After graduating from Brown, Vachon, short and chunky, with dark hair chopped into a no-nonsense pageboy cut and a lively, determined look about her, moved back to New York, where she had grown up. At that time, the cool, downtown filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Beth B, Lizzie Borden, and Paul Morrissey, were orbiting the punk rockers at CBGB’s on the Bowery. “I felt like it was a closed circle, and I was on the outside looking in,” she continues. “I remember going to parties and just feeling, like, completely intimidated and overwhelmed by what I saw, as in, I want to be one of those people.” Her older sister, Gail, was an experimental filmmaker and took her to places like the Collective for Living Cinema on White Street in Tribeca, but Vachon was bored by the films. “They were unbelievably slow and had no narrative whatsoever,” she says. She was put off by her sister’s friends. “They were so sanctimonious,” Vachon continues. “It was either like you made these narrative-free experimental movies that were political statements by dint of their being as unentertaining as possible, or you made disgusting Hollywood movies for New Line and sold out. There was nothing in between.” Indeed, she worked on a couple of low-budget New Line features like Demon Lover and just got condescended to for her pains. “I just wanted to learn how to do it, but those pictures were considered low class. It was like, That’s fine, but if you want to make movies that matter, then you go work for free for Jim Jarmusch. I probably would have worked for him if I had the opportunity, but it was more important for me to get really good at it and be able to pay the rent.”
Still, she did work on some “movies that matter,” like Jill Godmilow’s Far from Poland and Bette Gordon’s Variety. Godmilow introduced her to Bill Sherwood, who hired her to work on Parting Glances in 1986. She spent two years working her way from second AD to first AD, and she constantly felt she was bucking the old-boy network. She came up at the same time as producer Ted Hope, against whom she competed for jobs. “I didn’t like him,” she recalls. “To me he represented a boys’ club that I really wasn’t into. I thought he was a thuggy fratboy. He had a certain kind of arrogance that was very exclusionary. Somebody like me was automatically labeled a bitch by them.”
In the summer of 1987, Haynes, then in the MFA program at Bard College, made a film called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, helped by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) that also provided seed money for Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Superstar told the story of the decline and fall of pop icon Karen Carpenter as she plunged from a life of hyperreal normality to illness and death, a victim of celebrity and anorexia. The genius of the film is that Haynes used Barbie dolls to stand in for the characters and by so doing explored the mechanisms of identification and distancing. Vachon, who helped Haynes edit the sound, loved it, and critics later compared Haynes to David Lynch and John Waters for his ironic poking about among the icons of pop culture. “That movie was an epiphany for me,” Vachon says. “It was like, ‘Eureka!’ Superstar works brilliantly at an intellectual level, it’s provocative, it makes you think, and it’s also deliciously entertaining. By the end of the movie, people are practically in tears as they watch this doll die. It kinda blows my mind every time I see it, and it summed up this feeling that you could make a movie that was as provocative as that and be entertaining too. Those were the kinds of movies I wanted to make.”
Superstar made so much noise that even CAA gave the young director a call, said, “We watched that movie at lunch, we’d love to sign you up.” Recalls Haynes, “But everyone got the message that I wasn’t needing representation. I was writing my own material, living in New York doing that weird queer thing with that woman Christine.”
Despite its Brechtian pedigree, Superstar was a flop downtown. Vachon remembers, “Todd was this arts/semiotics major from Brown, and he wanted Yvonne Rainer and all those people to say, ‘Oh, you’re a great film-maker, that’s really cool.’ But they were, ‘What is this shit?’ When Todd tried to screen Superstar for the Collective for Living Cinema, they refused to show it. ’Cause it was too narrative!”
Superstar became a cult hit, and guaranteed that he’d be able to finance his next picture, Poison. Vachon told him she wanted to produce it. At a time when all the glory went to the auteur, and everyone was running around wanting to be a director, Vachon preferred to produce. Unlike the studio world, where the financing and distribution machinery is already in place, indies have to invent the wheel almost every time out, and producers play a much bigger role. She continues, “When the indie film movement bubbled up in New York City, there was a sense that there was business to be done, whether it was selling these movies to North American distributors like a producer’s rep such as John Pierson, or shepherding them through film festivals, making deals for the director’s next movie—suddenly people who had some business sense saw an opening for themselves.”
James Schamus, just out of Berkeley, trying to figure out what to do with his life, sought them out. He begged them for a crumb, anything, pleading, “Please let me help, pleeease!” Wearing what would become a signature bow tie and spectacles that made him look like a benevolent Peter Lorre, he seemed a little anomalous in the rough and tumble New York film scene. But like Haynes and Vachon, he came from the hothouse world of film semiotics, spoke the language of signs and signifiers, and was a wannabe screenwriter to boot. And, says Vachon, “Screenwriting or no screenwriting, James’s absolute first love was the art of the deal: how do you make one, how do you read a contract. He gets very excited at the idea of selling North American rights for a film.” She brought Schamus on board as associate producer.
In December 1990, Schamus teamed up with Ted Hope to form Good Machine, which became one of three New York-based companies comprised of producers who were dedicated to director-driven films, the others being Vachon’s Killer Films, with Lauren Zalaznick, and Larry Meistrich’s The Shooting Gallery. When Schamus went to Sundance with Poison, Hope stayed home, thinking, What the fuck’s Sundance, why should I go? “That’s when Ang Lee walked into the office,” he recalls. Lee had two grants from the Taiwanese government, and when he asked a friend, “Who can produce a film for no money,” the reply was, “You gotta meet Ted Hope.” Hope told him, “You gotta meet James Schamus,” and the rest is history, so to speak. Schamus and Lee went on to form a writing partnership that produced The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Ice Storm, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Poison somehow managed to get an NEA grant, along with money from the AFI and NYSCA. For the remainder of the roughly $300,000 budget, Vachon went the legendary doctor-dentist-family route.
In February, after Sundance, Haynes, Vachon, and Schamus took Poison to the Berlin Film Festival. It was the hip, happening film. Recalls Haynes, “Christine and I would go to festivals together, and it was all about the cult of the young, queer, groovy New York director. I was continually aware of how she wasn’t included in that.” To his embarrassment, Schamus, who had not actually produced the film, upstaged her. People swarmed around him, congratulating him on its success, ignoring Vachon, because she was female. North American rights went to a small company called Zeitgeist. “With great reviews, the freedom to stay in theaters, and a filmmaker who was willing to go to every city in America, you could coax it up to a million bucks,” says Vachon. “Which at that time was the beacon you were striving towards as an art film. When it hit a million, we opened champagne. I got a big check for just under 200 grand, and I sent it off to the investors, and it’s a good thing I did, because that’s the money they invested in Todd’s next film, Safe. Todd and I made a little bit of money, but we were so honest, and so grateful to the investors, that we hadn’t built in deferments for ourselves. I still hadn’t figured out how to actually make money producing.”
Although Vachon says her desire to produce Poison “wasn’t personally motivated—I never really thought about [the gay element],” it did connect with a vast gay audience. “I was savvy enough even then to be able
to tell that there was a market that nobody had really tapped into yet. People who in a million years wouldn’t go to see a movie that experimental, did so just because they heard there was male sex in it. Most of them came out feeling like, So I watched that whole movie for two seconds of boys fucking!”
If it was indeed Haynes’s intention to offend, he succeeded. The NEA got into political trouble for giving him a grant. “Roger Ebert met Todd at the Indie Spirit Awards where Poison was being feted,” Vachon recalls. “When Todd said, I’m Todd Haynes, Roger was, Who the hell is Todd Haynes? Todd said, I directed Poison. He literally snatched his hand back.”
BY THE MIDDLE of the new year, Miramax was hurting. If 1990 was bad, 1991 was worse. Flush with 1989 dollars and the Chase bank line, the Weinsteins had gone on a buying spree, and they were virtually hemorrhaging releases. The highest grossing film of 1991 was Madonna’s Truth or Dare, which did $15 million. Recalls former Miramax executive Eamonn Bowles, “Right after Truth or Dare, there were something like thirteen films in a row that they released, some of them wide, that were hideous failures, tank, tank, tank. You can’t just suffer those kinds of losses and not be hurt.”
Release after release splattered like bugs across the Miramax windshield. All in all, Miramax opened roughly forty films that year, about twice the number of a major studio. Says Schmidt, “We proceeded to try to continue to grow the company through 1990 and 1991, but it just got tougher and tougher, because the hits weren’t there anymore. We were just limping along.”
The Weinsteins were so desperate that they contemplated starting an exploitation division, to be called Dimension. They had watched enviously as archrival New Line cleaned up with the Nightmare on Elm Street series. The New Line model, with income generated by genre pictures driving the art film business, such as it was, made increasing sense to the brothers as they saw their company crumbling before their eyes. Exploitation pictures made lots of money, and because they didn’t employ stars, they were cheap to make, and it wasn’t necessary to give away the back end to profit participants. Ironically, the catalyst seems to have been Bob Shaye’s new Fine Line division, headed by Deutchman, which they, or at least Bob, took as a direct, personal affront. Deutchman’s coming out party, in effect, was the Museum of the Moving Image gala for Robert De Niro in the first week of March 1991. Deutchman spied Harvey across the ballroom, and with a smile wreathing his face, walked over and shook his hand. Harvey greeted him cordially, said, “Congratulations. It’ll be fun!” Bob, standing next to him, shook his hand too, but as he did so, he hissed, “We’re gonna bury you.” Then, his face turning purple, he started screaming something like, “How dare you come back to the art house world! I know you started that company to get us. Not only are we gonna kill you, but we’re going to go into New Line’s business and kill them in their business. We’re gonna do horror movies and kid movies.” Bob was as good as his word, saying to Harvey, “Let’s compete against those who are competing against us.” (Deutchman always claimed credit for Dimension.)
In increasingly straitened circumstances, some filmmakers found it hard to collect from Miramax. Kjehl Rasmussen filed suit to collect on Animal Behavior, which had been released by Miramax in 1989. “It was a profitable film for Miramax, and I believe they were not properly accounting to me,” he says. “It was a pretty clear cut case of they owed me money. The picture only played two weeks, and it took us three years to get our money. It wasn’t a pleasant few years.” According to Miramax, the film was an unmitigated disaster that did not even gross $50,000 in the U.S. Recalls Harvey, “After incurring significant legal fees, and facing the certainty of substantial additional fees if litigation continued, we thought it was best to settle, which we did. With no admission of any accounting irregularities.”
Two years after My Left Foot had grossed $14.7 million, domestic, its producer, Noel Pearson, complained that he hadn’t yet seen a cent of profit on his $2.5 million picture. “It’s a bit frustrating,” he said. “It’s like waiting for Godot to come, and I just wish he would come a little faster.” According to Weinstein, he owed Pearson nothing; if money was owed, Granada was the guilty party.
The Weinsteins sometimes bought films and then tried to better the deal. Says Mark Lipsky, “What they were then, and are today, are consummate negotiators, and even better renegotiators. They would say anything, do anything, no matter what it was or what it took, to get the deal done, and worry about it the next day. When they’re in the moment, and they tell you that their life depends on acquiring your movie, they mean it. But the next minute, it never happened. And they have no conscience about it.” Adds Safford, “The smarter filmmakers knew that and would insert terms into their contracts like, You must release the film theatrically in so many cities, spending so much money by such and such a date, and Harvey would happily sign it. That didn’t mean he’d do it. The film would get pushed back. Or dumped. You can’t believe what he says. Even he knows you can’t believe what he says. What are you gonna do? Sue them? Yell and scream all you want. Take a ticket and stand in line. It’s like Citizen Kane and Xanadu, the thrill of the hunt, of getting your hands on something, whether it’s a script, a film, or a filmmaker. Once Harvey has it, he’s no longer interested.”
Bobby Newmyer didn’t know anything about that when he sold them The Opposite Sex. Since 1989, Newmyer had been running Outlaw, his tiny indie production company on his share of the sex, lies profits, but the money was fast disappearing, and he was facing bankruptcy. The Opposite Sex, his second picture, was based on a screenplay he’d developed out of his own pocket, a broad romantic comedy starring Courteney Cox, Ari Gross, and Kevin Pollak. The budget was $2.5 million he’d raised in $50,000 and $100,000 chunks by begging friends and family for money. Salaries, including Newmyer’s, were deferred. When the movie was done, Newmyer showed it to distributors, including Miramax. Newmyer hadn’t seen much of Harvey since the sex, lies days, but he remembered him fondly. Harvey had done everything he said he would do and more. One summer Newmyer and his wife Debbie had run into Harvey and Eve on Martha’s Vineyard. The couples had gone waterskiing together or, rather, Newmyer and Eve had gone waterskiing, while Harvey sat in the back of the boat, in shorts and an enormous Izod shirt, a tent, chain-smoking True Blues, drenched in sweat, and looking like he’d rather be anywhere but there. Newmyer was charmed. “It was totally endearing to see a guy who weighed 400 pounds sitting in that boat,” he says. “That wouldn’t happen with a studio head. There was something very authentic and real about him.”
According to Newmyer, Harvey made a preemptive bid to take The Opposite Sex off the table for $5 million, an astounding price for an indie film in 1991, a million up front and four more when Newmyer turned over the elements.8 Newmyer said, “Great.” Elated, the producer wrote a letter to his investors, saying, “Here’s a million dollars back, 40 percent of your investment. In another few months when we technically finish the picture and deliver it to Miramax, there’ll be a good profit for everyone.” Plus, everyone who worked on the film was going to get their deferments paid in full. He delivered the picture. “In a deal for an acquisition, the producers generally got 10 percent on signing and 90 percent on delivery,” says attorney David Steinberg, who negotiated a lot of these deals for Miramax. “What they would do, often, is withhold the whole 90 percent if there was one missing thing, like a music license,” harsh but a right they had under the contract. According to Linda Lichter, who was still Newmyer’s attorney, “We inserted in the contract every form of security you could possibly have, and they still found a way around us. Outlaw had delivered all the boxes of elements, but Miramax said, ‘It’s not full delivery until we look through the boxes, and we don’t have time to look through the boxes.’ When they did go through the boxes, they said, ‘You didn’t get this point in this music contract.’ ” Adds Newmyer, “The reasons they cited became ludicrous. At one point, Harvey claimed, ‘Well, there’s a loose splice in Reel 8. Send someone up here to fix it
. On page fifty-two of the printout of the script, there’s a typo.’ ” Schmidt explains, “Primarily this was a cash flow management tool, a way to stretch until they could somehow find the money to pay for it.”
But Newmyer got the message: “We don’t want to pay you $5 million.” He talked to people who had sold films to Miramax. Everyone said, “This is how Harvey plays it. He doesn’t want to pay five, he wants to pay four. Go back and settle with him.” Newmyer had “discovered” Soderbergh, had given Harvey and Bob the film—sex, lies—that put Miramax on the map. Another guy might have been grateful, but not Harvey. Or maybe he was, but this was business. Newmyer says he kept calling—he still wanted the film, just not for $5 million—trying to get Newmyer to agree to a lower figure. To the producer, a deal was a deal, and he refused. He went into a four-month tailspin where he never slept more than ninety minutes at a time, resumed smoking, developed a four-pack-a-day habit, and gained 30 pounds. “To every one of my thirty-two investors—my dearest friends and my family’s dearest friends—I went from being the golden boy who was going to give them a tidy profit, to the moron who made this fucking deal without knowing the devil he was in business with,” he remembers. “Harvey nearly destroyed my life.”
One day, Newmyer was having lunch with a friend, a prominent attorney, at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, when Harvey walked by. As Newmyer tells the story, his friend, a large man, larger than Harvey, grabbed him, and sat him down, insisted he settle. Harvey didn’t want to settle, didn’t even want to sit. Lighting cigarette after cigarette, he refused to look Newmyer in the eye. He finally agreed to pay $4.7 million. By this time, the producer had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and a year of his life dealing wih the Weinsteins. He says he agreed to give-backs not contemplated in the original understanding, which allowed for Miramax to cover acquisition of music rights, etc., and still left him short.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 17
