Despite the collapse of their relationship, Ray was the only friend Lipsky had at October. As Ray remembers it, in February of 1995, Malin and Schmidt came to him and said, “We’re gonna fire Jeff. He’s a danger to the whole company, we could really go down if Jeff isn’t removed.” Ray didn’t disagree, but thought they should be able to deal with it. He said, “Why don’t you let me talk to Jeff, and maybe there’s a way he can get his shit together.”
“No, no, no, it’s not gonna happen.” Ray thought, They just want to move him out, one fewer obstacle for Amir to take over totally. They didn’t even want to be the ones to tell him. He said, “Well, I should tell him if you guys aren’t.” He went to Lipsky, said, “Jeff, they’re gonna move on you. They want you out.”
Lipsky was stunned, asked, “Where are you in this?”
“I don’t want it to happen.” But, according to Ray, both he and his friend were convinced that they were weak, their enemies were strong, and it didn’t matter what Ray thought.
Schmidt, Ray, and Malin gave Lipsky the bad news over a weekend. He was ready to go, took it with grace. Later, he expressed his bitterness. Bingham Ray “betrayed me,” he says. “I sometimes wonder if we were friends when we started. Maybe I was using him and he was using me to achieve a goal that we achieved. And that goal started dissipating almost as soon as we started compromising the original vision.”
Lipsky had helped Ray on his way up, bringing him into two companies. “I’ve regretted it ever since,” says Ray. “I allowed it to happen, I didn’t stand up. I could have said, ‘No, fuck you, you’re not firing Jeff Lipsky, you fire him, then you gotta fire me too.’ But I was a pussy, I got three kids, and so on. That was the beginning of Amir’s campaign to take over. He got rid of Jeff with John’s support, and my inability to act. I didn’t want to take him down, it wasn’t my idea. He blamed me for his downfall at October, put it on my head, he’ll hold that against me for the rest of his life.”
PULP FICTION WAS RELEASED on October 14, 1994. It was not platformed, that is, it did not open in a handful of theaters and roll out slowly as word of mouth built, the traditional way of releasing an indie film; it went wide immediately, into 1,100 theaters to such big numbers that the bad news about pictures like Little Buddha was simply obliterated. “I picked up where Marty Zeidman left off,” says Jack Foley. “There was no theater that was not good enough or too good for this film or any film that can turn in money. This is a business. We sell art as a business.”
Pulp grossed $9.3 million on the first weekend, just beating The Specialist, the Sylvester Stallone movie released in 2,300 theaters, the one that Kevin Smith thought would wipe out Pulp—or so Miramax claimed. By the time its run was over, it would gross $107.9 million in the U.S., twice as much as The Crying Game, and $212.9 million worldwide. Pulp became the first indie film to break the $100 million barrier. “Nobody saw that coming,” says Smith. “Miramax had the vision to see that it was going to pop.” Adds Foley, “Bob and Harvey had never had a $100 million movie before. That’s lunacy money. There’s so much you bathe in it. Consciousness changed in 1994.”
Pulp’s biggest impact was on Miramax itself, and therefore on the direction of indie filmmaking throughout the rest of the decade. Not for nothing does Harvey refer to his company as “the house that Quentin built.” He says, “I never had to tell any filmmaker around the world anything other than one thing, ‘We were the company that made Pulp Fiction.’ Once we did that, we were home free.” It cemented Miramax’s place as the reigning indie superpower.
Tarantino gave Miramax its voice. With his épater le bourgeois flair, his dark humor abetted by his spooky facility with pop culture, he was the director Harvey dreamed of becoming when he stumbled about the set of Playing for Keeps, lo those many years ago. Forget about third brothers; he became the son Harvey didn’t have. The feeling was reciprocated. “Quentin loved Harvey,” says Rick Hess, who before he moved to TriStar was a junior agent at the William Morris Agency, which represents Tarantino. “He felt Harvey was the master of the universe.” Speaking about Miramax, Tarantino says, “If I put myself on the open market, I could write my own check. But I don’t want to put myself on the open market. It’s not just about the money. It’s everything all together: the money, the autonomy, the creative freedom. I’m their Mickey Mouse. He could come by the set every day as far as I’m concerned. We just talk about how great we are!” Tarantino boasted that he could get Miramax to do anything he wanted, and he wasn’t wrong. Continues Hess, “Harvey saw him as this guy who was his ticket outta there, meaning Quentin was going to take him to the next level.” He used Tarantino’s loyalty to bludgeon his agents. “He would call up and say, ‘If you don’t give me that deal, I’ll call Quentin, I’ll move him to ICM,’ ” adds Hess. “But Harvey’s not dumb. He wasn’t going to beat this one down, he wanted to secure the position, so he basically acquiesced on most of the big points. Quentin’s deals were unprecedented. Huge. He got a percentage of video like no one ever had.”
Tarantino, more than any other indie filmmaker of the 1990s, followed in the footsteps of the great New Hollywood directors of the 1970s, pop culture nerds who were virtually kids when they were touched by the wand of fortune and turned into frog princes of Beverly Hills. Says Weinstein, “He’s the only one worthy of Marty Scorsese.” Adds Smith, “Quentin became the face of Pulp Fiction, more so than Bruce fuckin’ Willis, or Uma Thurman, or Travolta. When you see a director hosting Saturday Night Live, you’re like, My God, what happened here? Something huge. Nobody ever called me a genius—I did get called a genius, but by people that I’m like, That and 50 cents will get me a cup of fuckin’ coffee.”
After Pulp, Tarantino’s ego went off the rails. Said Alexandre Rockwell at the time, “Quentin is a video-geek-type character, who woke up in a candy store. All of a sudden, these women are interested in him who didn’t even want to rent videos from him before. It was like a wildfire.” As Hess describes it, “He had his fingers kissed by Tony Scott, and all the great directors, saying, ‘I wish I did what you’ve done.’ He had people parting the waters for him as he walked through. They wanted to use his name for a restaurant chain. It’s pretty scary, heady stuff. Some directors run away from it, but he was really into it, fueled it. He said, ‘Cool!’ ” Walking down the street in L.A. with a friend, approaching a newsstand, he would say, “Hey, man, if I don’t find five magazine covers I’m on, or feature articles on me, I owe you 10 bucks. C’mon, man, bet me.” Then he’d go through each one, and go, “Bingo, see? Five.”
If kids were already going into filmmaking for the wrong reasons, the rewards of fame and fortune that Pulp so conspicuously conferred on its director made things worse. Says Miramax development head Jack Lechner, “There’s just been so much hype, and so much press, with Quentin himself becoming the first independent celebrity director in a way that Soderbergh never was, that you get these people who in another world would be doing something else, because they’re not driven by the same love of movies that Tarantino has.” If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Tarantino quickly became the most flattered director on the planet. “There’s always been imitation, even at the height of the old Sundance days, when you saw the tenth movie with haystacks, a drifter, and a small town,” continues Lechner. “But I didn’t see a lot of people imitating sex, lies. Because there wasn’t yet that perception that this is a way to get rich, this is a way to gain fame and fortune. It really became rampant after Pulp Fiction.”
Pulp kicked open the door of the indie hothouse and allowed a fresh breeze to agitate the languid petals of the exotic orchids within. Oddly enough, the Weinsteins’ ambitions—art films for the multiplex audience—were not that different from Redford’s. Sundance too tried to broker the marriage of indie and mainstream, but it didn’t work, because Redford was so culturally puritanical that he more or less consigned films with any commercial elements whatsoever to the outer darkness. Miramax had no such inhibitions, and T
arantino fulfilled Redford’s dream, a melding of art and commerce that yielded a financially successful indie film. As Soderbergh puts it, “Genre films are a great place to hide. You can play on two levels. The audience is there to see a film of a certain type, and take pleasure in the satisfaction that specific genres can provide. Meanwhile, you can indulge in some of your personal preoccupations without it becoming too pretentious or boring.”
For indie filmmakers, Tarantino offered a new career path. The classic studio argument to filmmakers who considered themselves artists or auteurs was the one Paramount used on Francis Coppola in 1971 to convince him to do The Godfather, which, after all, was based on a trashy bestseller, namely, make a lot of money doing crap, and then you’ll be in a position to make whatever you want. In other words, make one for us, and then you can make one for yourself. The assumption was, art and commerce don’t mix. But after tasting the fruits of one for the studios, many filmmakers never get around to making the one for themselves. “I’m always being told that I have to do these movies that I don’t want to do, so that I get to do the movies I do want to do,” says Ethan Hawke, speaking as a sometime director and actor who faces similar choices. “When Dead Poets Society was done shooting, I was only eighteen years old, and I was at Disney for a meeting. I was taking a leak next to [Touchstone head] David Hoberman, and he said, ‘Well, the real question is whether you got the guts to be a movie star, the guts to want it.’ ‘Guts’ meaning to be a player. Because there’s another kind of guts, the guts to try to do it without playing by his definitions. People try to make you feel bad, say, ‘So you’re happy being a fringe artist?’ ‘Yes! Yes I am. What kind of a real artist isn’t a fringe artist?’ So I don’t buy it. I don’t see that many people who become giant international movie stars that then go off and make all kinds of sophisticated, subversive, challenging adult films. Tom Cruise is in Magnolia, I admired that he did it, but I don’t know that I could bear to make the other eighteen movies he had to make to get there. I have some of that romantic ’70s thing going, a very anti-corporate attitude. I feel this generation plays too much ball. I see young actors right now, making so much money, getting sucked up into so many movies, it just scares me. If actors and directors have a corporate mentality, then who in the world doesn’t have a corporate mentality?”
But, as it turned out, in the case of The Godfather, art and commerce mixed very well. It wasn’t just one for them, it was one for him too; it was one for all of us, great popular art, meaning that it was that rare amalgam of art and commerce—cinematic cold fusion. But since that doesn’t happen very often, the fate of Scorsese in the following decade is more common: after his personal projects either flopped (Raging Bull and King of Comedy) or were virtually unmakeable (The Last Temptation of Christ), he more or less adopted the either/or, one for them/one for him model: After Hours for him, Cape Fear for them. Every once in a while, he succeeded in giving his personal preoccupations popular expression, as he did in Goodfellas, mostly because his subject happened to be a commercial one, namely, the mob. Tarantino wasn’t raised in Little Italy, but his interests—crime, drugs, violence—were similar. He was the first and only filmmaker of his generation able to transcend the Me/Them career path. As Hawke puts it, “The thing that’s remarkable about Quentin is that he’s as true to his own art as anybody. It’s just his taste is very commercial. The reason Pulp Fiction broke the way it did is because you got a guy who’s making a non-narrative piece, no real beginning, middle, or end, a movie with Godard references, breaking all these rules, but people are slinging guns around, shooting up heroin, so it’s kinda titillating in a way that a lot of art house movies aren’t. Most art house directors aren’t interested in blowing somebody’s head off.”
While the Weinsteins were counting their profits, Hollywood, awash in red ink, was looking over its shoulder. Hudson Hawk had lost a pile of money for Columbia TriStar in 1991, ditto The Last Action Hero in 1993, and Waterworld, which would do the same for Universal, was bobbing up and down on the horizon. One hundred million dollars was a figure fast becoming more familiar to the studios as budget than gross. Jeffrey Katzenberg’s notorious memo, in which he called on Hollywood to take stern measures to stem rising costs, had been circulated in 1991, and as CAA’s John Ptak understood when he introduced Harvey to the Disney chairman the following year, the economics of the industry were becoming unglued. Each studio had about $750 million available for production, and each had to put about twenty movies a year into the pipeline to keep the exhibitors happy. At an average cost of $75 million a feature, the numbers just didn’t add up. When Pulp, with its tiny budget, passed the $100 million mark—not to mention $30 million more in cassette sales—it got Hollywood’s attention, transforming the industry’s attitude toward the lowly indies and spawning a flock of me-too classics divisions. With star salaries and P&A costs skyrocketing, smart studio executives suddenly woke up to the fact that grosses and market share, which got all the press, were not the same as profits. Says Hess, “That’s when they said, ‘Shit, indies are a low-expense business, negligible development costs’—which is the killer of all studios—‘and the movies cost in the teens,’ so they looked very attractive.” By 1994, the light bulb that went off in Katzenberg’s head the previous year had become a roman candle, and even studio executives who had missed Dil’s dick because they were taking calls could see the sparks.
Once the studios realized that they could exploit the economies of (small) scale, they more or less gave up buying or remaking the films themselves, and either bought the distributors, as Disney had Miramax, or started their own. Suddenly the Weinsteins faced stiff competition not only from old nemeses Sony Classics, Goldwyn, October, and Fine Line, but from new kids on the block, Universal’s Gramercy, Fox Searchlight, and even Paramount Classics. And of course, the studios wanted each of their new divisions to become the “new Miramax.” Like Fine Line, the other distributors that had become more aggressive—beefing up their acquisitions staffs, writing Harvey-sized checks, and investing in production—now began to copy Miramax’s marketing and distribution strategies, not to mention their Oscar campaigns.
So great was the Weinsteins’ success that the world of indie distribution was remaking itself in Miramax’s image. As Ray puts it, “The Miramaxization of the independents started when Harvey began spending advertising dollars on TV, which did everyone a disservice. Spending all this money has forced out the real, true indie, who can’t compete anymore. So fewer films are getting picked up, and fewer people are seeing those that are, because they’re only responding to the ones that are paraded in front of them in an aggressive way in terms of media advertising. And that’s just bullshit.” Adds James Schamus, “If your little movie doesn’t perform the first weekend, just like the big Hollywood movie, it’s gone. So you have to wildly overspend your marketing dollars in L.A. and New York in order to drive your opening-week grosses. If you can’t do that, you don’t have much of a business. Suddenly you needed a company that could handle those kinds of releases. You needed enough people to book those movies, to collect the money from the theaters, oversee that large number of prints being shipped around the country, and then the morning after, when Pulp Fiction is off-screen, be thinking, Now, what’s the next hit? The independent film business became a hit business, just like Hollywood.”
As the studios stooped to conquer, the indies stood on tiptoes to reach the studio table. If the studios wanted to get into the Miramax business, Miramax and its peers wanted to get into the studio business. Indies increasingly divested themselves of the characteristics that distinguished them in the first place. Whereas initiates had debated the definition of independent in the past, now they threw up their hands in frustration. The convergence between studio movie and indie film created an identity crisis among the indies. Sure, indies had become more viable, but were they still indies? A phrase was coined, “Indiewood,” to describe this new reality. In another sign of the times, that same year, the I
ndependent Feature Project made sure that films with studio financing, e.g., Miramax films, qualified for its Independent Spirit Awards, IFP’s answer to the Oscars.
With studio-sized pots of money being spent on marketing, studio-sized stars were needed to protect the investment. Like Miramax, they needed to cover their downside, and the Steve Buscemis of the world gave way to the Hugh Grants. Of course, indies had been kick-starting flagging careers at least since Drugstore Cowboy five years earlier, which had transformed Matt Dillon from a Tiger Beat cover boy into a (semi-) serious actor, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that indies became obligatory pit stops along the career freeway, where actors staggering under a load of blockbuster baggage—be it Willis, or Stallone, soon to appear in James Mangold’s Cop Land, or Pam Grier, mired in B movie hell, or Robert Forster, who was just nowhere—could launder or resuscitate their résumés. You couldn’t have a trailer as big as a railway car, with a caboose for your Cybex machines, or bring your entourage of trainers, nannies, chefs, and best friends from high school—although increasingly, that wasn’t so unusual—but it was just plain good for you, like carrot juice or mudbaths, or a month at Canyon Ranch.
But after seeing how much Pulp grossed, increasingly stars refused to cut their prices for these films, which brought studio budget creep to the indie world, with its attendent consequences. “The agencies and managers are totally complicit in blowing this thing out,” says ICM’s Robert Newman. “When the agencies started acknowledging that these were good places to put their clients, all of a sudden prices started going up. A movie that you should have made for $2 million, now cost $8 million, for no reason. And a movie that should have cost $8 million, now cost $20 million. And once you’re at risk for $8 million or $20 million, you’re totally different in the way you think about what you have to do to protect your interests. It’s a much different animal when that much money is at risk.” Increasingly, the indies and the studios met somewhere in the middle, forming what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in another context, used to call the “vital center.” Sundance and studios, midwifed by Miramax, had become not so different after all.
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