Working out of Lipsky’s home was hard on both of them. One Monday, Ray arrived to find that half the furniture was gone. He exclaimed, “What the fuck happened to the furniture?” Lipsky replied, “Oh, a friend of ours moved into town. We gave him half our tables and chairs.” A few days later he discovered that Lipsky’s wife had walked out, taking her share of the furniture with her. Lipsky was a tightly wrapped kind of guy to begin with, and the pressure was getting to him, expressing itself in hysterical symptoms. One time, recalls Ray, “Jeff came in, he was really agitated, had his hands over his eyes, and he was yelling, ‘I’m blind! I’m blind!’ He was knocking into shit, and I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ ‘I can’t see.’ And then of course, twenty minutes later, he was fine.” When Ray returned home from work that day, his wife asked, “How was your day, dear?” He replied, “Oh, Jeff went blind today!”
On another occasion, Lipsky and Ray were chatting up Bob Laemmle over lunch at a trendy Italian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. Laemmle, a bear of a man whose family had owned movie theaters since the beginning of time and had also founded Universal, was a major player in indie exhibition in L.A. and hence a key to the success of their new company. Lipsky and Ray were anxious to make a good impresson, “This is who we are, our first picture is Life Is Sweet,” and so on. But half way through the meal, Lipsky fell silent. “Jeff just stopped talking,” recalls Ray. “Stared at his plate. Bob and I were looking at each other like, ‘So, Jeff? You feel all right?’ Nothing. He wouldn’t explain his very odd behavior. Lunch wound down awkwardly. I was embarrassed.” Afterward, they climbed into Lipsky’s 1986 blue Thunderbird. “Jeff was driving like a bat out of hell, gripping the wheel, knuckles white. I felt like I was in The French Connection,” Ray continues. Unable to contain himself, he finally exploded, screaming, “What the fuck is wrong with you? How do you just sit there and say nothing for almost an hour? Bob Laemmle must think we’re two fucking losers, big time, you fucked everything up.” Lipsky’s head was getting redder and redder, a bell pepper. Squeezing out one word at a time, he said, “Right . . . now . . . I . . . am . . . bleeding . . . to death . . . internally.” Pausing for a breath, he continued, “I . . . was . . . ingesting glass . . . in that restaurant . . . that’s why I wasn’t . . . saying . . . anything. They put broken . . . glass in my food. And we’re driving to the emergency room at Cedars Sinai.” He showed Ray the “glass,” which he had brought with him to give to the doctors. Ray examined it, said, “Jeff, that’s not glass, that’s dried pasta, the edge of the lasagna.” They drove back over the hill into the Valley, and twenty-five minutes later, Lipsky was fine. “I’m going to be very kind,” Ray says. “I’m going to say he is a full-blown, driven eccentric, instead of just flat-out fucking crazy, which he is. Outta his fucking mind.” Madness, however, has never been an impediment to success in the movie businesss.
By 1990, the ground was littered with bankrupt distribution companies that had tripped blithely down the road to production. Lipsky and Ray pitched a company that would chastely foreswear making films. “We were not going to make the same mistake everybody else did, we were going to mind our knitting,” explains Lipsky. “There were people at the top who for the time being had deep pockets and were doing foolhardy things like making movies, and there were the bottom feeders who would never have the financial wherewithall to acquire any film they wanted. But the middle ground was missing, and that’s the niche we intended to fill.”
The two men were trying both to raise a half-million dollars for a one-off release of Life Is Sweet, and $7 million to capitalize their new company, which they called October, after Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film of the same name, and their birthdays, both in October. In the first case, they were successful; in the second they were not. Raising money in the movie business, it sometimes seems like all roads lead to the investment house of Allen & Co., and after a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing, Lipsky and Ray indeed found themselves knocking on that door, hats in hand. “I was never an entrepreneur before this, and I didn’t know Allen & Co. from shit,” says Lipsky. “They read the plan, said, ‘We think you’re real cute and everything, but you don’t have day-to-day entrepreneurial experience. Stay in touch, fellas.”
The few pennies Ray and Lipsky had scraped together were gone. They were running on fumes. With thirty years of experience between them, the two men had been confident that by Cannes they’d have rounded up the cash they needed. But Cannes came and went, and they had nothing to show for their efforts. One airless, summer afternoon, in this atmosphere of gloom, the phone rang at Lipsky’s home. It was Amir Malin, calling for Ray. Ray groaned inwardly. He had briefly worked at Cinecom, Deutchman and Malin’s company, years ago, before leaving for Goldwyn. Malin was not his favorite person.
Indeed, Malin did not seem to be anyone’s favorite person. His detractors blamed him—fairly or not—for forcing out his partners, Deutchman and John Ives, and riding a thriving company into the ground before himself being ousted by the new owner. At Cinecom, Malin was the inside man. He seemed content to stay in the shadows and proved to be something of a wizard at squeezing money out of ancillary deals. Says Sony Classics’ Michael Barker, “Amir was the first guy in the independent world to see the value of television and video, how ancillaries could drive you instead of theatrical. And how libraries are the value of your company.” But when someone else, namely, Deutchman, stole the spotlight, hobnobbing with filmmakers and getting the credit for the company’s success, Malin seemed, although he would never admit it, jealous, hurt, and angry. He couldn’t decide, in other words, if he were Bob or Harvey. He gave the impression of wanting to appear smaller than life, but inside he probably felt larger—Bob, with an inner Harvey struggling to get out.
Bart Walker, who was executive VP of Cinecom and is now an agent at ICM, explains, “I always considered Amir a good and decent person, and our business relationship has a personal quality. He is very smart, and I learned a lot from him. But a lot of our problems at the company stemmed from his inscrutability, which he cultivated. He could be an artist at making people feel uncomfortable—which is great in negotiating but a big problem in managing a small company.”
Among some former colleagues, Malin had the reputation for being something less than forthright. According to Deutchman, he was a “pathological liar. He lies even when it would be in his interest to tell the truth.” John Shestack, who worked for Malin years later as head of production at Artisan, says, “Basically, everybody who comes in contact with the guy regrets it. The truth is just one tool in his toolbox, only to be used occasionally, when it’s helpful to him. It would be little things, but over time they would aggregate. He would lie to make you feel bad. He would say, about a script, ‘I read it, I’m very disappointed in it, and if you can’t fix it, I’ll get somebody who can,’ when he hadn’t read it. Then later someone else would want to buy it, and he’d say, ‘No, we’re keeping it.’
“ ‘Why are we keeping it? I thought you didn’t like it.’
“ ‘No, I really like it, it’s the one movie I really want to make.’
“ ‘Here’s your e-mail where you said you hated it, it was really disappointing. So, which is it?’ You just wouldn’t get a response. He created an atmosphere of fear. It was like working in a den of sociopathic fibbers.” Shestack referred to him as “Malach Hamavet,” which means, in Hebrew, the Angel of Death.
Some filmmakers said they had trouble collecting what they believed was owed them. Cinecom’s big hit was Merchant/Ivory’s A Room with a View in 1985. The two filmmakers noticed, in Ivory’s words, that “the money that we ourselves personally earned because of our percentages in the film always came from Europe and England, never from the U.S.” Merchant chimes in, “When we called Cinecom’s accountant, he would have all kinds of excuses, that his uncle had died, someone else was very sick in the hospital, and so on. We said, ‘OK, we’ll send the auditors.’ ” When the film broke $20 million, they say Malin
sent them an expensive clock from Tiffany’s. According to them, he charged it to the budget of the film, so in effect, they paid for their own gift. They also say he charged several Armani suits, claiming that they were expenses he incurred when he attended the Oscar ceremony after the film had been nominated. One time the two filmmakers, flying to L.A., ran into Malin. There’s nothing like a commercial flight to make the economics of the film business crystal clear. Malin was in first class, and they were in coach. Merchant blurted out, semijoking, “I could kill you,” and he says now, “It’s the filmmakers’ money that finances everything they do. The distributors wear Armani suits and buy huge offices on the success of a film. But the businessmen who start these companies, they have no devotion to them. It’s how much money they can put in their pockets. And that’s what is Amir Malin. He completely wrecked that company, which had done so well.” Concludes Ivory, “We stopped making films with him.”
“I don’t remember sending him a Tiffany clock, I don’t know anything about Armani suits, I don’t charge my clothes, I don’t play games with expense reports, it’s totally fabricated,” retorts Malin. “If there were issues with the accounting, they would have litigated it. What I do remember is that one day Ismail walked into my office with a gift for me, a beautiful framed picture of himself, me, and Denholm Elliott taken at a Sunday brunch at the Plaza Hotel, celebrating Room with a View’s record breaking run at the Paris Theater. I thanked him, and then a couple of days later, we got the bill, for the picture and the frame.” Adds Walker, “I would never say Amir Malin bankrupted Cinecom. It was a child of his, and he was very committed to its survival. Nor do I believe Amir stabbed Deutchman in the back. From what I saw, Stephen Swid, who succeeded Amir as CEO, made that decision.”
Richard Abramowitz started at Cinecom in 1983 in sales, and he left in 1992 eight and a half years later. “All those years at Cinecom, I was Amir’s sole defender inside the company,” he says. “We used to eat lunch together, but I gained a perspective on him as time went on. We used to refer to Amir as the poster child for anti-Semitism. This is not the guy I would want out there for—Oh yeah, that’s a Jew! It was like, Do something, you’re making us all look bad. He reflected most of the stereotypical characteristics that are most troubling to those of us who are sensitive to the way Jews are perceived. It always appeared that there was no such thing for Amir as a win-win negotiation. It was win-humiliate. The only way Amir considered that he’d won was if he got every fucking last nickel. People would say to me, ‘He’s the devil.’ I would defend him, say, ‘He’s not the devil, you’re giving him way too much credit. The devil has a certain magnitude. You don’t compare everyone to Hitler. He’s not significant enough to be the devil. He’s just a jerk.”
Still, Lipsky and Ray both knew they could use a business affairs guy. Malin had convinced Cinecom’s creditors that he was the best person to manage the company’s only significant asset, the library. According to Ray, he told him, “I think what you guys are doing is great, I’m doing the Cinecom library, I have access to money. You guys don’t do ancillary sales, that’s what I do, why don’t we talk about partnering.” Ray was pacing and smoking, smoking and pacing, saying, “I dunno, I dunno.” He couldn’t even stand the sound of Malin’s voice, which he describes as “whiny, oily, and put-upon, like he’s some kind of victim.” But for Lipsky, the bad news about Malin was no more than hearsay. He and Ray were like rubberneckers standing by the side of the road gawking at a pileup of cars. They thought it couldn’t happen to them. Ray said to himself, This might be a means to an end. If it gets us to the next level with Allen & Co., it might not be a bad business move. Lipsky broke the silence, said, “Let’s fly to New York and see what he has to say.”
MY LEFT FOOT WAS RELEASED in November 1989, Cinema Paradiso at the end of December in time for Academy consideration. It got killed in the New York Times by Vincent Canby, who compared it to a bad episode of Growing Pains. Nevertheless, Harvey stuck with it, and made it a hit at a time when very few if any Italian films were even being released in the United States.
When it was evident both My Left Foot and Cinema Paradiso were going to do well for Miramax, Harvey and Bob bought out the producers, making them offers they couldn’t refuse. The brothers told them, We’ll give you money now, maybe you’re financing another picture, and who knows what you’ll get later, maybe nothing, we might change our minds. It worked.
Come Oscar time, Cinema Paradiso even picked up a nomination for Best Foreign Film. Miramax found itself in the enviable position of receiving six additional nominations that year, five for My Left Foot, while Soderbergh was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
Companies were starting to send out screener tapes to Academy members, a practice that leveled the playing field. “The tapes are what did it for My Left Foot,” says Weinstein. “We didn’t have the money to do screening after screening, busing people in, having lavish parties. That gave us parity.” Harvey’s campaigns were heavily dependent on personal appearances by the principals. He persuaded director Jim Sheridan and producer Noel Pearson to relocate to L.A. to work the Hollywood old-boy network, whose votes weighed so heavily in the outcome of the Academy Awards. Pearson in particular charmed them all in an incessant round of one-on-one breakfasts and lunches, topped off with small dinner parties hosted by pillars of the Hollywood Irish community like Gene Kelly and Carroll O’Connor. The dinners became items in the trades and gossip columns—Army Archerd, George Christy, and Liz Smith—which in turn generated word of mouth. He even had Day-Lewis testify in the Senate on behalf of the Disabilities Act. (His critics charged that this was a stunt to get him an Oscar but, according to Weinstein, the votes were in by that time.)
The brothers were not the first to employ these techniques. Studios had always gotten celebrities to host exclusive dinners followed by screenings of Oscar contenders at their homes in Bel Air and Brentwood, but no one had thought to do the same thing with indies and foreign films until Miramax did it—relentlessly. “In those days the studios had a lock on the Oscars, because none of the indies campaigned aggressively,” Weinstein explains. “The only thing that we did to change the rules was, rather than just sitting it out and getting beat because somebody had more money, more power, more influence, we ran a guerrilla campaign.” Recalls former publicist Mark Urman, “You create evening social activity where influence peddling can take place as an innocent, natural thing. More mouths to more ears.” Such gatherings were particularly useful in introducing foreign actors and directors who weren’t part of the community. Miramax exported the “eat, greet, and screen” practice overseas as well, to London and Rome, wherever there were pockets of Academy members.
Urman, who worked on several Miramax campaigns, continues, “They figured out that you can win an Oscar by a single vote, so they didn’t consider any voting member too much trouble to seduce. They have more screenings, in more places, than anyone else. [They] set up screenings at the Motion Picture Retirement Home because Academy members live there, even if they’re on life support. They find out where people holiday in the period between Christmas and New Year’s, and if it’s Aspen, they have screenings in Aspen. If it’s in Hawaii, they have screenings in Hawaii. They actually called people at home. And now that companies aren’t allowed to do that, they hire every single person who will work for them, and they do the talking for them. Many of them are part of the old Hollywood establishment who fifty-two weeks out of the year have nothing to do with a Miramax-type movie, but they know Academy members, and for the Academy season, they talk the Miramax talk, walk the Miramax walk.
“If it was important to get makeup or music score or something like that in addition to the obvious nominations—director, picture, actor, screen-play—so they could, say, claim ten nominations instead of seven, they looked at the membership roster in the applicable branch and just went into overdrive. They would sit there playing six degrees of separation—‘Who do you know who knows how to get to th
is person?’ ” Harvey worked the phones himself. Later, when Miramax was bigger and he was financing films, he might get on the line with a director or actor and say things like, “I’d love to work with you in the future. Don’t you think The Piano is a great movie?”
But Daniel Day-Lewis was a problem. He was the son of Cecil Day-Lewis, a poet laureate of England, and he took himself very seriously indeed. On the set, he stayed in character, wouldn’t eat with his hands. To him, Harvey was the very definition of a Hollywood huckster, and the Miramax co-chairman had to twist his arm to get him to do any promotion at all. Explained Weinstein, “I’m surrounded by people who never hear the truth. They are insulated beyond belief. Their asses are kissed daily. Like Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s ‘Yes, Mr. Lewis, No, Mr. Lewis. Your Highness. Your Lordship. Your this. Your that.’ How can he judge anything? . . .I always tell him he’ll end up in regional theater in Ireland with his Oscar, going, ‘I was famous once . . .’ ” Harvey loves to quote Day-Lewis as saying, “There’s only one part of you that works—the ability to pick scripts and pick movies. Otherwise, you’re a complete disaster as a person.’ ”
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