Concludes Newmyer, “I’ve been in the movie business since 1982, produced fourteen, fifteen movies. I’m used to all forms of deception and manipulation, but to have someone just outright chew your face, basically say, ‘I’m gonna fuck you because I can,’ that was a first for me.”
Harvey adamantly denies reneging on the deal and disputes Newmyer’s version of events. “Newmyer signed a deal for $4.7 million, which Miramax paid. This was far in excess of the approximately $2.7 million that was represented to us as being the budget of the picture. Miramax also agreed to spend no less than $2 million in print and advertising expenditures for the U.S. theatrical release of the picture. In addition, Miramax was delivered a movie that was essentially unreleasable, and we incurred approximately $500,000 in reshoot costs. Despite our best efforts, this movie turned out to be a commercial and creative disaster. Miramax spent over $4 million, double the amount of our contractual commitment in support of the release. It grossed only $700,000 in the U.S. Miramax lost millions of dollars on this picture.”
In the grip of the cash squeeze, Harvey’s temper, always short, snapped like a frayed shoelace. He hired David Linde to supplement the acquisitions team of Trea Hoving and Mark Tusk. Hoving had the taste; Tusk, who was gay and hip, would go where no one else dared; and Linde’s job was to do the deals. When Harvey was in a playful mood, he referred to them fondly as his “three blind mice.” But he wasn’t often in a playful mood. Hoving was often seen spooning Pepto-Bismol down her throat after a visit to Harvey’s office.
The New York Film Festival followed right on the heels of Toronto in late September, and Harvey had executed a coup by scoring the opening night slot for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. The brothers threw a bash at the Mayflower Hotel on 62nd Street and Central Park West to celebrate. It should have been a festive occasion, but for Harvey the cheer good news brought lasted about a millisecond, and then he was back to worrying about the next catastrophe. After the screening, the Miramaxers, spruced up in formal attire, drifted in slowly, feeling good, buzzed by the champagne that flowed freely. Harvey spotted Linde, who had been riding the deal for Jocelyn Moorehouse’s Proof, starring the young Russell Crowe. He asked, “David, you closed on Proof?” Suddenly the laughter died, the gaiety vanished like the sun behind a cloud. There was a collective intake of breath as staffers waited to hear Linde’s response, because the deal had not been closed; the film was still in play with Linde bidding against Deutchman at Fine Line. Instantly, Harvey’s Jekyll became Mr. Hyde. He pulled Linde and Tusk into the hallway, moved in a little closer on Linde, the way he always did when he wanted to use his body to intimidate. Kim Lewis was Moorehouse’s agent, and Harvey barked, “Find Kim Lewis, find him now! Do you have his home number? Call him at home! Call him in L.A.! Call his office! Call!” By this time they had been joined by Linde’s wife. As she watched in horror, Harvey, swollen with rage, jabbed him with his finger, while spewing a fine spray of epithets not heard since the schoolyard. (Ultimately, Miramax lost Proof, and even now, many years later, Linde instinctively steps backwards when he encounters Weinstein.)
With creditors nipping at their heels and the brothers’ attempts to sell Miramax going nowhere, the public offering became even more important, and preparations marched ahead. There was only one problem: since Midland Montague owned a big chunk of the company, 45 percent, they too would benefit, and therefore Bob and Harvey were determined to buy them out. By that time, the streetwise bankers who engineered the deal were gone, and so was Midland Montague’s New York office. The investment was being managed by a merchant banker from London named David Hutchings. Hutchings was in the classic British mold, proper and punctilious; in other words, he was a man who was completely unprepared to deal with the Weinsteins. Continues Schmidt, “Harvey and Bob tortured him. Endlessly. They communicated with him—their largest shareholder—by saying things like, ‘You will never see a cent from this company. We will take this company down before we pay any money out to you.’ ”
Preparing for an IPO is an arduous, time consuming, and expensive process. The volumes of data on Miramax’s finances were bound and at the couriers ready to go to the SEC to register for the offering, when Harvey and Bob stuffed themselves into a limo outside 711 Fifth Avenue, where Allen & Co. was located, on a hot August day in the aftermath of the aptly named Hurricane Bob, to make the trip downtown to their office. When they emerged twenty minutes later at the Tribeca Film Center, they blithely announced, “Look, we’ve changed our minds, we’re not doing it.” Schmidt, who had just risked his life flying down from Nantucket in perilous weather, said, “Fuck you all, I’m outta here.”
The Weinstein’s about-face stunned everyone. “There was a constant effort to move towards a more enlightened business environment that was ultimately unsuccessful,” Schmidt explains. “To me it was a watershed decision. They decided to stay on the treadmill, chasing the next film and living off bank debt. Essentially, they said, ‘We want to run the company in the same old way, our way, the way that got us here. And if it means we’ll screw people, so be it.” Adds one source, “They couldn’t accept the idea that these British guys would make a big check off their sweat. Made ’em crazy. It was all about Bob and Harvey’s greed.” Schmidt continues, “Like all IPOs for small companies, theirs included an option plan for employees. So it was not just Midland Montague that got cut off at the knees, it was producers who were owed money, and the employees who worked very hard to get them to the point where their company could be a success. There could have been a way for them to take a little less into their pocket and spread it around more to the people that helped them get there. But that was never part of their thinking, because from their point of view, they were the ones who got them there. It was very sad.”
Schmidt understood that the brothers were not about to let someone who was not a Weinstein dip his hand into the honey pot, and he resigned, effective March 1, 1992. He explains, “The fact that there was a good deal of abuse and pressure that went along with the job, and no equity position for the lead managers that were helping them build the company, no bonus, meant that the writing was on the wall. I left Miramax because my mother and father were not named Miriam and Max.” Schmidt was sitting around, twiddling his thumbs, and wondering what to do next when he got a call from his pals at Allen & Co. They told him they were discussing a business idea with some guys they liked, who wanted to start a new company. Was he interested? A few days later, Schmidt met the two men. They hit it off, and he agreed to join October Films.
EVEN THOUGH Quentin Tarantino was still a nobody, when he arrived in Park City for the 1992 Sundance Film Festival with his new film, Reservoir Dogs, his reputation preceded him. He had been to the June lab the year before, and almost everyone in town had read the Dogs script. Allison Anders, whose second film, Gas Food Lodging, was in the competition, first heard his name at a pitch meeting for one of her own projects, when her partner, Kurt Voss, interrupted his spiel to digress about Tarantino for half an hour. Anders recalled, “I couldn’t believe it. Goddamn it, this is my meeting, and I don’t know who the hell they’re talking about. OK, so he’s a great writer, can we get back to our meeting here?”
Tarantino had never been to a film festival, had rarely been out of L.A., had never seen snow. He was walking around in a T-shirt in 20 degree weather until Live Entertainment executive Ronna Wallace bought him a parka. He was like a kid at his birthday party, not knowing what to go for first, plunge his hand into the bowls of candy, rip the wrapping off the presents, or stuff his mouth with cake. A cartoony-looking character with a high forehead and prominent jaw, he came across like Martin Scorsese in the body of Popeye. He was wired all the time, surfing an adrenaline rush, speed rapping about the gay subtext to Top Gun, how the contrails of the jets suggested anal entry, and he would cite chapter and verse, shots, and scraps of dialogue from any Tony Scott movie you could name, to anyone who was interested, and often to those who weren’t. His
bubbly enthusiasm, lack of pretension, and apparent guilelessness made him irresistible. Anders met him for the first time at Z Place, a club on Park City’s Main Street, and was pleased to discover in him a warmth, a sweetness, and a generosity that she had not expected. “People would gush and make him sound so huge that I thought he was going to be ten feet tall, with a beard and all the filmmaker obnoxious ego stuff,” she continues. “He came up to me and said, ‘Are you Allison? My name’s Quentin, and I loved your movie.’ I thought, Oh my God, this is the guy.”
Each year Sundance became more crowded, more frantic, more Hollywood. Suddenly, everyone had cell phones glued to their ears. During one screening, an agent was even observed calling another agent a few rows away. Ford Explorers and Jeep Cherokees full of buyers, producers, agents, and press still looking—so far in vain—for the next Soderbergh, rubbed fenders in the clogged streets of Park City and made it impossible to find—yes, parking. The 1992 lineup had been put together by Gilmore and Garcia. (Garcia, burned out and disillusioned, resigned later that year.) Sixty submissions in 1987 had become three to four hundred by 1992. Soderbergh, still the festival mascot, was once again in attendance. He told one journalist, “Obviously, I think Park City is the greatest place in the United States!”
The New Queer Cinema was still cresting, with Vachon returning for the second year in a row, this time with Tom Kalin’s stylish Swoon, in addition to newcomers Gregg Araki, with The Living End, an HIV-positive lovers-on-the-run romp, and Christopher Munch with The Hours and Times, a fictionalized account of the relationship between John Lennon and Beatle manager Brian Epstein on vacation together in Barcelona. Says Vachon, “When you had movies in it like The Living End, that then got bought and had a successful commercial run, it changed people’s expectations of what they could send to Sundance.” Or, as Gilmore puts it, “It was becoming clear that the young nobody directors, the Gregg Arakis of the world, were really important.”
Vachon, along with Haynes, Kalin, Araki, critic Ruby Rich, and others appeared on a panel devoted to the New Queer Cinema. Like Poison, these films were more interested in shocking straight audiences than reassuring them with the we’re-just-like-you portraits of Lands’ End–clad gay yuppies who populated films like Parting Glances that just a few years earlier had seemed so daring. The new generation of gay directors was looking to Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy instead. The Living End was an exercise in agitprop that mocked the positive role models so dear to the gay activists who made such a fuss over Sharon Stone’s homicidal lesbian in Basic Instinct, and substituted in their stead proto-criminals who fantasized about infecting then-President George Bush with their diseased blood. Recalls Vachon, “It was an insane time. Most of these people were members of some activist group or another, and both Poison and Swoon remember people in their titles who had recently died. We were all really young, and in your twenties you have a sense of righteousness. Urgency. You have to speak now, because time is running out.”
Other films in competition included Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup, a very low-budget, very charming tale about a filmmaker hustling money from an over-the-hill hood, winningly played by Seymour Cassel and shot in black and white, by then a rare and exotic format; and Anders’s Gas Food Lodging. Gas Food Lodging was an off-kilter coming-of-age portrait of two sisters (Fairuza Balk and Ione Skye) making their way down the bumpy road of adolescence under the worried eye of their single working mother (Brooke Adams) in a trailer park in New Mexico. It sounds like a recipe for a Sundance PC pudding, but it’s so richly observed, so understated, and so finely executed that it transcends its genre.
Anders was a force of nature, a tremendously appealing woman who was a single mother herself. She was born in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1955, the daughter of white trash parents, and it hadn’t been so long ago that she herself lived on welfare. Ray Price, the indie veteran whose IRS Releasing distributed the picture, says, “Everybody liked Allison. She made that film work. When she talked to women in the audience, they totally connected. Allison transcends her films. She’s a morally driven person, and she makes you sit up straight, become a more moral person yourself. I loved being in the room when she was in the room. I felt better about myself.” Anders was totally free from artifice and pretension. What you saw was what you got. Says Rockwell, “She’s a human mood ring. She walks in the room the shade she is.”
Price continues, “Critics are harder on women directors, and Gas Food Lodging was a little soapy for some of them, but women are more comfortable talking in the syntax of daytime TV; it’s more a part of their lives. The guys have their language, and the women have theirs. I have always thought the important thing about a movie was, you know there is somebody there. You can really feel the filmmaker coming through the screen. And that was true of Allison.” Anders, Rockwell, Araki, Kalin, and many of the other filmmakers in the competition that January were “emerging” directors, the very people Sundance had written off only a year before.
Miramax’s Trea Hoving and Mark Tusk had been at the first screening of Dogs on Saturday at 10:30 P.M. at the Holiday Village Cinema and loved it. David Linde caught the second screening. “Everybody was freaked out about it,” he recalls. “It was an intense movie, and in those days, that kind of intensity didn’t happen in independent films.” To say the least. The rumors about the Dogs script were correct. Tarantino, it turned out, could write like an angel. Although he was working in a different idiom, his work was reminiscent of the great Robert Towne scripts of the 1970s, providing a heady mix of B movie attitude and Nouvelle Vague cool—the apotheosis of movie geek chic.
Watching guys with guns was a guilty pleasure at Sundance and a rare one as well. Festival programmers endlessly discussed whether genre films could be art films as well. Dogs nicely embodied this dilemma. It was very much a genre film, and then again it wasn’t. Purposely written in such a way that it could be made on the cheap, its plot is tailored to its budget. Dogs is a case study in the aesthetics of poverty, a heist film without a heist, just the events before and after. Dogs is all backstory—mostly dialogue, with few locations. The conceit is conventional, but the execution is not, nor is the time hopping, the mischievous conflation of the literary and the lurid—gangsters debating the fine points of popular culture like graduate students—electrified by the vicious kick of high-voltage violence. Tarantino’s films are a walk on the wild side, and he could be depended upon to be a veritable fount of political incorrectness. The breathtaking un-PCness of his body of work, the white maleness of it all—the inventive obscenities, the rat-tat-tat of taboo words like “nigger,” the butt fucking, the mainlining, the pleasure his films seem to take in casual killing, theatrically staged (for laughs, yet), their sadistic, almost baroquely creative bloodletting along with their apparent absence of redeeming social value, and the insouciently indulgent attitude he displays toward his deadbeat characters—all combine to give them a dangerous charge. They flirted with sexism, racism, and homophobia, and as such were a slap in the face to everything Sundance stood for. Sneeringly, Tarantino once referred to white liberals as “the most sensitive human beings on the planet,” and he loved nothing more than to thumb his nose at their bleeding hearts. Dogs was an equal opportunity offender.
It is easy in retrospect to dismiss the brouhaha Dogs provoked as no more than the squealing of stuck Lynne Cheneys and William Bennetts—this was 1992, after all, when George Bush père was still exploiting the euphoria of the Gulf War. Moreover, Anthony Hopkins had sucked, chewed, and swallowed face in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs the year before. But that was a studio movie, and Dogs was an indie, and this was Sundance, sanctuary of the indie spirit. Violence was long regarded by Sundanistas as the special provenance of the despised Hollywood movie, so it’s not surprising that Tarantino’s picture was greeted by a mixed chorus of applause and outrage. Recalls Richard Gladstein, the Live Entertainment executive who shepherded the project, “Going in, I didn’t realize—stupidly, fo
olishly, ignorantly—that Sundance didn’t show films in this genre. Watching the movie with that audience was shocking. You heard these gasps.” People rarely died in Sundance films, lest of AIDS, old age, or boredom, and in Dogs, they not only died, they died slowly, painfully, bloodily, with feeling. The soon-to-be-notorious ear slicing that Tarantino choreographed to the monotonous thrum of “Stuck in the Middle with You,” provoked a firestorm of protest that eclipsed the furor over the New Queer Cinema, especially when Tarantino refused to give an inch in the face of angry catcalls from the sober guardians of indie film virtue who stood up at screenings to denounce Dogs for being socially irresponsible. Instead, he goaded and provoked his critics. At the last screening of Dogs, the big one at the Egyptian Theatre that Tarantino ever after referred to as “the Faye Dunaway screening,” because she was in the audience, a man stood up and asked, “So, how do you justify all the violence in this movie?” The director replied, “I don’t know about you, but I love violent movies. What I find offensive is that Merchant-Ivory shit.” He says today, “Violence is one of the greatest things you can do in cinema. Edison invented the camera to do violence, all right?”
Tarantino was raised in the 1970s, when the 1960s were still vivid. “The Vietnam War and Watergate were a one-two punch that basically destroyed Americans’ faith in their own country,” he observes. “The attitude I grew up with was everything you heard was lies. The president is a monkey. I remember my parents saying, ‘Fuck the police, fuck the pigs.’ ” But his films have little explicit politics, as such. His rebellion was largely cultural, a bad boy aesthetic that embraced not only the street films of Martin Scorsese and the Grand Guignol of Brian De Palma, but TV sitcoms and kung fu movies he grew up with, everything that respectable mainstream culture abhorred. He may have loved Godard (Truffaut was too sweet), but Hong Kong was his Paris, chop-socky his New Wave. He was the Howard Stern of indies, and proud of it.
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