Allison Anders had better luck. She called her friend when he got back. “I was really scared, the way you are with friends, you think they’re gonna get away from you,” she explains. “I was in tears. He was just so great. He said, ‘You didn’t think I would change, did you?’ I said, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ But I think he’s gonna really be fine with it. It’s frustrating, ’cause you sort of want to save him, but at the same time you realize he’s got his head more securely fastened on than people imagine. I remember when he first got his PAL video player, he said, ‘Ya know’—and he was dead serious—‘I just figure if it doesn’t work out with film, I can dupe tapes for people from PAL to NTSC.’ It was, ‘That’s great, baby, I’m glad you got a backup plan.’ ”
KEVIN SMITH’S TINY FILM Clerks exploded out of Sundance. Smith was left scratching his head. “Life instantly changed, but at the same time it didn’t,” he remembers. “I was sitting there saying, ‘Do I stay at the Quick Stop? Who knows if this thing is gonna work out or not.’ I decided to keep working there. Of course, Miramax instantly went, ‘You’re still working at the convenience store?’ Suddenly, it became an angle. They sent every journalist in the world there. ‘Look at him! He is America! Working at a convenience store!’ I was like, ‘That’s not why I went back to work—to be a symbol.’ ”
When Smith and Mosier returned to New York, Harvey told them, “I’m an old man, this is a young man’s movie, I wouldn’t even know what to tell you to cut, you say you got ten minutes, go do it!” He allowed Smith to make his cuts without interference. Then he made them take their dog-and-pony show on the road. “They introduced me to the notion of the grassroots campaign,” Smith says. “We spent a year going from festival to festival, from Cannes down to the Colorado Film Festival, the first year of the New Orleans Film Festival, everywhere. We did the college tour as well. I got real comfortable being out there by doing it so fucking much. People would say, ‘Do that dance you did in Clerks,’ or ‘Did you ever really try to suck your own dick?’ and I sat there going, ‘Okay, these are not the questions that Woody Allen gets if he goes to speak at a school, but that’s fine, I’m not Woody Allen.’ ”
Smith was smart, personable, and very funny—a good performer. He was refreshingly frank and unpretentious about his own work. He refused to put on airs, and his fans felt he was one of them, which was more or less true. He was not quite megastar material like Tarantino, but he had his niche, and within it he shined brightly. He became the George Lucas of the self-abuse set, Red Bank his Skywalker Ranch. He had his own Web page from which he sold merchandise—T-shirts, posters, toys, whatever—and today he still spends four to five hours a day talking to his fans in chat rooms. He does college tours even when he doesn’t have a new film out. He explains, “Miramax turned directors into rock stars because it was just easier to get the filmmakers to go out and talk about the movie than trying to negotiate with an actor or her publicist or agent, especially when they’re on to their next picture.”
Clerks opened on October 21, 1994, and grossed $3.1 million, exceeding Slacker and possibly Reservoir Dogs, two of Smith’s favorite films, and then matched that worldwide. Not a bad business, when everything worked right. When Smith and Mosier got the producer’s statements for Clerks, they discovered that Miramax’s expenses for Cannes had been equally divided four ways. “We may have wound up shouldering costs that we had nothing to do with,” says Smith, who often found himself scratching his head over film studio accounting methods. He says that he didn’t see any money for Clerks until 2001. “Clerks is a movie they easily cleared $7 million off of,” he adds. “It never played on more than fifty screens. But [they claimed] their P&A budget on that was something exorbitant, like $2 or $3 million. I’m like, ‘On what?’ We went to a lot of festivals, but the festivals flew us there.” However, Linklater likes to point out, contrasting the marketing philosophies of Sony and Miramax, “Sony spent $200,000 to make $1.3 million on Slacker, while Miramax probably spent over $1.5 million on Clerks to make $3 million.”
Smith had another script ready to go, a satiric evisceration of the Catholic Church called Dogma, but it was a bigger film, and he didn’t feel up to directing it until he’d had more experience. He showed the script to Harvey, saying, “This is the next one I want to make with you guys.” Harvey read it, came back, “Great, love it, we’ll put it out on Good Friday!” Says Smith, “Years later, when we actually made the movie, he wasn’t making Good Friday jokes.”
Like Linklater, Smith couldn’t resist biting into the apple, and did his second film, Mallrats, for Jacks and Daniel at Universal. He recalls, “Jacks kept pitching it as a smart Porky’s.” That was fine with him. He continues, “I didn’t grow up watching Eric Rohmer, I grew up watching John Landis. I wanted to make a teen tittie comedy that nobody makes anymore. Jim had the studio agenda in mind all the time. Initially, we wanted to make the movie for three million bucks. [They said,] ‘You can’t make a movie for three millon bucks.’
“ ‘Yeah, we can. We made a movie for $27,000.’
“ ‘That’s not really a movie. No movie can be made for less than $6 million.’ Later on, you find out that no movie can be made for less than $6 million if the producers are making $750,000 apiece! I didn’t want to respond to some of the notes they gave me. For example, there . . . [was] a scene . . . [in Mallrats] where everyone is sitting around talking about scars they’ve gotten from eating pussy. We call it the Jaws scene. And they were like, ‘You gotta take that out.’
“ ‘Why?’
“ ‘Because nobody will think it’s funny, they’ll think it’s offensive, and you’ll send them screaming from the theater.’
“ ‘You’re just kind of hammering out what’s original about the script.’
“ ‘It’s not being hammered out, it’s just about reaching the widest possible audience. Don’t you want to reach the widest possible audience?’
“ ‘Yeah, I guess.’
“ ‘Don’t you just want as many people as possible to see your movie? Can that be such a bad thing?’
“ ‘Yeah, I guess that makes sense.’ And then later on, you figure out on your own, it’s not like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily for everybody. It ain’t about reaching the widest possible audience, it’s about reaching an audience. There are some people that just like to tell stories, and it doesn’t matter if a hundred million people identify with it, or a thousand people identify with it. There’s a certain satisfaction, a certain artistic satisfaction—for lack of a better word—that kind of draws them to filmmaking. And I was one of those people. Independent cinema kinda allows anybody to pick up a camera and tell their story. I don’t think of myself as an artist at all, but I think I’m just kind of pigheaded enough to want to do my stories my way, without any involvement, without any tips from somebody else.”
The way Universal sold—or failed to sell—Mallrats says a lot about the differences between studio and indie marketing. “Dropped the ball is harsh, but there was no grassroots whatsoever,” Smith continues. “One junket, and I’m talking to forty-, fifty-year-old journalists about a movie that’s so not for them. Going through that experience, I learned that that’s not where I wanted to be. So I was like, ‘Oh fuck it, let’s set up our deal at Miramax.’ You slowly learn that Miramax is about as independent as Universal anyway. The big difference . . . is that you don’t think of Miramax as a faceless corporation. There is a face on it. It’s not a well-dressed, well-groomed fuckin’ cover-boy-lookin’ face. . . . It’s a face you could see cutting your meat in the fuckin’ deli.”
BY THE MIDDLE OF 1994, in the aftermath of the Disney sale and the runup to the release of Pulp Fiction, there were a lot of fresh faces at Miramax.
Although the Weinsteins undoubtedly drove the company, their employees contributed significantly to the success that culminated in the Disney buyout. Customarily, a company in Miramax’s position would have given them bonuses. The Weinsteins called a meeting in th
e Tribeca screening room to announce the news, where they told people that they were indeed going to get bonuses, but somehow the bonuses never materialized.
The Weinsteins had always been skilled at assessing the strengths of the competition and luring away key executives with a combination of flattery, real or simulated passion, and an uncanny ability to suss out just what fantasy of success was lurking behind the eyes of the pigeon, what it would take to bring him or her over. It was the same gift for seduction that they exercised so successfully in bringing films and filmmakers into the fold. For example, when Pierson sold Go Fish to Goldwyn over Harvey’s strenuous objections, he let Harvey know that Bowles had been a key player for his competitor. Harvey immediately threatened to hire him away, and he did so the following year. When Harvey ran into Bowles on the beach at the Sarasota Film Festival, in Bowles’s words, “He came waddling up in a terry cloth ensemble, and rasped, ‘That was textbook, that was beautiful, I loved it, I loved it. Awesome. Perfect, just a perfect job.’ ” Shortly thereafter, Bowles left Goldwyn for Miramax. “Fear runs through you at the thought of working for the Weinsteins because of their reputation, and I didn’t want to do it,” he recalls. “But at the same time it was something I was kinda looking forward to.” At first, he loved it. “At Goldwyn, I’d throw out an idea, and the executives would say, ‘That’s too much trouble, let’s not bother,’ ” he says. “When I threw out an idea at Miramax, it was, Bang! ‘That’s great, let’s do this, let’s do that, turn over every stone.’ We worked like dogs. There was no sitting around the watercooler talking.” Of course, once you took their money, they thought they owned you. They lost all respect, and the skills that had attracted their attention in the first place mysteriously evaporated. As good a job as you were doing at Goldwyn, or Fine Line, or Sony Classics, you were doing a lousy job at Miramax, and it was somebody else, somewhere else, who became the gold standard. Says one former employee, “It’s like the guy who wants to make a sexual conquest, and the hunt is more intoxicating than the kill. Once they’ve gotten laid, they lose interest.”
Nevertheless, the Weinsteins achieved a critical mass of extraordinarily gifted executives, who set the stage for the remarkable four-year run that culminated in Shakespeare in Love in 1998. In particular, the publicity and marketing departments were beefed up with Marcy Granata and Mark Gill coming over from Sony Pictures Entertainment, aka Columbia and Tri-Star. “We were asked to bring in the big-studio thinking,” says Granata. “For example, you can be on David Letterman not just one night with one movie star, but six nights in a row with six different stars, like Sam Jackson and Uma Thurman, who had never been on Letterman. That was the new thinking: we can do it all.”
Gill was quick, charming, and ambitious. In an industry built on spin, his silver tongue and reputation for frankness made him a favorite of journalists, although they sometimes got him into trouble. His relationship with the brothers was not so smooth as Granata’s. According to Stacy Spikes, whom Gill had brought over from Columbia Records to help service a younger, hipper demographic through promotion of Miramax soundtracks, “Gill would argue with them, say his piece, and they’d say, ‘Well, Mark—why don’t you quit!’
“ ‘I’m not giving you the satisfaction of quitting. Fire me.’
“ ‘No, quit. ’Cause you’re terrible at your job, you’re an idiot.’
“ ‘Fire me. Why don’t you fire me. Don’t you have the balls?’ Mark would never quit, and they would never fire him. He knew how to walk that line and he could walk right up to the edge of it.”
Spikes had problems of his own. He recalls his first day, when he was ordered into the conference room. Bob popped a TV spot for some Miramax film into the VCR, and sat down next to him. Harvey was at the other end of the table. Bob said, his voice rising and falling with his signature singsong delivery, as if speaking to a child, “Stayyceee? Did you like that teevee spahht? Is that a good teevee spahht?”
“Yeah, Bob, I think it’s a good TV spot.”
“It sucks. It’s horrible. How could you think that that’s a good spot?” Harvey reminded Spikes of the Don Logan character played by Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, the gangster who so petrified the other thugs that the prospect of a phone call from him was enough to make them soil their pants. No one could deny him. “There was no such thing as no,” says Spikes. “We could be in a meeting waiting for Harvey to get there, and the people in the room were telling you eight ways they’re gonna tell him no, and he arrives, and they leave saying yes.”
Spikes left shortly for October.
In addition to Jack Foley, Donna Gigliotti, the highly regarded colleague of Michael Barker and Tom Bernard at Orion Classics in the 1980s, arrived in September 1993 as head of production. Jack Lechner was lured away from Channel Four in London via HBO to become executive VP of development. Cary Granat came from Universal to run Bob’s division, Dimension. And then there was Scott Greenstein, an attorney who came over from Viacom’s Legal Department. The joke was that when Harvey auditioned lawyers, he pulled a signed contract out of the filing cabinet and said, “Okay, if you’re so good, tell me how I can get out of this!” Greenstein looks like a Jewish Drew Carey, with a big, squarish head like a loaf of bread that broadens from forehead to chin until it bottoms out in a massive jaw. He was overweight and afflicted with a skin condition—psoriasis or eczema. Staffers didn’t like him because he negotiated employment contracts. His condition became an occasion for ridicule. “When people made snow jokes around Scott, they did not refer to cocaine,” says Tusk. “They were talking about his dandruff.”
Greenstein grew up in New Jersey, and no matter how successful he became, he seemed gnawed by that bridge-and-tunnel sense of being not quite hip enough to play on the New York courts. He overcompensated in a big way, letting you know that he was on a first-name basis with “Bruce” (Springsteen), “Little Stevie” (Van Zandt), and Jon (Bon Jovi). He loved celebrities: sports stars, rock stars, movie stars, any kind of star. He tried hard to be cool, with his neon blue suits and oversized photo-sensitive glasses with gold frames that made him look like an owl. But he worked hard at getting it right, and eventually he did, more or less. After Pulp, he switched to Sam Jackson’s shades. He was a shameless flatterer, and even though the target would see it coming and knew he did it to everyone, it worked anyway. He’d say, “Now look, [fill in the blank], this is just you and me talking. You’re one of the few guys I can really trust about this. I can talk to you, because you can really understand this.”
Still, Greenstein had a surplus of nervous energy—one colleague called him “a terrier on speed”—and quickly made himself indispensable to the Weinsteins. Says former Miramax head of production Paul Webster, who came from Channel Four around this time, “Scott was Harvey’s attack dog.” He would walk a step behind him, like a pilot fish. When Harvey looked to the right, he looked to the right. When Harvey looked to the left, he looked to the left. He always had a cell phone glued to one ear, while into the other, Harvey barked, “Tell ’im to go fuck himself,” “Tell him I’ll cut off his balls and shove them up his ass,” or something less delicate. Greenstein was a fixer. Harvey would meet somebody at a party, go into his godfather mode, promising him or her the world. The next morning, it would be, “Whaddid I do that for? Scott, get me out of it.” Scott would deliver the bad news, find some loophole, badger the guy, threaten, scare him, buy him off. It was as if he were following his boss with a bottle of Mr. Clean and a wet rag, tidying up after him. He was like Winston the Wolf, the character played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, the crime scene laundryman who wipes the blood off the walls, scrapes the brains off the carpet. As Bowles puts it, “If there was a totally unpleasant, distasteful, almost impossible task to do, Scott would do it, by hook or by crook. He was an amazing weapon. That’s what Bob and Harvey loved about him. He was the most relied upon, trusted person there. He executed.” Eventually, Greenstein established himself as yet another “third brother.”
> But Greenstein had his partisans. He was a loyal friend to some Miramaxers, and they felt that beneath the bluster, posturing, and eagerness to carry the brothers’ water, there was an insecure little boy unhappy about his looks, his weight, his dandruff. “I’m a big fan of Scott’s,” says Lechner. “Harvey would say, ‘Go make this happen.’ It wasn’t easy, because Harvey was always asking for the impossible. But a remarkable amount of the time, Scott made the impossible happen. He was instrumental in setting up Miramax Books, and record deals, and trying to extend the brand.” According to one source, “There was a lot that was very difficult for him, but people have different thresholds. He had a higher threshold than most.”
But alas, although there was lots of competition, the third brother slot was also known in the company as the “whipping boy” position. The closer Greenstein flitted to the flame, the more often his wings got singed. The brothers heaped humiliation upon him. Harvey would shortly buy Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man for $4 million, sight unseen. Walking out of the screening in Cannes in 1995, one of the brothers turned to Greenstein and asked, “Whaddya think a’that, Scott?” Not known for his taste, or even interest in films, at that point in his career, and knowing that they had already paid a lot of money for it, he replied in words like, “God, I think it’s the most brilliant film I’ve ever seen, absolutely sensational.” Bob or Harvey replied, “Ya know, we think it really sucks!”
On another occasion, Harvey was standing by the elevators at the Miramax offices on his way to the screening room on the second floor, when Greenstein walked up. He got in the elevator with him. All of a sudden, Harvey said, “Scott, where ya goin’?” Greenstein replied, “I thought I’d catch some of the movie with you.” With a look of disbelief on his face, like Greenstein had just said he could fly, Harvey asked “Why?” He wasn’t being mean, he just couldn’t comprehend why Greenstein, who to Harvey had all the creative juice of an orange rind, would spend his time, for which the brothers were paying him good money, watching a movie instead of sitting at his desk pulling out someone’s fingernails.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 27
