In May 1993, right after Miramax was sold, the script made its way to Mark Tusk, who passed it around the new Disney division. The consensus was, It’s our kind of movie, the cost is right, let’s go for it. At about the same time, through a friend, Korine’s script had also made its way to Cathy Konrad, an attractive, wiry woman with a direct, no-nonsense manner who was then running Cary Woods’s production company, Woods Entertainment. She recalls, “My friend said, ‘This script is so dark, it’s so dirty, ohmigod, I couldn’t even finish it, made my skin crawl, I hated it, but you’ll love it, the guy’s really talented.’ I read it, thought it was unbelievable, so raw, riveting, I never read anything like that.”
Woods and Konrad also thought they could set it up at Miramax. Konrad recalls, “There was a lot of buzz about Miramax as a place to be, because it was taking chances on risky material with first-time filmmakers. Nobody was doing that then. Suddenly there were chances for people, other than mortgaging their parents’ home to make a movie.”
Clark recalls, “Miramax was gonna give us money to do Kids. Harvey put his arm around me, said, ‘You’re my next guy, my next star. We’re doing this movie.’ He was gonna give us a million bucks. And then they just dropped out completely. It was on, and the next day, boom, it was off. What happened was, they’d just made their deal with Disney, and they were just afraid.” Gladstein called Vachon. He said, “If it was up to me, we’d make it. But it was Harvey and Bob.” Vachon thought, They’re blowing me off. It’s the script, it’s too risky, it’s bad for Miramax’s image, they’re moving away from those kind of movies. She called Clark and told him, “Look, I still want to make this movie, but I don’t have a company, I’m just one person, I have to go make Safe for Todd Haynes in L.A.” A few weeks later, Clark called her up, said, “So I think we found this guy who says he can get us the money. This guy Cary Woods. Is that, like, cool with you?” She replied, “Well, if you can get the money for it, you should do it, right?”
Woods had met two twenty-four-year-old wannabe venture capitalists, one with $10 million of his father’s money to fool around with, and of course they couldn’t wait to blow it on the movies. Woods had intended to use the money to make Alexander Payne’s The Devil Inside, later known as Citizen Ruth, but when he stumbled on Kids, he changed his mind, called Payne, told him he was going to use it to produce Kids instead, but not to worry, he would find a way to do Payne’s picture too. (Woods says Payne’s script wasn’t ready and Kids was.) Kids went forward in the summer of 1994, with Woods and Vachon sharing producing credit with six other people.
Clark was adamant that it be cast with nonactors, and it was, save for Chloë Sevigny. The shoot, in the summer of 1994, was, according to Vachon, a nightmare. Often, when this is the case, it’s the stars who are temperamental. On this set, the volatility was behind the camera, Clark and Korine. According to Vachon, Clark was inexperienced and paranoid, convinced that people were trying to take the picture away from him. In his mind, nobody knew “what the fuck they were doing,” she says. He would look for a reason to hate somebody, invariably find one, and want him or her—more often her, since he seemed to get along better with men—fired. Says Clark, “She was used to shepherding first-time directors through their projects. The first day of filming she came up to me and made some suggestions, and I said, ‘I appreciate it, but I don’t want to hear it, I don’t need any help, any comments, anything.’ Everybody was looking at me saying, ‘This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s too close and he doesn’t do any wide shots, no establishing shots.’ But I was thinking, That’s why your fucking films all look the same. Like cookie cutters. Leave me alone and let me make my film. After that, Christine did leave me alone and helped me. Anything I wanted she made sure I got it. I loved her.”
There was already a lot of buzz around Kids, and when it was finished, Woods showed it to Harvey. He knew that Kids would most likely pull an NC-17, and that Miramax was the only distributor on earth that would have the guts to put it out. But he also knew that Harvey’s hands might be tied by Disney. Miramax had already passed on the script once. He thought, If Michael Eisner sees this movie, it’s all over. Woods showed it to Harvey at Todd-AO, in Midtown, off Ninth Avenue, at noon. Weinstein exclaimed, “Wow, congratulations, that’s some movie you have there. What are you going to do with it?”
“We’ve been accepted to Sundance, I was thinking that I would just go there and see what happens, take bids.”
“Well, what about me? What about us?”
“Look, Harvey, do you want me to talk to you as a friend?” Woods was close enough to Harvey to know what buttons to push. “As a friend, here’s what I would say to you. You’re part of the Disney family, you’re doing really well, you’re way too rich for—why do you need this headache? On the other hand, whoever puts out this movie is going to be the new Miramax!” Woods had spoken the magic words, better than “Goldwyn’s interested” or “Fine Line’s bidding.” Harvey was not about to let another company become “the new Miramax.” He said, “Be in my office at three o’clock.” Woods appeared at the appointed time, and Harvey bought worldwide rights for $3.5 million.
Harvey, in other words, was schizophrenic. On the one hand, he understood Disney’s sensitivity to projects like Kids, and he passed on it as a production, but then he turned around and picked it up as an acquisition. Explains Lechner, “Harvey the acquisitions guy and Harvey the producer were two very different creatures. Harvey would never have made The Cook, the Thief, but he was able to recognize it for what it was.” The same was true for Kids. He wouldn’t produce it, but he was ready to acquire it.
The 1995 festival not only showed Kids at midnight, but Haynes’s Safe, in the competition, along with Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion, Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, Mike Newell’s incest film, An Awfully Big Adventure. The Brothers McMullen won the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic competition. It was acquired by Fox Searchlight, and went on to become a sizable indie hit, grossing $10 million. But it was a soft, sentimental film and came in for a lot of flak. Says Kevin Smith, “Ed Burns and The Brothers McMullen was the beginning of the end. It was a movie that absolutely could have been made by a studio. It had as much edge as vanilla ice cream, no name brand. Everyone wanted to get a Brothers McMullen underway. ’Cause everyone wanted that cheap but softshell picture that fuckin’ reaches into the warm and fuzzies of the fuckin’ average multiplex moviegoer while still being able to call it an independent. Even Harvey fuckin’ talked to Burns about making a movie at Miramax. It made me heartsick for a year.”
The revolving door that spun employees out of Sundance at warp speed in the late 1980s and early 1990s had slowed—at least for the moment. The institute rested, like a three-legged stool, on Gilmore, Michelle Satter, and Nicole Guillemet, the general manager. Still, the old problems persisted. As Cathy Schulman says, “It was a dysfunctional place. Since nobody was making a cent, people fought over power, and access to Redford. There was a lot of competition among Gilmore, Beer, and Guillemet for Redford’s ear, who was going to get to have dinner with him.” With some exceptions, Redford was well known for running hot and cold on people, and the composition of his inner circle—among them a handful of shameless groupies and sycophants—was chronically in flux depending on who had seized his fancy at any particular moment. Sundance wags referred to them as the “Bob whisperers.” Says Sterling Van Wagenen, “Bob sees things in a very black-and-white way. He’d pick somebody out who for some reason he didn’t think shared this mysterious Sundance vision. It was not an easy thing to confront him and say, ‘You’re wrong about this.’ You’re either in or you’re out, and if you’re out, don’t expect to be invited to the tenth or twentieth anniversary party, or that there will be any sort of institutional memory that will acknowledge your contribution. And once you got on the other side of that fence, you just didn’t get back.” With a few exceptions, the people who do best at Sundance, and
last the longest, are the ones who refrain from playing the Bob game, who are blessed with egos modest enough to be satisfied with basking in his reflected glow, rather than aspiring to shine themselves.
Despite the institute’s unaccustomed stability through mid-decade, Redford hadn’t changed much. He was still so passive-agressive, still such a conflict avoider that it was almost impossible to know if he liked something or not, and if not, hard to assess the degree of his dislike. He was invariably polite, always prefacing his remarks with something complimentary, and whatever criticisms he then voiced were so mildly expressed you could leave the room thinking he loved your work when in fact he didn’t. He would say, “I like the thinking, but I have a question,” furrowing his brow and running his fingers through his tangled copper locks, adding, “Let’s look at this further,” or, “We gotta spend some time together,” or, “We can get into that more later,” leaving whomever feeling warm and fuzzy with the dreamy expectation of future meetings. But “later” never came, so decisions were postponed, and efforts to reach him failed because he was away on the set, otherwise preoccupied, or just unavailable, period, no reason given. And when he did get into it later, the way he did so was often by replacing the person responsible for the work he may or may not have liked. Redford, with his “Bobspeak,” gave people he worked with the feeling that they were standing on sand.
The star was rarely around, and when he was, he would make a couple of oracular pronouncements and then vanish, leaving the staff to tease the meaning out of the tea leaves he had left behind. Says one former Sundance executive, “He’ll disappear for six or nine months on a shoot, leaving you hanging out to dry. And if in the meantime you’ve been too independent, because that’s what you thought was needed, when he comes back it’s problematic for him.” He was like a husband who frequently disappears on protracted business trips, leaving the care of home and family to the little woman. If she made a decision in his absence—moved his favorite easy chair or bought a new rug—when he got back, he filed for divorce.
Redford was just as suspicious as ever, more so, perhaps, since family ties had failed him—he never forgave Van Wagenen for trying to “leverage” him—so he increasingly surrounded himself with people of strong religious faith, a hazard, perhaps, of living in Utah. One of his long-term associates, attorney Reg Gipson, is the son of a missionary, and in the mid-1990s, Redford hired a colorful, highly successful advertising executive named Gordon Bowen as the chief “creative” officer for the Sundance Group. Bowen was best known for squishy ads that tugged the heartstrings. He was good at listening to Redford and articulating Redford’s vision, but in the opinion of some, he just amplified the problem, which was, all vision, no execution. Bowen would kill people with encouragement, and then, like Redford, disappear, walk out in the middle of a meeting in New York, take a cab to the airport and return to Salt Lake City, where he lived.
In other words, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Gilmore’s festival and Satter’s labs were thriving, but Redford complained bitterly about the catalogue, the resort, and the other “entities.” Some of that could be discounted as just Redford complaining, because he loved to complain. “No matter who you are in Bob’s orbit, he complains about you,” observes Van Wagenen. “In order to feel comfortable with people, he has to figure out where their limitations are, so everyone was relentlessly scrutinized. Bob is constantly analyzing what people do and why they do it, what their strengths and weaknesses are. It’s an actor’s talent, to analyze the character you’re playing. After a while you think, Give it up, go with people and support their strengths and watch out for their weaknesses.” As one former Sundancer puts it, “Bob is almost genetically impossible to satisfy. He is first and foremost dissatisfied with himself. And he will say that. He’s so self-critical, it’s sad. He thinks he’s square and pedantic and boring. He’s got an inferiority complex about his own intellect.” But that notwithstanding, there were still real problems: the old questions about the financial health of Sundance were about to resurface.
WHEN AWARDS TIME rolled around at the beginning of 1995, Tarantino cleaned up. He won big at the L.A. Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics. But there was the occasional thorn in those bouquets. When he won a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, he neglected to thank or even mention Avary, who was already furious with him over the credits, and for appropriating his Top Gun riff for a cameo Quentin did in a film called Sleep with Me—without telling him. As Tarantino was walking past Avary’s table, Avary’s wife intercepted him, shouting, “Fuck you!” Says Avary, “He could have stood to learn a little humility, although humility is a hard thing to come by when everyone is telling you that you’re the Second Coming.”
On February 14, 1995, when the Oscar nominations were announced, Miramax got an astounding twenty-two, more than double the previous year. Most of this success was attributable to Pulp, which alone picked up seven, including Best Picture and Best Actor, some of it to the addition of Mark Gill and Marcy Granata to the company. Bullets Over Broadway also got seven, and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures got one, and several other films shared the rest. Facing stiff competiton, mainly from Forrest Gump, Weinstein sang the little guy song. “I’m always going up against the huge Hollywood establishment, and this time it’s no different,” he complained at the time. “You have Bob Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, who could both be mayor of Beverly Hills.”
On March 27, the big night, Gump thumped Pulp, showing that the Academy didn’t get the joke. Miramax won only two Oscars, one for Dianne Wiest for Best Supporting Actress for Bullets, and one for Best Original Screenplay, which Tarantino shared with Avary. After the director, wearing a Dogs-style skinny black tie, made his remarks, Avary, who wasn’t used to winning Oscars, thanked his wife and said, “And I really have to take a pee right now, so I’m gonna go. Thank you.”
Tarantino wasn’t amused by Avary’s faux pas. “My whole thing was if, after Roger gets through thanking his wife, he thanks me, it will all be water under the bridge, he’ll have said all that I ever wanted and would need to be said, in a sweet moment,” says Tarantino. “He walked up there and thanked his wife and said, ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I expected no less. I was trying to take care of Roger, which finally made me feel like an idiot. Because I knew I was a better friend to him than he was to me. Roger would be working at an advertising agency right now if my mother never met my father. If I never existed. Roger never would have directed one foot of film, ever. And if I hadn’t written Pulp Fiction, he would never have won an Oscar.”
AS A PRETEEN, Steven Soderbergh was a Little League phenom, a pitcher with a 7 and 0 record, a no-hitter, and a .450 batting average. He dreamed of going all the way to the majors, but then one day he woke up and it was all gone. He couldn’t pitch and he couldn’t hit. The baseball gods had forsaken him. One year shy of twenty years later, it seemed like déjà vu. The precocious director of the hottest indie of 1989 had had two flops in a row and was well on his way to a third. Now everyone who had been looking for the next Soderbergh was looking for the next Tarantino, and it seemed that even he was not immune to the Tarantino bug. In 1994, he had done his own heist movie, The Underneath. He had written the script himself and was using one of his sex, lies stars, Peter Gallagher, but he hated it and he hated himself. “To sit on a movie set at age thirty-one and wonder whether or not you even want to do this, having no other real skills, is so terrifying and depressing,” he said, adding, “I was bored, I was empty. I’d just run out of gas. I felt, If I have to set up another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m just gonna shoot myself.”
The Underneath followed Kafka and King of the Hill quietly into the night. Not only was his career in the toilet, but his five-year marriage to Betsy Brantley ended in October 1994. Soderbergh had been in the habit of parking Brantley, along with their young daughter, at their farm in Charlottesville while he took off for distant climes, sometimes locations, some
times not. He was an emotional evader and avoider, a pattern familiar from sex, lies, and not unlike his bête noir, Redford. According to Soderbergh, “The problem with my marriage was that I had not come to terms with the degree to which I had swallowed what I had seen growing up and then proceeded to reenact it.” Brantley remembered, “At one point, I said to him, ‘You are two different people. You have this secure, confident professional side. But personally, you’re the most insecure person I’ve ever met.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You’re just now figuring that out?’ ”
But now the professional side of him was becoming unhinged as well. He hadn’t been having any trouble getting work. “People kept thinking, He might do it again,” he recalls. “And I’m very comfortable disappointing people. It’s like a really easy place for me to be. But I felt I was running out of time. What concerned me was, was I going to stay where I was and have the kind of career that is a footnote? I realized that I had a fear of success issue that I needed to confront. I was just lost. I didn’t know what to do.” He pauses. “Actually, I did know what to do, which was start over again, literally re-create the circumstances under which I made my first short films, which had a very Richard Lester energy to them. What the fuck happened to that? The Underneath is so sealed off, it’s just somnambulant. How did I become a formalist? That’s not how I started.”
Soderbergh remembered the way it was when he lost his fastball, his timing at the plate, and everything else. He thought, Is that what’s happening? Have I lost the thing? He decided that no, he’d just drifted off course, and the back-to-basics therapy he came up with for himself involved returning to Baton Rouge, where he’d made sex, lies. He called Rick Linklater in Austin, said, “Do you know any sound people?”
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