Like Go Fish, Clerks was the very definition of an indie film, the kind of shoestring production that comes out of nowhere with no sigificant money behind it, lacks stars, production value, finesse, and a video deal. It was the kind of film that was easy to overlook in the cascade of increasingly glossy indie product. But Clerks had what Sundance’s programatically regional films often lacked—a real, felt sense of place. It was clear these guys had never been out of Red Bank. And it was instantly evident that the film was the product of a wickedly inventive talent with a fresh and original perspective that had been successfully—and a bit miraculously—translated onto celluloid.
Clerks first screened at New York’s Independent Feature Market in late September 1993. Tusk, whose job it was to hang out at the Angelika, where the market was held, schmooze filmmakers, and see as many pictures as he could, had run into Smith’s producer, Scott Mosier. The Disney deal had gone down. Mosier looked at Tusk’s ID tag, and said, “This is not a Disney movie.” Tusk was hearing his worst fears made real. He thought, Do they think that I’m working for Disney? He had championed Paris Is Burning, and he worried that he would be unable to acquire those kinds of films in the future. Tusk recalls, “The perception was that Miramax and Disney were oil and water. It was, Oh my God, are you guys not going to be allowed to screen certain things? Are our hands going to be tied?” This wasn’t an idle question. Harvey had picked up a raunchy Martin Lawrence concert film called You So Crazy. It got an NC-17, and Disney made Miramax sell it—to archrival Goldwyn no less, which opened it unrated. Harvey was furious. “I lost all of Martin Lawrence’s business, which would have been very fruitful over the years,” he says. “He loved the company, and then didn’t want to talk to me. That’s when I said, ‘We have to find another way.’ ”
Clerks was screening on Sunday morning. Virtually nobody showed up, except for a woman who collared Smith, said, “That’s a really hateful little film you made.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“I’ve got a theory that all the Nazis that died were reincarnated, they live in New Jersey. Your film proves it.”
“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that theory.”
Then she gave him her head shot. “The next day I was real depressed,” Smith continues, “because it seemed like everything we’d worked for was a bust.” But somebody suggested he enter his film in Sundance. Like many other filmmakers, Smith thought of Sundance as the sex, lies festival, and to him sex, lies was a real movie, slick, full of stars or near stars, beautiful women and lots of production value. “We never even thought about Sundance,” he says. “That was not a festival that we were meant for.” But, to his surprise, he was accepted. He was still working at the Quick Stop where Clerks was shot. “I was standing behind the counter, and I wanted to tell everybody who came in, but nobody knew what the fuck Sundance was, so it was wasted information.” Smith hired Pierson to rep the film. “Pierson took us around to the five families,” he continues. “We handed the tape to Sony, Fine Line, October, Goldwyn, and Miramax.” Tusk recalls screening it at the Tribeca Film Center. Harvey passed. Smith was deflated. “Miramax was the premier indie label, the A Team,” he explains. “This is where you wanted to be. But we figured we were dead at Miramax. The chairman didn’t watch it. By the time we got to Sundance, everybody had passed.”
Nor did Smith have high expectations from the festival. Pierson was ignoring them, focused on selling Go Fish. But audiences seemed to like Clerks. The question-and-answer sessions after the screenings were full of energy. They loved the story about the filmmakers sleeping on the floor of the Quick Stop while they were shooting the film. They laughed out loud when Smith recounted how he’d lied to get discounted film stock from Kodak, saying he was in film school and then actually having to enroll in a course at the New School to get a student card. The buzz started to build. Tusk promised Smith he’d bring Harvey to the last screening. He buttonholed his boss, said, “I’m amazed that nobody else bought this movie. You’re gonna sit down and you’re gonna watch this movie with an audience.”
“No way.”
“Harve, way!” For a while it seemed like the Miramax co-chairman wasn’t going to show up, because he had been attacked by a disgruntled screenwriter at a party and was rumored to have left town. But come Friday night, there was Harvey, puffing on a cigarette and gasping for lungfuls of the thin Park City air as he struggled up Main Street toward the Egyptian at the top of the hill.
The movie had barely started and already Harvey was getting fidgety. The acquisitions people had tricks for keeping him in his seat. He liked to sit on the aisle, so he could make a quick exit, but they wedged him in the middle, between Tusk and Hoving. He loved his chocolate-covered almonds, from Bazzini, that came in large cans. He’d pass them around, but they were warm and sticky by that time and no one could stand to touch them, much less eat them, so they would drop them on the floor under cover of darkness. He could eat his way through two cans, but on this occasion, there weren’t any. Tusk told him, “Remember, think thirty-seven, you gotta stay until the number thirty-seven crops up, the blowjob stuff.” (He was referring to a highly entertaining spat between one of the characters and his girlfriend over how many guys she’d had sex with.) That got Harvey’s attention. Smith, standing in the back, heard one guy guffawing like a madman. He thought, Who’s the incredibly rude fuckin’ dude who’s laughing like Max Cady in Cape Fear? Of course, it was Harvey. When it was over, Tusk introduced the director to his boss. Weinstein exploded, “Great fuckin’ movie, I want to put a fuckin’ soundtrack on it, and put it in the fuckin’ multiplexes.” Smith thought, Fuck, yeah. He replied, “Mr. Weinstein, it’s an honor to meet you, I’m in awe of the movies that you’ve worked with, and I’ve seen this movie with an audience now four times, I’ve been taking notes, and I know the ten or twelve minutes that I would welcome the chance to take out.” Intentionally or not, Smith was playing him like a fiddle. He says, “We’d read a lot about Harvey Scissorhands, but when you’re trying to get your movie picked up, you don’t give a fuck! If somebody wanted to cut it up, as Quentin says, like a kid cutting out paper dolls, it was, ‘Here, take it, I don’t care, go ahead!’ ”
Weinstein, Tusk, and David Linde herded Smith, Mosier, and Pierson over to the Eating Establishment across the street. They passed the October gang, Ray and Lipsky. Pierson asked Ray and Lipsky to speak now or forever hold their peace. They weren’t interested. Harvey continued to lavish praise on the picture. “We dug on Harvey immediately, because he’s a true vulgarian,” recalls Smith. “I didn’t know whether he was putting it on to talk to us or if that was him. Later on, I learned, that’s him. He’s just got potty mouth. He was smoking, like, nine cigarettes, eating fistfuls of potato skins. It was, ‘This dude’s in charge of the company? This is phenomenal.’ ” Pierson pulled them aside, said, “Their offer’s not huge, but you guys didn’t get into this business to make money, did you?”
“No, fuck no. I’d give ’em the movie for fuckin’ free, I don’t give a—it’s Miramax, are you nuts?”
“Great! They’re offering 200, I’m gonna get ’em up to 227.” Clerks had cost $27,000. Weinstein said, “A hundred thousand dollars of that money goes to trimming the film, remixing, kicking it up to 35mm, whatever. The rest is yours.” Smith thought to himself, Sure, they liked Clerks, but they picked it up because they’ve just been bought by Disney, and everybody’s asking, “What does this mean? Will we still see movies like The Crying Game? Will Disney allow a guy to whip out his cock on film?” Buying Clerks sent a very clear message. “We’re still Miramax, ’cause we picked up a grubby-looking black-and-white indie with a foul, foul fuckin’ mouth.” Someone produced a bottle of champagne. As Smith and Mosier left the restaurant, one said to the other, “Man, did you ever think we’d be able to pay the deferments? That’s so cool.” They went to the Miramax condo to party.
Jim Jacks, the producer at Universal who, along with his partner Sean Daniel, had financed Link
later’s third film, Dazed and Confused, buttonholed Smith at the closing Sundance party. Jacks said, “Miramax bought your movie? That’s a shame, because I would have liked to have taken it for Universal, and remade it.” Says Smith, “I had no interest in remaking the movie, and I didn’t want to make studio movies. Clerks never could have been made through a studio system. What they like is simple stories about overcoming adversity. But in Clerks it’s a couple guys at work in a convenience store, hate their jobs, and by the end of the movie, they’re still working there, and they still hate their jobs. Like, nobody overcomes anything, really. I wanted to be an independent filmmaker. I wanted to work at Miramax. In those days it was still, ‘We are independent film.’ ”
Ironically, 1994 was probably the last year for genuine indies like Clerks, Go Fish, and Spanking the Monkey. The future lay with films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was distributed by Gramercy and went on to gross $53 million. Says Vachon, “You’d never be able to sell Go Fish now. That was a genuine low-budget garage film. People’s expectations for that kind of movie have really shifted. When they go to see a so-called independent film they want to see Shakespeare in Love, they don’t want to see something that is really challenging, that’s in black and white, where the sound is difficult to make out.” Adds Hope, “No matter how grounded somebody is, once you have one Kevin Smith or Rose Troche instantly launched into a career and wealth, the expectation that this could happen to you—which is ironic because that is the title of a movie about hitting the lottery—is inescapable. Whereas once it was, ‘Man, we just need to get our movie screened,’ it became, ‘Now’s the time to make big score. To get what’s ours.’ ”
Liz Manne, who was then head of marketing at Fine Line, noticed the change as well. “It felt like movies were being made for the wrong reasons. It was the independent-director-as-rock-star syndrome. These people were getting their auteur stripes based on one film. And it was no longer Andrew Sarris writing about them, it was some dipshit on E! sticking a microphone in the face of somebody in front of the Egyptian who’s never seen a Bernardo Bertolucci film in his life, and would not know Antonioni if he bit him in the ass. It became a mockery.”
THE SUCCESS OF the festival raised Geoff Gilmore’s profile within the institute, cloaked him and his staff with an aura of untouchability, breeding envy and resentment among the other programs. On the other hand, the festival staff regarded the institute’s other programs as parasites, siphoning off cash that it generated. As Cathy Schulman puts it, “The attendance was huge, and growing by leaps and bounds every year, and we would add up how many people bought tickets at these extraordinary prices, and we’d go, ‘Where’s all the money going?’ There were rumors that it was being funneled into the failing ventures, like the resort.”
The festival had become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it became a sorely needed and extremely welcome profit center for the hard-pressed institute. “That ’94 festival was a turning point in terms of getting more solvent and a bigger budget from Sundance,” says Gilmore. “It was the first year we hard-bound our catalogue. Sundance was being written about as a national institution, and was being regarded by people inside the industry as playing an important role in setting the agenda for the independent universe. Even if they weren’t buying the films, people came to the festival trying to figure out ways for young directors and young actors to cross over. All of a sudden those lines that had separated the industry from the independents a couple of years earlier blurred dramatically. The agents facilitated that. Robert Newman would bring Robert Rodriguez over to Columbia.” Gilmore applauds the very thing—the erosion of the barriers between indies and the industry—that makes purer souls cringe. And indeed, the market element, dangerous as it was, did give filmmakers an unprecedented opportunity to sell their films for real money. If their distributors, Miramax and Goldwyn, were able to drive them into profit, so much the better.
On the other hand, everything Redford feared when he resisted taking over the U.S. Film Festival had come to pass. Not only were filmmakers pitted against one another in the competition, but “the competition was drawing Hollywood,” says Schulman. “They liked to know that somebody was saying something’s best.” Gary Beer, whose job it was to raise money, favored the competition for the same reason Schulman opposed it. His goal was to grow Sundance, and at every opportunity, he screamed the word “branding.” Worse, the market was cannibalizing the festival. Quality was being quantified—measured in dollars—and so desperate was the institute for money, that almost every nook and cranny of Park City had been sold off to the highest bidder—automobile companies, studios, magazines, vineyards et al. You couldn’t walk three feet down Main Street without a goody bag being thrust into your hands filled with branded T-shirts, mugs, caps, maybe a CD or two, in fact, everything but Sundance gear itself—the sweatshirts, parkas, hats, pre- and après-skiwear that were sold in special kiosks at huge markups. The year before had seen corporate logos thrown on the screen at the end of the Sundance trailer for the first time. As former Sundance programmer Lory Smith puts it, “Gary Beer was really successful at attracting corporate sponsorship to the festival. Now you’ve got Mercedes-Benz and Hugo Boss and Piper-Heidsieck supporting independents. Yet on some level, it’s almost like the heart and soul has gotten bled out of the organization. It’s turned into this juggernaut.” So many sponsors and underwriters had to be accommodated at the awards ceremony that there was no room for the filmmakers who had directed the shorts, some of whom would presumably return with features. Pierson, tired and disillusioned, stopped repping films after that year’s festival, and the job would increasingly fall to agents and lawyers. Alexander Payne, who would attend the next year with Citizen Ruth, observes, “You have independent films at Sundance whose message is, Hire me, I want to be a commercial director, I want an agent and I want to come to Hollywood.” Or, as Bingham Ray puts it, more succinctly, it became “a zoo, a circus, a pain in the fucking ass.”
Even if the market aspect of Sundance has been good for filmmakers, it was not an unmixed blessing. As indie veteran, attorney Linda Lichter puts it, “In the beginning, there was a counterculture that supported an alternative point of view, either politically or artistically. That world is gone. Now, basically, it’s about making it. At Sundance, the bulk of the pictures are about losing your virginity. It’s babies making movies about babies. With some exceptions, the filmmakers don’t really have a voice yet, and the place is so overpowering that they get eaten, chewed up, and spit out.”
If, in 1994, Sundance was on a knife edge, and it was possible to argue about whether Clerks, Go Fish, and Spanking the Monkey represented the end of the old or the beginning of the new, Quentin Tarantino’s next film would change all that, rewrite the rules of the game by making it very clear in which direction the indie movement was going.
QUENTIN TARANTINO, who had never before been outside the continental United States, had spent the better part of a year on the road, traveling around the world on the festival circuit with Reservoir Dogs. When he made pit stops in L.A., he would stay with Roger Avary at his apartment in Manhattan Beach. Jersey Films, Danny DeVito’s company, gave Tarantino a $1 million development deal. He had been offered all kinds of things, but his mind kept coming back to the never completed anthology film he and Avary had written while trying to get True Romance off the ground. He told Avary, “What a great idea that was, except—I want to write all of the stories.”
“Great! Do it!”
“Well, can I have the story you did?”
“Sure.” Avary’s story, “Pandemonium Reigns,” the tale of the fighter who refuses to throw a fight, eludes some gangsters while retrieving his father’s gold watch, constitutes about a third of the film Tarantino eventually directed. “When we originally ventured into Pulp Fiction, the agreement was that we would split the writing part of the back end participation, as well as screenplay credit,” says Avary. Jersey had a deal with TriStar, then headed
by Mike Medavoy. TriStar had no interest in Avary, and when the studio tried to get rid of him, Tarantino fought for his friend. He also used his new heft to help Avary find financing for his own film, Killing Zoe, by attaching himself as executive producer.
Exhausted by his grueling world tour, Tarantino finally went to ground in Amsterdam for three months, writing. Avary, who joined him in Amsterdam, recalls, “We took ‘Pandemonium Reigns,’ and rewrote it, although what I wrote and what he wrote are almost indefinable. We essentially raided all of our files, and took out every great scene either of us had ever written, put them on the floor, started lining them up and putting them together. I had my computer, so I would combine them into sequences. Quentin was being financed by TriStar, but I didn’t have two pennies to rub together and had to make a living, so eventually I left and went to make Killing Zoe.”
Tarantino picks up the story: “We could have made Pulp Fiction for TriStar for $8 million, and they really couldn’t lose on the film, but they would have rather had me come to them with a star-driven piece of material that they could do for $25 million. I don’t think they wanted to make a movie unless they thought they were going to make $100 million.” TriStar looked at Tarantino and saw trouble. When he had the big meeting with the studio executives, their reaction was cool. He recalls, “They were talking about how dark and harrowing the movie was, and I went, ‘Wait a minute, let me just get this straight, you didn’t think it was funny?’
“ ‘Well, there were some funny lines in it, but—’
“ ‘A lot of it’s really funny, guys, it’s gonna be really funny, trust me.’
“ ‘Well, Quentin, uh, you’re telling me it’s funny, but I see a guy sticking a needle in his arm, and I don’t think anyone’s gonna laugh.’ ” According to Rick Hess, then a junior executive there, Medavoy thought it was “too demented.”
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