Working day to day with the Weinsteins in New York had gotten to Brantley, as it had to the others, and she had begged Harvey to let her operate out of the London office, an elegant townhouse on Redburn Street in Chelsea, between the river and Kings Road. One of her jobs was to babysit Day-Lewis, who became fond of her. His attitude was, She’s the normal person in this crazy company. Harvey would never have gotten through Granada’s doors had she not opened them, and he had somehow neglected to reward her with a bonus. She had never been to the Oscars and figured he owed her. After some prodding, he finally agreed to fly her to L.A. and pay for her hotel room, but he said, “Alie, I just can’t get you a ticket.” She replied, “Harvey, don’t worry. I’ll get one myself.” No sooner said thanDay-Lewis gave her his extra ticket. When she arrived in L.A. the day before the ceremony, she got a call from Miramax publicist Christina Kounelias, who told her, “Uh, Harvey wants to talk to you.” Brantley, who had been astonished to see that the ticket was for the front row, next to Day-Lewis, couldn’t help recalling that Harvey had refused to let her sit next to Soderbergh at the closing ceremony in Cannes and understood right away he wanted to sit with the nominee. She replied, “I will be damned if he’s gonna get this ticket.” But she had indiscreetly disclosed Harvey’s intention to My Left Foot producer Noel Pearson, which Harvey discovered. It made him look bad, and he was furious. There was a meeting of Miramax staffers at the Beverly Hills Hotel at noon the next day. Harvey called her, bellowed, “You get yourself over here right now, down to this meeting.” She thought, Oh, shit, I’m in for it. I am not walking into that meeting with this ticket in my bag. I’m going to go to my hotel and lock it up. She imagined him pawing through her purse going, “Where is that ticket?”
Twenty minutes later Brantley walked into the Miramax suite. To her chagrin she realized that everybody of any importance at the company was there. She had expected a one on one, never imagining that they would drag her in front of the whole place. She thought, He’s just trying to spook me. Bob came over to her, put his arm around her, and said, “That was really dumb what you said to Noel. You must have either been stupid or disloyal. Which one was it?” She thought, This is like the Mafia. But not wanting to get herself into any more trouble, she said, in a small voice, “Oh, I guess I was really stupid.” Just then, the phone rang. It was Tom Pollock, head of Universal. Harvey took the call, put on his I’m-talking-to-somebody-important voice, and after he hung up, he looked at her and said, “People at Universal would get fired for less than this.” Bob put his arm around her again and walked her to the door. He was terrifying when he was being sweet. She thought, This is utterly creepy, and fully expected to hear him say, “Alie, you’re finished.” He didn’t, but she recalls, “In my heart I knew my days were numbered. You don’t stand up to Harvey.” None of the people in the room said a word in her defense. “They sat there watching like in a circus,” she adds. “Looking back on it, I wish I had said, ‘Fuck you!’ and walked out. The thing about working for them for me was, we weren’t raised to be like that. We were southern.” She never did give him the ticket. “I went, and I sat next to Daniel, and it was great.”
Harvey may have failed to get his front row seat next to Day-Lewis at the March Academy Awards, but he found ample consolation in the outcome. Day-Lewis won Best Actor, Brenda Fricker took Best Supporting Actress, and Cinema Paradiso got Best Foreign Film, giving Miramax three Oscars. The awards raised the value of the films in foreign and future ancillary markets, established the brand, and lent Harvey’s promises to get Oscars for his actors the ring of truth, thus helping him win acquisitions. By the time My Left Foot left the theaters, it had grossed $14.7 million; 1989 was indeed an annus mirabilis for Miramax. As Bob put it, “In 1989 we turned the heat up.”
The Weinsteins rode Scandal, sex, lies and My Left Foot, and Cinema Paradiso, into 1990. Cinema Paradiso went wide in February. Recalls former Miramax acquistions executive Mark Tusk, “It was an experiment. Bob said, ‘Why do you have to platform it like an art house movie? Why don’t we do it like a genre movie? Why don’t we do TV advertising, put the film on 500 screens, 700 screens, whatever.’ They single-handedly pushed it onto screens that never played subtitled films.”
The brothers had a genius for picking foreign films that they could cross over, that Miriam, who often accompanied them to screenings, and her friends would pay to see. As Bernardo Bertolucci, who would have occasion to waltz with Harvey a few years later, puts it, “The Italian films in particular, they are very, very sentimental. Harvey’s nature is violent, and when he looks at a movie, he loves to be able to go in front of the mirror and say, ‘Look, there is a tear here!’ ”
The Weinsteins’ lineup ran from films that were unabashedly sentimental to films that were genuinely daring. The theory was, Pick up anything that provokes a reaction, positive or negative—like Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, where half the audience walked out during the screening at the Toronto Film Festival. The important thing was that it not be boring. A violent, erotic, and blackly humorous broadside against Thatcherism run amuck, The Cook, the Thief was definitely not boring. Harvey wanted Greenaway to cut the film and gave him twenty-seven pages of notes to help him. Greenaway was inclined to ignore Weinstein’s request, when the Miramax co-chairman called and informed him that he was so upset with Elliott Stein’s article that the director needn’t cut the film after all. The Cook, the Thief did very well, grossing $7.7 million, against the $625,000 Miramax paid for it and did a brisk business on video as well.
According to Greenaway’s Dutch producer, Kees Kasander, Harvey paid the advance and some modest bonuses, but neither he nor the director ever saw a penny of the revenues. After an audit, Kasander claimed, “He owes us at least $1 million, but it would have cost more to get that money. This became a big problem for our company.”
Says Harvey, The film was a “modest success, but not enough to earn overages. They were not gross participants because they had no track record. He hired a top accounting firm, but they never submitted an audit report to us. That apparently reflected that the audit did not turn up any meaningful claims. Kasander proved we owed him a million, and he voluntarily didn’t take it, knowing that he was owed it? What the fuck!”
Buoyed by its success, Miramax had grown to the point where the 48th Street office resembled the subway at rush hour. In February 1990, Miramax moved down and west to Robert De Niro’s hip, spanking new Tribeca Film Center on the corner of Greenwich and Franklin. Harvey’s office was small. There was the obligatory TV monitor, along with stacks of video tapes, snapshots of Eve, his parents, and one of his most prized possessions, a picture of him and Bob posing with Keith Hernandez, the Mets All-Star first baseman. Weinstein’s on-again, off-again dieting somehow gave him license to eat more junk food. There must have been an element of self-hatred to Harvey’s eating. Every once in awhile he would drop his guard. He once complained to Steve Earnhart, who worked in post-production, “I look like a fuckin’ hippopotamus, Earnhart.” Still, he kept at it. If he were on his way to pick up Eve for a screening or a party, using the car service, he’d whip a tuna sandwich out of his pocket, mutter, “Eve will smell this on my breath tonight, but I don’t care,” gulp it down in two bites, and jam a cigarette into his mouth to mask the odor.
Undoubtedly urged on by Eve, he hired a personal trainer. At the outset, so the story goes, he told the trainer, “You better be here every day. Here’s a $1,000, I’m giving you in advance, don’t pay any attention to what I say, make me work out.” The trainer duly appeared at the apppointed hour. Harvey, on the phone, made him wait, and wait. Finally the trainer gained entry to the inner sanctum, and said, “Let’s start.” Harvey replied, “I don’t have time now, here’s a fifty, get the fuck outta my office, come back tomorrow.” The trainer returned the next day, same thing. He came back day after day, week after week. Until he gave up.
The Weinsteins were tired of living on the edge, p
utting the entire company at risk every time they opened a movie. They knew they were in a capital-intensive business and that to succeed, they needed to have more cash at their disposal. Moreover, they were under a lot of pressure from the Chase Bank to get their act together. One route was going public, but they were leery. “We went out to one of those Allen & Co. things in Sun Valley,” Harvey recalls. “You sit in a room, and there’s forty guys, analysts, and they bombard you with questions. If your earnings don’t move up 15 percent every year, you get lambasted. But the movie business is mercurial. What would they say if we brought in another My Left Foot, some weird movie. We went, Uh-uh, we’re not going public. Other than my mother, going public was the one thing that terrified us.”
Allen & Co. persuaded them otherwise. What with their profits from Scandal; sex, lies; My Left Foot; and Cinema Paradiso, they understood that it was now or maybe never. But the old CFO, whose job it would have been to handle the offering from the Miramax side, seemed to have disappeared. John Schmidt, the new CFO, took it over. Schmidt was an example of “hiring up.” A brother of Yale president Benno Schmidt, he had sandy hair, a ready smile, and a disarming sense of humor. His father was a friend and partner of John Hay “Jock” Whitney. Schmidt arrived in the spring of 1989. Like Mark Lipsky and Marty Zeidman before him, he found the place was a mess, especially the financials. “Miramax was maybe three to six months away from chaos,” he says. “The bank line had been negotiated but hadn’t been closed because there was no one in place to do that or to collect our theatrical receivables or manage the company’s liquidity. What’s our bottom line? When do we run out of money? How much are we gonna have to borrow a year from now? They had no idea.”
Still, Schmidt loved working there, at least in the beginning. “The atmosphere was electric,” he recalls. “We were doing things on every front at the same time that were all new. Every day was an invention. They had an us-against-them, us-against-the-world mentality that was a lot of fun. Eventually, as we got bigger, the ‘us’ became more Harvey and Bob, and the ‘them’ became the employees.”
Just a few years out of Harvard Business School, Schmidt was squeaky clean and idealistic, but he also understood that cleaning up their act was just good business, necessary to get to the next level. “I argued to Harvey and Bob that this was a point in time when our legitimacy as a growing independent company had to be based on a certain way of doing business. These were very visible films. We [had to] pay out participations and show people that if they came and worked with us, they wouldn’t regret it. Because that’s what getting to the next level was all about.” Miramax paid out an estimated $4 million to the producers of sex, lies, and Harvey always boasted about it, used it as proof that indeed, Miramax did keep its word. “Usually, if they were paying out an overage, a profit to a producer, it was because there was something they wanted,” Schmidt continues. Indeed, what they wanted in this case was legitimacy. He adds, “I can’t say that left to their own devices they would have screwed the sex, lies, and videotape producers out of their overages, because they had gross participation7—Harvey and Bob couldn’t really fuck with that—but the discussion was all about, Look, we’re making $5 or $6 million on this film, we owe this money, and these guys are going to be going around talking.” (Miramax denies this.)
For a similar reason, Schmidt pushed them toward the public offering. Not only would it have allowed the Weinsteins to bring in $30, maybe $40 million in new capital and expand their debt capacity, but as a public company it would have opened them to scrutiny, thereby establishing their legitimacy in the financial community the same way that paying overages did in the film community.
At the same time, on a parallel track, Harvey and Bob were talking with studios about buying the company. If they didn’t succeed in going public, they wanted a sugar daddy who could send money when they needed it. But in the midst of these maneuvers, the Miramax gusher ran dry as suddenly as it began. Three productions—The Lemmon Sisters, Strike It Rich, and Animal Behavior—incautiously initiated in the wake of the company’s successes, all bombed. Ironically, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, released in November 1990, may have been the company’s highest grossing film of that year, pulling in a very respectable $7.7 million, and Joanne Woodward was nominated for Best Actress. But as usual, this wasn’t good enough. “New Line was cleaning up with Ninja Turtles,” says Schmidt. “The success of New Line, always a step ahead of Miramax, killed them.” The Grifters more or less broke even; The Cook, the Thief did well; Dick Pearce’s The Long Walk Home grossed $4.8 million; Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, grossed $3.8 million; while a couple of critics’ films—Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou and Michael Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl—made pocket money. But there was a long string of duds—something like eight straight at one particularly grim stretch, films like The Tall Guy, grossing $510,712; American Dream, grossing $269,000; and Hal Hartley’s Unbelievable Truth, grossing $546,541. Lizzie Borden’s second film, Love Crimes, turned into a sink hole. It was rewritten, recut, reshot, re-everything, all to no avail. Miramax entered a two-year trough which, despite the occasional hit, would lead it to the edge of the precipice.
IN THE SUNDANCE INSTITUTE’S heart of darkness, Redford sounded like he was a hair’s breadth of walking away from the project. But he stuck with it, and deserves credit for seeing it through. Says Edward Norton, “People take for granted what it takes to sustain an effort when you’re finding your way. Actors get together to form theater companies all the time, and they never last, because actors by definition have to be self-involved about their own careers. They’ll push the truck up the hill for a little way, but when it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna start, they stop. Follow through is unusual. Redford deserves a lot of credit.” Ironically, it was the festival, into which Redford had to be dragged screaming and kicking, that became the tail that wagged the dog and changed the fortunes of the institute. As Sydney Pollack puts it, “It was initially almost impossible to support Sundance. The turning point came when it took over the U.S. Film Festival.” Not only was it developing into a rare profit center but, in Larry Estes’s words, sex, lies made it “the place where films came from nowhere and turned into these huge things.” First under Tony Safford and then Geoff Gilmore, it proved to be an effective counterweight to the conservatism of the lab selection committee.
If 1990 was a snooze, by 1991, despite being held in the shadow of the Gulf War, the festival was starting to pick up. That year marked the tenth anniversary of the institute and was the year it officially became known as the Sundance Film Festival. Gilmore, still feeling his way, had again let Alberto Garcia program the competition, which included Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Hal Hartley’s Trust, John Sayles’s City of Hope, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn, and Todd Haynes’s Poison, produced by Christine Vachon. Of the sixteen films in competition, about half were released.
For Poison, the timing was perfect, a narrow window between the granola Sundance of the past and the cell phone Sundance to come. Shot in black and white, without stars, filled with difficult, not to say offensive content, Poison was a portmanteau film consisting of three stories: a parody of a ’50s mad scientist B movie, a “documentary” coming-of-age tale in which a 7-year-old boy shoots his father, and a segment set in prison based on a Genet story, Miracle of the Rose. In Todd Haynes’s words, Poison “contains humiliation, abuse, unabashed homoeroticism and a certain level of what I suppose you’d call masochism.” It was strong stuff for the Sundance audience. People walked out in droves during a scene in which a couple of prisoners spit into the mouth of another.
The jury was leaning toward Hartley’s Trust, but journalist Karen Durbin made a fiery appeal on behalf of Poison, and to everyone’s surprise, it won the Grand Jury Prize. Jennie Livingston’s ode to transsexuality, Paris Is Burning, won the documentary award, marking a sweep for a miniwave of cutting-edge gay films—instantly dubbed the “New Queer Cinema.”
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sp; The New Queer Cinema was a cinema of transgression born in the flames of the AIDS epidemic. As Haynes explains it, “AIDS was a life and death issue then. A lot of gay people wanted to be accepted and treated like everybody else, but AIDS was making that impossible, so there was almost no choice but to stand up and express a more militant position. If I have any investment in being gay, it’s not about just fitting in and being like everybody else, it’s actually acknowledging how upsetting homosexuality is to the world, and that’s why I love Genet, who articulated its criminality and rejoiced in it, rejoiced in his outsider status.”
Gradually, the film culture of Sundance began to thaw. Poison marked a watershed for the festival. Says Gilmore, “The regional filmmaker that had been the core of what the independent world had been all of a sudden was less important. It was back to a New York/Los Angeles bias.” Poison was worlds away from Heartland. The earnest, politically correct stalwarts of the 1980s, the Glen Petries, the Gregory Navas, the Annick Smiths, were swept away by a torrent of films made by a new crop of young, rowdy, nose-thumbing filmmakers. Sundance was smart enough to jump onto the train. The requirement for finished scripts was dropped, and selection committee members, some of them hoary with age, would in the future be rotated off after one year. Times were a-changin’.
Haynes and Vachon were students at Brown together in the late 1970s. The New Left may have begun to recede into the mists of time, but it had left its mark on the Brown faculty, then a hotbed of deconstructionist, Marxist-inflected film theory. Vachon was not one of those people who sat around asking, “Where is the undiscovered gay audience? Where are the films that show people like me and my friends?” And not seeing any, decide to make them themselves. For one thing, she says, “I didn’t grow up gay. When I got to college it was very fashionable to be bisexual. So everybody was. It was also right before AIDS, when there was still that sense that the more ‘liberated’ you could be in your sexuality, the cooler and hipper you were. But I had boyfriends all through college. I even got married. To some creep! I didn’t come out till well after college.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 16
