Pulp became the Star Wars of independents, exploding expectations for what an indie film could do at the box office. By raising the bar, changing the rules of the game, Pulp caused Miramax gradually to lose interest in the kind of dinky, uncommercial films that are not amenable to big-money studio marketing strategies, that is, the kind of classic indies that maverick filmmakers liked to make. As Allison Anders put it, “The biggest thing was when Pulp Fiction had the outrageously good opening weekend at the box office. We all saw it as something good for Quentin, and presumed that it was good for ourselves as well. But in fact, that victory was sort of the beginning of the end for the rest of us, because very few indie films can compete in that same kind of a way.”
Miramax’s competitors wanted their own Pulp Fiction too. Says Sundance festival director Geoff Gilmore, “The major guys are shooting for much bigger prizes. Harvey, Bob Shaye, Amir Malin, they want to be worth a hundred million dollars, so they change their agenda. Do they want a film out that will net $4 million? Or do they want a film that can do $20? Or $50?” Anders continues, “They set out to duplicate Pulp’s success. . . . It became a problem for nongenre, character-driven stuff . . . slow-moving tales with no violence, and no big stars. . . . And so that kind of put an end to the dream that we had in the early ’90s.”
Although Pulp cast a shadow over every other picture Miramax released that year, it was by no means the only hit. There was The Crow and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy, Red, White, and Blue, and Bullets Over Broadway, the first of four Woody Allen films Miramax would release over the next few years. Nineteen ninety-four was such a good year—both in terms of revenue and the wide spectrum of films that Miramax was able to handle—that it made the Weinsteins look like geniuses not only to themselves but to everyone else as well. As Matthew Cohen, VP of creative advertising and one of the architects of the Pulp campaign, put it, “Miramax at that time felt, seemed, and truly was, invincible.”
IN THE SHORT TERM, Pulp, like The Piano and the Weinsteins’ other post-purchase hits, strengthened the brothers’ hand at Disney. Breaking the bank with a film as scabrous as Tarantino’s allowed them to continue in the vein to which they had become accustomed, picking up dark films like Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, and Boaz Yakin’s Fresh, all released in 1994. But right after the New York premiere of Pulp, Katzenberg abruptly resigned, after famously losing the battle to succeed Frank Wells for the number two heir apparent slot, after Wells was killed in a helicopter accident during a ski trip. Katzenberg’s departure effectively ended, or rather, gave serious pause to the honeymoon that had been based both on his warm relationship with the brothers, and on their success. Not that it was entirely cordial. “Bob yelled at me one day,” Katzenberg recalls. “I said, Bob, you can always yell at me, just don’t cross the line. Just don’t threaten me, that’s all. Once the words come out, you can’t take them back.”
After a few months, Katzenberg asked his marketing and distribution head, Dick Cook, to take charge of Miramax. Cook, a cherubic, gentlemanly, mild-mannered man cut from the cloth of the old, pre-Eisner Disney, was exactly the wrong choice to deal with the Weinsteins, who regarded themselves as Eisner’s equals and were not about to defer to the likes of Cook or anyone else. At one point, Cook and Bob Weinstein almost got into a fistfight. Recalls Harvey, “Bob really got in there and soured Dick on us. Since I am my brother’s keeper, I had to choose sides. I found myself in a terrible position, making me uncooperative with Dick against my will. Dick could have really been helpful to us, but quite honestly, Bob denied us both.”
Since Cook and the brothers disliked one another, Katzenberg turned them over to Bill Mechanic, who was then head of international and worldwide video. Mechanic was a numbers guy from the business side, but a straight-shooter who knew the Weinsteins from a prior incarnation. Right away, he had to read Bob the riot act for massaging grosses. Says Mechanic, Disney caught Bob “floating high gross numbers, and I had to call him up and say, ‘Bob, you’re now part of a public corporation, it’s actually a federal offense to report incorrect information, an SEC violation. I’m not going to jail for you, so—.’ Bob denied it.”
One of Mechanic’s tasks was to help Miramax conform its business practices to the Disney model, which was roughly equivalent to turning post-Soviet Russia into a capitalist economy. According to Mechanic, Miramax did not provide their employees with retirement benefits. Again, Mechanic remonstrated, said, “You gotta do it, it’s not a choice. Don’t worry about it. Nobody lasts long enough to collect anything anyway.” Indeed, Mechanic explains, “There was nobody there longer than three years, they were just churning people, so in essence, the retirement packages meant nothing anyway.”
Mechanic left in the fall of 1994 to become chairman and CEO of Fox. Then Katzenberg followed, and the Weinsteins passed to former Fox production head Joe Roth, who replaced Katzenberg. Easygoing and laid-back, Roth was the opposite of his tightly wrapped predecessor. He prided himself on dressing casually—refusing to wear ties was his signature—and enjoyed a reputation for being a friend of talent. Roth admired the Weinsteins, at least in principle. “The big cost in the movie business, once you’ve made the movie, is how much you spend on TV advertising, and they just didn’t do that,” he explains. “What they were brilliant at was not going into the field and spending $20 million on TV until they knew it was going to work. Of the forty-odd movies they put out every year, they probably were in wide release on no more than three or four. So they didn’t have movies that lost $30, $40 million, where studios have four or five of them a year. And every year they had some kind of a breakout.”
One of the first things Roth did after assuming the Katzenberg mantle was fly to New York with Chris McGurk to break bread with the Weinsteins. To the Weinsteins, Roth was an unknown quantity. They were suspicious and mistrustful, looking for a reason not to like him. It didn’t help that the brothers had aspired to Katzenberg’s job, asked Eisner if they could take over the movie division, and were turned down. Harvey denies it, but says, revealingly, “To this day, it’s our contention that had we been put in charge of the movies over there, we would have streamlined costs and made the place more profitable.” The four men had lunch at the Tribeca Grill, the restaurant in the Film Center where the Miramax offices were. Intending to make nice, Roth said, innocently, “You know, you probably have a business—if we worked it all out—you could make $100 million a year.” Bob, always eager to put the worst construction on whatever was said to him, started screaming, “Don’t you dare pressure us like this, what we do is good enough, don’t put expectations on us.” Roth was very cool, just sat there and let it blow past him. He tried to interrupt several times, and finally said, “Can I talk? I know this is not at me, it’s Michael and Jeffrey’s thing, and you’re gonna blame it on me. But I’m going to give you more freedom. I’m not going to micromanage you. You’re going to say in two years, you don’t miss Jeffrey.” Now, he says, shaking his head, “That was my first encounter with these guys. I was trying to be complimentary, and Bob went through the roof.”
The Weinsteins and the Disney executives spent the day together, and ended up at Elaine’s at one in the morning. Before Katzenberg left, the brothers had been promised Hollywood Pictures, the Disney production division that had been struggling. (It was known as the “Sphinx that stinks,” after its logo.) That would have been a big break for the Weinsteins, allowing them to step up to more expensive productions. But Eisner had his own candidate for the job, Michael Lynton, who had little experience in the film business. His mother was said to be a friend of Eisner’s mother, part of the Park Avenue Mafia. McGurk warned Roth that there was going to be a problem, but Roth, who still didn’t quite get it, brushed him off, saying, “Maybe we can amend their deal, give them the opportunity to produce two movies a year for Hollywood Pictures, and they’ll get a producer’s fee, and a percentage, and that’ll solve the problem.” McGurk, looking at the ceiling,
said, “Yeah, right.” The brothers, of course, had not forgotten the promise of so sweet a gift. In the middle of dinner, Harvey rumbled, “Whadabout Hollywood Pictures?” Roth looked about him uneasily, as if for help, cleared his throat, and replied, “I know you guys wanted Hollywood Pictures, but I gotta tell ya, we decided that we’re gonna give it to Michael Lynton, but we’ll amend your deal.” You could practically see the steam start to pour out of Harvey’s ears as his head swelled until it looked like it was going to burst, something out of David Cronenberg’s Scanners. He bellowed, “You mean to fuckin’ tell me that you and Michael Eisner think this fuckin’ kid Michael Lynton can do a better job of running Hollywood Pictures than my brother Bob and me? Is that what you’re saying?” Roth didn’t know what to say. Backtracking, he stammered, “I didn’t realize the depth of your feelings about this, I’ll have to call you later on it.” In the limo going back to the St. Regis Hotel, sitting with his hands on his knees, he turned to McGurk and said, “Ya know, Chris? When I took this fucking job I totally forgot about Bob and Harvey!”
Roth was charged with turning around Disney’s feature film division, which was in desperate straits, but he found himself putting out fires the brothers had started. “If I heard that [ICM heads] Jim Wiatt and Jeff Berg were calling me together, I knew right away Harvey had threatened them with taking their clients over to William Morris or CAA or something like that, if they didn’t get someone to work for free, get somebody off a picture, deliver a client, whatever the issue was.” He adds, “Everybody else who was working at the studio was happy to be inside the box. Harvey and Bob always wanted to go directly to Michael. So that was a wild card for me. They were coming in and lobbing grenades from the outside.”
Roth wished the Weinsteins would just go away, so he asked McGurk, who liked them, to be their minder. McGurk took up the cudgels on their behalf against their detractors, who were vocal and numerous. “Harvey was as good as it gets, creatively, and Bob was as good as the best in the industry, business-wise,” McGurk says. “Stylistically they were just so different from your MBA or lawyer types, people didn’t understand the great thing about Bob and Harvey, which was that everything to them came down to two things: 1) a passion about making movies, and 2) a passion about making money. If you could break any issue down to one of those two things, you could have an intelligent conversation with them, resolve it, and get on. But if you didn’t understand that, it was like dealing with Attila the Hun and his younger brother. So it was battle after battle after battle. Sometimes I felt like I was a voice crying in the wilderness on their behalf against corporate Disney.”
To Miramax, the Disney executives came off as arrogant suits, whose attitude was, We have to show you the way it’s done. Recalls Foley, “You had this efficiency machine at Disney coming over into chaos-ville, saying, ‘This is what you should do.’ They put an audit on us, and the Disney auditors were truly the most Draconian, Machiavellian, Kafkaesque bureaucrats you’d ever want to meet in your life. They were trying to bash us.”
Eisner supported Harvey but, says Roth, “They’re enough alike to really not get along. They had some pretty big fights.” The Weinsteins showed up at a corporate retreat one year wearing T-shirts that said, “Corporately Irresponsible,” which pretty well summed up their attitude. Continues McGurk, “Miramax was set up to be an autonomous business that lived outside the rules. To Disney executives they seemed to be this outlaw company that leeched off the Disney divisions and made the executives look bad, because they were doing so well, so they hated that.” Adds Roth, “Miramax acted like Disney was just another company, and to Cook, it felt like he was being forced to support a competitor.” For example, Miramax never paid the slightest attention to Disney’s release schedule when they set their own. They routinely opened their pictures on the same dates that the parent company released its pictures. “They cared when they thought we had a stronger piece of product,” recalls Roth. “Then they would call up and beg, borrow, and steal to get us to change.” The Weinsteins’ attitude was simple. As Disney VP of finance Rob Moore puts it, “People who did stuff for them, they liked, and people who didn’t do stuff for them, they hated. You were their best friend or they wanted to run you over. There was no gray with them.”
Almost everyone the Weinsteins dealt with, the middle-level bureaucrats—the foreign sales force, foreign theatrical, foreign TV, and video—regarded them as little better than dog hair. It was like the brother-in-law had moved in, Roger Clinton in the White House. Not only were they forced to piggyback Miramax product onto their own, they disliked the product, so different from Disney’s. They felt it was dragging them down. At best it was an irritant and at worst it was cannibalizing their business. Says one former Disney executive, “Miramax had no brand identity, the packaging sucked, the trailers sucked, there was no awareness of their pictures because they were never distributed in the small towns between the coasts. Plus, Bob and Harvey were disagreeable sons of bitches to talk to over the phone. If you’re a salesman at Buena Vista Home Video, and your bonus is based on how much you sell, do you want to push The Lion King? Or do you want to push The Cook, the Thief? Their video business was like a booger on your finger that you couldn’t flick off!”
Disney had a video duplication deal with Technicolor. On one sixtieth of Disney’s volume, Bob went out and negotiated better terms for Miramax, and as a result, Disney was able to renegotiate its own deal, saving the company millions of dollars. Eisner agreed to pay them a bonus of $8 million, which caused further resentment. As one former Disney executive puts it, “I thought it was a joke. Some of us were saving the company hundreds of millions of dollars every year and we weren’t getting special bon-sues for it. It was part of the job. It just showed how Michael, despite all this tough talk, was scared of these guys, afraid of losing them or pissing them off.”
Another irritant was that the same year Disney bought Miramax, Ted Turner had paid $505 million for New Line, over seven times what the Weinsteins’ company had fetched. The discrepancy between the brothers’ payday and Bob Shaye’s payday made them crazy. It was as though Shaye had become a billionaire and Harvey and Bob got a job, bolstering John Schmidt’s contention that they would have done well to have gone public when they had the chance, as New Line did in 1986, raising $32 million. Recalls Moore, “They got pissed off by the New Line deal, then had a couple of big hits and came in and said, ‘Ya know? We’re not happy with the deal we originally made.’ ” Roth adds, “They spent the entire time I was there renegotiating! These are guys where the deal is never really closed.”
The jockeying between the two companies quickly took on the aspect of negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with threats flying fast and furious on both sides. The brothers waved DreamWorks in Disney’s face; they would go join Katzenberg. Disney said, “Go ahead and walk, we’ll hire one of those third Weinstein brothers, like Scott Green-stein.”
Says another high-placed former Disney executive, “They drove McGurk insane. Dick Cook. Roth. I believe that they got extreme pleasure out of biting the hand that fed them. They still do. Psychologically, it makes them think that they’re still independent, that they didn’t sell out to a large conglomerate. But they did. They traded freedom for money. I immediately made it clear that I would not lift a finger to help these people. I just thought that they were troublemakers. I thought they had no respect, and I didn’t get what people felt was so fabulous about them.”
NINETEEN NINETY-FIVE was a relatively strong year in Park City, defying the diurnal waxing and waning of the festival. The hot ticket was not even entered in the competition, but was sneaked at the Egyptian in a midnight screening to a packed house of four hundred highly expectant people. The film was Larry Clark’s Kids. The audience was not disappointed.
Gus Van Sant was an executive producer of Kids. He had met Larry Clark in San Francisco in 1993 while he was editing Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Van Sant had been introduced to Clark
’s work in the late 1980s when he was preparing Drugstore Cowboy. Clark’s Tulsa was a collection of photographs of street kids shooting up and nodding out that had been something of a bible a quarter of a century earlier for Scorsese and Paul Schrader, who dumped it into the creative cauldron from which Taxi Driver emerged. Teenage Lust was more of the same. Kids was going to be Clark’s first film, and Van Sant agreed to produce it. But, as Van Sant says, he was a lousy producer, and after the project had been turned down by a few people, he lost interest, turned his attentions to his new film, To Die For.
Shortly thereafter, Christine Vachon got a call from a British producer. In a broad Cockney accent, she said, “There’s this really cool kid, Harmony Korine, eighteen or nineteen years old, who’s written this script, and this photographer, who wants to direct it.” She described the film, a scabrous walk on the wild side down the Larry Clark street, a raw portrait of boozy, drugged-out teen zombies. Like somnambulists, they wander through a long hot summer’s day in AIDS-ridden New York City. Oblivious to the dangers of infection, the boys are obsessed with deflowering “babies,” the younger the better. As Clark put it, “Their idea of safe sex was sex with virgins.” Telly, known to his pals as a “virgin surgeon,” scores with a thirteen-year-old. The kids otherwise amuse themselves by drinking whiskey out of brown paper bags, peeing on the street, kicking cats, and stealing. This sounded like Vachon’s kind of material, and indeed, she was intrigued. Her father had been a photographer, so she didn’t need any introduction to Clark’s work.
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