“Yeah, we got some around here.”
“Do they have their own equipment?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Do you think they’ll work for nothing?”
“Steven, I’ve gotten this call from grad students. I’ve never gotten it from a Palme d’Or winner and an Academy Award nominee! What the hell are you doing down there?” With used equipment, a crew of five, and a shoestring budget of $350,000, he was deconstructing his own life in an alternately amusing and self-punishing autobiographical fantasy of a kind that was unprecedented in the oeuvre of a major director. He called it Schizopolis.
Soderbergh admired Lester not only for his energy, but for “his eclecticism, the range of Hard Day’s Night, Petulia, Juggernaut, Robin and Marian,” he explains. “I think that’s what you do if you’re not Fellini.” But Lester did have a personal style, especially in his early films, and Soderbergh set out to make a Lester film. Schizopolis features himself in two roles, as well as his ex-wife and his young daughter. It was an indie Rashomon. He treats its subject (himself) with astringent wit, but its concerns are serious, if abstract and jejune, like a student film: the unknowability of others, the impossibility of relationships, the futility of communication. It bristles with fragments of his own personal history, including his marriage; satirical shafts aimed at a variety of contemporary targets; and allusions to other movies. In a jaw-dropping sequence, one of his doppelgangers masturbates in a men’s room, as if to say, Soderbergh had been wasting precious time, if not bodily fluids, jacking off.
What with Soderbergh having just come through a painful divorce—“It was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life, ever!”—and directing his ex-wife, it was a stormy set. “We fought like cats and dogs,” she recalled. “It was the one time I had him in a room he couldn’t walk out of. He couldn’t leave. He was the director.” Looking back on it, Soderbergh says now, “What was that about? What would possess you to create a situation in which you are acting out surreal satirical variations on the marriage that is now over?” He continued, “I was so wrapped up in my own shit that I wasn’t looking out the window. I was just hanging out in my own house with the blinds drawn and the music on and not answering the phone. Schizopolis was about detonating that house, blowing it up and putting myself in a position where I couldn’t go back anymore.” He adds, “I guess I wanted to be uncomfortable. I wanted it to be difficult. I wanted to be in a situation where I wasn’t in control, entirely.”
Weinstein offered him $1 million for Schizopolis, sight unseen. Soderbergh warned him off, saying, “Harvey, thank you, I’m flattered, you don’t want to do that, see the movie first.” Once the Miramax co-chairman did see the movie, he called Soderbergh and said, “Thanks. I really appreciate that.” Reflects Soderbergh now, “It would have been a disaster for both of us.”
DAVID O. RUSSELL was a director Harvey Weinstein very much wanted under his tent, and he came on very strong, pressing for Russell’s next film, Flirting with Disaster. The filmmaker remembers, “It was like, ‘This is the deal, it’s good for like an hour. And after that, it’s not on the table anymore.” Russell grabbed the opportunity. It was the summer of 1994, and shortly after the phone call, he and his wife, Janet Grillo, found themselves on Martha’s Vineyard, where Eve Weinstein’s parents have their place. His lawyer told him, “You’re going to go meet Harvey, sign the deal.” Russell had spent every summer on the Vineyard as a child. He continues, “I went to this part of the island that I’d never been to, East Chop or West Chop, a gated community, WASP central. I met Harvey at the tennis club. Everybody was wearing tennis whites, except him, sitting on the porch wearing this blue T-shirt and too tight royal blue shorts, with his big gut, his balls bulging out, and his big hairy Jewish legs. I thought I would feel so uncomfortable here, but he just plops himself down, right in the middle of it. Everybody was coming up to him, all the preppies, the Chips and the Missys, saying, ‘Hello, Harvey.’ He’d given them, like, the ‘Harvey Weinstein playground,’ and I realized what a ballsy guy he was, the only Jew in the whole place, just sitting there like he was the mayor.”
Russell was looking to get as far from the darkness of Spanking the Monkey as he could. “To me that incest material was really vile,” he explains. “I didn’t want to be that guy. I decided I wanted to make a fun comedy.” Improbably, he fashioned his fun comedy from some rather unfun materials. It was the story of a young, adopted man searching for his biological parents. Right away, he had trouble getting Harvey’s attention. “After we made the deal, that’s when he was most excited, when he still had the smell of battle in his nose,” he recalls. “Later he loses interest. He moves on to the next location of carnage. I couldn’t even get a cup of coffee with him.” The director wanted to cast Janeane Garofalo, and he had to make a commitment immediately or she was going to take another film. Garofalo was an actress, not a star. In Harvey’s eyes she was about as glamorous as a bowl of cold oatmeal. Russell told him, “We better move fast, I don’t want to lose her.” Harvey opened the door of the Miramax conference room, and shouted down the hall, “Bob, sell the company! We can’t get Janeane Garofalo!” Then he turned to the filmmaker and said, “I don’t give a shit if we can’t get Janeane Garofalo.” And walked away. Harvey wanted John Cu-sack for the lead. He said, “I’ll show you, lemme call John Cusack and wake him up.” Cusack was in L.A.; it was six in the morning there. He got the actor on the line, went, “John, it’s Harvey Weinstein and David O. Russell. Have you seen Spanking the Monkey?”
“Uh, no, but I, uh, wanna see it!”
“I want you to see it, and meet this guy.” Says Russell, “Of course, that went nowhere. He wanted him, but he also just woke John Cusack up to prove that he could.” Russell liked the look of My Own Private Idaho. He got on the phone with Harvey and said, “I want to use Eric Edwards, Gus Van Sant’s guy, to shoot Flirting with Disaster.”
“Who cares? I hate Gus Van Sant’s films. You’re depressing me. You’re manic-depressive. I hate talking to you!”
“Why are you speaking to me like this?”
“Because you’re depressing.” Harvey hung up. If Russell hadn’t been depressed before the conversation, he was now. Later, of course, Harvey apologized.
On the basis of the script, Russell recruited an exceptional cast that included Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Téa Leoni, Lily Tomlin, and Mary Tyler Moore, among others. The picture was shot on a shoestring budget. The actors had trailers, but Russell did not, to save money. He had to knock on the doors of theirs to use the toilet. There were the customary demands from Miramax. In the opening scene, in which Arquette undresses, Russell was asked to make sure he had some shots of her breasts.
When Flirting was completed, Miramax tested it in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Recalls the director, “The testing was a hideous experience. The movie did moderately well, in the high 60s and mid-70s, but there were some tests where it was down in the 50s, and I realized how subjective audiences are, and the insanity is that they’re not audiences who would even choose to go to see my movie.” Harvey thought he could raise Flirting’s scores by getting rid of some codas, brief shots under the tail credits. One showed the two gay characters in bed; another, Leoni’s character pregnant, smoking and drinking. “He was hell-bent on this. He thought they would prevent the film from crossing over, which I disagreed with completely,” says Russell, who was thinking to himself, That’s a chickenshit attitude. The director knew he had final cut, and there was no way he was going to drop the codas. Out loud, he told him, “The movie’s over by this point. You will have either liked it or not.” Harvey replied, “Well, David, okay, I sat with”—he threw out a director’s name—“and he was willing to work with me, so I’ll be more passionate about marketing his film, and your film I’m not going to be as passionate about, because you’re not willing to collaborate with me.” Recalls Russell, “It was right on the eve of the release, and he was threatening me, saying he would not support the film. So out
they came. Now I’d tell him to go fuck himself.”
Miramax expected Flirting to do $30 million plus, but it plateaued at $14.7 million. Afterward, Harvey discarded Russell. “The thing that sickens me about Miramax is that Harvey isn’t interested in having relationships. He’s just interested in getting you when he wants you, and getting you to do what he wants you to do, and then he’s on to the next person. They treat you like used Kleenex.”
Russell’s picture was a dry run. Harvey was only flirting with disaster. The real disasters were yet to come. Like Kate and Leopold, brought in by Cathy Konrad, with Sandra (Speed) Bullock attached, hardly a Meryl Streep, but eminently bankable. Although it was a script with problems—by a college buddy of Bullock’s yet—Harvey was apparently blinded by the glare of Bullock’s stardom. Recalls Konrad, “Harvey hungered to make movies that could compete with studio films. He said, ‘This is going to be my big fat fuckin’ commercial movie.’ He wanted to taste what that was like.” But he didn’t want to drop studio-sized wads of cash on development. When costs flirted with the $2 million mark after an expensive rewrite by Carrie Fisher, Bullock dropped out, and Harvey refused to put any more money into it. The project stalled.
Meanwhile, throughout the spring of 1995, the controversy over Kids roiled the waters at the Tribeca offices at the very moment that the company and its parent, Disney, were entangled in a nasty tussle with William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League, over a little film called Priest that Miramax had picked up at Toronto in September 1994 for $1.75 million. Priest had gotten a standing ovation at Sundance just a few weeks earlier and had picked up the Michael Powell Award for best British feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It was directed by Antonia Bird. Set in Liverpool, Priest is an angry story about a priest who is persecuted by the Catholic Church for being gay. The church is portrayed as rigid, small-minded, and hypocritical. And while the film is by no means graphic, there are a couple of scenes in which the priest makes love to another man, handled by Bird with tact and delicacy. Priest is about as far from exploitation as you can get, but the Catholic League, a conservative watchdog group always looking for a way to raise its profile, was spoiling for a fight, and Disney was a ripe target.
Harvey’s first instinct, as it was with Dogma, was to go for the jugular and release it on Good Friday. It was like jabbing Donohue with a cattle prod. The league called on its constituency to tie up Disney phone lines with complaints and boycott Disney products. New York’s Cardinal O’Connor, without having seen the film, denounced it for being “viciously anti-Catholic.” (Today, of course, in the light of the Church’s pederasty scandals, it looks woefully understated.) Disney had ridden out these kinds of storms before, but nobody had anticipated the virulence of this one. “It was overwhelming the amount of phone calls that came in, the faxes and letters, the death threats,” says former Miramax executive David Linde. “The publicity chicks were losing their minds, because Enchanted April had been doing well, people were calling up going, ‘Hi, I saw Enchanted April, can you tell me where that is, I want to plan a vacation.’ ‘Portofino!’ And then this!” Harvey recalls, “Cardinal O’Connor lit the fuse. There’s nothing as frightening as getting these letters that said, ‘Dear Jew, Go fuck yourself, I’m gonna kill you.’ My mother criticized me on top of everything else. You think that publicity always fuels the box office—not that kind of publicity.”
Harvey apparently never gave the Good Friday release date a second thought. As Linde puts it, “Harvey perceived no boundaries. He’d do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. He would push the envelope as far as it would go. It didn’t matter what Disney said, it didn’t matter what anybody said. They fueled the fire, which is the way he marketed movies. He saw controversy as an opportunity to create greater publicity, greater awareness.” Harvey told McGurk what he planned to do. McGurk thought, Oh shit, Michael’s not gonna like this. He called Eisner to tell him the news. It was about nine months after the Disney CEO’s heart attack. McGurk said, “I just want to tell you, there’s an issue I’m trying to deal with.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, Harvey wants to release Priest on Good Friday! For the publicity.” There was a dead silence on the other end of the line. McGurk thought, I hope he hasn’t fainted. Eisner finally replied, “Whatever you do, you gotta stop him.” Eventually, Harvey came to his senses, moving the release up to March 24, 1995. Says Bowles, “Priest was a turning point for Miramax in a lot of ways. That’s when they saw the downside of controversy, and how it could come back to bite them. And now that they were in the Disney fold, there was much more at stake than just Bob and Harvey’s film company. This was a global multinational corporation. Harvey isn’t dumb. While he likes the controversy, likes the attention, he’s not going to cut his own throat.”
Some Disney executives were reportedly furious that Miramax acquired Priest and Kids in the first place, knowing they couldn’t release an NC-17 film. They took it personally, the sense being that, as one executive puts it, “He was doing it just to fuck with Michael. It seemed hostile.” Says Roth, “We had a couple of years, ’94, ’95, when it was rough going. The amount of controversy that was connected up to Disney was terrible. There was definitely a conversation about how do you continue a business and make a profit when you are so connected to these two guys.”
On June 14, 1995, Miramax opened Il Postino, a charming story set in Italy about an unlettered village postman whose life is changed when he delivers mail to Pablo Neruda, in exile from his native land, Chile, then under the boot of the brutal Pinochet regime. Harvey had picked it up in Toronto the previous year. He was sitting in the back of the theater crying. Recalls Amy Israel, then Hoving’s assistant, “He said, ‘You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna republish Pablo Neruda in a book of love poems, and I’m going to have a CD of famous people reading Pablo Neruda.’ In that one minute, he came up with the entire marketing plan for the movie. And that’s what he did, put a CD out with Julia Roberts and Andy Garcia reading Pablo Neruda.” Adds Amy Hart, a marketing coordinator, “If Harvey believed in a film, he did not base his decisions on the first weekend’s grosses. He would say, ‘We’re gonna work it.’ ” Il Postino was one of those films Harvey wouldn’t give up on. Recalls Peter Kindlon, who also worked in marketing, “First we pulled quotes from reviews, then we used everybody with a big name who ever had an opinion about anything. The ads practically shamed people into seeing the movie, like, You must see this movie and if you haven’t, there’s something wrong with you. They did promotions with Italian restaurants around the country—Bring in your ticket stub, you’ll get a free glass of wine! Relentless.” Harvey drove Il Postino to a remarkable gross of $20.7 million.
Il Postino represented the calm before the next storm, the one you didn’t need the Weather Channel to predict. Harvey had gone too far down the Kids road to pull back. The film played at Cannes in May. Cannes director Gilles Jacob didn’t want it in the main competition, recalls Larry Clark. “It was too controversial. They offered us the Directors’ Fortnight, and I said, ‘No, I want the main fucking competition.’ Harvey threatened to pull all of Miramax’s films out of the festival. He strong-armed them—for my film, so I’ll always love him for that. I got to see Kids at the Palais on that gigantic screen, and after that, I said, ‘I could die right now a happy man.’ ” The French went crazy for Kids, but Todd McCarthy, the influential Variety critic, dumped a pail of ice-cold water on the Miramax parade. Kids “seems voyeuristic and exploitative of its young subjects,” he wrote, “[and] will undoubtedly raise the spectre of kiddie porn.” The red flag, of course, was “kiddie porn,” as in “Disney Caught in ‘Child Porn’ Film Row,” a headline in Britain’s Guardian.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., senator and presidential hopeful Bob Dole, whose wife, Elizabeth, claimed she was going to sell $15,000 worth of Disney stock because of Priest, referred to Kids, among other films, as a “nightmare of depravity,” without, as usual, having seen i
t. Miramax screened the film for Roth. “I saw the movie, I said, ‘There’s no chance for it to ever get an R rating,’ ” he recalls. “I told them they couldn’t do it.” Harvey was humiliated. The Weinsteins bought the film back from Disney and formed another company, Shining Excalibur Films, headed by Bowles, expressly for the purpose of distributing Kids. “Kids was a hot potato,” Bowles remembers. “The most shocking film ever made, blah, blah, blah. There were ugly rumors—child pornography, drug use, underage kids having sex on the set—which were not true, but they were out there. I put the phone in my wife’s name and decided to do it.” For Disney, the problem was how to prevent the Weinsteins from exploiting the situation for their own ends. Bowles insists that Shining Excalibur had its own staff, but the parent studio suspected it drew on Miramax personnel to work on the marketing. “It was all Miramax people doing the work and distributing it, except under the straw company,” says Clark. But Disney could never prove it. Explains Roth, “It set a bad precedent. Anybody inside the company could then take a controversial film and manipulate the system so that they would get kicked out and then create a separate revenue stream for themselves. Disney didn’t want Harvey to make a profit [on it].” Good luck.
Clark had hoped for an R rating, based on the absence of nudity, but on July 8, the Ratings Board slapped it with an NC-17, which meant writing off the big theater chains and theaters outside the major metropolitan areas, four hundred screens instead of eight hundred. The Weinsteins released the film unrated. “Harvey asked me to come in, and he said, ‘We need a version for Blockbuster,’ ” Clark recalls. “We’ll get another million dollars if we give them an R. If you could just clip a couple minutes out of the film, I will give you a check for $100,000, right now, under the table.’ I said, ‘Harvey, you can’t buy me. And you have enough money anyway.’ He looked me straight in the eye, said, ‘Larry, you’re right, I do have enough money, but it’s not for me, it’s for all the little people out there. All the secretaries in the cubicles, they have an interest in this film. That’s who you’re gonna hurt if you don’t do this.’ I thought, Man, is this guy sharp. He didn’t miss a beat.” To the press, Harvey said, “I just love movies. Other movie companies just love money. I cannot live, and nor can my brother, with the idea of artistic merit not being first.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 32
