SCANDAL OPENED on April 28, 1989. As was his custom, Dan Talbot insisted on exclusivity (“clearance”) over the entire city for his Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side, until the picture had played for a number of weeks. But Scandal was such a draw that it enabled Marty Zeidman to break Talbot’s monopoly and play three runs in Manhattan—on the Upper West Side, the East Side, and Greenwich Village, tripling the gross. “With Scandal I realized you could start playing upscale commercial movie theaters with these films,” instead of just the art houses, he says. “When I first got there, the playdates for all the films they were working on [fit on] a chalk board. That’s how few films they had, and they were dealing with [no more than] 10 or 15 prints of each movie, nationally. We probably got onto a few hundred screens with Scandal. That doesn’t sound like a lot, compared to today, but there weren’t the number of screens that there are now.” As a result of Marty Zeidman’s aggressiveness, Scandal grossed $8.8 million in the U.S.
With Scandal up and running, Zeidman cut a new deal that allowed him to open a Miramax office in L.A. He became the envy of everyone in the New York office. As Mark Lipsky puts it, “Nobody wanted to be in the same state, much less the same office building with Harvey and Bob. He was the first to put an entire continent between himself and them.”
Miramax had pulled itself back from the brink. The 56th Street apartment was bursting at the seams, and in the late 1980s, Miramax moved to 18 E. 48th Street, between Madison and Fifth, a dank, dark, midblock building. When you exited the elevator on the sixteenth floor, the office was on the right, half a floor, but already full, even as they were still moving in, a rabbit warren of tiny spaces, with chilly fluorescent lights, drop ceilings, few windows, and walls that were so pitted and scarred it looked like they’d taken a couple of barrels of bird shot. It was only a little more roomy than the between-the-floors space occupied by John Cusack in Being John Malkovich. The carpet buckled in one place, tripping people up as they started down a corridor maybe 30 feet long and 12 feet wide and so choked with desks that Deutchman wondered how Harvey could thread his bulk past them to reach his office at the far end. Bob and Harvey’s area was hung with production stills and posters from The Burning and Playing for Keeps. Ed Glass used to visit a dentist in the same building. “I’d go in there, and it was either my dentist or Harvey and Bob,” he recalls. “I don’t know which one was more painful. They were very intense. It was like getting hit by a ten-ton truck that kept going forward and backing up on top of you.”
Once, the elevators broke down, and Harvey had to walk up the stairs. Says one staffer, “He was huffing and puffing so hard that we thought he was going to die then and there.” Harvey’s type A personality, lack of sleep, chain-smoking, and diet from hell, along with the sheer poundage he was lugging around made him a coronary waiting to happen. Periodically, Miriam, the brothers’ elfin mother, would drop by with rugulah. Says Lipsky, “Bob sniped at her. They’d keep her waiting, sometimes as much as an hour, then not show up, or if they did, they’d cut her short—‘Your time’s up.’ It was, ‘Just give out the rugulah!’ ”
Miriam was so sweet, “you couldn’t imagine these two guys came out of her and were raised by her,” observes one former employee. The brothers’ relationship with her and their father was complicated. According to childhood friend Alan Brewer, Miriam was a “demanding, aggressive, pushy Jewish mother.” When they were kids, she was in the habit of making invidious comparisons between her sons and the other kids in the neighborhood along the lines of, “How come David got an A when you didn’t?” or “Oh, you didn’t have time to do your homework? How come Mikey had time?” Harvey used to call her “Mama Portnoy.” The brothers grew up in a development called Elechester, built by the electrician’s union, next door to Queens College. Brewer, who first met Harvey in 1964 in Campbell Junior High School 218, in Kew Gardens, is of the opinion that Miriam’s relentless nudging was the goad that eventually flowered in Harvey’s competitiveness. With some jocularity, Brewer observed, referring to Dream-Works’s Best Picture Oscars in the late 1990s, “I could see her calling him up, saying, ‘Those DreamWorks people, what makes them better than you? Stevie Spielberg’s mother, maybe she did a better job? You coulda done it if you pushed a little harder.’ It motivated him, challenged him to prove, ‘I am the best, I am the king.’ ”
Their father, Max, was a diamond cutter who worked in Manhattan’s diamond district. Says Steve Earnhart, who worked in post-production in those years, “There must have been cycles of abuse and love. The abuse became the love. Because a lot of times he only bawled you out if he really cared about you.” But to the boys’ friends, Miriam appeared to be the one who wore the pants in the family; she barked out the orders, browbeat her husband. When the boys got together with Max, it was “Ach, your mother, don’t worry about that.” There was a certain amount of disdain for Miriam and, according to Brewer, deep down the boys regarded Max as the cool one. He admitted he had made mistakes, and used the saga of his own disappointments to motivate them. Again, according to Brewer, the lesson they learned at the paternal knee was, “Don’t screw up like I did. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it, don’t let anyone get in your way, and if they do, fuck ’em”—words the boys apparently took to heart. The other lesson they took to heart was that it was them against the world.
Max served in World War II, posted in Cairo, and when the hostilities ended, he remained in the area and worked with the Zionist underground in Palestine. Growing up, Harvey tore through the novels of Leon Uris. The Holocaust wisdom stereotyped Jews as victims, filing into cattle cars with nary a murmur. This mortified him. The Jews he identified with were the ones who drove the British out of Palestine, beat back a larger army of Arabs, and founded the State of Israel. He once told the New York Times, “Instead of growing up to be a professor, a lawyer, or a doctor, you could grow up to be a soldier, you know, for your people. You can be tough. You can be John Wayne, too.” Likewise, he admired the movie adapted from Uris’s Exodus by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. “Trumbo’s great theme [was] the power of the few against the mighty,” he observed. “It’s a theme of my life: you can beat the mighty, you can go against the majors, and you can win.” As an adult, he liked to say, “I’m not the kind of Jew who marches politely off to the gas chamber. I’m the kind of Jew who says, I’m gonna track you down and kill you, you SS fuck—and your family.” Perhaps the best glosses on the Weinsteins, metaphorically speaking, are Ang Lee’s The Hulk, and Rich Cohen’s lyrical ode to New York’s Jewish gangsters, Tough Jews. More Meyer Lanskys than Woody Allens, had the Weinsteins been born seventy-five years earlier, they might have been found running numbers on Hester Street, bootlegging whiskey, or sitting across a card table from Louis Lepke, the head of Murder Incorporated.
The success of Scandal and the new digs did little to improve the brothers’ dispositions. Both had volcanic tempers. They were wizards of abuse, excelling in the exotic art of public humiliation, lashing staffers in front of their peers. Says Stuart Burkin, who started in post-production in 1991, “Miramax ran on fear. They’re intimidating, they shout a lot, they foam at the mouth.” And Amy Hart, who worked at Miramax as a marketing coordinator for three years, “Anything anybody ever says about them being monsters is true.”
Finesse was never part of Harvey’s arsenal. He tore phones out of walls and hurled them. He slammed doors and overturned tables. Almost anything within reach could become a weapon—ashtrays, books, and tapes, the framed family photographs sitting on his desk that he’d heave at some hapless executive and watch as they hit the wall, exploding in a shower of glass, because the reality was, they rarely, if ever, hit their targets. It was theater—of cruelty. The joke was, get in the way, so you could settle out and be paid to leave. Recalls Hart, “I’ve sat outside of that conference room and seen those glass walls just shudder with his profanity.” Staffers would occasionally expostulate with him, saying, “How can you treat people that way? You’ll ge
t more out of them if you treat them nicely, even if you don’t like them.” He’d sigh, and reply, “Yeah, I know, I know, but I can’t help myself. I try, but I just have a bad temper.”
If the brothers liked you, there was a familial aspect to life at Miramax. David Dinerstein lived on the Upper West Side at 101st Street and Amsterdam. There was a basketball court there, across the street from the projects. Bob was a pretty good basketball player for a short, Jewish guy, and every once in a while they’d get their car service to drive them uptown for a pickup game against the black kids from the neighborhood. Harvey preferred softball, but he wasn’t the athlete Bob was; he just enjoyed his times at bat, and then replaced himself with a pinch runner. He brought the designated hitter to softball. Bob would captain one squad, and Harvey the other, and the competition between them was fierce. Bob once offered a staffer coming up to bat $100 if she made it to first base. She did, and he paid her. He once fired one of his employees for dropping the ball—the unfortunate man looked like he was going to burst into tears—and rehired him half an inning later.
Still, even for the favored few, it was no picnic. Indeed, “The culture at Miramax was very fierce,” observes Mark Urman, a publicist who worked on and off with Miramax for years, and is now head of U.S. distribution at ThinkFilm. “It was all about aggression. Nothing was ever good enough, nothing was ever enough, period.” They liked Myrna Chagnard, who worked in the small L.A. office for five years. She was a hard woman with a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude, but eventually she too snapped. “I was having a nervous breakdown,” she recalls. “I couldn’t take the stress anymore, of having Bob say, ‘You’re fired!’ I would get my stuff and go down to my car, and then he would call me back. I started to lose weight, I was moody, depressed, it almost destroyed me. I went on workmen’s comp, and stayed out for three or four months. I was a basket case.” Recalls Eleanor Reznikoff, who was a publicist in the L.A. office in those days, “Working there was like having your feet held to the fire. Everyone had terrible stories, everyone was petrified of them. My first experience with Harvey was when he was flying out for a premiere. He would usually arrive the day of the screening, and he called from the plane, and said, ‘When my flight lands, if I don’t have twenty-five tickets in my hand, you’re fired!”
If they didn’t like you, life inside the Weinstein bunker could be hell. Large and burly, Jeff Rose looked like he’d been dipped in the Weinstein gene pool, and for a while he was a favorite, another third brother, even accompanying Harvey when he visited his grandmother, who was dying. (Rose waited in the car.) “In the end, there are no third brothers,” he says. One year at Cannes, in Harvey’s hotel suite, Rose continues, “we were in a staff meeting at 7 A.M., I think Harvey was in his towel, and he said something about some deal. I disagreed, and instead of saying, ‘Hey, you know what? We’re gonna do it my way because I’m the boss,’ he took a table, set for breakfast, and just tossed it on me.” From then on, Rose could do no right. Over the course of the next six months, he got thinner, more haggard, until he apparently had some sort of nervous breakdown. Rose refuses to comment, beyond saying, “He pushed me to the edge—I definitely looked over—and I left.”
Some people were just too nice to work there, and the Weinsteins tortured them. Like Harvey, Mark Silberman was a big bear of a man, but unlike Harvey, he was a gentle soul. It was St. Patrick’s Day in March 1988. The 48th Street office was so close to Fifth Avenue that it sounded like the marchers were parading right through the space. Suddenly, there was a loud commotion, so loud they assumed it was drunken revelers outside in the street. Recalls Lipsky, “There was very scary yelling, somebody screaming, ‘Call the police,’ and several minutes after that, Mark came into my office with a look that was sort of otherworldly. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.” There had been an incident. Soon after, without explanation, Silberman was gone. Perhaps it’s no accident that at the end of the 1990s it would be the Scream franchise that would drive the company, with its plot premise—victims serially picked off, one by one—an increasingly apt metaphor for life at Miramax.
Employees argued over which one was worse, Bob or Harvey. Says Paul Webster, who headed production in the mid-1990s, “Bob is the scary one, for me. Bob had a great fury inside him, a great anger.” Brantley agrees. “Bob scared me much more,” she says. “For the first three months I didn’t even walk into his office. The air in there was so weird.” Adds one person who knew them both in those days, “If you could consider Harvey as the light one, Bob was the dark one. I’ve never walked down death row, but that’s the feeling I got around Bob. He was spooky.” As Tina Brown is said to have quipped, years later, “Bob’s the one who hasn’t been house broken.”
But some people liked Bob better. In the view of former marketing executive Eamonn Bowles, “You don’t want to get Bob on a bad day. But he’s more of a mensch. Bob would flip out, he’d get all pissed off, but it would be, The guy’s got a reason.” Adds former marketing head Dennis Rice, “When it churned up inside of Bob it was all about business. It was nothing personal. He just doesn’t want to be fucked.”
For others, it was Harvey who made their stomachs turn, provoked that trip to the bathroom. He let you know that when he was out of control, he might do anything. Says Brantley, when Harvey got angry, “He would kind of puff up, like the barometric pressure had changed, so you’d think he was gonna explode. Sometimes he would explode. His face got really red, and his whole expression would go to stone. It wasn’t like he was gonna throw chairs, it was more you thought he was gonna go right for you, strangle you.”
Bowles continues, “I’m really susceptible to people trying to flatter me, and Harvey can be the most charming person you ever met in your life. I’d spend forty-five minutes with him, and think, Wow, what a great guy, and two minutes later he’d be the most fearsome person you ever met in your life. It’s scary as all hell.” And Lipsky, “When Harvey [lashes out], he wants to hurt people. He has moments of dementia where he really loses it—he gets so into whatever it is, he’s not thinking straight. There isn’t a woman in that office that wasn’t made to cry. Could be anything, even a marketing concept. Once I saw him so flummoxed and so bent out of shape about something that he was screaming at a woman, just berating her beyond belief, and calling her some man’s name—he didn’t even know who he was talking to. It’s weird with Harvey, because he does want to be the padrone, an old Hollywood mogul. But when he turns on you, it’s with venom. And it is personal.”
Harvey’s rages struck some Miramaxers as more calculated than spontaneous. Bowles continues, “He’s obviously got a really bad temper, but I do think there are instances where there’s a set up, get somebody into a room and pummel him verbally. He always tries to find out what makes people tick. What motivates them. He’ll poke a bunch of different areas to see if you’ll light up, and then use that.” Safford, who worked for Miramax in the mid-1990s, agrees, adding, “His emotions are completely calculated. I would tell people, ‘Don’t be put off by his anger, because it’s strategic. On the other hand, don’t be fooled by his compliments, because they’re equally strategic. But people were devastated by his attacks and fooled by his compliments.” Is Harvey a decent guy who can’t help himself? “I don’t think he’s a decent guy,” Safford continues. “I think he’s a bad guy who can’t help himself.”
The Weinsteins exploited their volatility, turned it into a good cop/bad cop routine that they used to keep the little people cowed and quivering. “They drove everybody crazy,” says Lipsky. “Their M.O. from the time I’ve known them, was to stomp on you, then help you up, brush you off, and apologize.” You could have produced a small film on the money Miramax must have spent on Harvey-didn’t-mean-it flowers. As Rice puts it, “Some days Harvey would verbally abuse you, and other days he would verbally stroke you, and treat you to baubles, a bonus to make amends, and the next thing you know, he had you. For me it was the analogy of a cat with a mouse. The mouse woul
d think it’s getting away, only for the cat to put its paw on its tail and stop it.” Says one source, “They were good and evil in one package. You wouldn’t know who was good and who was evil on any particular day. One of them would throw things, kick you out of the office, fire you. Then the other one will call you back, and say, ‘Oh, did he do that?’ as if he were trying to help you out. ‘My brother didn’t mean it. Come back.’ There was no winning.”
Some staffers thought that fighting back worked. According to Lipsky, “Harvey and Bob are the quintessential bullies. If you let them bully you, they will. If you stand up to them, just once, they won’t. But not a lot of people stand up to them.” He recalls incurring Bob’s wrath over a “horrible” Australian movie called The Quest (1986), with Henry Thomas: “I had promised [the producers] we would buy $10,000 of TV, because it was the only way we were going to get the movie. Two days before the movie opened, Bob came into my office and said, ‘Pull the TV.’ It was killing him that we were gonna spend that $10,000 when he knew the movie was gonna gross less than nothing. I said, ‘No. I made the commitment, and we’re gonna do it.’ Bob got in my face, very close, very intense, and he actually reached into a pencil cup on the desk and started pulling out pencils and breaking them. I started laughing, said, ‘Bob, what are you doing, man?’ He walked out of the office, never mentioned it again. And they never did the TV.”
But standing your ground or returning blow for blow could often make it worse, provoking the brothers to ratchet up the rage. “There’s a hesitancy to wave a red flag in front of Harvey, because he’ll just go apeshit, and he’ll do things irrationally to hurt you,” says Safford. Adds Bowles, “If you got on an emotional level with them, you were gonna lose, you were dead. They were gonna have much more combativeness than just about anybody.”
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