Cinema Paradiso was pared down—although marketing executive Russell Schwartz claimed Tornatore cut it himself—to two hours, still long, but not interminable. Cutting pictures for length, however offensive to filmmakers, made a certain amount of sense, especially when it was done with tact, sensitivity, and in conjunction with the director. But there was more. “Harvey used to say, our job was to listen to these films, even the British ones, with an American ear,” recalls Stuart Burkin. When the actors came in to dub their dialogue, “we’d ask them not to have such an overtly British accent.”
Boning foreign films into easily digested fillets, safe from the kinds of cultural idiosyncracies that might stick in the throats of American audiences made less sense; arguably, it is just those unfamiliar customs, linguistic usages, or behavioral tics that contribute to the sense of difference that makes foreign films foreign, windows onto unfamiliar worlds, and not just yet another mirror held up to ourselves. The last thing we want to do is stumble onto a McDonald’s in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Harvey Keitel trying to tease words out of the mute heroine of Jane Campion’s The Piano is, or should be, a paradigm of the relationship between American audiences and foreign films; we need to work at unlocking their secrets, and if we do, the best ones repay us with a bounty of pleasure. Besides, it is a slippery slope; the goal of big grosses all too easily tips the balance against preserving the integrity of the director’s vision. Once you unzip a film, changing this and altering that, it’s hard to know when to stop, and you all too easily end up at the bottom of the slope in the wreckage of those wonderful Hong Kong martial arts movies destroyed by dubbing that became Miramax staples. Harvey Weinstein insists, “We never tested the movies to change the movies.” But, explains Diana Tauder, who worked at Miramax in post-production for six years, from 1993 to 1999, “Miramax did market-research screenings, and then, based on what people thought of the film, we would go back and recut it. I understood that what I was doing might not have been the most ethical thing, but it was how this movie was going to make more money. And in my opinion, most of the time, it was going to be better.” By allowing audiences to play a creative role in filmmaking, however, Harvey was well down a road that led to the death of serious filmmaking—foreign films, indie films, art films, whatever—an arid desert where nothing grows save the TV networks with their lowest common denominator programming ruled by the Nielsen ratings. In short, Harvey was McMiramaxing foreign films.
Whatever the purpose, cutting for length or cutting for American eyes and ears was often a coercive procedure. As Burkin describes it, “We never put it like this, but we were saying [to the filmmaker], ‘You tell us how you think you can accomplish the goals that the Weinsteins are looking for.’ It went easier when they got it, because they knew that it was gonna happen anyway.”
Most of the young graduates Harvey hired had been schooled to respect the auteur. Even though they believed they were helping filmmakers by improving their films, they often had little stomach for their work. “It was not fun,” says Burkin. “Sometimes I thought I was cutting out the idiosyncracies that made the film what it was just to make it move quicker. I internalized that and had a lot of stomach pain all the time.” Burkin got an ulcer from the stress.
Diana Tauder felt the same way: “I just felt like it was taking someone’s baby and telling the parent, I’m gonna operate on it when they think it is perfectly fine. A lot of these people were really seasoned directors. They’d obviously made a work of art. Maybe embarrassed is the right word for what I felt. At the end of my career there, I realized that it wasn’t the right way for me to be creative, because I was being creative with someone else’s work.”
Harvey nearly got into a fistfight with Ismail Merchant, who had produced Mr. & Mrs. Bridge for his partner, James Ivory, to direct. The film, relatively expensive, starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and was based on two books by Evan Connell. It was produced by Cineplex Odeon. Miramax paid $4 million for it on the basis of the cast and the script, by Merchant/Ivory’s regular writer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. “I love Ruth,” Weinstein says. “She’s the great talent of the trio.” The filmmakers knew the brothers’ reputation, but according to the contract, Ivory had final cut, so they were confident that they were protected. Harvey and Bob visited the set in Kansas City and were effusive, saying, according to Merchant and Ivory, “This is so wonderful, we’re so happy to be associated with you,” blah, blah. Everything remained so wonderful until Miramax saw the film, and then everything wasn’t so wonderful any more.
Ivory had changed the ending, had Mrs. Bridge sitting in her car calling out, “Is anybody there?” while the snow fell silently around her. The script had ended on a more upbeat note, a flashback to their wedding. Says Merchant, “They thought it would be better that if Paul Newman comes, takes her in his arms and goes inside, with swelling music, so that the American audience feels satisfied.”
Neither Cinecom, nor any of Merchant/Ivory’s other distributors did test screenings, so when Miramax tested Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, the duo was appalled. Over the years, they had developed a high opinion of their own talents—not undeserved—and with A Room with a View on their résumé, they regarded themselves as well beyond the reach of preview cards and focus groups. Nevertheless, the brothers proceeded, testing Mr. & Mrs. Bridge at the Paris Theater, in New York. Recalls Weinstein, “It got a bad reaction, especially the ending. People gasped. Gasped!”
At a meeting with the filmmakers in the conference room at the Tribeca offices, Harvey insisted, “We have to make changes in the film.” Merchant, a tough veteran of the indie wars, was disinclined to be pushed around. He told them, “The changes are not possible to do. Here you have opportunity to distribute first rate movie, and if you don’t want, don’t distribute.” Ivory asked to see the cards from the test screening. He took one look and said, “This film’s intended for sophisticated audiences. This isn’t the kind of educated, upper East Side crowd you’re saying it is.”
“Why do you think that?” asked Harvey.
“Look at the penmanship. I can hardly read these, they’ve been scrawled by people who can barely write.” Harvey, raised in Queens, thought, Wow, this guy is making fun of his audience. He erupted: “God, that’s pretentious of you. Penmanship, goddamn it, you want fuckin’ penmanship, I’ll give you fuckin’ penmanship.” Recalled Ivory, “Harvey went mad. He started screaming, stamping around the table. I think they simply don’t like to be crossed. They feel a kind of power and grandeur, sort of bullies in the schoolyard.” After a flurry of “Fuck you’s,” Merchant leaped up from the table and said, “I’m taking film away from you. You do not deserve to distribute, Cineplex will pay you back your money.” Merchant challenged Harvey and Bob to fight him outside, down on the street, and stormed out, in the process swinging his attaché case against a glass partition, which shattered noisily. He recalls, “They didn’t come out, because obviously they thought that this very fiery Indian would completely—like Shiva’s sword would fall on their heads, and they would have only body and head—separated.”
Harvey demanded that they shorten the film; they refused. According to Ivory, Miramax “withheld the last payment of the money that they’d owed to us, and of course we needed that money to pay the lab and the recording studio, and the interest on the bank loan. Even though I had final cut, he thought if he held the money back, we might cave in. We told Paul what was happening, and Paul got on the phone to Harvey and said, ‘Lay off and pay ’em,’ so they did.” Merchant didn’t talk to Harvey for ten years.
Occasionally, the filmmakers complained to the press, which made Harvey crazy, because if it got around that he reworked films willy nilly, the kinds of directors he desperately needed in his stable would steer clear. Ivory, for example, still smarting from his treatment at Harvey’s hands, vented to Howard Feinstein, film editor of New York’s Village Voice. Feinstein assigned an article on the subject. When the Miramax co-chairman got wind of it, he became apoplec
tic, especially since the piece was slated to appear on the eve of a benefit for the American Film Institute’s National Center for Film and Video Preservation, sponsored by Miramax. According to Feinstein, Harvey called him at home on his unlisted phone number and threatened to send a film crew to his office to shoot him cutting one of his writer’s pieces. Feinstein remembers, “He got pretty nasty. The way I took it at the time was as a veiled threat to me. That I could be hurt. I don’t think he was stupid enough to actually say, ‘I’m gonna have you killed,’ but the tone was so nasty that I was quite frightened.” When the article, by Elliott Stein, appeared, it cited a half dozen films that Miramax had cut, including The Thin Blue Line, Pelle the Conqueror, Scandal, and The Little Thief. Although the origins of the sobriquet are obscure, Harvey henceforth became known as “Harvey Scissorhands.” Says Steve Woolley, “No one should be surprised at ‘Harvey Scissorhands,’ because he was always that way. Look at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. He took a big knife to two films, different directors, and cut them together into one. I don’t think Harvey for one minute sees it as being derogatory or negative, because he got results from doing it. ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ is a compliment.”
Often, however, Harvey merely got the worst of both worlds: he earned the enmity of the filmmakers and reaped bad press for making cuts, but he didn’t cut enough, because he either needed the directors to do publicity for their films or he wanted to work with them again, or both. Although determined, Harvey was conflicted about what he was doing. He’d worry, “Are we gonna piss ’em off? Is this stupid? Should I just let it go?” Sometimes, after a screening, he’d say, “You know what? I think I went too far. It’s missing something that my brother and I loved about this movie in the first place.” All in all, as Burkin puts it, “During my tenure, from 1991 to 1994, the films that did the best for us were the ones that we bought finished and never touched: sex, lies; My Left Foot; The Crying Game. Harvey really was a guy who loved movies, but he also loved money, and he also loved fame.”
Three
Risky Business
1990–1992
• How Miramax plunged into free fall, while Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon launched the “New Queer Cinema,” Quentin Tarantino unleashed his dogs on Sundance, and Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky gave birth to October.
“sex, lies, and videotape was like the first time you had sex. Everybody since then has been trying to recreate that moment, but it was an aberration.”
—TOM BERNARD, CO-PRESIDENT, SONY CLASSICS
One fine day in October 1990, Skouras Pictures’ Jeff Lipsky was walking along the bank of the river Thames, when the proverbial lightbulb went off, as though in a thought balloon over the head of a character in a comic strip, which is sort of what he looked like. Bald as a cue ball—he suffers from alopecia, the Lex Luthor disease, not a hair on his body—Lipsky has an angular face and wore black-framed Mr. McGoo glasses. He was fussy and retentive, intense and intimidating. In those days he had a weakness for the color purple, sometimes wearing purple clothes exclusively, down to shoes and socks. He had purple chairs in his office when he worked at Goldwyn. But he had a reputation for being a fiery partisan of indie films, as driven as anyone at Miramax, but unlike anyone at Miramax, a passionate defender of the artistic integrity of filmmakers. The license plate on his car read, MPAA-NOT.
At that time the head of the motion picture division at Skouras, Lipsky was in London to see Mike Leigh’s new film, as yet untitled. One of his triumphs at Skouras had been High Hopes, which he had picked up and made into a modest hit. It was the director’s first feature to secure North American distribution, and Lipsky’s campaign brought Leigh to the attention of U.S. critics, who applauded the film. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Lipsky was the architect of Leigh’s American career, turning the underappreciated British director into a medium-sized international star. Lipsky worshipped the ground Leigh walked on and had developed a rapport with the curmudgeonly director and his producer, Simon Channing-Williams, who protected him fiercely. Leigh kept inviting Lipsky over to London to see his film. Lipsky told his boss, Tom Skouras, “We have to keep up this relationship.” Skouras replied, “We’ll see, we’ll see.” Weeks passed, and Leigh called yet again, and still Skouras dragged his feet. Lipsky thought, Well, Tom may want to sever the relationship with Mike and Simon, but I don’t. He and his wife flew to London on their own dime and saw the film, which would come to be called Life Is Sweet. Over lunch Lipsky told the filmmakers, “This is a masterpiece—but we’re not going to buy this movie.” He explained the situation at Skouras. They encouraged him to start his own company, saying, “You have all this experience, you have all these connections, we’ll support your acquisition of the film.”
Lipsky and his wife flew back to L.A. the next morning. He walked into Skouras’s office and said, impetuously, “I resign.” At that point, Lipsky was a sixteen-year veteran of the business. But he knew he couldn’t go it alone. Lipsky had already had several conversations with Bingham Ray, who was likewise unhappy in his current job at Avenue, about the possibility of joining forces. Recalls Ray, “We were tired of working for other people, tired of people saying, ‘No, we can’t buy this film,’ and ‘Yes we can buy this film.’ I felt I was being held back. I wanted to be the guy.” Lipsky stalked out of Skouras’s office, retired to his own, and called his friend. He said, “I did it, I just resigned, I’m starting the company, I saw this great movie in England, that’s our first release, are you interested?” Ray took a deep breath and said, “Yeah.”
Like Lipsky, Ray, age 46, lived and breathed movies. The son of an engineer, Ray grew up in Scarsdale, a wealthy town in wealthy Westchester, just north of New York City. “I would come in from the suburbs wearing a button-down shirt to the Elgin, sit next to a guy in a raincoat,” he recalls. “My father would say, ‘You keep going to all these movies, you’re going to turn into a bum!’ ” Save for a couple of fugitive WASP genes, he had the DNA of a Jewish producer. He was short, profane, and volatile. He had a famously brief attention span, made snap judgments, was proud of, and trusted, his gut. If Lipsky had a passion for purple, Ray had his own sartorial idiosyncracies. His uniform, day in and day out, was a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, a blazer, topsiders, and a Mets cap. He was constitutionally unable to put on a tie. “Why ties?” he wonders, rhetorically. “They’re so stupid. There was this hockey coach, won Stanley Cups, who blew his nose on his tie. I was raised where you don’t blow your nose on your tie. But, why not? If you don’t have a handkerchief, it’s there. It’s handy.” Ray chainsmoked Marlboros, loved to drink, and was a real charmer, a great storyteller, expansive and flamboyant. Filmmakers loved him. He didn’t have much in the way of a firewall between thought and speech, was not in the habit of biting his tongue, which flicked over friends and foes alike, sharp and tart, and often got him into trouble. Like Lipsky he was blunt and confrontational. Someone once said of Ray, “If you locked Bingham up alone in a closet, he’d pick a fight with himself.”
Also like Lipsky, Ray had worked at most of the important indie companies, Island, New Yorker, Goldwyn, Alive, and Avenue. The upside of the Lipsky-Ray partnership was that neither man was in it for the money—they both carried into the 1990s the pure blue flame of passion that burned in the hearts of the young cinéastes in the 1970s and 1980s; they knew distribution and marketing inside out. The two men also shared a taste for darker, quirkier, more dangerous pictures than their competitors. Lipsky, for example, had acquired Alex Cox’s grim Sid and Nancy for Goldwyn. “Upbeat” and “life affirming” were dirty words in their lexicon, and they were willing to take risks on movies that few believed had a prayer at the box office. As Ray explains, “I always wanted us to be able to try things that were not necessarily commercially viable. I’m not some avant-gardist, I know the difference between something that’s truly experimental and something that’s wholly mainstream, but I’d like to think that somewhere in the middle is a comfort zone where there�
�s an audience. It might not be the largest, or the most lucrative, but for me the rewards there are the greatest.”
The downside was that they both knew distribution and marketing inside out, that is, instead of complementing each other, their skill sets overlapped. With their hefty egos, they would be two carp in a goldfish bowl. To the outside, they appeared to be fast friends, sharing a passion for the Mets. But if their skills were identical, their personalities were not. They were an odd couple, with Ray playing Oscar to Lipsky’s Felix. Lipsky was compulsive. Everything had to be in its place, just so. He got up at 5:00 A.M. and went to sleep early. Ray was just the opposite, slept late and stayed up late. Beyond that, he had spent a good chunk of his professional life in Lipsky’s shadow, and as time would show, he was ready for his place in the sun.
No one was making a killing distributing indie pictures in those days, and neither Lipsky nor Ray had any money of his own. On the first of March 1991, they began working out of Lipsky’s ranch-style house on Haseltine Avenue in Sherman Oaks. Every day, Ray made the long trip by car from Venice, where he lived, up the 405 to the San Fernando Valley, knocked on the door, and waited for Lipsky, who refused to give him a key, to let him in. His office was Lipsky’s dining room, his desk the dining room table. When he arrived, on his chair would be the morning’s “memos” “from: Jeff,” “to: Bingham,” re: this or that, even though the two men sat right next to each other. Ray wangled free office space from a friend at Republic Home Video but it was near the airport, that is, closer to his home, and Lipsky refused to budge. Says Ray, “Jeff is an extraordinary talent. He was involved in the distribution of dozens of successful films. That doesn’t happen by accident. But he’s dogmatic as the day is long. There was only one way to go about doing things, and that was Jeff’s way. There was only one time, and that was Jeff’s time. It had to be in Jeff’s house. It was Jeff’s fucking show. I was just along for the ride.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 14
