just watch me!’ ” Harvey pitched the film on the basis of the soundtrack album, which he promised would be packed with the superstar acts they had promoted in Buffalo. It didn’t matter if the movie itself bombed, he argued; the soundtrack would be solid gold, not to mention the music video spinoffs. A London-based company called J&M Films bought his pitch and agreed to finance the movie to the tune of about $4 million.
Built into the structure of most productions is a system of checks and balances—the director against the producer, the star against either or both, and the studio against all of them. But whether from megalomania, paranoia, or some other, more exotic “ia” disorder, the brothers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to do it all, direct and produce. And to make matters worse, much worse, each would do both, co-produce and co-direct.
The film, called Playing for Keeps, was shot on a farm in Bethany, Pennsylvania, near Wilkes-Barre. The Weinsteins had had the entire script story-boarded in L.A., so in theory it should have been an easy shoot; all they had to do was connect the dots. In practice, it was anything but. Recalls Jeff Silver, who is now a partner at Outlaw Productions, and was then hired by the production manager to be the production manager, “I’ve always called Playing for Keeps the Noah’s Ark of films because there was two of everything.”
Needless to say, the two-headed beast ate through the budget double time. The financial problems were severe and started early, even before the beginning of principal photography. Silver remembers, “When I was brought in, two weeks before the shooting started, it was, Help, we’re sinking here, and I was supposed to find out who and where the problem was. I went through each department asking, ‘Why are you so far over budget here
?’ They’d say, ‘We get one decision from Bob, one decision from Harvey.’ Harvey and Bob mostly disagreed with each other, except where it came to hammering the production team on costs, and there they were in perfect harmony. They did a lot of yelling and screaming about the costs, but they would be the biggest instigators of cost increases owing to their inability to decide anything. My report was, ‘It’s the boys, it’s the brothers that are mucking everything up here.’ I was brought in as a detective, but I found out that the culprit was the client.”
The cameras rolled in mid-September 1984. Co-directors are as rare as two-headed mules, and Playing for Keeps was Exhibit A in why that is so. Whenever it came time to make a decision, it was, Should we shoot this way? Should we shoot that way? “They would have behind-the-monitor arguments incessantly, to the point where we’d all be standing around kind of wondering if we were supposed to be doing something, because the arguments would go on for fifteen and twenty minutes,” Silver recalls. “On the set, that’s an eternity.” When they couldn’t agree, which was most of the time, they shot it both ways, thinking they’d resolve it in the editing room.
The promo reel to one side, the Weinsteins had virtually no track record with actors, sensitive souls who require a lot of tender loving care, particularly these actors, who were young, inexperienced—and cheap. (Mary Ward played the “love interest,” and Marisa Tomei in her second movie, was also featured.) They don’t respond particularly well to bullying and belittling, the only directing skills in the Weinsteins’ arsenal. Recalls a source who was often on the set, “It was, Okay, Bob’s been sitting at the video monitor for two hours, relaxing, getting energized, then he’s gonna come kick your ass. Now Harvey’s gonna go and relax, and then he’s gonna come kick your ass. It was like tag-team directing. One day, they made Mary Ward burst into tears, cry hysterically. They were both ganging up on her, yelling. It was, Now, I’m not only being yelled at by one director, I’m being yelled at by two.”
Adds Silver, “It wasn’t limited to Mary Ward. I saw tears in the editing room, I saw tears in the art department. Those guys were tyrannical and emotionally manipulative. They would yell at you for something that they told you yesterday, and the next day tell you that’s not what they said at all. Something was great one minute and horrible the next. I’m professionally accustomed to cutting directors a whole lot of slack in the temper department. People undergo personality changes in the midst of productions. It’s a war-like mentality. The first half a dozen times, I figured, I get it guys, you’re just in over your heads and having a bad time, that’s okay, we’re here to help. But this went beyond that. These were desperately angry men. There was no way to get through to them. When they started turning on you and acting like you’re there to harm them, that’s where you throw up your hands and go, ‘OK, maybe I can’t help.’ They made all of our lives miserable.” In the end, Silver just gave up. “My job description was, ‘Get this sucker under control.’ Nobody could do that.”
And because the Weinsteins were producing as well as directing, there was no one to say “No.” Recalls Brewer, who was also onboard as a producer, “It was hard for them to listen to anyone saying, ‘But if you do that, it’s gonna cost you. We don’t have it in the budget.’ They’d say, ‘I don’t care, take it from somewhere else!’ But eventually there was no place to take it from.” Silver continues, “No one knew what the budget was. In truth, there was no budget. It was a real mess.” Even today, it is impossible to determine what the film ultimately cost. Adds Silver, “I would not be surprised if it was twice the $4 million budget going in. It ran over weeks, and millions.”
Alarmed, Film Finances, the completion bond company, sent David Korda, the son of Zoltan Korda, who directed the 1939 version of Four Feathers, and was a member of the famous British film family, to the set. J&M, meanwhile, sent former United Artists executive Chris Mankiewicz to lie down on the tracks in front of the runaway train. Like Korda, Mankiewicz was a scion of cinema royalty. His father was Joe Mankiewicz, who directed classics like All About Eve, and his uncle was Herman J., who wrote Citizen Kane. “It was amateur night in Dixieville,” Mankiewicz recalls. “Neither Harvey, the Otto Preminger of the two, the ranter and the screamer, nor Bob, the gnome-like brother, who was very stubborn, very tough-minded, had any idea how to direct a movie, and they couldn’t admit that. These louts, these crude barbarians from Buffalo showed not the slightest aptitude for filmmaking. They didn’t know what they wanted to do or how to do it. I remember a glacial pace of production and massive indecision. This was a film of a very dubious screenplay. Extremely dreadful, unfunny comedy business. The Weinsteins directing that Frank Capra kind of comedy—no. I thought of them as charlatans. I couldn’t believe anybody would have given these people money to do it. They were very brutal customers in those days. Harvey would hiss at me every time I got into his eyesight. Hell hath no fury like a Weinstein scorned. He was ferocious. He was like Mike Tyson was when he first came up, when he would rush out at the opening bell, and everybody would hold their breath thinking that he would just crush his opponent. I’d never met somebody with that kind of animal intensity.”
Nor did Harvey impress Mankiewicz as being particularly interested in film. “There was nothing about film history or films that I felt he had any respect for,” he continues. “Imagine having a Korda and a Mankiewicz around, and never asking, ‘Gee, tell me something about your dad or your uncle.’ I don’t think he had any idea who David Korda’s family was or my family or cared. I’ve grown up knowing a lot of great screenwriters. There’s a sense of the poet or a storyteller about them, an artistic sensibility. [With Harvey] you never felt that there was an artistic muse involved. Whether he was going to be making films, or donuts, or machine gun parts, it was a product, and there was just a sense of ferocious ambition. He was a guy who wanted to have a career or make a lot of money.”
The production dragged on and on, days, weeks past the scheduled stop date, until Film Finances pulled the plug on November 10, 1984, after forty-eight days. According to Martin Lewis, the brothers knew the picture wasn’t much good: “They were trying to make it better. Their way to make it better was soundtrack. They called in every favor in Christendom—and Jew-dom. They went to Townshend. Peter Townshend! And they got a song from him. “Life to Life.” Simon Lebon from Duran Duran. They got a song from Phil Collins, an outtake from one of his albums, but not a bad song. Still the boys still weren’t satisfied with that. They wanted to get the older crowd, so they got Peter Frampton. They wanted to get the African-American crowd, so they went to Sister Sledge. They covered every fucking demographic known to mankind. Bob and Harvey didn’t have pictures of these guys having sex with animals; they were given the songs because of the relentless charm, pressure, cajoling, ‘Please give us a break, we’ve done a movie, we need your help.’ Their drive was far in excess of their creativity as directors, but you couldn’t help admiring it. They would not take no for an answer. They were like the Terminator. They just wouldn’t stop.”
Harvey had left Robert Newman and his Buffalo-era pal Jim Doyle to mind the store in New York. But without the brothers’ full attention, the business was suffering, especially with editing dragging on for another year or so, and with Playing for Keeps sucking the air—not to mention the cash—out of the room. Says Brewer, “Playing for Keeps definitely weakened the finances of Miramax, and put it in a very tenuous position. The atmosphere was tense and scary.” Adds Lewis, choosing his words carefully, “Their passion to make Playing for Keeps succeed was out of proportion to the quality of the movie, more intense than their friendship with me. I felt not burned, but singed. When you’re giving a party, and you’ve invited everybody, you’ve done all the preparation, at a certain point you’ve got to sit back and say, ‘That’s it. It’s gonna be what it is.’ They weren’t like that. They could not stop. If it had succeeded, it would have been a big coup for them. They were chasing that success.”
Universal, which
had picked up the film in the waning days of the Frank Price regime, probably for its soundtrack, unceremoniously dumped it. Says Tom Pollock, who succeeded Price, “What was done to it is what Harvey has done to so many other movies since.” Lewis continues, “Really dumb people would have said, This is a great movie, Universal screwed us, we’ll make another movie. Here comes Playing for Keeps 2. Instead, they said, ‘We’re not Steven Spielberg, we have to find a niche for ourselves.’ Their skills were that they understood movies, and they had a passion for them, they could market them. And they went that route.”
Harvey and Bob turned back to Miramax, but it was not the same Miramax. Playing for Keeps had taken its toll. As Ed Glass, who cut trailers for the Weinsteins, puts it, “That movie was like World War II. It just went on and on and on and on. They shot it, they edited, they went out and shot new scenes, they reedited. There was lots of yelling and screaming. [The brothers] were fighting with each other. It destroyed everybody who came in contact with it.” Gradually, the old gang dribbled away. Recalls Doyle, “Within days or weeks after the film was released we all left one by one. Harvey and Bob were just so angry and so disappointed about the failure of the film. They were [always] tough to work for, but during that time it was just awful.” Brewer, who had known Harvey since junior high school, left. So did Lewis. Continues Doyle, “Newman also decided he didn’t want any part of it anymore. He moved on. I was listening to them telling me stories—‘Bob said this, Harvey did that, I can’t stand it, Jimmy, I got to get out.’ Now it was just me. Everyone else was bailing. So I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ ”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 8
