The first stage of the Miramax rocket had fallen away.
After the Playing for Keeps debacle, the Weinsteins circled the wagons. The first order of business was to repopulate the depleted ranks of the company. The brothers were too poor or too penurious to employ people with experience; they preferred to hire young and hire cheap, took in kids off the street or just out of college. Having taken Lewis’s lessons to heart, the brothers made sure they were well stocked with publicists, at least twice as many as companies of comparable size. They were the shock troops, the marines, the first to go in and ignite the word of mouth that would drive the film. Once they created the heat, money for advertising would follow, first local, and then, if the film caught on, national. As the frontline, they were under fierce pressure, and inevitably passed that pressure along. Largely female, they were known as the Furies.
The second order of business was to find a new Robert Newman to head up distribution. In the dark, at the back of Dan Talbot’s Lincoln Plaza theater—the prime exhibition site for indie films in New York City—Bob approached Bingham Ray and asked him if he wanted the job. Ray turned him down, suggested Jeff Lipsky’s kid brother, Mark. Mark didn’t know much about Miramax, had only heard that it was run by these two crazy brothers. He recalls, “I called everybody I knew in the business to ask for advice, and there wasn’t a single person I called who didn’t say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t work for them.’ ” When Bob offered him the job, he took it.
It wasn’t long before Lipsky discovered that Miramax was in desperate straits. He recalls, “We couldn’t walk into a single screening room in New York without the money to pay for it. I was literally turned away from one: ‘Come back with a check in your hand.’ ” Adds post-production staffer Stuart Burkin, “If you said you worked at Miramax, it closed doors. It was the last thing you would tell someone when you were trying to book a stage or trying to get an actor to dub lines: ‘We need to go back and rerecord your voiceover, but we can’t pay you anything.’ ‘Who are you again? Miramax? Oh, Harvey Weinstein owes me money!’ ” Moreover, the Weinsteins had no idea how to run a business. “Getting the phone answered was a nightmare,” Lipsky continues. “The Weinsteins didn’t let their employees do their jobs. Too many people were doing the same thing, and things had to be done over and over. If they had spent $500 on a mail-order management course, they would have doubled their income overnight.” When Marty Zeidman was hired two years later to head distribution, that is, book films into theaters, his wife, who worked there briefly, discovered that there was a desk in the office stuffed with unopened envelopes containing checks. He recalls, “They sat there for months. Nobody was even going through the mail.”
That same year, 1986, Miramax hired Eve Chilton, a blond from an old WASP family with a house on the West Chop, on Martha’s Vineyard. Eve was stunning, with perfect features marred only by a small, wine-colored birthmark on one side of her face. She became Harvey’s new assistant, and he was instantly smitten. “It seemed like not even a day [passed] before he was all over her,” Lipsky remembers. “For possibly a couple of weeks or more, there were a dozen roses on her desk when we walked into work, to the point where we had to confront him and say, ‘You can’t do this, it’s an office, not your personal sexual playground.’ In no time he took her to the Venice Film Festival or one of the European markets, and from that moment on they were inseparable. It was a bolt of lightning, very intense, very fast.”
Immaculately turned out, Chilton was an anomaly in the Miramax pigsty, but people liked her, even though she was shy, quiet, and reserved, not about to let anyone in. They appreciated that she didn’t take advantage of her connection to Harvey. Which is not to say they weren’t cynical about the relationship. What did a woman as beautiful as Eve see in a guy like him? they wondered. They were equally fascinated that he fell for her. It was as if the blemish humanized her, put her within reach, gave him some kind of leverage over her. Behind their backs, of course, they referred to the couple as the Beauty and the Beast.
Alison Brantley, a southern girl well brought up in North Carolina whom Harvey had hired to head up acquisitions, believed she understood. “I thought they genuinely loved each other. When she met him, he was just struggling, a nobody, and there was something about him she liked, something about beauty within him.” When you were in his presence, you understood the package, or should have. As Brantley puts it, “If you walked into his office and you didn’t think he was gonna try to screw you every which way to Sunday, you were a fool. So deal with it. And that’s part of the charm. That’s part of what Eve liked about him.”
There may have been something of Kay Corleone in Eve; when Harvey didn’t want her to know something, he figuratively slammed the door on her, and she was content to avert her eyes. In any event, the relationship thrived, and he promoted her, putting her in charge of the children’s division. Eventually, Harvey and Eve got married at a posh club on the East Side in the ’70s. They went to St. Bart’s on their honeymoon.
Chilton was the first rung of the ladder that helped Harvey to climb out of the Queens shtetl where he grew up, and it seemed like some of the new hires reflected the brothers’ desire to give Miramax a veneer of class. In addition to Brantley, the brothers brought on Trea Hoving, the daughter of Metropolitan Museum of Art head Tom Hoving, in acquisitions. Brantley herself came from Granada, the crème de la crème of British production companies. When Harvey hired her, everyone she knew told her, “ ‘They lie and cheat and steal, and they are totally untrustworthy,’ ” she recalls. “My background and theirs were so diametrically opposed that for me it was like walking into the jungle. There are lions there, and I was just what they wanted to eat. But from the moment I met Harvey, I loved him. I adored this movie Alain Corneau had made, Indian Nocturne. Harvey screened it, and rather than yelling at me, like, ‘Whaddya crazy?’ he said, ‘You know, Alie, sometimes you fall in love with a movie, and that’s okay. Don’t be afraid to use your instincts. You’re not going to be right all the time. That’s why we have a group of people, that’s why we talk about it.’ He encouraged me. I was never afraid of telling him exactly what I thought, because I knew that’s what he paid me for. No matter how much he tried to intimidate me, it didn’t stop me.”
Harvey and Bob went to Cannes in May of 1986. In the bar of the Petit Carlton, Harvey struck up a conversation with a tall, disheveled Brit named Nik Powell. Powell and his partner, Steve Woolley, a clever, boyish-looking young man with fine features who wore his brown hair gathered into a ponytail, ran Palace Pictures. Palace was more Miramax than Miramax. A freewheeling, we’ll-trying-anything duo, Woolley and Powell had a keen eye for films and talent, and had cherry-picked the best of films of the 1980s for British distribution, pictures as diverse as Pixote; The Evil Dead; Diva; Blood Simple; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; Stop Making Sense; and the Nightmare on Elm Street series. It didn’t take long for the Weinsteins to recognize in Powell, and especially Woolley, kindred spirits. Says Paul Webster, who later headed up production for Miramax and who worked for Palace in those days, “Harvey got the idea for Miramax from Palace. The relation between him and Steve was key.” Woolley recalls, “I came out of the punk scene of the ’70s and he came out of band promoting, and we both loved movies. A breakfast meeting turned into a whole day of just chatting. Harvey’s thinking in modeling Miramax on Palace was to try to acquire movies like we did—Paris, Texas or Kiss of the Spider Woman—quality films that had a certain prestige, a certain European cachet so that they could cross over. What he learned from us was the kind of bravura showmanship, ‘We really love this film, we’re gonna be as passionate about this film as the filmmakers were when they made it.’ I really took to Harvey, admired his spirit. We kind of formed an unwritten alliance.”
If the Playing for Keeps fiasco had taught the Weinsteins anything, it was that they didn’t have a clue about production, and Harvey was hungry to learn. When he ran into Robert Hakim in Paris, the powerful and intimidati
ng French producer behind films like Belle de Jour and Isadora, he seized the opportunity, exclaiming, “Look, I want to make movies, can you teach me?”
“If you come to the Georges V every Wednesday, I’ll give you four hours.” Harvey went, sat at Hakim’s knee. One day, the Frenchman told him a story about producing Plein Soleil, aka, The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Alain Delon, at the time a huge star. Delon didn’t like the way things were going, and two weeks into the production he gave Hakim an ultimatum: “If things don’t change around here, that’s that.”
“You walk off, I’m going to close the movie down.”
“How can you? You’ve shot two weeks of footage, you’ll lose millions!”
“I don’t care. I’m not going to have my movie blackmailed by you.” Hakim explained to Weinstein, “If you’re going to be a great producer, you have to be the boss of the movie, and you have to take a threat like that and just say, ‘Forget it.’ ” Says Harvey now, “This was one of the lessons I learned early.”
The Weinsteins saw Working Girls at the Directors Fortnight where Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It also made a splash. It was a down and dirty feature about the lives of hookers in New York City, an exercise in zero-budget filmmaking—$100,000 in the can—whose rawness lent it the conviction of a documentary. The director, Lizzie Borden, a small, slender woman dressed from head to toe in black, and dramatically made up with blood-red lipstick and heavy eyeshadow, was a feminist and fixture in the downtown scene, a bubbling cauldron of art, politics, and theater. In those days, before Ronald Reagan clamped down, films like Working Girls could get money from the federal and state arts endowments, and the $40,000 Borden collected in grants made up almost half the budget. “I would get shortends3 free and developing free,” she recalls. “You spent 90 percent of your time borrowing and begging.”
To Borden, Working Girls was “not about sex, but about labor”; to the Weinsteins it was about sex, and Bob in particular was desperate to acquire it, although, as Mark Lipsky says, “He was squeamish about it. It was a lesbian movie. They are both very conservative guys. They went after these kinds of movies but cringed inside.” Lipsky and the brothers met with John Pierson, whom the producers had hired to rep the film. Pierson was tall and thin. With flying hair and a prominent Adam’s apple, he looked a little like Ichabod Crane. He knew the Weinsteins only slightly, but he liked them. The brothers left the meeting elated, thinking, We got the movie. Then they got a call from the producers. “We would, but we can’t,” they said, revealing that they had a prior commitment to Circle Releasing, which had made an offer of $100,000. But Bob would not take no for an answer. He kept calling, demanding that they meet with him again. They replied, “No, Bob, we’ve sold the movie, we have a deal.” Bob insisted: “No, you don’t understand, you gotta meet with us one more time.” Says Borden, “Bob kept appearing with a suitcase full of a little bit more money every time we said no. It turned out that they had probably already sold the video rights. I didn’t trust them, but I liked them. I visited them in the apartment they were working out of. The thing that got me turned around was when I met Harvey’s assistant Eve, who was the sweetest girl ever. The fact that this woman could be in love with that man made me think, Oh, okay.” When Miramax doubled the Circle offer, putting $200,000 on the table, Borden gave in, saying, “Fuck, these guys want it more than anyone else, why not give them a shot.”
Miramax, like every distributor, took its costs off the top, and was accused of “grossing up” movies, spending what would have been the filmmaker’s cut on marketing to drive up grosses, thus swelling its share of the profits, while raising the profile of the company—a not uncommon practice in the industry. Directors loved the publicity and the grosses—and only later did they recognize the ugly truth: a goose egg at the bottom of the profit statement. But the brothers did a good job with Working Girls. It grossed nearly $1.8 million when it was released in March 1987, very impressive considering its cost, and earned about $750,000 for the director and producers. But after going over the statements, Borden’s producers demanded an audit and found charges for a ski rental during the Sundance Film Festival, and a $1,000 bill from the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco two months after the film had opened there. Miramax had to reimburse Borden. It was small change but, as Pierson wrote later, “Distribution costs on an independent film should always be only direct, out-of-pocket costs—the cash spent on that one, specific movie. Second, there should be real, documented, invoiced expenses.” The flap did not help the Weinsteins’ reputation.
There were other films on the runway waiting to take off, among them Pelle the Conqueror, which Harvey had acquired at Cannes the previous May. Pelle, directed by Bille August, was a grim and gritty, albeit ravishingly photographed film set in nineteenth-century Denmark. It told the tale of a Swedish boy’s struggle to free himself from serflike servitude to a hidebound family of landowners and at the same time escape the shadow of his beloved but feckless father, beautifully acted by Max von Sydow, an Ingmar Bergman stalwart who most memorably played chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. Bleak and uncompromising, Pelle was a tough sell. Unlike Working Girls, there was no sex to speak of. But Harvey was determined to push the picture across the art house divide. As publicist Christina Kounelias puts it, “They were trying to unghettoize art house films, get them out of the teeny theaters at the edge of town where the beatniks live, and make them accessible to a broader, more mainstream audience.”
In practice, that meant once again putting a commercial spin on the film. There’s a scene where a ghostly fishing boat that has been battered by heavy seas and long given up for lost, washes up on the rocks near shore, its sails in shreds. Glass included a shot of the boat in his trailer. Zeidman recalls, “Harvey was ranting, during the trailer, ‘I want a happy boat! I want a happy boat!’ It was beyond me. I said to Ed, ‘A happy boat?’ The film was just so bleak and they were trying to find some way to make it not so dark.” But somehow they managed to do it. “Their father was a diamond merchant,” explains Glass. “There’s millions of diamonds out there. But once he put the diamond down on the black velvet, you went, ‘Wow, look at that stone!’ Compared to all the commercial junk, their movies were like diamonds. They knew how to display them very well.”
Zeidman, who arrived in October 1988, was one of the few new hires who actually had real experience. He had given up a big corner office at Lorimar/Columbia and taken a cut in pay to work for Miramax. “From the very first, Harvey believed he could get Max von Sydow a nomination for an Academy Award,” he remembers. “This was a very small Scandinavian film, and it was almost inconceivable. At that time, I was not a true believer. I just didn’t get it.”
Pelle was released December 21, 1988, but the picture stalled. Harvey used a shot of a nearly topless peasant girl (who appeared for a nanosecond in the picture) in the ads. One of Miramax’s sub-distributors even tried to sell Pelle below the Mason-Dixon line, historically a graveyard for foreign language films. Recalls David Dinerstein, who would eventually head marketing, “We sold it as a genre film—Pelle the Conqueror, this action hero—and we booked it as such into some multiplexes. It was their way of getting to those places you were never able to get to in the past, maybe not in a truthful manner, but still getting the film out there. This was Harvey at his best.”
When Academy nominations for 1988 were announced, Von Sydow got one for Best Actor, and Pelle was nominated as well for Best Foreign Film—and won, giving Miramax its first Oscar. Zeidman understood he had been wrong. “It was one of the first times I realized that Harvey could make things happen that were way beyond what you would think was in the realm of possibility. In a lot of ways I believe Harvey has a certain genius.” The long march had begun.
Two
The Anger Artists
1989
• How the Weinsteins terrorized their staff but took sex, lies out of the art houses into the multiplexes, while the Sundance Kid nearly rode his institute into
the ground and competed with Sydney Pollack for Steven Soderbergh’s next film.
“Bob and I grew up as underdogs, and if there’s a theme to the movies we make, it’s about the outsider who can come in and change things.”
—HARVEY WEINSTEIN
When Miramax threw its hat into the sex, lies ring shortly after Sundance, the brothers were still searching for the breakthrough hit they needed to propel them into the front ranks of the business. In 1988, the New York office of a British bank called Midland Montague had bought, in effect, a 45 percent interest in Miramax for $3.5 million, $2.5 million of which was a direct loan to the company. On this basis, Miramax got a $10 million line of credit from Chase bank. The company was perhaps best known for Errol Morris’s groundbreaking documentary The Thin Blue Line, still in theaters. Randall Adams, the subject of Morris’s film, a victim of Texas “justice” was in jail for a murder he very likely did not commit and had just been released, as a result, Miramax claimed, of the blizzard of press it had stirred up around the issue. Scandal, for which it had high hopes, was in the pipeline, slated to open later in the year, as was My Left Foot, directed by Jim Sheridan and starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
The Weinsteins had paid $400,000 for Errol Morris’s documentary. From a marketing standpoint, the film presented some of the same problems as Miramax’s other pictures, namely, to get butts in seats, the true nature of the film had to be con concert film—concert films were supposed to be box office poison—The Thin Blue Line could not be sold as a documentary. The “D-word” had to be avoided at all costs, and it was sold as a “nonfiction feature,” whatever that meant, with an emphasis on the miscarriage of justice and crusading journalism. “A documentary has a limited, narrow audience,” explains publicist Christina Kounelias. “The sell was, he’s a detective figuring out the clues to a mystery. ‘The director detective.’ ”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 9
