Prosperity had not made the Weinsteins kinder or gentler. In fact, quite the opposite. With Pulp’s impending success a vote of confidence in his own perspicacity, Harvey Scissorhands became bolder. As Stuart Burkin puts it, “When I started there, before Disney, it was really about courting filmmakers. After Disney, it was another culture, arrogant.” Harvey had picked up Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. Bertolucci, of course, was one of the towering masters of cinema, the director of Before the Revolution, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and 1900. He was not Robert Bresson; he had never displayed a taste for spare, economical narratives. He liked vast, sprawling canvases, rather like Francis Coppola. Little Buddha, starring Keanu Reeves, and shot in Nepal, Bhutan, and Seattle, had been financed by CiBy 2000 to the tune of $40 million. Bertolucci had had great success with his epic The Last Emperor, and Harvey was eager to be in business with him and his producer, Jeremy Thomas—like Saul Zaentz in America, one of the few consistent suppliers of quality films. He bought North American rights for $8 million after reading the script and watching a twenty-minute reel, which he loved. Jeffrey Katzenberg advised him against it, saying, “Harve, don’t buy it. I’ve bought twenty-minute reels too. You’re about to make the same mistake I’ve made.”
“But it’s Bertolucci!”
“You never had eight cents, much less $8 million, so now you think you can go out and make movies with Bernardo? If the movie’s three and a half hours long, you could be on a collision course. You don’t need that in your life.”
“Jeffrey, I don’t care if it’s three hours long. The Last Emperor was long too. That didn’t bother me.”
“I guarantee it’s going to be an unhappy chapter.”
Says Harvey now, “I shoulda listened to Jeffrey on that. For me and Bernardo, it was an unhappy chapter.” Weinstein’s was not the best offer. But, says Bertolucci, “In Europe, we were very curious about this American distributor who was able to squeeze money out of movies that probably not even in Europe had been released in a proper way.” Bertolucci thought, He is one of the few distributors who understands that there doesn’t exist only one audience, that there are different kinds of audiences for different kinds of movies. Being smaller, being independent, he wasn’t putting the movie in fifteen hundred theaters like a big studio, but in fifteen theaters, and widening it little by little. He adds, “I had some kind of fascination for that man, because it’s rare to find someone different from all the executives you meet in Hollwood.”
When Little Buddha was finished, the brothers went to London to get a look at “the film they had bought before seeing it,” Bertolucci continues. “Harvey was brutal. He said, ‘You have to cut at least twelve, thirteen minutes.’ The tone was threatening. But at that point I was just at the moment of the mixing, the film was me, I was the film, so I couldn’t accept any kind of [criticism].”
After the fever of mixing had broken, the director reconsidered. He met Harvey halfway: “Tell me what you want to cut. I’m not here to do the European auteur, in capital letters, with their big egos they faint with horror if somebody says to cut a frame of their film. If you convince me I’ll do it.” But Harvey couldn’t convince him. A chill descended. Harvey sent letters containing lists of cuts, told him that he wanted to take the film wide, but he couldn’t unless it were shorter, and threatened to send the film straight to video if Bertolucci didn’t do as he wished. At one point during the winter of 1993–1994, Bertolucci and Thomas went to New York. Harvey tested Little Buddha in New Jersey. “You knew what the result would be when you saw the movie theater,” says Thomas. “It was a multiplex in the middle of an industrial wasteland.” Recalls Mark Urman, the publicist on the film, “They had recruited a bizarre group of people who were guaranteed not to like it. It didn’t go well, and this was meant to be used as evidence for cutting the film.” Says Bertolucci, “Previews are a terrible weapon in the hands of people like Harvey.” (Miramax screened the film again in Manhattan to the same scores.)
According to Weinstein, “I couldn’t get Bernardo to cut his hair, much less a frame of his film. They never listen to me. The only way to get some of these great directors to make changes is to get other great directors to tell them to. Jonathan Demme was the linchpin on Bertolucci. The minute Demme said it was too long, shit flew outta there.” Bertolucci says it never happened: “It’s another one of his fantasies.”
The director was staying at a hotel in midtown. Accompanied by Thomas, Urman, CiBy 2000 head Jean-François Fonlupt, and a few others, he got into a stretch limo at 59th Street, and headed down to Tribeca for what he thought was just going to be a marketing meeting. It was snowing lightly, and the cars looked like they had been sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. In the movie business, it is customary to deliver bad news at the last minute, when it is impossible to do anything about it, and Fonlupt waited until the car had almost reached Tribeca to say, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to see another version of the film, on tape.” Shocked, Bertolucci, who contractually had final cut, exclaimed, “What are you talking about? I haven’t made any cuts yet!” Fonlupt replied, “Well, they cut the film!” Says Urman, “They had some editor, some post-production person who did trailers—who knew who this person was, he was certainly not Bertolucci, nor Bertolucci’s editor—do an abridged version of Little Buddha.” Bertolucci announced, in heavily accented English, “This does not happen to me. I’m not attending any meeting.” Turning to Thomas, he added, “Why did you let that happen? Why did you not protect me?” Urman continues, “Bernardo just flipped out. He was surprised that they would do something like that to a director of his rank, especially after he had indicated that he would be open to cutting it himself. He was Bernardo Bertolucci! He asked the driver to pull over, got out of the car, and disappeared for hours. We were worried about him, because he never showed up for the meeting.”
“I found a bar,” recalls the director, “and walking to the door, there was this very slippery patch, snow becoming ice, and I slipped, and ended up with my bottom on the ground, and I said, ‘Okay, that’s it, that’s my situation.’ ”
Bertolucci never did look at the Miramax cut, but as months passed, in his words, “I realized that this movie wasn’t coming out. So I told myself, these two or three years with Buddhists taught me to be modest. I said, ‘Let’s be Buddhists, let’s give up the ego. So maybe the movie will come out. Otherwise we are going to go straight to TV or video.’ I didn’t cut twelve minutes, I cut eighteen minutes. I showed the movie to Harvey, and he said, ‘Oh, thank you, you really did a great job, it’s a great movie now.’ Hello, he lied, because he opened it, but he didn’t really open it.”
Little Buddha was released in the last week of May 1994. Despite the fact that Bertolucci had cut it, Miramax never did take it wide. The Little Buddha camp thought Miramax dumped it. The director and producer were crushed. “I dropped Bernardo in the shit,” says Thomas. “I should have protected him better. But I didn’t think it was possible that such a thing was going on behind my back. A film like Little Buddha is not like a normal film, it’s a massive undertaking. You spend years to get into these places, into Nepal, these old monuments, costume all those people, it takes a toll on you, two or three years of your life, and it’s even worse for a director. Bernardo was distressed by it. It took time [for him] to recuperate. It’s just strange not to take care of a treasure like Bernardo, because he is a treasure. And you need treasure in cinema.”
Bertolucci wonders now why Weinstein bought Little Buddha in the first place. “He’s a snob,” he says. “Snob means sine nobilitate, ‘without nobility’—he is a snob because he has no nobility, so he wants nobility, and maybe he likes to go after movies that can make him look more noble. But then in my case it was just to punish the thing that can make you better. It’s complicated. He had a certain kind of sense of smell for things. Then, as Harvey Scissorhands, he started to believe too much in himself as auteur of the film, and there’s where he started to go out
of [control] with that kind of megalomania. You cannot believe in a quality film made by personalities, like these movies are, and then go and overcome the personalities of the people who made the movies with your not very luminous ideas.” Bertolucci has recently finished a film called The Dreamers, set in Paris in 1968. Did he offer it to Miramax? “No, I wouldn’t offer a cup of coffee to Miramax. I wouldn’t trust Harvey. He’s like a little Saddam Hussein of cinema. I was watching The Sopranos, and I recognized certain mannerisms of Harvey.” If he were making a biopic about the Weinsteins, would he cast James Gandolfini as Harvey? “Yes, but I don’t think I would have him as the main character. He doesn’t deserve it.”
Six
The House That Quentin Built
1994–1995
• How October put Jeff Lipsky out on the street, Disney told Miramax that Larry Clark’s Kids was too hot to handle, while Quentin Tarantino became Weinstein’s Mickey Mouse.
“Miramax is a studio. There are no two ways about it.”
—QUENTIN TARANTINO
Allen & Co. had always thought October’s management structure—its quartet of partners—unwieldy. Worse, a year in, the company wasn’t making any money. During a weekend retreat at Boca Raton in 1993, where the four partners were supposed to bond and strategize while playing tennis and golf, Amir Malin informed Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky at dinner that the board wanted him and John Schmidt to run the company. “The problem we had was that Bingham and Jeff were not businessmen, didn’t care about dollars and cents,” says Malin. “They just cared about their names being mentioned or about films that may have gotten good reviews but didn’t make money. We were on a course for sinking the ship.” He continues, “The board wanted me to run the company. I refused. I told them I would take more of a leadership role if John were involved.”
Schmidt liked Malin more than Ray did, and disagrees with the characterization of him as a “pathological liar.” “That’s too strong a term,” he says. “Amir’s just one of these guys who carries his own reality around with him. I would characterize him more as someone who bends the truth. Shades things. You feel like you’re in quicksand. Which is not a good way to work. But he’s also someone with very sincere feelings about people, his friends, his family. In his own mind, there’s nothing about any of that that’s not completely genuine. And heartfelt.” Still, Schmidt says it was he who derailed the board’s attempt to elevate Malin, not Malin himself. “It was then that I began to believe in my heart what I had heard about him, that he would use the boards of these companies to oust his partners. Amir had maneuvered himself into a position where he was making a play to be the CEO. The Book of Amir is the opposite of the Book of Job. Everyone around him gets boils, but he doesn’t.”
In any event, highly agitated, Ray asked, in a loud voice, “Whaddya telling us? You’re gonna fire us? From our own company? That we started, that we brought you into?” According to Ray, Malin just repeated, “Allen & Co. wants this, they want me to run the company.” Ray continues, “We were no longer in the board’s eyes equal partners. Malin and Schmidt were superior, and we were inferior. They were the finance guys and we were the lowly acquisitions, marketing, distribution grunts. Jeff and I were devastated.” As time passed, Ray became convinced that “Amir’s handiwork was behind the whole fuckin’ thing. That was the beginning of his campaign to take over. Amir thinks his moves are invisible, but they’re merely transparent. Why the board fell for Amir’s [shtick] is one of the great mysteries of life. At the end of that street lies death.”
The consequences of the management shake-up were serious. The roles of the two founders were changed. Lipsky took over marketing and distribution, Ray took over acquisitions. Explains Ray, “We became like place kickers.” After the retreat at Boca, relations between Ray and Malin, never good, became worse. If Ray and Lipsky were a mismatch, Ray and Malin were from different planets. Ray continues, “There was open animosity between us in the office, in front of everybody, loud disagreements on almost anything, with Amir trying to impose his will and me not letting him.”
Removed from acquisitions, Lipsky went his own way. “Jeff was not acting like a partner,” says Ray. “He was doing cowboy things by this time, and really annoying John and Amir. He hated The Last Seduction, because he didn’t have a say-so in its acquisition. He had been taken completely out of the loop. Jeff was so under the gun he started shvitzing, getting heart palpitations.” Pale, shaking, and sweating profusely, Lipsky lay down one day on the couch in his office, said, “I’m having a heart attack, someone call an ambulance.” Schmidt, who had never seen this before, was alarmed. Ray told him to ignore it, said, “He’s just stressed out. It’ll blow over, trust me,” and it did. “Jeff is an extraordinary talent,” he continues. “You can’t get a more fiery, passionate guy about a movie, but the thing about Jeff is, he has one fucking speed. That’s full-out, 150 miles per hour all the time. There’s no curveball, there’s no change-up, there’s just a fastball at your head every single time. It works, but not for very long. He’s so intense, so peculiar in the way he presents things to people, in the way he dresses, that these whiteshoe folks found it hard to take.”
For his part, increasingly isolated, Lipsky could see things were going wrong. Malin, who initially had been content to remain in the shadows, as he had at Cinecom, was edging into the spotlight. In the spring of 1994 he came to Lipsky and said, “We’re going to do this movie with Martin Scorsese,” whose name—as executive producer—worked magic. Says Lipsky, “I was given a dreadful script called Search and Destroy. Illeana Douglas, who at that time was Scorsese’s girlfriend, was going to be in it. I said, ‘Wait a second, fellas, why are we doing this? You’ve got a first-time director, David Salle, an artist who’s never gotten behind a movie camera in his life. You’ve got this script, based on a Broadway play’—I sent my assistant to the Donnell Library, ‘Get me every review of Search and Destroy that you can find,’ and she brought back ten reviews from the New York papers, some of the most scathing reviews I’ve ever seen in my life. It was crazy. It was our reputation. If you’re going to dip your toe in the water like this, why choose this vehicle? There’s got to be something better.” But Malin ignored him. From his point of view, October’s exposure was so small it was a no-brainer. “Production was Amir’s destruction at Cinecom, but it was his passion and it still drove him at October,” says Lipsky. The movie flopped.
While Lipsky was hunkered down in his office, Ray was increasingly out of town traveling to festivals, buying films Lipsky hated, felt were unmarketable. He recalls, “When Bingham and I started, we had determined that we would buy nothing that we didn’t jointly have a passion for. One liked it, one didn’t, we didn’t do it. Then Bingham went off to France and spent $700,000 to acquire Colonel Chabert, a film I detested and couldn’t sell. And Cemetery Man and Bad Behavior. I was compelled to support the decisions that he was making. This was when I had to say, October is no longer what I conceived of walking along the Thames River in London.”
Lipsky had another problem, named Gary Siegler, the lead investor. Siegler was a hotshot venture capitalist. In Ray’s words, “Gary’s an arrogant, well-educated, extremely wealthy guy in his thirties who thinks he’s got the world by the balls, and everybody should kiss his ass. You had to suffer Gary. Jeff didn’t.” According to Ray, Siegler was always complaining, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He would say, “This investment is really working out well. If I wanted this kind of return I could have invested the money in T-bills.” Recalls Lipsky, “Allen & Co., I understood them. I didn’t understand Gary. Siegler and I hated each other. He would become irate with me, because we would have benefit premieres for charitable organizations where we would charge people $250 a ticket, and we would save seats for all our board members and their guests. The movie would start, no Gary. Fifteen minutes into it I’d say to someone sitting on the steps, ‘You paid $250, I guess nobody’s coming, sit down there.’ Gary would invariably show up twenty-
five minutes after the movie started, with his girlfriend on his arm, and fly off the handle. Well, life’s too short.”
Ray continues, “Stupid, petty things like this were huge issues at board meetings. One time, when Jeff was going through the production slate, Gary went fuckin’ ballistic. ‘How dare you give my seats away!’ When there was a little pause in the tirade, Jeff said, not in a terribly snide way, ‘Are you finished?’ And Siegler went, ‘I am not fucking finished!’ Red-faced with anger. Rage. To show him, I’m fucking Gary Siegler, you’re just a piece of shit. From that point on, it was death.”
As 1994 became 1995, the October time bomb ticked away. If Ray was buying pictures Lipsky hated, Lipsky returned the favor. Like Smoking and No Smoking, two pictures directed by Alain Resnais, which he bought on his own in Paris. Says Ray, “Jeff was making decisions in a vacuum without involving anybody. He brought the films back, and everybody hated them, we didn’t want to release them. ‘What the fuck were you thinking, Jeff, when you bought these for $200,000? If they’d turned out to be Hiroshima Mon Amour, it might have been a different story, but they weren’t. It led into a lengthy legal situation with the producers in France. Made us look really bad.”
From the outside, people familiar with his MO suspected that Lipsky’s skid was a Malin operation, the opening salvo in what would most certainly be an attempt to take out his three partners, one by one. But there was way more than enough combustible material there to start a blaze without Malin lighting the match; he just had to sit back and enjoy the show.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 28
