In 1994, Soderbergh received a form letter from Redford, inviting him to a “best of” Sundance event in Tokyo. He didn’t bother to respond. After Redford left footprints on Soderbergh’s back, the honeymoon between the Sundance Festival and its most famous alumnus was over. Said Soderbergh, “The image that is given [of Redford]—as being a friend of the filmmaker—is not what I experienced.”
WHEN THE SUNDANCE FESTIVAL ENDED, Dogs still did not have a distributor. Gladstein recalls leaving Park City doubting that the film would ever get a theatrical release. Still, Hoving and Tusk were eager to acquire it. Neither Weinstein had attended. As part of the belt-tightening, recalls Tusk, “They were making us do nonrefundable airfares. It was, I can’t change the back–to–New York airfare, so, just go to L.A. So I carried the print of Reservoir Dogs from Sundance to the Carolco screening room in West Hollywood to show it to Harvey and Bob.” Twenty minutes into it, Harvey was getting a little itchy. Tusk told him, “Sit still. Trust me.” The movie ended. Harvey was dubious, afraid it would be a hard sell at the box office even if it got good reviews, which seemed questionable, given the carnage. Back in New York, the brothers screened it again, then went around the room, canvassing the staff. Ben Zinkin, an outside counsel, said, “That was probably the single worst movie I’ve ever seen.”
“Russell?”
Russell Schwartz, head of marketing, replied, “Not my cup of tea. For me, it’s a pass.”
“Marty?”
“Actually, it could do Blood Simple business,” said Zeidman. But several of the younger people were passionate about it. Recalls Gladstein, “Harvey said to me that it was really the enthusiasm of the staff that made him buy the movie. I felt it was more of a Bob acquisition than a Harvey acquisition.” Harvey was particularly uneasy about the ear slicing scene. “I was afraid it would turn off women,” he explains. He used his wife, Eve, and her sister Maude as guinea pigs in screenings the way he used everybody else. “When the ear scene came on, they were out of their seats like jumping jacks,” he recalls. “Forget it, there go the women.” On her way out, Eve turned to him and said, “I don’t care how good the movie is, this is disgusting!” He thought, This is like my mother saying, “Brush your teeth and wash your face.” Harvey wanted to impress Tarantino, but, he recalls, “They were circling outside the screening room, pissed off at me, pissed off at Quentin, pissed off at the movie. Angry.” Embarrassed, he apologized to the director, who retorted, exasperated, “I didn’t make it for your wife!” Eve and Maude stood outside the screening room for fifteen minutes. Then they returned and watched the rest of the film. “I thought you hated the movie, how come you came back?” Harvey asked them. Eve replied, “We wanted to find out what happened.”
But Harvey wouldn’t give up. Tarantino was incredulous, said, “What? You want to cut out the torture scene?!” The Miramax co-chairman had a way of getting behind a filmmaker, and then zeroing in on a signature scene, the one that best expressed the filmmaker’s particular voice, that made the film, in this case, “a Tarantino film,” and trying to get rid of it. “Without this scene, you have a mainstream movie,” he told the director. “With this scene, you put it in a box. Without that scene, I could open this movie in three hundred theaters. As opposed to one! Thirty seconds would change the movie in the American marketplace.”
“It’s a problem if they’re expecting it to be Pretty Woman,” Tarantino replied. “This movie was never meant to be everything for everybody. I made this movie for myself, and everybody else is invited. Forget it, it’s staying in.” The director recalls, “I didn’t have to cut out anything, because he bought the film the way it was. But that doesn’t mean anything to him. He had one market research screening of Dogs at the Miramax theater. His minions were hanging around. He wanted to take out an invisible ten minutes. In particular the torture sequence. It was a moment with me and Harvey that really dictated our relationship.” Tarantino thought back to his experience at the Sundance lab, when his scene was critiqued by all the resource people. He remembered, It was like a picnic table inquisition. It was a beautiful summer day, the birds were flying around and chirping, and all these people were just telling me, You suck! “I think most directors are pussies,” he says now. “If you couldn’t handle it at Sundance, with people who have the best of intentions, how’re you gonna handle it when you gotta swim with the sharks, when you’re trapped in a room with Harvey Weinstein and you gotta fight for your way, and fight in such a way that you’re not alienating people as you fight, but you’re doing your job, which is protecting your baby.
“He went, ‘How ’bout this, let me give it to my guys, let them try editing it out. See if we like it. We’re not touching your movie. It’s on video. You hit erase and it’s gone. Lemme just try it.’ I knew that was the death of me, just letting anybody else get in there and fuck with it. But it was hard saying no. Because Harvey doesn’t get his way by yelling and screaming like a maniac. A person like that is easy to fight with. He was being so reasonable, so nice, and he started dropping names of all the movies that he’d worked with. ‘I took ten minutes out of Steven’s movie . . .’ He was seducing me, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. I wanted to be embraced and brought inside his family that had done so many good movies, I wanted to blurt out ‘Yes’ just to make him happy, but I couldn’t. So I said, ‘Harvey, no. I think the movie is perfect just the way it is. I think the torture scene—it does put the film into a smaller niche—but I think it’s one of the best things in the movie.’ There was just the tiniest bit of a pause, and he goes, ‘Well, okay, then, and I want you to remember it was Miramax that let your movie go out exactly the way you wanted it!’ It all comes down to little moments, and that moment decided my career for all time. With anybody and with everybody. It’s that line in The Color of Money, ‘If you you know when it’s time to say yes, and when its time to say no, everybody goes home in a Cadillac.’ ”
Reservoir Dogs opened on October 23, 1992, in New York. Says David Linde, “When Reservoir Dogs came out, everyone was tense because Miramax had run out of hits and was trying to get this one movie to cross over.” But it didn’t. Although the Weinsteins were making their mark by distributing art films like mainstream movies, ironically, in the case of Dogs, the reverse was true, or at least that’s the way Tarantino looked at it. He complained that Miramax marketed the picture like an art film. As he recalls, “Miramax had fucked Live up the ass with Madonna’s Truth or Dare, that Live wanted for video the year before, so when the shoe was on the other foot, Live stuck it to Miramax,” driving such a hard bargain that Miramax had little incentive to push the film. All and all, it was probably the least auspicious sendoff ever given someone who was destined to become a major filmmaker. Dogs only grossed about $2.5 million, despite a hurricane of press. Bender, his producer, wasn’t happy. “I thought they could have done better,” he says. “I wished they had put it out there more.” Dogs did more than twice as well ($6 million) in England, where it was indeed opened like a mainstream movie. It sold very well on video, of which the Weinsteins only had a small cut, over 100,000 units in the U.S. and probably an equal number worldwide. (The video was banned in England.) As of the year 2000, Dogs had grossed about $20 million worldwide. Says Tarantino, “That’s pretty fucking cool.”
Tarantino more than paid Keitel back for his help. For the late-blooming actor, his memorable role in Dogs revived a career spent in the shadow of Robert De Niro. Keitel would also give a sensational performance in The Piano, and subsequently became a bit of a Miramax repertory player. But ironically, the Weinsteins turned out be a stone in his shoe. Keitel and De Niro, two wild and crazy guys, had long lived next door to each other in Tribeca way before Tribeca was a happening place, when it was just industrial lofts, rats, and garbage. Years before Miramax moved in, they were the “Harvey and Bob” of the neighborhood. But there was room only for one “Harvey and Bob” in Tribeca, and as Miramax prospered, the Weinsteins were the ones who grabbed boasting r
ights to the names. When Keitel’s assistant called over to Nobu to order sushi for the actor’s lunch, it often ended up on Weinstein’s desk, driving Keitel crazy.
Tarantino’s success nettled the Archives guys who, with the exception of Avary, had become his ex-friends. In both Dogs and True Romance, ultimately directed by Tony Scott, they heard scraps of conversation, stories, and jokes that they recognized as their own. Tarantino had hoovered up everything around him without so much as a “May I?” and when he left his pals behind, they resented it. According to one, Rand Vossler, “There wasn’t a day during those two and a half years that we weren’t together working. Quentin and I were as close as guys could be. He slept on my floor. [But] he’s Mr. Tarantino now. He became extremely difficult to get in touch with, because once the ball started rolling on Reservoir Dogs, it rolled fast. Quentin couldn’t bother with anything that I was doing.”
Allison Anders had asked Bumble Ward, the publicist she shared with Tarantino, to fix them up. Tarantino had had an on-and-off relationship with the love of his life, Grace Lovelace, and now they were off. He seemed to have fairly specific requirements in the girlfriend department. She had to like to sit in the third row. She had to like Rio Bravo. “Also, she shouldn’t be a stickler when it comes to my personal hygiene,” he added. “She has to cut me a little bit of slack. I’m not speaking about BO. But people have a natural smell, and she has to like my smell. If she has a big problem with it, that’s sort of the beginning of the end.”
In any event, the two filmmakers hooked up at a party for In the Soup. They bonded over their shared redneck history.
On their first date, they went to see Passenger 57, a Wesley Snipes movie, and then drove back to his apartment in the red, two-door Geo Metro he bought with his True Romance money. On the right side, the fender was crushed like a beer can, and the inside was a mess, the floor littered with flattened Styrofoam coffee cups and blackened Q-tips that looked like they had been places you didn’t want to go.
Tarantino was living in the semi-squalor of a single guy, occupying a cramped, funky apartment on Crescent Heights, below Sunset, filled with movie posters, movie memorabilia, dolls, and mounds of dirty laundry piled in corners. A portrait of Lovelace curled up asleep on a purple couch hung over the mantel, on which lay the straight razor that starred in Dogs. (The ear was in “storage.”) The small living room was dominated by a big black Panasonic TV with a rectangular screen in the proper aspect ratio for viewing movies unscanned. He was deathly afraid that rats would overrun the apartment and took evasive action, sleeping in a different room every night.
Tarantino and Anders lay on the floor listening to music and playing Mystery Date and Mr. T, two board games Tarantino yanked out of a closet stacked from top to bottom with his vast collection based on TV shows and movies. Anders still hadn’t seen Dogs and didn’t really want to. She thought, Okay, date number three, I’m gonna have to watch this guy’s movie.
Like so many others, Anders worshipped Scorsese. She told Tarantino she had sent him a copy of Gas Food Lodging. Tarantino said, “Oh yeah, he wrote to Miramax, said he really liked Reservoir Dogs.”
“Oh really? He sent me a fax.”
“To the company?”
“No, to me!”
“He sent you a fax?”
“Yeah, and I’m going to his house for dinner.”
“He’s cooking lasagna for you? And I wear this guy around my neck like a ball and chain?”
Tarantino had been riding the festival circuit, with its paparazzi, autograph hounds, and groupies. On one of their dates he said, “I’m thinking of doing this article on festivals—‘A Young Filmmaker’s Guide to Getting Laid at Film Festivals’: first you choose your big festivals, then you go to the cool festivals, and then you go to wherever you like the girls. If you’re into Swedish girls, you go to Stockholm.”
“It doesn’t work that way for girls,” she replied. “You don’t get that kind of groupie action. I get menopausal women. Following me around.”
Tarantino and Anders were not meant for each other. It was the sixth week of their relationship, and they still hadn’t slept together. After dinner at a restaurant, Tarantino asked her, “Do you want me to drive you home, or do you want to come back to my apartment and watch me alphabetize my videotapes?”
“You can’t go out with other filmmakers,” Anders observes. “Kathryn Bigelow said, ‘Four times, no more.’ I went out on dates with Quentin, I’ve been editing all day, and I was like, This guy can’t be my boyfriend, he’s telling me what’s in his trim bin, what brilliant scenes are no longer in Dogs. I don’t want to know this about you. It’s like dirty handkerchiefs or something.”
THE WEINSTEINS began to emerge from their funk in 1992, but box office did not rebound enough for them to claw their way out of the hole they had dug for themselves over the course of the previous two years, and the company’s downward slide just seemed to accelerate. Enchanted April, directed by Mike Newell, was released on July 31, and became the year’s big earner, grossing $13.2 million. Mediterraneo, which won 1991’s sole Oscar for Miramax, did $4.5 million. Delicatessen grossed $1.9 million. But there were no breakout hits, comparable to Robert Altman’s The Player, from Fine Line, and Merchant-Ivory’s Howards End, from Sony Classics, each grossing nearly $25 million. The brothers’ overhead was climbing too, at the same time that they were paying more for acquisitions because that market was overheating as a result of the blaze they themselves had started. Worst of all, most often the cash they were putting out wasn’t paying off. Dust Devil, Richard Stanley’s follow-up to Hardware, was never released, while Tom and Jerry: The Movie and Love Crimes both flopped. Harvey bought Spotswood, aka The Efficiency Expert, directed by Mark Joffe, because it was Anthony Hopkins’s first film after The Silence of the Lambs. He recut it and watched it die in November, grossing all of $101,307—impressive next to Tom DiCillo’s Johnny Suede which took in $13,477.
Variety quoted one exhibitor saying Miramax “has lost its edge from the early days because they’ve acquired too many films.” According to the trade paper, as of September 1992 Miramax had a backlog of sixteen unre-leased pictures that the company apparently couldn’t afford to open. Variety got hold of audited financial statements showing that Miramax posted an after-tax profit of $2.64 million on revenues of $28.12 million in 1989. In 1990, the company enjoyed an after-tax profit of $4.04 million on revenues of $49.9 million; but in 1991, after-tax profits were nearly flat—$4.35 million—even though revenues had increased by 50 percent to $74.09 million. These numbers show how deceptive grosses can be in terms of the overall profit picture, and give a good indication of how much Miramax must have been spending in 1992 just to keep up with the previous year. Profit margins dipped from 9 percent to 8 percent to 5 percent over the three-year period. The movie business is cyclical, and studios, with their deep pockets, are able to withstand those inevitable cold spells, but it’s very hard for a small indie company to survive a bad year, almost impossible to survive two or three.
All told, Miramax released twenty-two films in 1992 with a total gross of $39 million, or a mere $1.8 million a film. Its new Dimension division, known in-house as “Dementia,” hit the ground running with Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, which grossed $12 million, and Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, which grossed $7 million on a budget of $900,000. The two movies accounted for a little over a quarter of Miramax’s profits. These figures—which don’t include advances and expenses and don’t address financing arrangements, ancillary profits, and so on—provide only a partial glimpse of the company’s performance, but what they do show isn’t good. Cash flow was nearly choked off. Recalls Tusk, “Creditors were knocking down the doors. We were being told, ‘You’ve got $50 per day for Cannes.’ ” You couldn’t buy a hamburger for that. Staffers were expected to turn over paper printed on one side and use the back for photocopying. Instead of replacing old toner with new, office workers recycled it into the copiers. They had
to pay for their own coffee, water, and parking. Tusk continues, “You would hear they weren’t paying vendors. Or they were trying to cut deals like, ‘We’ll give you 75 cents on the dollar.’ We had always been urged, ‘Read as many magazines as you can, keep in tune with what the critics are saying, read the feature press.’ Suddenly it was, ‘The other magazines are being cut off. You get Variety and Hollywood Reporter.’ ” Staffers ran to the bank with their paychecks, lest they bounce. Recalls Stuart Burkin, “Bob would come around and say, ‘You guys want to work out of your homes the next few days? The lights are going off, and the phones.’ The bills didn’t get paid.” As Bob himself recalled, “I used to go into Chase Manhattan Bank on my knees, to start out with, then I’d be on my belly, begging for money. You’d be trying to explain Jane Campion to bankers and, then, mid-sentence, you’d think, Why am I even talking?”
Miramax, in other words, was like one of those cantilevered California homes that threatens to slide down the hillside into the sea every time it rains. It was propped up on four wobbly legs: North American theatrical distribution, foreign sales, video, and pay cable. The theatrical leg was always weak because even in the best of times, the brothers were in a business where they had to spend a lot to make a little, where the more they made, the more it cost to make it, where they had to run fast to stay in place. Even with films that were “successful,” it was questionable how much was left over in profit: the longer the pictures stayed in theaters, the more they had to pay for advertising, and the more the division of the box office receipts favored the exhibitors. Its deal with HBO, which paid 25 to 30 percent of its production costs, was soon to expire. This relationship was critical to the company, because the kind of specialty product Miramax distributed commanded an upscale, pay cable demographic, and therefore had little free television value. But even outlets like HBO were trying to broaden their audience with big Hollywood movies, and when HBO declined to renew its agreement, it was a disaster, especially since Miramax still owed money to several banks, including Midland Montague. Says CAA’s John Ptak, who was hired by the Weinsteins to plug the HBO hole, “Harvey was up shit’s creek.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 21
