Gilmore had been worried about the violence in Dogs. In a final spasm of political correctness, the festival that year had turned down Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity. Ditto One False Move from the team of Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson because, like Dogs, they were genre films filled with mayhem. The official Sundance line was clear: “I’d gone to the theater one night during the . . . festival to see a few films . . . and I could barely eat for twenty-four hours because they were so loaded with violence,” Redford commented. “There are too many films here that have token violence that’s appealing to the commerciality of the marketplace. That’s when I said, ‘Let’s be aggressive about finding edgier, more experimental, riskier films that don’t depend on anything formulaic whatever.’ ” Tarantino just couldn’t understand it. He recalls, “They didn’t want to have two gun movies there? I’d buy that, if they didn’t have six gay movies there. They could have changed the name of the festival to the Sundance Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.”
Despite Tarantino’s thinly veiled homophobia, Dogs had more in common with the kinds of gay films screened at Sundance in 1992 than he might have cared to admit. In some ways, Dogs was a (not so) straight version of those films and marked a seismic change in the direction of indie film, which was rapidly moving toward a more genre-inflected cinema—albeit with a transgressive and ironic, post-modern spin. Despite the success of Poison, the New Queer Cinema peaked in 1992, almost as soon as it began. There were many reasons for this, but not the least of them was that Tarantino had stolen its thunder. Dogs was as unsettling as Poison, without having to shoulder the queer baggage.
In Tarantino’s nihilistic attitude toward “that Merchant-Ivory shit,” i.e., “art films,” lies the key to Dogs’ impact. Dogs is an anti-art film art film, a canny amalgam of outsider and insider art. If the New Wave gallicized Hollywood B movies, Tarantino re-Americanized the French hybrids, reclaiming them, as it were, and by so doing imported both the sophistication and sentimentality of the French into homegrown indies. But by so doing, he also cut the umbilical cord that had linked the indies of the 1990s to their European art film predecessors and had kept them in their shadow. First Soderbergh, now Tarantino: American indies had come of age.
In opening the door to genre that had been slammed shut by Sundance in the 1980s, Dogs represented the return of the repressed, the revenge of the exploitation picture. By accepting Tarantino’s film, Gilmore gave the festival’s imprimatur to a much different kind of indie feature, closer to the tastes of the barbarians (read, Americans) outside the gates of Park City and—most fraught for the direction of the movement—potentially commercial. Dogs was everything Sundance wasn’t: it was dark, downbeat, and irreverent. Like Harvey Weinstein, Tarantino was the anti-Redford, and such can be the power of a single film that it was Sundance that had to bend, not Tarantino.
Carrying that much freight, it was perhaps not surprising that Dogs was passed over at awards time. The Sundance politic was still very much in evidence, not only in its skittish stance toward genre films and violence but, as Tarantino had noticed, in Gilmore’s programming preference for diversity over quality. And, so far as the awards went, in the nod toward films that “needed” a boost, as the director was told later, versus films, like his own, that didn’t. The slight still rankles. “It was the thing about Sundance that I hated the most at that time,” says Tarantino. “They were liberal in the worst sense. It wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if I hadn’t been told by everybody I was gonna win—something. But it hurt my feelings. I was sad, I was mad. When it was over I did a slightly less drastic version of storming out. ‘Fuck all you!’ ” Later, when Tarantino became famous, recalls former festival programmer Cathy Schulman, “We were always trying to involve him in everything. We tried to get him on the jury. We tried to get him to work in the labs, as a resource person. He was never accessible to us. He was pissed off.”
The jury bestowed the grand jury prize on Rockwell’s winsome In the Soup. Rockwell, of course, was delirious. “It changed my life,” he recalls. “All of a sudden I was getting CAA sending me little cookies at my hotel door, still hot. I signed with them, and I left them after about four months after realizing that they were not interested in independent films.” Rockwell, Tarantino, and Anders hung out together, and subsequently referred to themselves as “the Class of ’92.” Recalls Rockwell, who was then married to actress Jennifer Beals, “When my film won the Jury Prize, there was some tension about Reservoir Dogs—some critics thought it should have gotten the prize. Quentin later came to New York and stayed with me. He was standing in my kitchen looking at me, and he said, ‘I’m so happy you got the prize, I’m so proud of your movie,’ and he came over and hugged me. With all my other director friends, you felt a little bit of resentment, they didn’t want to introduce you to people who might finance your movie, but Quentin was not at all like that. He was the most generous and totally supportive guy I knew.” Tarantino used their apartment for two weeks. “You didn’t want to go into the room he was staying in, ’cause it was like a pop media bomb went off, with half-drunk Dr Peppers, board games, full-sized John Travolta dolls,” continued Rockwell. “Quentin is intense.”
Four
The Buying Game
1992–1993
• How Quentin Tarantino drew a line in the sand with the Weinsteins, who sold their company, if not their souls, to Disney, while Robert Redford left Steven Soderbergh at the altar.
“We don’t want to grow up and be another Walt Disney.”
—BOB WEINSTEIN, 1989
There are two kinds of executives in the independent film business. As Sony Classics’s Tom Bernard puts it, “People like Michael Barker and me, or Ira Deutchman or Bingham Ray or Jeff Lipsky, we’re in the business ’cause we love it, but a lot of the guys, like Amir Malin, put these companies together to get rich.”
Lipsky and Ray flew to New York to meet with Malin, and had ample opportunity to see how he was spending the money Merchant and Ivory believed Cinecom owed them. Ray immediately recalled why he had disliked Malin so. “He was kind of dumpy, he could make an Armani suit look bad,” recalls Ray. He continues, “If Amir told me the sun was shining, I’d look out a window. To this day I don’t know if he understands how people regard him as just this side of an oil slick.”
Ray and Lipsky stayed with him in his spanking new white brick Mc-Mansion in Oyster Bay Cove, where he lived with his wife, a dermatologist, and two children. Ray, who wasn’t about to give Malin an inch, suspected that Oyster Bay Cove was a real estate agent’s fiction, insisted that Malin’s address was really Syosset, a considerably less distinguished location nearby, and to irritate him sent him mail there, noting with satisfaction that it always seemed to reach its destination. The furnishings—sleek, black oversized chairs, a huge projection TV—were new, trendy, and expensive. “It was nouveau with a capital N,” says Ray. “This was not a simple guy, with simple tastes. He had some of the ugliest fucking clothes going. I’ve probably never in my entire life owned as many suits as Amir has thrown out or given to Goodwill. I was put in a small bedroom, like a hospital room, sterile, something out of Todd Haynes’s film Safe.”
Malin didn’t allow smoking in the house, and Ray couldn’t keep his hands off cigarettes. At night, the house was in lockdown. Ray continues, “He had this expensive alarm system hooked up to every nook and cranny. The guy was fearful of who knows what, he was Israeli, maybe Arabs coming to kidnap him. I wanted a cigarette, and I opened the window to blow smoke out, and of course, Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! He came in, ‘Are you smoking in there?’ It was like, Oh fuck, the smoke police are out to get me. I’m, ‘How can you live like this? In fear. You’re out in the ’burbs, Oyster Bay Cove slash Syosset!’ ”
“When Amir came into October, the only question was, Who’s out first, Jeff or Bingham,” says former Cinecom executive Richard Abramowitz. “Because you knew Amir was going to be the last man standing.” As soon as word got out on the street, the p
hone started ringing. Their competitors, yet. Like Barker and Bernard. Recalls Ray, it was, “ ‘What’re you, fucking crazy? Don’t you know what this guy is like? He’s gonna come after you. He’s gonna kill you!’ I said, ‘Look, I’m not saying I can control him, but I’m not going to be his friend, I’m going to be his business partner. Even though he is loathed, he is respected. I think we’re mature enough, it’ll work out.’ ” Deutchman remembers, “There was plenty of word on the street about Amir at this point, but they chose for whatever reason to ignore it. I tried to warn them, and they kept insisting that he was a changed man, that he was acknowledging the mistakes that he made at Cinecom. And he did have a skill set that they needed.” Ray confronted Malin at his office-in-exile, 850 Third Avenue, where he was tending the Cinecom library, keeping it warm, a hen on an egg. As Ray recalls, the conversation went this way: Ray said, “What you did to people at Cinecom, I know you’re gonna try to do at October, and I’m just not going to let you do it.”
Malin answered, “You’re gonna have to give me the benefit of the doubt.”
“Why? What have you done to earn the benefit of the doubt? Nothing. Your track record sucks. Leopards don’t change their spots.”
“I’ve really turned over a new leaf.”
Continues Ray, “He’d tell you anything he thought you wanted to hear. He was the reason why everything worked, and other people were the reasons for everything being fucked up.”
Ray may have had misgivings about Malin, but Lipsky was driving him crazy, and Malin was a willing ear. Ray would call him to complain about his partner, long conversations, forty-five minutes, an hour. Malin wondered what he was getting into.
Lipsky, on the other hand, was a good deal more upbeat about Malin. “I never had a negative encounter with Amir,” he says. “I think he’s one of the best dealmakers I’ve ever known. Is he duplicitous? Backstabbing? All these things that you hear from people? I’ve never been a victim. I think people are jealous of how shrewd he is.” In any event, Ray and Lipsky agreed to take on Malin as a partner. Lipsky called Allen & Co. and crowed, “Great news. We just added a partner who started his own company, it was successful for a while before it went bankrupt!”
Unconvinced, Allen & Co. still refused to give them the keys to the car. Life Is Sweet had opened in October 1991, the first release of October Films-in-waiting. In December, the company that did not quite exist got a shot in the arm from the prestigious National Society of Film Critics, which named Life Is Sweet Best Picture of the Year. Says Ray, “Just two guys released that movie and it did over $2 million. That was the proudest moment of my life.” Then Allen & Co. introduced them to John Schmidt, fresh from Miramax. He came with no baggage. He was like Switzerland. According to Ray, Malin had assured them he would be able to close, that is, secure the money they needed, but he hadn’t. Just to irritate him, Ray used to stand in front of the door to his office and shout, “Who’s the closer? Schmidt’s the closer!”
Schmidt rewrote the business plan in March and April 1992, and closed the financing, appropriately enough, on October 5, 1992. Although there was a certain amount of euphoria, Lipsky and Ray were disappointed in Allen & Co. Instead of raising the $7 million they needed, the bankers raised a paltry $3.3 million and took a $300,000 fee, so October effectively began with $3 million of operational capital. “They were penurious,” says Lipsky. “We weren’t sure if they were just doing this to make us go away, or if they were testing our mettle, as if to say, ‘If you’re so cocksure of what you can do out of thin air, that’s what we’ll give you, thin air.’ ” Moreover, Lipsky couldn’t help noticing that his equity and control had been progressively diluted, not to say, dissolved. He continues, “What began as me owning 100 percent of nothing, and me and Bingham owning 50 percent of nothing, then me, Bingham, and Amir owning one third of something worth nothing, then became four of us owning 25 percent of something worth nothing. And of course, once we made the deal with Allen & Co., we became glorified employees. You’re all of a sudden reporting to a board, and we ended up with one seat out of eight people. Our autonomy—it wasn’t compromised, it was eliminated.”
Lipsky et al. found themselves in a financial straitjacket. He adds, “We had the ability to make whatever decisions we wanted up to a certain financial threshhold—$750,000 per title for combined acquisition and P&A—above which we would have to get board approval.” And the investors, an assortment of bankers, “harped on how they were gonna make money, their exit strategy, how they were gonna get out. These people were not investing in the futures of Jeff Lipsky, Bingham Ray, Amir Malin, or John Schmidt. Their passion was money. Our passion, or at least Bingham’s and my passion, was film. And we did a damn good job of merging those two passions—at least for the first couple of years.”
By the fall of 1992, October Films was ready to rock ’n’ roll. The pitch to filmmakers was, “October was the kinder, gentler Miramax. You’re not going to get Harvey Scissorhands here. We’re gonna let you make the movie you want to make.” The first acquisition was Gregg Araki’s The Living End, which had gone begging after Sundance. October acquired it for a trifle, $100,000 (the film only cost $30,000), opened it for no more than $350,000, and drove it to $1.4 million. They did well with a French film called Tous Les Matins du Monde, and The War Room, the D. A. Pennebaker documentary that made a minor star out of James Carville. At the same time, they exploited Malin’s strengths. He made video and TV deals on titles like Chain of Desire, Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, and Free Fall, while squeezing an annual $200,000 to $400,000 out of the Cinecom library. “It would have been very difficult to start October solely as an art film distributor,” says Schmidt. “It was much more viable with a direct-to-video business. This was an important source of earnings for us.” Even Ray had to give Malin his due: “The guy was really intelligent, he helped construct a lot of models of deal structures.”
Still, it was tough going. Ray wanted to buy Reservoir Dogs, but couldn’t come up with the cash. “It was frustrating when you can’t compete,” he says. “I wanted to have the money to go toe to toe with these guys. But we never had it, so I said, Okay, why drive yourself crazy? We’re in a niche, we gotta be really smart in our niche, the films we can get.” The most successful acquisition of those early years was John Dahl’s The Last Seduction. October paid $300,000 for the North American rights in 1994, and launched it on a successful theatrical run in the fall after it had already played on HBO, almost unheard of. It grossed $5.8 million. If there was trouble down the road—and there was—the partners were too excited to see it.
QUENTIN TARANTINO, born on March 27, 1963, grew up in L.A.’s South Bay, a depressing sprawl of ticky-tacky tract houses near the Los Angeles airport. Raised by his mother with the help of a series of father surrogates, one of whom she married, her son, taking his new stepfather’s name, became Quentin Zastoupil. He changed schools often. The eternal new kid, with a dorky name, Munster-ish looks, and aversion to sports, he was the oddball, the loner. “I was the dumb kid who couldn’t keep up with the class,” he says. Lonely and unhappy, he skipped school at every opportunity, hiding in the bathroom until his mother went to work, spending the rest of the day at home, burying himself in comic books and television—every mother’s nightmare. He dropped out of the ninth or tenth grade when he was fifteen or sixteen, depending on which version of his life you believe, worked at a series of odd jobs, attended acting classes, and in 1984, he got a job at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, a magnet for every movie geek in the South Bay. He was the avatar of a new wave of filmmakers raised on video, as opposed to the so-called movie brats of the 1970s, who went to film school and were weaned on the greats of world cinema. “I didn’t go to film school, I went to films,” he likes to say, confessing, “Film school was never an option for me. I didn’t go to college. I didn’t even start high school. My film school was trying to make my first film, My Best Friend’s Birthday. I thought, Jesus Christ, people are paying small fortunes to
go to college, and so I was always saying, ‘Don’t pay that money for tuition. Just go off and make a movie.’ ”
Roger Avary, a former friend and writing partner who also worked at the Archives, dropped out of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. “Before video, I would rent 16mm prints and read cinema books,” he recalls. “You’d hear about movies described as if they were mythology. Every now and then one would breeze through town, and I’d rush out to see it—that’s if I could get in. When video came along, all of a sudden you had a database of twenty thousand titles. One day I realized, What am I doing? Why go to film school to listen to somebody lecture about film in the old style when you can sit around for eight or ten hours a day and discuss movies with your friends. That was the greatest film school any of us could ever have.”
With the advent of video, in other words, a culture of scarcity was transformed, almost overnight, into a culture of plenty, effectively stripping film of its hieratic halo, the mystique of the image that had inspired French Catholic film critics like Andre Bazin and through them a generation of American auteurs and would-be auteurs. (Scorsese had nearly become a priest.) Video heralded a cinema Reformation. Already the “democratic art,” it democratized movies further, rendering, as Avary makes clear, the middlemen—the critic/teachers, the priests of the religion of the cinema—irrelevant. But the price of short-circuiting the film school route was the sacrifice of film culture, the “great tradition” academics made it their business to pass on to the students of the past. Blissfully innocent of civilizing influences, as it were, delayed adolescents like Tarantino preferred their martial arts movies to, say, Eisenstein or Renoir, and so video facilitated a new brutalism, of which Tarantino became the leading and most accomplished practitioner.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 19
