The WASPs thought the Jews had it easier. The Jews thought the brothers treated the WASPs better. Says John Schmidt, who was CFO in the early 1990s, “They were equal opportunity abusers. If they wanted to pound on someone, it didn’t matter what race, creed, ethnic origin, or color they were. It was lights out!” But there is general agreement that the brothers were tougher on male employees. “I always felt sorrier for the men, because without it even having to be over an issue, with men Harvey would get like a dog, that moment right before it actually bites,” recalls Brantley. “He would test them all the time. He just wanted you to know he was the big guy.” To a degree, Harvey and Bob indulged employees whose expertise fell in areas they didn’t know anything about. If, on the other hand, you had the misfortune to work in marketing, which Harvey considered his backyard, you were doomed to be micromanaged, second-guessed, and carpet bombed with criticism. Worse, you were spending their money. If you were a male in marketing, you were at ground zero, and you might as well pack it in. Once, angered by the poor placement of an ad in The New York Times, Harvey roared at Dinerstein, “I’m gonna fuckin’ throw you outta that window, right now.”
Far from L.A., the heart of the industry, the staff was beached in New York, too intimidated to socialize with their peers in other companies. Many were so emotionally abused—their personalities deconstructed and then reconstituted in the image of Harvey and Bob—that no matter what the brothers dished out, they went along with it. Harvey was fond of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle that he regarded, he always said, as the motto of Miramax, namely, “There is no reason goodness cannot triumph over evil, so long as the angels are as organized as the Mafia.” And indeed, Miramax was organized like the mob. Explains Brantley, “Your job was to do their bidding, to be as loyal as the day is long.” The Miramaxers would do whatever they were told. On one occasion, a staffer had made some mistake or other, and Harvey told him, in front of a room full of people, “Michael, see that balcony over there? Take five steps towards that balcony.” He actually took the five steps, although when his boss followed up with, “Michael, now jump off!” he had the sense not to. Those who did manage to leave often came back. Perhaps it was the Stockholm syndrome that bound the staff to the Weinsteins. Or maybe it was cult behavior, Moonies or zombies in thrall to Jim Jones. If Harvey told them to drink the Kool-Aid, they would do it.
In 1990, Miramax would release a disturbing British gangster film called The Krays, directed by Peter Medak, based on the true story of two preter-naturally brutish brothers who dominated the British underworld during the 1950s and 1960s. They were suckled by an adoring but controlling mother. The likeness was too close to be ignored. Behind their backs, wise-ass staffers referred to the Weinsteins as “the Krays.” Or, a variant, “the Kray-zies.”
Still, Miramax was an exciting place to be. Says Rice, articulating a sentiment so often expressed by ex-staff that it seems like a consensus, “People hate working there, but they love what Miramax stands for, they love the magic they created in the independent film world. It’s a very intoxicating feeling, and to be associated with that is addictive, so you found a way to turn a blind eye to how they did it, and to the people who became casualties along the way.” Adds Foley, “They were nuclear in their energy and in their anger, even in their malevolence, but to be out there with them, that was the best.”
THE MANAGEMENT CRISIS that afflicted Sundance throughout the 1980s was bad enough, but there were other problems that were even more serious. Throughout the decade, Redford had been unhappy with the quality of the projects coming into the labs. Explains Sterling Van Wagenen, “Bob was constantly critical of the selection process. He felt American films were getting worse and worse, especially in relation to what was happening in Australia and Germany.” The promise of production might be first, a way of luring better projects into the labs, and second, of nudging them in a more commercial direction. But Redford feared that production would corrupt the Sundance process, turn it into a snakepit of competition and backbiting. Moreover, production is expensive. The institute would have to raise more money or involve itself in dicey alliances with the studios—or both. Van Wagenen continues, “Bob said, ‘Don’t get involved.’ His view was that by getting entangled with the studios we would be making a pact with the devil.” Eventually, Redford changed his mind. He recalls, “I’d heard filmmakers say, ‘I need money.’ So I thought, Maybe if we put more emphasis on the commercial aspect for awhile, give them some incentive to get their picture made, that would allow us to go in and hammer them and make it more commercial.”
But, as would immediately become apparent, there was one big problem: the idealistic filmmakers themselves, for whom “commercial” was a dirty word. The Production Assistance Fund was an accident waiting to happen, and it did happen in 1984. Desert Bloom was a girl’s coming of age story set in Las Vegas against a background of the A-bomb tests of the 1950s. It was one of the best films to come out of Sundance in those years, and although it slipped into oblivion after a limited release in 1986, many thought Jon Voight should have been nominated for an Oscar for his role as the abusive father. The script was written by Eugene Corr, who was set to direct, and Linda Remy, on whose life it was loosely based. At the time, she was involved with Corr.
Remy and Corr went to the June lab in 1983. “In the beginning, Sundance was wonderful,” Remy recalls. “They opened doors for us. We talked to the top cinematographers, set designers, costume designers. We were the flavor of the week.” Sundance helped set the project up at TriStar. But it didn’t take long for things to get ugly. As Safford puts it, “Redford’s name attached would guarantee funding, but then he would meddle from beginning to end.” Continues Remy, “We could interview everyone we wanted, as long as we went with their choices. [If we didn’t] they would pull back their support. Sterling said, ‘Trust me.’ I said, ‘But you’re asking us to jump off a cliff.’ He said, ‘But I’ll be there with you.’ In the end, nobody jumped off but me and Gene.”
By that time, Desert Bloom had moved over to (Johnny) Carson Pictures, and the production degenerated into a pitched battle among Corr and Remy, on the one hand, Sundance, and Carson president Richard Fischoff on the other—over locations, casting, editing, you name it. The crowning blow came when, says Remy, “Redford took over the film from Gene and locked him out of the editing room. It was worse than a studio. I thought Sundance would protect us. I was utterly naive. Redford hated our film. He would have liked something slicker, glossier.”
From the other side of the desk, Fischoff, who denies that Corr was locked out of the editing room, adds, “It might have worked if only Sundance had honored its commitment to help Gene with the production, but it didn’t. Redford never came to the set and never reassured the actors, who had taken pay cuts because of him, put themselves in the hands of an inexperienced director because of him. Instead, he went to work on Out of Africa. We wanted to make this film for the right reasons, not because we thought we were making a killing. The moral is, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ ”
Safford says Redford tried to have Desert Bloom pulled from the 1986 festival after it was accepted. When Safford threatened to resign, Redford backed down, although he refused to go to the premiere.
Desert Bloom was by no means the only film Redford disappeared on. Animal Behavior was a romantic comedy directed by Jenny Bowen and produced by Kjehl Rasmussen. Rasmussen understood that it had been developed at Wildwood for Redford to star in and had gone through the lab, but Redford decided he was too old to do it. “Our investors were putting up $3.5 million in cash to finance the film,” he says. “Our concern was, We love the script and we have a great cast, but we have a first time director. Redford had dinner with the investors and said, ‘She’s great, I love her, and I’m here, I’ll be standing behind it, if you have any problems, I’ll be a guiding light.’ We moved forward on his representation, and then of course he went off and made Out of Afric
a. When we had problems, he was not there to help.”
If production was supposed to be the carrot that would induce filmmakers to make more commercial choices, it was not working. Corr and Remy, like many other indies of their generation, had little investment in careers; fighting for their artistic vision was more important. As Van Wagenen puts it, “The problem was, we had been dealing with idealistic filmmakers who had no interest in accessing the studio system. I began to search for people who were looking to work within it.”
Sundance did search for people who were looking to work inside the system, but it paid a price. “The institute has really missed the boat,” concluded Safford in 1990. “The kinds of filmmakers Sundance tends to attract fall into the ‘mushy middle.’ Sundance hasn’t censored political stuff, but it has censored stylistic stuff. The projects have all been very conservative.” It was becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that the stars of the indie movement who emerged in the mid-1980s—Spike Lee, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, the Coen brothers, and David Lynch—had no use for Sundance and never participated in the labs. Some of those who did, skinny and pale New Yorkers plucked from their railroad flats to find themselves gulping thin mountain air and blinking in the bright Utah sun, complained they were being browbeaten into making Hollywood movies by the Oscar-winning resource people. Tom DiCillo, who had shot Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise and would go on to make his best film, the razor-sharp, wickedly on-target Living in Oblivion several years later, went in 1989 with the script for what would become his first feature, Johnny Suede. “It was helpful to take a scene, shoot it on video, work with actors and then look at it,” he says. “It’s something you never get a chance to do on an independent film. But it was the first time I heard, ‘Plot point A does not intersect with plot point B at the right page.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, what is a plot point?’ Everyone was saying to me, ‘This is not a screenplay.’ It was insane, destructive, and negative. It was, This is how you get to Hollywood. I never had any interest in doing that. It really pissed me off.”
“Independents” had once been an umbrella term for filmmakers and companies outside the studio system that made all sorts of films, from art to porn. Sundance built a firewall between art films and the rest, appropriated the term “independents” for itself, and dismissed the others as junk. But in reality, the festival was schizophrenic. Safford, bored with programming the competition, had turned it over to his protégé, Alberto Garcia, a young, former volunteer driver who wore granny glasses and his hair in a pony tail, while he devoted himself to mounting tributes to just the kind of déclassé schlockmeisters Redford didn’t get and didn’t much like, such as Sam Fuller. Redford’s distaste for the pulpy, tabloid underbelly of mass culture was probably a function of his own insecurities. A college drop-out (he had gone to the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship), he suffered from the intellectual anxieties of the undereducated and consequently sought the imprimatur of literary or museum culture, which is why so many of the films he directed himself (A River Runs Through It, The Horse Whisperer, and The Legend of Bagger Vance), with their lacquered veneer of exquisite pictorial beauty, are as lifeless as insects preserved in amber.
Redford’s tilt toward Native American and minority projects may have won points for him with People for the American Way, but it was not in and of itself a recipe for exciting filmmaking. Given the sorry spectacle that passed for Hollywood filmmaking at that time, Redford, peering down from his aerie in the clouds, could not have been blamed entirely for turning his back on genre films of all sorts—cops and robbers, vampires and werewolves, time and space travelers, visitors from Mars in their flying saucers, G.I.s and Asian guerrillas, narcs and inner city drug traffickers, South American drug lords, gross teenagers, their acne, and their dating problems. The only trouble was, his unwritten prohibitions covered a vast territory, and when all was said and done, there wasn’t a whole lot of ground left on which to plant your flag if you wanted to make indie films with the institute’s help. As Michelle Satter, who was director of the feature film program, admitted at the time, “There was a mandate to work with regional, human stories, Americana, but there aren’t that many really unique stories in any given category. We began to support too many mediocre projects.”
SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE went to Cannes in May. Harvey had been to Cannes before, of course, but he still impressed publicist Mark Urman, whom the brothers hired to promote the company there, as a rube. Urman recalls that to save money, “They literally brought their own fax machine, plugged it into the wall, and it blew up, because they didn’t realize that it was a different electric current in France.” Still, he was impressed by “their innate sense, from the begining, that there was no such thing as a small film. You could make a film as big as you wanted it to be, or you could try.”
Brantley was the minder Harvey had assigned to Steven Soderbergh, his skittish young director. They shared a southern background. She first met him at a dinner Miramax threw for him and the cast. She recalls, “My impression of him when I first met him was of an incredibly nice, self-deprecating person. None of this stuff was happening to him. Here he was the toast of the town, but we were being really southern and making jokes with each other, like, ‘We’re in Cayunnes.’ He had a healthy perspective on all that stuff. His Eeyoreness kept him sane.” The two of them hit it off and it seemed like they might be on the edge of a romance.
Also in competition in 1989 was Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a powerful exploration of race relations in an urban neighborhood on the verge of insurrection that ends with the character played by Lee himself heaving a trash can through the window of a pizza parlor owned by Sal (Danny Aiello). Do the Right Thing was originally set up at Paramount. “Paramount wanted me to change the ending,” the director recalls. “They thought it was too down, not enough hope, they wanted Mookie and Sal to join hands and sing ‘We Are the World’ or some shit like that. We weren’t doin’ it.” Paramount dropped the picture, and Lee took it to Universal, at that time run by Tom Pollock. Lee continues, “Tom said, ‘Spike, I’m not gonna mess with your content. You got $6.5 million, you got final cut, do what you wanna do,’ and he let me run with it.” The result was Lee’s finest picture. Soderbergh worried that Lee would dismiss sex, lies as a “white-plight” movie, but he claimed to like it. Wim Wenders, still riding the success of Wings of Desire, chaired the jury.
The awards ceremony was held on May 23, in the Palais. Harvey wouldn’t let Brantley sit next to Soderbergh and relegated her to a lesser seat, farther back. Soderbergh thought Do the Right Thing would walk away with the top prize, the Palme d’Or. But as he and the Weinsteins strode down the aisle, they passed the Do the Right Thing gang and noticed that they looked glum. They had already been told that they had won nothing. Festival President Gilles Jacob advised Harvey that he was going to have a “good night.” Soderbergh had already won the International Critics Prize and was expecting to win the award for new directors, the Camera d’Or. Once seated, and so nervous he was almost insensible, he heard James Spader’s name announced. Spader had already left Cannes, and the young director rose to accept the acting award for him from Sally Field. Then he walked off stage where he figured he would watch the remainder of the proceedings, but he was hustled back to his seat in time to see Wenders getting ready to bestow the Palme d’Or. As he made his remarks about “a film by a young filmmaker,” Soderbergh tried to connect the dots with the other entries. Suddenly, the words “sex, lies, and videotape” escaped Wenders’s lips. More, he praised the film extravagantly, saying, “[This movie gives] us confidence in the future of cinema.” Soderbergh recalled, “It’s like a door opened and every sound in the world came out and I’m on my feet again, and my heartbeat is throbbing in my surely red ears. This time Jane Fonda hands me the Palme d’Or, and I stand there for a moment, waiting for the applause to stop and trying to figure out what to say and trying not to fall apart. I looked out and said ‘Well
, I guess it’s all downhill from here.’ ” Later, he said it was as if a fairy had waved a wand and said, “You’re John Lennon for three hours.” When the ceremony was over, Soderbergh, surrounded by well-wishers and still in a daze, slowly made his way out of the Palais. He left the Palme d’Or under his seat.
Spike Lee was vocal about his disappointment. He apparently was told that Wenders had said there were no heroes in Do the Right Thing. He replied that he had a Louisville Slugger with Wenders name on it, and added, referring to Spader’s self-abusing character, “What’s so heroic about a guy taping women?” In fact, the triumph of sex, lies over Do the Right Thing ratified the turn away from the angry, topical strain of the indie movement that had its roots in the 1960s and 1970s toward the milder aesthetic of the slacker era.
Soderbergh returned to L.A. to find that the squabbling over his next film had intensified. Redford had given Barbara Maltby the go-ahead on King of the Hill. He would executive produce, with Maltby, Ron Yerxa, and Albert Berger producing. But Soderbergh met with producer Mark Johnson and writer Lem Dobbs. They made a handshake deal to do Kafka together. Redford continued to romance the young director, inviting him to a get-to-know-you meeting. The actor was late as usual, but Soderbergh was so overcome he barely noticed. He memorialized the occasion in his journal, writing of Redford, “He’s extremely smart and very candid, and I think we spent as much time talking about non-film related issues as we did about business. . . . We talked about King of the Hill, and he said he was very enthused about the project and I left thinking that the time had gone by very quickly.” Soderbergh basked in the glow of Redford’s attention. He knew nothing about the actor’s checkered relationship with independents.
“Both Redford and Pollack were really competing for Steve’s next movie,” recalls Newmyer. Redford seemed irritated that his pal Pollack was muddying the waters. He had always said, “This is not Robert Redford’s Sundance,” but now he was acting as if it were, and he was merely exercising his royal prerogative. According to a source close to Redford, he said, “What the hell’s going on here? Why does Sydney have a deal with Steven, and we don’t? It’s my festival.”
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