Five
He’s Gotta Have It
1993–1994
• How Miramax knocked Bernardo Bertolucci on his ass, while indies like Clerks and Spanking the Monkey had their last hurrah, and Quentin Tarantino wowed Cannes with Pulp Fiction.
“There’s a bunch of people that don’t think I’m a good filmmaker, just fucking hate my guts, and they can’t understand why I’m able to keep making movies. But I’m not asking for a bunch of money to put what they deem crap up on the screen so, I mean, shit, I can go on forever.”
—KEVIN SMITH
Christine Vachon was back at the 1994 Sundance Festival with a small, black-and-white lesbian film called Go Fish, directed by Rose Troche and produced by Gwen Turner. John Pierson, who repped and partially financed the film, sold it to Goldwyn for $450,000. The sale of Go Fish, while relatively unremarkable in itself, was significant, because it was the first time a commercial transaction had actually occurred while the festival was in progress, and as such it became a marker, inaugurating the era of frenzied bidding that characterized the growth of the acquisitions bubble in the mid-1990s. Good Machine’s Ted Hope arrived just after Go Fish had been sold. “That was a big deal, there was already that whole hysteria there is today,” he recalls. “It had turned totally into being about the deal. Here was a movie that was never going to have much of an audience—two people in a room talking about their problems. And yet every distributor wanted it. It changed the whole tenor of the festival.” According to Mark Tusk, it was Pierson as much as anyone who created the competitive atmosphere at Sundance. “It was that Go Fish screening, where that mantra of have your checkbook out kicked in. He was saying, it’s gonna sell, it’s gonna go quick. The intention was to make sure the Harvey Weinsteins, the guys who could pull the trigger, were at the screenings, not just the scouts.” The competition was fierce. Says Ray, “In the acquisition world, seeing a film first, before your competitors, before Harvey, before Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, was what everyone got up each morning striving to do.” Tusk adds, “This was the period when people would say, The way to get a deal with Miramax is to tell them that Goldwyn is interested.”
After the conclusion of the deal with Disney in May 1993, Miramax went into overdrive, a Beetle with a Cadillac engine. With the studio supplying high-octane fuel, the Weinsteins didn’t need to be goaded by Pierson to spend money. To switch metaphors, Harvey was like a hungry man at a buffet table laden with tasty dishes. He had always had the appetite, but now he had the means to eat until he was stuffed, then more. As former Miramax executive Eamonn Bowles puts it, “When Miramax got the Disney money, they just went on a slash-and-burn acquisitions rampage. It was like mad money to them. So they just went out and bought everything in sight. If they thought other people were interested in it, they would just swoop down and take all these films off the table and away from other companies.” If New Line’s motto was “prudent aggression,” Miramax’s could well have been “imprudent aggression.” Concludes Bowles, “Just to get something away from Miramax in that era was a triumph.”
Gone were the days when the acquisitions people from competing companies, who all knew one another—they went to the same festivals, traveled on the same flights, stayed at the same hotels—fraternized, and, God forbid, helped one another. Says Tony Safford, “There was a great suspicion of outsiders at Miramax. Very little socializing with them, let alone exchanging information, which was forbidden.” The Weinstein acquisitions team was now comprised of Safford, Tusk, Hoving, and an army of junior people. Miramax had so many troops at the festival that many of them had nothing to do but call every filmmaker, chat them up—“We loved the script, Harvey’s really interested in your movie”—and find out when and where they were going to be every minute of the festival. Each one was made to feel special, as if they were within a hairsbreadth of a Miramax deal. The Miramax soldiers used every trick in the book to get first look. Rumor had it that they bribed projectionists to smuggle them prints of coveted films between screenings, suborned lab employees, sneaked into cast and crew screenings pretending to be a friend of a friend, you name it. They even surveiled their opposite numbers to find out who they were speaking to. Miramax covered every conceivable base. They had Safford going to Australia repeatedly in the course of a year, and had people in China before Chinese films were on the map. One Miramaxer had flown to Hong Kong to get an early peek at Farewell My Concubine. As Tusk puts it, “Hong Kong? At that time you might go to a festival there, but for one movie?” Continues Safford, “The motto at Miramax was, ‘Do anything, go anywhere to get your job done.’ We literally went to work with our passports in our bags, because we never knew where we were going to be that night.”
Amy Israel, who had joined the company as Hoving’s assistant, recalls, “After a whole day of screenings and dinners, we’d meet at midnight and watch more films till three in the morning. We’d watch the first reel, the third reel, the sixth reel. Usually Harvey picked up what his mother liked. Like Passion Fish was his mother.”
But it wasn’t just ego and appetite that motivated Miramax. There was a method to the madness. As Chris McGurk explains it, “Miramax could afford to pay $1 million or $2 million more for everything simply because they had all the Disney TV and video deals backing them up. So they bought everything, forty, fifty, sixty films, and nobody could touch ’em. The thing was to release as many films as you possibly could. Most of them lost money, a few broke even, and the one or two that broke out of the pack generated huge amounts of profit. Control the market, own more titles than anybody else, have an economic formula that they can’t match, and you’ll rule the world. It was great. It was the best of times.”
Harvey understood the law of large numbers. His films were so inexpensive that he could afford to open three or four putative Oscar contenders in the late fall, wait and see which pulled ahead of the pack, and then throw his formidable marketing and publicity resources behind it, as he did with The Crying Game. Releasing more films than all the other indie distributors combined enabled Miramax to shut the competition out of theaters. Jack Foley came over from MGM later that year to succeed Marty Zeidman as VP of distribution. “My attitude was, we had forty movies a year, almost a movie a week, we were General Motors, we were going to dominate, and we did,” he explains. The whole point was to eliminate the opportunity of the competitors to gain access to screens, so they couldn’t do business. “Let’s say a theater was making $5 million a year. Miramax was worth maybe 50 percent of that gross. So I could make threats like, Look, we made your theater, you owe us, give it to us! If you don’t, you’ll never see another Miramax sprocket hole again. It was always bullying and taunting and jiving and goading and pressing and molesting. If I could sustain a formidable, voluminous presence in the marketplace, then somebody else was gonna have a tough time getting theaters. Or, if they were gonna get in anyway, I could push them back, so that they had to wait seven weeks to open up a movie. So they lost momentum. Timing is everything. If they didn’t get their openings, they wouldn’t gross, and they’d be in trouble.”
Paying most and buying more, Miramax was fast becoming the first stop for agents and producers’ reps—unless they’d had a bad experience with the Weinsteins and had a good reason to avoid them, and even then they came back. Miramax was used to getting first look and other kinds of special treatment. If Harvey couldn’t make a festival or a screening, he would want a print, or at the very least a tape, shipped to wherever he was, and usually the sellers were more than willing to accommodate him. In addition to the opportunity to make a first, or preemptive bid, he wanted to be able to make the last bid, to match or better anyone else.
The deep pockets consequent on the Disney sale, coming on top of the success of The Crying Game, and then The Piano, lent the troops a new swagger, a sense of entitlement. They were always trying to get that little extra bit of edge, push the envelope for Harvey. If they didn’t get what they wanted, they would wheedle and bul
ly, themselves become mini-Harveys. Typically, the seller would be told, “Harvey has to see it.” Harvey would look at it, and word would come back, “Harvey thinks he’d rather wait and see. But if you’re gonna sell it to somebody else, call us up, because you never know.”
“No, I’m not going to call you back.”
“Whaddya mean, whaddya mean?”
“If somebody else makes an offer based upon seeing the same movie, then it wouldn’t be the honorable thing for me to then call you up and say, ‘Hey, do you want to make an offer because somebody else made an offer?’ ”
“You gotta give us a shot, man, you gotta give us a shot.”
“You had your shot, and if we decide to give everybody else a second shot, we’ll show it to you as well.”
“You can’t do that. Harvey will be really fuckin’ pissed off, man.”
Miramax used its brawn to scare off the competition. According to video executive Larry Estes, Harvey was enthusiastic about Don Boyd’s Twenty-one at Sundance in 1991, but, “after telling everybody else that the deal was on, they backed out.” The filmmakers tried to sell it elsewhere but, “everybody was like, ‘You made your bed with Miramax, sleep in it.’ They acted like it was sloppy seconds.” Occasions like that weren’t oversights or accidents, they were policy, just business—Miramax style. In 1995, a picture called The Young Poisoner’s Handbook played at Sundance. It was directed by a young British director, Ben Ross, and financed by Pandora, a company run by Ernst Goldschmidt. The film played at the Prospector Square. According to Mark Urman, who had been hired to represent the movie, “The Miramax people went nuts for it.” Harvey orchestrated his arrival at the theater for the moment Ross emerged. Says Urman, who was there, “He threw his arms around Ben and said, ‘Nobody gets near this guy.’ Ben was summoned to go meet with Harvey and it was, ‘They’re buying the movie, they’re buying the movie!’ The festival ended, they hadn’t bought it yet, but they’re talking, they’re talking, they toyed with it, they flirted with it, they sent out every possible signal that they were picking it up, they made it impossible for anybody else to get near it, and then they didn’t do it. Which made it damaged goods. People moved on and didn’t even realize it hadn’t been picked up. It was too late to recover. Miramax always had its eyes open, like—who else is interested? At a certain point they would realize, nobody else is interested, maybe they shouldn’t be interested either, and then they would walk away.” In the great scheme of things, behavior like this may not seem that outrageous—after all, what’s one film more or less in a crowded marketplace—but it can have a devastating effect on the careers of young directors. Ross went on to win an Emmy, but features? Forget it. (Miramax denies it promised to buy this film and maintains that the lack of interest from other buyers confirms its judgment.)
The other distributors were not amused by Harvey’s game of keep away. Sony Classics, October, Fine Line, Goldwyn—they hated Miramax and maligned the Weinsteins at every opportunity. Bingham Ray nearly came to blows with Harvey one year at Cannes. With typical bravado, Harvey laughed it all off. There’s a “scene in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly when the three banditos burst in on Eli Wallach and he’s in the tub,” Harvey told journalist David Carr, misremembering. (There’s only one gunslinger.) “So just imagine, Michael Barker, Tom Bernard, and Ismail Merchant, the three of them, they walk in and they see Eli Wallach and he’s playing Tuco, he’s the Ugly. And they go, ‘Tuco, you bastard,’ in dubbed Italian. ‘You shot up this guy, you got our gold, you have to die.’ And then they reach for their guns, but he comes out of the bathwater with the gun and he shoots all three of them and says, ‘When you talk, you talk, when you shoot, you shoot.’ These guys are busy talking like old ladies about ‘What is Harvey going to do? What is he going to do?’ While they are talking, I am shooting.”
As the competition geared up to respond, it set off a veritable arms race. Says Bowles, who was then with Goldwyn, Harvey’s strategy “worked. It really dried up the opposition. If they weren’t generating their own projects, there was almost nothing left for them to pick up.” Companies like October, which didn’t have money for production, were most vulnerable. Bowles continues, “Because all the product had been taken away from them, the other distributors beefed up their acquisition teams, and made all sorts of preemptive strikes, doing deals without seeing the films, putting up big money, in many cases with disastrous results.” Besides driving up prices, this stampede had dire long-term effects. In a culture of caution, Harvey’s edge was speed, decisiveness, and appetite for risk—he was so reckless that he became known for being “risk perverse.” Acquisitions were getting so expensive that if a distributor got in at the script stage, it was both guaranteed and less expensive. In the old days, before Miramax upped the ante, the distinction between acquisitions and production was clear. But with companies going in earlier and earlier, the line between the two was becoming blurred. Acquisitions gave way to pre-buying, which gave way to production. Outside of a few big-ticket acquisitions, production is generally more costly, and these companies had to take measures to protect themselves. Says New Line’s Janet Grillo, “As the risks became greater, we had to be more conservative, and that’s when I started to see the death of independent film. The heartbreak was that it became harder and harder for films that were more personal or poetic. It no longer made business sense. Unless you had a tremendous cast behind you that was going to give you collateral.” Indeed, indie distributors adopted the studio practice of hedging their bets with stars. Observes Ethan Hawke, who got his big break in 1988 with Dead Poets Society, “One of the things that’s completely changed since I started acting is that almost 100 percent of film financing is cast-contingent. In those days, a director would get a go movie and then he would cast it. Now, you can’t get a go movie until you cast it. It’s not who’s right for the part, it’s who’s right for the money. Miramax really started that.”
But it wasn’t just Miramax. David O. Russell’s audacious and scandalous first film, Spanking the Monkey, a mother-son incest drama, which played in competition in 1994, was a case in point. New Line’s Bob Shaye liked the script and optioned it, but wouldn’t make it without a major female star. Recalls Russell, “Shaye said, ‘If you can get Faye Dunaway, I’ll do it.’ I went to her house, and she laughed in my face.” The role was considered a career buster, and not a single actress would touch it. New Line let its option lapse.
Out of college, Russell had worked as a political organizer, and made a documentary about Central American immigrants living in Boston. “I felt like I’d missed out on the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement,” he says. “Then I found myself the lone activist in the Reagan ’80s and chicks weren’t interested the way they were in the ’70s. They were with the bankers and brokers. And I was in Maine organizing mill workers! On $6,000 a year. It was like, ‘What happened?’ ” So he took a $40,000 NEA grant he had gotten, some donated 35mm film, and made the picture in Pawling, New York, using his college roommate’s mother’s connections. (He never told her what the film was about.) Russell edited the film on his dining room table. It cost $80,000 to get in the can, $150,000 more from an investor to finish, about $250,000 in all.
After The Miracle, Neil Jordan’s incest film, “Harvey was like, ‘No more incest movies for me!’ ” continues Russell. “It’s not exactly box office fodder, and he was going in the direction of Shakespeare in Love. He didn’t want anything to do with it at Sundance.” In fact, Russell felt like a pariah there. “I made a movie that said, ‘I hate my mother,’ which is considered a heresy, certainly at Sundance at that time. A lot of people regarded me as a dirtbag. People in this country are so sanctimonious about the family. Harvey named his fucking company after his parents. He sentimentalizes them. But emotionally criminal things happen there, and why lie about them?” But Spanking the Monkey won the Audience Prize at Sundance, and was picked up by Ira Deutchman at Fine Line for $250,000. It grossed about $1.5 million.
Harvey hadn’t been to Sundance in a while, and Miramax watchers interpreted his appearance in 1994 as a signal that he was still committed to indie films even after the Disney deal. Go Fish was bookended by its straight, male-bonding counterpart, another small, black-and-white film also repped by Pierson, called Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith. Harvey was so annoyed that Go Fish had gotten away, he told Pierson not to bother him about Clerks, give that to Goldwyn too. But Tusk was hocking Harvey about it, and Tusk had been right before.
Smith, short and broad—a fullback in a bottle—was a kid from a self-described working-class background in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father was a postal clerk. Smith shot the film in and around the Leonardo Quick Stop, a convenience store where he worked. Down and dirty, in ragged black and white with nonactor friends, Clerks exploded with testosterone-drenched trash-talk bent raunchily askew by Smith’s twisted, adolescent sense of humor. Reviewing it in the New York Daily News, Dave Kehr nicely described it as Howard Stern crossed with David Mamet. Smith’s I-can-do-that film was Rick Linklater’s Slacker, which he saw at the Angelika multiplex on the corner of Mercer and Houston in New York in 1991, on his twenty-first birthday. “Seeing that movie was very empowering,” Smith recalls. He thought, Wow, this counts as a movie? Nothing’s really happening, just people walking around, no plot, just a lot of dialogue. Shit, if this motherfucker is making a movie in Austin, Texas, and I’m sitting here watching it in New York and enjoying it, why the hell aren’t I making a movie in Jersey? I can fuckin’ do this!
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 24
