Harvey caught Morris being interviewed on National Public Radio and hated him. He sent the director a “Dear Errol” letter, dated August 13, 1988, in which he wrote, “You were boring,” and led him through a Socratic dialogue, that went in part: “Let’s rehearse:
“Q: What is this movie about?
“A: It’s a mystery that traces an injustice. It’s scarier than Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s a trip to the Twilight Zone . . .” Harvey continued in this vein, furnishing Morris with his lines. He concluded with, “If you continue to be boring, I will have to hire an actor in New York to pretend that he’s Errol Morris.”
The Thin Blue Line opened on August 26, 1988, and grossed $1.2 million, unheard of for a documentary in those days.
Meanwhile, the Weinsteins’ friends across the Atlantic, Steve Woolley and Nik Powell, had come up with an ambitious slate of films in which Harvey would invest. Says Donna Gigliotti, who was then with Orion Classics and would join Miramax in 1993, “Harvey was an outsider in Hollywood, so he looked to where everybody else wasn’t. It was just smart.” Scandal was the first. It was based on a true story of “tarts, titles, and tits,” as one wag put it, that rocked Britain in the 1960s and led to the resignation of Secretary of State for War John Profumo. Palace had sunk about £200,000 into the project and attached Michael Caton-Jones, a first time director with a pay-or-play4 deal. Like Working Girls, Scandal, with plenty of sex and controversy, was the perfect Miramax title, and the Weinsteins came in to the tune of $2.35 million. Joanne Whalley-Kilmer played call girl Christine Keeler, and Bridget Fonda took the role of Mandy Rice-Davies, Keeler’s best friend. The film went into production in late June of 1988. Harvey, dressed in a black aertex T-shirt and black pants and carrying a plastic bag full of scripts so as not to lose a moment of work time, traveled regularly to London to keep an eye on things. The furor caused by Alan Parker’s X-rated Angel Heart had deeply impressed the Weinsteins, and Harvey insisted that Powell and Woolley deliver Scandal as an X. He repeatedly muttered in Caton-Jones’s ear, “Michael, you gotta get her to take her clothes off.” At the same time, he was badgering Woolley: “Steve, you’re making all the decisions, I’m your executive producer, I gotta do something. I wanna work on the movie.” Finally, Woolley replied, “All right, you want to make decisions? Look, this weekend I’m going to take some time off, why don’t you take over.” Be careful what you wish for. Woolley knew that Whalley-Kilmer’s skinny-dipping scene was coming up. After speaking to her husband, Val Kilmer, on the phone, the actress abruptly refused to do it, saying, “Val doesn’t want me to.” But Harvey, having anticipated this eventuality, had hired a body double. Whalley-Kilmer stood by while the cameras rolled. Finally, she had enough, complained, “Boy, that girl’s got a big ass! I can’t let her do that.” She ended up doing most of the scene herself.
Scandal wrapped in late summer 1988. Post-production proceeded through the fall. Harvey demanded that the film be recut for American audiences. He explains, “I’m a kid who was born in Queens. If I could grow up the way I grew up, with a dad in the jewelry business and a mom who worked as a secretary, and I could love these movies—Truffaut, Fellini, De Broca, Visconti—why can’t a guy in Kansas City love these movies? Why make it so difficult?” Harvey had never forgotten showing And Now My Love, a film by one of his favorite directors, Claude Lelouch, at the Century Theater in Buffalo. The long haired crowed jeered, screaming, “Fuck this movie, fuck . . . subtitles.” If he was going to succeed, he had to make foreign films palatable to American audiences. Says Ed Glass, “We re-edited Scandal. Harvey said, ‘Nobody fucking knows who Profumo is, nobody knows who Christine Keeler is, you’re dealing with Americans! You’ve gotta tell them upfront.’ Woolley and Caton-Jones thought he was insane. The auteurs felt like they were swallowing poison. They didn’t want to cut a frame. But Harvey made the movie more accessible to more people.”
In November 1988, Alison Brantley accompanied Harvey to London where they saw My Left Foot, a story about a man who overcomes cerebral palsy to become an artist. Harvey sat on one side of the aisle and Brantley on the other. When the shaking little boy writes “mother” in chalk with his foot on the floor, they both burst into tears. She says, “A lot of the movies Harvey liked had an underdog quality to them. It appealed to all the things he wanted to prove.”
Harvey was desperate to acquire the film, which had been produced by Brantley’s former employer, Granada. “They’d never heard of Miramax, or whatever they’d heard wasn’t good,” she continues. “I was the perfect front person for them, and I told Granada, ‘You should really take this meeting. You may not like some things about these guys, but they’re good at what they do.’ ” Harvey knew he had to put on a show, act like he was a powerful indie even though he wasn’t. He rented a suite at the posh Savoy and invited Steve Morrison, Granada’s head of programming to meet with him there. Morrison thought the film would sell itself because of Daniel Day-Lewis. Harvey had to demonstrate his enthusiasm for the picture while at the same time convincing Morrison that it had to be marketed hard because Day-Lewis was a romantic lead, and nobody wanted to see him folded up on himself like an accordion. Along the way, of course, he promised he would get the actor an Oscar. It was one of Harvey’s patented I’m-going-to-lock-the-doors-and-keep-you-here-until-you-sign numbers. The fact that Day-Lewis played a disabled character and didn’t want to have his picture taken out of character was something Harvey was going to have to deal with later. Morrison was persuaded and agreed to take $3 million for worldwide rights.
Back in New York, Harvey screened My Left Foot for the staff. When the lights came up, half the audience was crying and the other half was going, “Are you crazy? A drunk Irish cripple? Daniel Day-Lewis may be a love object, but he’s in a wheelchair and he’s all crumpled up. You think this is going to work?” Harvey did think it was going to work, at least after he had “fixed” it. Speaking of My Left Foot, he says, “I had tested it. The audience loved it, but they didn’t understand certain things. Rather than Alan Parker’s approach on The Commitments—I couldn’t follow half that movie—I straightened out some of those rough Irish accents. What’s a ‘jar,’ what’s a this, what’s a that? I went back and revoiced some of it. A ‘jar’ became a ‘glass.’ Isn’t the intention to communicate? And if it is, let’s find a way to do it, without compromising the integrity of the suffering. We didn’t say, ‘Okay, Daniel’s singing and dancing Fred Astaire.’ Nobody changed the ending, the pain. The essence of the movie is preserved, and it went on to play thirty-two weeks in Kansas City.”
Harvey knocked on doors all over town trying to find a studio partner to share the costs. He recalls, “I said, ‘I would love your help.’ They said, ‘You’re crazy to even release this movie.’ ” It was impossible at that time for an indie distributor like Miramax to start a dialogue with the studios. “When you’re talking to Universal or Paramount, and they were doing $40 million on a weekend, and you said, ‘I just did $2 million on Pelle the Conqueror in fourteen, sixteen weeks,’ they think you’re retarded,” says Jack Foley, VP of distribution in the mid-1990s, who came from MGM. “It just demonstrated the obdurate, incapacitating, heedless, ineffective thinking that goes on in the major studios. Their attitude was, ‘I’m more powerful than you, my cock is bigger than yours.’ ” In Harvey, however, they’d met a cock they couldn’t elbow off the walk. He says, “It pissed me off, and that anger fueled my belief in the film even further.”
The MPAA slapped Scandal with an X rating in the spring of 1989, demanding a two-second excision from the orgy scene. An X rating was bad for business because most newspapers would not advertise it. Nor would video retailers like the family-fixated Blockbuster megachain stock the tapes. But the board was just playing into Harvey’s hands, because by the time he caved, the fight had generated a bounty of free publicity. Since SPOB, Harvey’s strategy was always the same: come in as an X, make as much noise as possible, and go out as an R. In this case, he substitute
d an outtake that showed, according to Woolley, “Christine gazing gooey-eyed at a naked black man in place of a bit of dry humping.”
Neither of the Weinsteins had bothered to show up at Park City that year. Mormons? Skiing? It wasn’t their scene. But after the festival, Miramax went after both sex, lies and True Romance. The brothers screened Soderbergh’s film at Magno on 49th Street and Seventh Avenue, in New York. They loved it. If there was anything they could understand, it was duplicity.
In those days, Miramax was small enough to be free of the hierarchical pecking order that characterizes most companies. It was the brothers and then everybody else. Each employee, no matter what the title—vice president of this or that—was essentially an assistant and could easily find him or herself licking envelopes, answering the phone, or taking notes at a meeting. Titles were merely ego candy meant to stand in for decent salaries. By the same token, the Weinsteins threw their babies into the deep end and let them sink or swim. Lowly assistants or even interns could be invited to screenings and canvassed for their reactions to a movie the brothers were thinking of acquiring. This was flattering and fun for some but an ordeal for others, since the process often took the form of a police interrogation. You couldn’t get away with yessing them, because if you just said, “Yes, Harvey, yes, Bob,” they thought you were stupid or not to be trusted, and in either case didn’t want you around. If they suspected you were afraid to say something, they’d just push and push and push, intimidate you until you blurted it out. Then they made you feel like an idiot if you didn’t agree with them. One or both would always say, “That’s a stupid answer. I can do better than that. I can do your job and my job.” Although they prided themselves on being truth sayers, the brothers were surprisingly thin skinned. As former acquisitions executive Mark Tusk puts it, “It was easier to say, ‘Yeah, Harvey, that’s a great idea,’ than to say ‘No,’ so the people who worked around him ended up being yes men.”
When the lights came on, Harvey said, “Whaddya think?” There was total silence. “Whaddya think?” One brave soul said, “I really liked it.” Harvey bore in, “Whaddya like about it? What exactly?”
“I just liked—”
“Be specific, tell me, tell me.”
“I liked the ending.”
“Whaddya like about the ending? Did you like the whole ending?” And on and on. Bob in particular was hot for sex, lies. When it was his turn to ask, “Whaddya think?” several people chimed in with opinions about how the critics might react. Bob interrupted and said, “Don’t tell me what I just saw, what’ll it gross? Whaddya think of that title? Do you think we should keep it?” Somebody demurred. He exclaimed, “Whaddya crazy? That’s the best title I’ve ever heard. That title alone will sell the movie.” From a marketing point of view, just the fact that it contained the word “sex” was golden. Continues Tusk, “At that point it was pedal to the metal to get the film. Cover every angle, be as aggressive as possible.”
Both Weinsteins were outstanding negotiators. They had sure instincts about what to fight for and how to get it from the other side. Harvey was especially skilled at closing, constructing circumstances favorable to himself, making sure he had all the information relative to who was making the key decisions and why, figuring out who was against him and how to neutralize them. As David Linde, who did acquisitions and international sales in the mid-1990s puts it, “People will say all kinds of shit about you in this business, so you want to be there, you want to be physically within the process. If Miramax was in a negotiation and one of the producers was in L.A., then you sent your guy to L.A., and you sat in front of them, got in their face and made sure that they were not negotiating with somebody else. You got their home phone number and you called them and called them until you got the picture. If the brothers lost a movie, then they got very pissed off and very angry, and on occasion, vituperative.”
Larry Estes was impressed by Harvey. He recalls, “Everybody who called us said, ‘We saw the movie, we think it’s great, but we have to show it to our people.’ Harvey called from New York and said, ‘Can we meet tomorrow?’ The next day he was in L.A.” Like the other buyers, Harvey and his entourage made a pilgrimage to the RCA/Columbia conference room. He was on his best behavior, polite, dressed in a suit, although he visibly chafed at the no-smoking rule. “Harvey had three posters ready and some ads, mounted on boards, with translucent covers,” Estes recalls. “He’d done the marketing work. They were charged up.” Harvey told him and producer Bobby Newmyer, “I’m not going back to New York until I have this movie,” and he promised to best anybody else’s bid by $100,000. Says Newmyer, “At that time, they were rated fourth or fifth among distributors. We had a feeling that they were hungrier.”
All the other buyers badmouthed Miramax, called Harvey and Bob every name in the book, implied that Miramax would be out of business by the end of the year. Recalls John Pierson, “They were pointing at Miramax going, ‘These guys are rock ’n’ roll crooks, and even if they don’t cheat you, they don’t know what they’re doing.’ ” Nancy Tenenbaum remembers that Estes and Newmyer “seemed a little nervous, based on their reputation. I brought up the idea, ‘What if we had someone there who’s representing us.’ ” She was thinking Ira Deutchman. Deutchman and Harvey were polar opposites. Deutchman was buttoned down, fiscally conservative, and principled to a fault. He wouldn’t spend a dime unless he knew he could get it back. He explains, “There was paranoia about Miramax. They had a reputation for recutting and feeling like they knew best what the final form of the film should be. Filmmakers were shying away from their crassness, how they promoted films inappropriately, leading people to believe that the film was something that it wasn’t. Soderbergh was particularly sensitive about that with sex, lies, because of the title. My job was to make sure that Harvey didn’t dump the movie or, conversely, didn’t go overboard.”
Newmyer and his attorney, Linda Lichter, decided to call Harvey’s bluff, if bluff it was, to see how badly he wanted the picture. They drew up a list of seven demands. Recalls Estes, “It was one of those dream situations, like, ‘OK what do we want? We want $1 million in advance.’ Harvey said, ‘OK.’ ‘We want $1 million for P&A.’5 ‘OK.’ ‘We want you to hire Ira as the marketing consultant, and you have to pay for it.’ ‘OK.’ We went through the whole list and eventually, when the guy keeps saying ‘OK,’ he’s going to say, ‘So we have a deal now?’ So I said, ‘I have to run it by the boss but—we have a deal!’ ”
Still, the sex, lies gang hemmed Miramax in with conditions. Says Tenenbaum, “Estes insisted that Miramax pay the advance upfront and put the money into an escrow account so we were assured we’d get it. We said they had to take the movie as is. There wasn’t going to be any additional cutting.” Miramax agreed. Estes was thrilled. “At the time $1 million just for theatrical and television on a film that you couldn’t have video rights to was unheard of, plus a million dollars on top of that for P&A, basically a $2 million deal for theatrical only. None of the independent companies we talked to was aggressive enough to say, ‘Tell me what you want, I want to make this deal.’ Everybody else was just blah blah blah. And I really felt more comfortable with Ira being involved to tattle on them.” The Weinsteins estimated that sex, lies would make between $5 and $10 million. Soderbergh was floored. “The whole thing made me uncomfortable,” he recalls. “I thought, These guys are out of their fucking minds. People went, ‘Jesus Christ! What am I missing here? What’s the catch?’ I guess the catch was they saw a way to do it.” Says Mark Lipsky, “They probably did overpay, but they had to because nobody wanted to give them movies. In their minds, they were being extremely liberal, giving the filmmakers large advances which they were putting in their pockets, and in addition the brothers were driving the competition away. They were getting what they wanted.” Adds David Steinberg, a former Miramax attorney, “The perception within the acquisition community was the reason Miramax had to pay bigger advances than anybody else was the filmmakers’ per
ception that they wouldn’t pay you the back end.” 6 Indeed, it was his impression that the company’s practice was “to pay them as little as possible and only when they had to.”
In any event, the other bidders were stunned. Recalls New Line’s Janet Grillo, “Hearing that Harvey was offering a million, I thought, That’s ridiculous. It can’t possibly be true. When we heard it was true, I was just in a state of shock, and thought, Let him be an idiot and lose his money. He’s either just destroyed his company, or he knows something that we don’t.”
It turned out, of course, that Miramax did know something that New Line, or anyone else, didn’t. “It was so audacious of him to do that, because it changed everything,” continues Grillo. “We all knew what films were coming on the market, and we would queue up politely, take the producers’ reps out to lunch, go to the screenings with everyone else, have coffee afterwards—until Harvey came along. He didn’t have manners.” Harvey just wasn’t about to sit in the back of the classroom politely raising his hand in the air until he was called on. Adds Tony Safford, “Up until then, companies tended to sit back and wait and see what showed up on their fax machine. That kind of extremely aggressive approach to finding, getting, negotiating materials changed the business.” One day, in a screening at the Toronto film festival, Margie Skouras found herself sitting on the floor because the room was packed. She recalls, “I looked around, and who’s sitting next to me but Harvey. On the floor! Tom Skouras would never sit on the floor. Sam Goldwyn would never sit on the floor. They wouldn’t even wait in line! That was the first time I realized that we were going to have trouble competing with Harvey and Bob.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 10
