But, to change metaphors, 1992 was like a roller-coaster ride, with gut-wrenching lows followed by breathtaking highs. Tony Safford, who had left Sundance to head acquisitions at New Line, had been unhappy for some time, and he chose that moment to jump ship to Miramax. “They’re big on raiding other camps,” he says. Safford was dubious about leaving a company that was thriving for one that was “always teetering on the edge, with a lot of films that weren’t working, that had a lot of pictures on the shelf, banks looking over their shoulder, but I experienced [New Line’s] Bob Shaye as a brooder, who would literally sit in his office as the sun went down, and even though it got darker and darker, he never turned on the lights. Harvey, on the other hand, not only wore his emotions on his sleeve, he played his emotions magnificently as the situation required. To be at Miramax during that period was exciting.”
Although the Weinsteins’ belt-tightening cinched the waists of their employees, they were not about to let it interfere with their own lifestyle. “They were the kings of T&E,”9 says Schmidt. They loved luxe hotels, the Beverly Hills Hotel in L.A., the Savoy in London, the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes, the Ritz on La Place Vendôme in Paris. “They flew first class, then they started chartering their own planes, they had limos, car services,” Schmidt continues. At the point when things were at their worst, Poly-Gram head Michael Kuhn ran into Harvey at the Beverly Hills Hotel, went up to his rooms, an expensive corner suite, and sat there dumbstruck as Harvey poor-mouthed, harangued him about reducing expenses and slashing staff. Incredulously, he asked, “Harvey, if that’s the case, how come you are in this huge corner suite?” Harvey replied, “Well, I only pay a single room rate for it.”
“How on earth do you manage that? I can never get anything like that on this floor.”
“It’s because I spend so much money here.”
Miramax had brought Reservoir Dogs to Cannes that year. The French loved it, but more important, they adored Tarantino, who was becoming a star on the festival circuit. He would talk to anybody who would talk to him. The Weinsteins marketed directors, and it was clear that in Tarantino they had a winner.
The festival also afforded the brothers the opportunity to unload some films Miramax had acquired but could not afford to release. Ptak, one of a handful of pioneers who had tilled the soil of foreign presales and cofinancing, introduced Harvey to Jeffrey Katzenberg, with the notion of inducing the Disney chairman to buy the South African musical Sarafina!, which starred Whoopi Goldberg, along with Vincent Ward’s Map of the Human Heart. Katzenberg watched forty minutes of Sarafina! and agreed to buy it, along with a package of five more films for video, for $13.5 million. “Miramax was the happiest bunch of people in the world,” recalls Ptak. “They were about six to eight months from bankruptcy. When I came to their offices in New York the secretaries hugged me.” (But it took CAA nine months to collect its commission on the deal.) In addition to selling Disney its package of pictures, Ptak engineered a first-look deal to produce larger budget pictures for Miramax, buying some time.10
The creation of Dimension, as well as the sale of Sarafina!, were regarded by the trades as acts of desperation, sure signs that Miramax was headed for the indie graveyard, which wasn’t far from the truth. As Schmidt puts it, “Without The Crying Game in the picture, you’re out of money.” But The Crying Game was in the picture. Way back in the summer of 1982, Neil Jordan, whose Mona Lisa in 1986 had been an art house hit, hatched a tale he called, alternatively, The Soldier’s Story or The Soldier’s Wife. But Jordan was unable to resolve the story problems, and put it aside to work on The Company of Wolves, which Palace produced in 1984. Seven years later, Jordan and Steve Woolley found themselves at the Berlin Film Festival, which was screening Jordan’s latest, The Miracle, an incest film. Over drinks with Woolley in a Berlin bar, Jordan brought up the unfinished script, asked, “What do you think if Dil, the girlfriend of the black soldier who Fergus looks up in London, turned out to be a man?” Woolley thought it over, decided it was a smashing idea, and assured Jordan he would produce it. He sent the script to the Weinsteins. “How the hell are you gonna do this?” Harvey asked.
“We’ll find somebody.”
“I don’t believe it. Good luck.”
According to Jordan, Weinstein, like everyone else, was afraid to touch it, with its combustible mix of race, politics, and sex. Harvey said “he’d do it if I cast a girl as the transvestite, because he thought audiences would find it too unacceptable and too revolting otherwise.” Not easily discouraged, Woolley proceeded anyway, with the backing of Channel Four, British Screen, and a consortium of banks. Finding “a chick with a dick” to play Dil was proving difficult. Finally, director Derek Jarman’s boyfriend recommended Jaye Davidson, a clubber and some-time fashion assistant. Jordan and Woolley liked Davidson’s readings, but the search continued. Then, one day, Woolley called a halt. He said to Jordan, joking, “This is stupid. Jaye’s so good and he’s saying the lines so well. Can we just get on and cast him before I end up fucking him.” The film was shot in the fall of 1991. With three films in production, all of which would become hits, Palace entered bankruptcy in August 1992.
Set in London against a background of IRA terrorism, Jordan’s muted, melancholy film that begins and ends with death, tells the story of a man, Fergus, played by sad-eyed Stephen Rea, whose lover, Dil, indeed turns out to be a transvestite. Davidson, seductive, vulnerable, and scary, all at once, is absolutely convincing. Ironically, Jordan structured the film with the same fable of the scorpion and the frog that Matt Damon uses to gloss Harvey.
Jack Lechner, who was an executive at Channel Four at the time, saw a rough cut and walked out into the streets of Soho thinking, This is a really wonderful movie, and I hope twenty-five people go to see it. “It never occurred to anyone involved that it would ever be more than a lovely little British film that, if we were lucky, might make its money back,” he recalls. “Cannes passed on it, and Venice did too. It seemed that the cards were stacked against it.” Woolley and Powell set their sights high, deciding to take The Crying Game (as it was now called) to the studios instead of the art film distributors in February 1992. Typically, the executives didn’t get it. They made and received phone calls during the screenings. Brandon Tartikoff, the Paramount chairman, took one such call just before the shot of Dil’s private parts, and missed it entirely. When the screening ended, Woolley noted that he expected the film to be very controversial. Tartikoff, with a puzzled look, asked, “Why’s that?”
Miramax saw the film at the American Film Market, two months before Cannes, at the Aidikoff Screening Room. Harvey liked it, but it was Bob who was blown away, and it was his enthusiasm that drove the deal. Both Weinsteins were convinced that they could prevail on the press to keep mum regarding Dil’s member. But the question, as always, was money. Over and over the Weinsteins asked, “Is there any video value in light of the content?” They were worried that Blockbuster might blackball the film because of the premise. Finally they rolled the dice, decided to enter the mild bidding war for the picture. Miramax, which had shown zero interest in The Crying Game in the script stage, when it could have had North American rights for well under $1 million, ended up bidding through the spring against Sony Classics for the North American rights. But the frugal Barker and Bernard refused to go the extra mile, and the North American rights went to Miramax for about $1.5 million. A lot of distributors, like Fine Line’s Deutchman, walked away, and regretted it later. He recalls, wistfully, “I could have put Harvey and Bob out of business. I came very close to deciding to acquire that movie, but ultimately I backed off, assuming there was no way you could keep the surprise a secret, and once it was out no one would be interested in seeing the film.”
Jordan, who felt that Harvey had dumped The Miracle, his previous film, insisted on severe terms. “I was nervous they would try to recut it and test it to hell,” he says. Adds Woolley, “Neil was very bruised. We just didn’t want to give it to somebody to chop up, and we were
able to make sure they couldn’t touch a frame, they couldn’t change the title, they couldn’t dub it, they couldn’t test it—they had to just basically release the film.” It was a good deal for the investors and a bad deal for Miramax. In return for its $1.5 million, the company was not getting any back end participation, only expenses and a 25 percent distribution fee. In other words, after Miramax took its fee, deducted its costs from what remained of its share of the gross, the balance belonged to the investors.
Throughout the fall of 1992, The Crying Game played festivals like Telluride and Toronto. Initially, Miramax, which was flogging Strictly Ballroom as its Oscar film, ignored it. Woolley, who had come up with the don’t-reveal-the-secret strategy for the British release, was on his own. At Telluride for the first screening, the theater was deserted. “Nobody [at Miramax] had put any work into it,” he recalls. “We were, Oh, my God!” But the next one was almost full, and the third was packed. Todd McCarthy gave it a rave review in Variety and it was off to the races. The tracking numbers were strong, and The Crying Game was looking like a winner. “Harvey did not create the phenomenon,” says Woolley. “He managed the phenomenon, and as such he did a superb job.”
As the British release date approached in October 1992, the IRA initiated a new round in its terror campaign in England, and The Crying Game, which had been retitled after a 1964 Dave Berry song to downplay the IRA angle, opened the same week. Despite respectable reviews, it did disastrous business, taking in no more than £300,000 at the box office, less than a seventh of its budget, forget P&A. In view of the grosses, Channel Four and Palace had little likelihood of paying the above- and below-the-line costs that had all been deferred.
The Crying Game opened in America on November 25 in only a handful of theaters in New York and L.A. Even at that point, Miramax was so disorganized that Woolley was appalled to see that it had not supplied posters for the theaters. But Harvey prowled the lobbies during the first weeks into release, buttonholing patrons, asking, “What happens in this movie? What’s the big secret?” Says Woolley, “It was, ‘You can sleep with my wife, but I’m not telling you the secret of The Crying Game!’ The audiences were terrific. That’s what sold the film.”
In hock to the banks and barely able to put food on the table, here was the hit the Weinsteins had been praying for. They could practically taste the money. They redoubled their efforts to buy out Midland Montague, and they finally did so in December 1992, for $3.1 million and the assignment of a $ 2.7 million debt due to Miramax. As someone who was involved with the deal on behalf of Miramax put it, “We were struggling to find every nickel. The boys didn’t have a pot to piss in.” Bob was thrilled. He always used to say, “We made the best deal, fuckin great!” Says Harvey, “We never forced Midland Montague out; they wanted out. They were scared of us, that they were gonna lose their money, and they cited Avenue pictures that was going broke—Cinecom had gone broke—and they thought that this was not a worthy investment. They used the idea that Miramax was at its borrowing limit with Chase. Chase was not looking to extend further credit, and was in fact looking to have its entire loan paid off, so that we could not expand any further. They made a profit. And we were not in negotiations with Disney or anybody else during those negotiations.”
But there was one big problem: “The reason we wanted to buy out The Crying Game investors was because we wanted to take the movie and expand it into a thousand theaters,” says Harvey.
Acquiring the rights to The Crying Game was going to be a challenge. In December, with the grosses already well up in the teens, Bob went to London to offer a settlement to the various parties: Channel Four, which owned the international sales rights, had actually made the deal with the Weinsteins and therefore was the lead party for a group of investors that included British Screen; the creditors of Palace; the Berliner Bank; Poly-Gram; and the agents for the people with the approximately £500,000 in deferrals—everyone from Neil Jordan down to the grips. They gathered in the dim basement conference room of the old St. James’s Club in London. For Miramax, the question was, What would make them sell? What would incentivize them?
According to Harvey, Bob told them, “We’re gonna spend $10 million, The Crying Game is going to play those theaters in Nebraska where people go to see all the Disney movies, all the Bruckheimer movies.” The investors were appalled, replied, “We know what you’re doing. You’re just going to spend off our money.”
“No, no, we’re gonna expand the gross. And everybody’s gonna make more.”
“No, no, no, we’re gonna make less.”
In other words, the investors thought that Bob was just going to “gross up” the film by spending their share of the profits, behavior other producers had accused Miramax of in the past.
Bluntly, Bob said something like, “We’re not gonna open the picture wide unless you guys sell out, because we have no incentive to do so.” But he was too tough, made the mistake of presenting them with a lose-lose proposition that just infuriated everyone: either the investors retained their interest in the film, in which case Miramax would bury it, and they would get nothing; or they sold their interest to Miramax, in which case they would be unable to benefit from the big score, if there was one. The air in the room was thick with hostility and mistrust. Recalls British Screen’s Simon Perry, “Bob was just aggressive and ill-humored. He threatened us: ‘You have to do this, or you’ll get nothing.’ We smelled something big coming at the box office, and we thought, If they want to buy us out, they must know something we don’t, so initially we turned him down.”
With Bob getting nowhere, Harvey sent his financial consultant, Peter Hoffman, to join the negotiations. Hoffman had been a principal in Carolco, the Hollywood mini-major that had taken the Rambo and Terminator films to the bank before going down in flames. He had a reputation for being a brilliant tax lawyer with one of the sharpest minds in town, maybe too sharp for his own good. As one studio executive joked, “He was always talking about reverse self-liquidating mergers that we could do based on section 32E of the IRS code.”
Hoffman played the good cop to Bob’s bad. The dominoes that had to fall first were Channel Four and British Screen. Once they went, no one else was going to block the deal. Miramax knew that the mandate of Channel Four and British Screen was not necessarily to make a profit, but to nurture English filmmakers. For them, the goal was to get the deferrals paid, every last penny. Says Powell, “That was a big concern. Those people worked for next to nothing.” Hoffman understood that, and he flattered them, made them feel good about selling. He said something like, “C’mon guys, this is the right thing to do. Don’t get mad at Harvey and Bob and do the wrong thing. Keep your eye on the ball. You have all these good British boys who made this picture, and they should get their money.”
Channel Four’s Colin Leventhal was skeptical that the film would do all that well, and Hoffman seized on that too, played up the risk involved. According to one of the people who was in the room, he said, “The boys are taking a gamble, they’re rash, who knows what’s gonna come out of this.” He tried to scare them, said something like, “Do you really think they’re ever going to pay you anything? When you get done with this you’ll be lucky if you get an accounting statement, much less get a check, and there’ll be a bunch of garbage on it, who knows if they can even pay. Because they may have pissed all that money away on something else, and by that time, who knows where they’ll be? They’re up to here with the banks, this is a shaky situation. At the end of the day it’s going to be a war.”
This was not idle talk, and eventually, threats and cajolery did their job. Says the source, “It’s hard to imagine that people actually do selfless things, but Leventhal and Simon Perry really sacrificed the interests of their companies to insure that no matter what happened, the people who had deferred their payments got paid.” Sure enough, once Channel Four and British Screen fell in to line, the others followed.
When the negotiations had been completed, all t
he parties gathered to sign the deal, in which Miramax was going to buy out the U.S. and Canadian rights to the picture and terminate everyone else’s participation for a payout that included a guaranteed amount for the back end, as well as bonuses if the film exceeded certain levels of U.S. box office performance. At the last moment, Powell said, “I don’t know, I have to check with Neil to see if I can do this. Neil’s worried about it.” It was like he was finally waking up to the fact that he and the others had made a terrible deal. It is worth noting that the deal was not without risk to Miramax. Although the film was doing well as an art house release in the U.S., it had yet to garner any broad commercial success. Bob was so angry he looked like he was going to levitate himself across the room and strangle him. Hoffman interceded, said, “Bob, stop it. Calm down.” Bob left the room muttering, “I’ll kill him, I’ll fucking kill him.”
Ultimately, the momentum was just too great to stop the train. There was so much suspicion of Miramax—that they’d never pay out anything—and so much pressure for the deferrees to get their checks, that all the parties felt better with a bird in hand. Ultimately all deferments were paid, as well as the bonuses tied to the U.S. box office performance.
While the negotiations were going on, Jordan and Woolley were in L.A. doing publicity for the film, which was showered with honors—the Producers Guild, the L.A. Film Critics, the New York Film Critics, the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild—all of which were paving the yellow brick road to the Oscars. “I kept away from the negotiations because I felt there was something about it which didn’t quite fit,” says Woolley. “They took me out, they took Nik out, British Screen, everyone. It was a wipeout. Clever for Harvey to do that, but very strange. I left it to Nik. It was bad of me, but we were busy releasing the film, and it was out of my hands.” The Crying Game did get six Oscar nominations. Harvey roared with glee—for maybe two minutes, then he was on to the next thing, in this instance a funk over Jaye Davidson, whose nomination he hadn’t anticipated. After all, key to the film’s continued success was preserving the fiction that the actor was a woman, and he’d been nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Now the press would be all over him, and he’d give himself away. Harvey hustled him out of the country—to Egypt—but only for a day, because Davidson couldn’t find a place in that Muslim country to buy a drink.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 22
