Shining Excalibur released Kids on July 21 at New York’s Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, then rolled out the film to about thirty-five to forty markets on July 28. “Harvey and Bob did everything for that fucking film that could be done,” says Clark. “We broke new ground. None of the chains played unrated films, and we got it into the Sony theaters. I flew back to Tulsa where I was born and went to see Kids with a bunch of my childhood friends. In a mall!”
The picture did not break any records. Still, it did about $7 million in domestic box office, on a budget of $1.5 million. Despite Disney’s efforts to the contrary, the Weinsteins made out like thieves, according to Bowles possibly taking home a couple of million each. Clark, on the other hand, got next to nothing. “I got $40,000 to do Kids,” he recalls. “I saw another hundred and a quarter when it was first sold. I never got a bonus. I had 10, 12 percent of the net, but according to their bookkeeping, the film never made anything, even though it made so much money all over the world. I just got fucked out of everything. But they were very nice to me. And man, I got to make my film.” According to Miramax, Clark received all he was entitled to. Says Harvey, Kids was a risky movie, “it grossed $7 million, not $70 million. It did terrible overseas, and no payment was due him other than what his contract required.”
Like Priest before it, Kids was a defining—or redefining—picture for Miramax. Says Vachon, “Kids was a Miramax before-and-after movie.” The Weinsteins thought, Enough already! Although Miramax had indeed distributed a handful of daring, cutting-edge films, its reputation as a champion of the First Amendment was a carefully cultivated figment of its publicity department. As Tusk puts it, “While everyone thought we were battling the MPAA and doing all these transgressive films, the truth was, we were doing My Left Foot. We were doing Hear My Song, we were doing Mediterraneo.” Adds Bowles, “Bob and Harvey were moving on to fry bigger fish. They were moving into the big-film game.”
A year later, at the Independent Feature Project Spirit Awards on March 23, where Kids’s Justin Pierce won for best debut performance, the executives at the Miramax table refrained from coming over to the Kids table, where Clark, Van Sant, Korine, Sevigny, Woods, and Vachon were sitting to proffer their congratulations. Some of the Kids gang felt snubbed.
Harvey sent Clark a sweet note every time one of his films (infrequently) came out, but never produced or acquired one again. Says the filmmaker, “They were offered Bully, about kids who murder their friend who’s a bully, and Ken Park,” another unrated, scabrous look at teenage dysfunction, but, he continues, “they passed. They were tough films, and Miramax had changed.”
Seven
Pumping Up the Volume
1995–1996
• How Harvey Weinstein lost Shine but found Sling Blade and rescued The English Patient, while Four Rooms nearly broke up the Sundance Class of ’92 and October scored some hits.
“I’m not looking to make an NC-17 movie anymore. . . . The mantra at Disney is to keep the ratings ‘R,’ and I’m happy to do so. I don’t want to cause Disney any problems. Why ruin a perfect relationship?”
—HARVEY WEINSTEIN
Quentin Tarantino was not one to flee from the fame that was thrust upon him in the wake of Pulp Fiction. “I always wanted to be a star since I was a little kid,” he explains. He was quick to appreciate the perks. “The clubs and restaurants, I’ve been there when I’ve been the loser, and it’s a lot better to be the winner: ‘Okay, you motherfuckers, get up. Let these dudes sit down.’ ” He loved the limelight, the heat, the buzz. A fan himself, he felt a responsibility to the legions of people who worshipped him. But of course, celebrity like his exacted a price. No matter how much he gave, it was never enough. When Chasen’s, L.A.’s legendary restaurant-to-the-stars, finally closed its doors, he wanted to be there. “I drove him over,” recalls Robert Rodriguez. “As soon as he opened the door, people were already there with Pulp Fiction posters. Mobbing him. He said, ‘Man, that guy, I signed his poster, and he looked at me like I was a dick, ’cause I didn’t sign all ten.’ ”
Says Tarantino, “It was getting hard to do a lot of the things that I liked to do. I would think, If I was Neil Jordan, I could have twelve hookers and no one would know who the fuck I was. It was getting hard to just take walks. Everybody was a homeless person. I had to avoid eye contact. Because to make eye contact with somebody was to invite them to approach me. My regular-guy shit, going to a used record store and spending two hours on the floor, yanking out the boxes, looking through everything they have—all of a sudden I’m getting jacked and pimped by these people. I’d say, ‘Dude, it’s my day off, man, I just want to look through the fuckin’ records. Like you.’ ”
Tarantino got acquainted with Mira Sorvino at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1995, where she was wildly acclaimed for her performance as the hooker with a heart of gold in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite, for which she subsequently won an Oscar. When Tarantino finally broke up with his long-term girlfriend, Grace Lovelace, they started dating. “Mira and I were in Paris together for our exciting romantic week, and she had never been to the Rodin Garden, which was one of my favorite things,” he recalls. “So we had a little picnic, and we were making out, and everybody was looking at us. It was like, Ohmigod, that’s been taken from me. If I had to make the trade, yeah, I would, but goddamn, if I had known in advance, before I got famous, I would have gone to the Rodin Garden more. I woulda done a whole lotta shit more before I got famous if I knew I was gonna lose the option.”
In addition to doing press for Pulp and campaigning for an Oscar, he had been polishing an old script called From Dusk Till Dawn for Rodriguez to helm, noodling an idea for a martial arts movie he called Kill Bill, which he had developed with Uma Thurman, and preparing to direct one “room” in a collaborative portmanteau film planned by Rodriguez, Allison Anders, and Alexandre Rockwell, called Four Rooms. Four Rooms was a project of the so-called Sundance “Class of ’92.” (Rodriguez, who attended the festival in 1993, was an honorary member.) Anders missed the sense of community that characterized the New Hollywood movie brats of the 1970s. With film school no longer the common thread, Sundance, with its labs and its festival, its moral and often practical support, was the closest shared experience for the 1990s generation. Says Rockwell, “Basically I’d been paying my dues alone in New York as an independent. Then I went to Sundance with In the Soup, and I met Quentin, I met Allison, I met Rick Linklater. All of a sudden I realized, Other directors aren’t the enemy. There were a lot of new filmmakers coming up, there was a New Wave feeling—why not do a movie that celebrates that feeling. I was at a dinner party, and I said, ‘How about this for a premise, a hotel, and a bellhop’s misadventures on New Year’s night.’ I called Quentin, and he got excited by the idea right away.”
Harvey was so high on Pulp that he would have financed Tarantino’s laundry slips. Still, anthology films rarely work, and in similar circumstances, probably few other companies would have agreed to back Four Rooms. This was Harvey doing what filmmakers loved him for, taking a flier on a nutty, unconventional project, even if it cost him a couple of million dollars. Of course, it was doomed to fail, and he made his own unique contribution to that failure.
Each filmmaker would write and direct a segment set on New Year’s Eve spinning off from one common character—the bellhop, Ted, played by Tim Roth. (Originally, Linklater was going to do a fifth room, but he smartly dropped out.) “It was really exciting to go against the way that things have traditionally been done,” explains Anders. “Nobody had truly collaborated before, so it was, Let’s all make this film together, let’s do it experimentally, let’s not have to worry about movie stars. We’ll just cast people we like. Everyone was going to be paid the same. But very quickly all that changed.” Simply, there was an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting in the room that nobody wanted to acknowledge, and its name was Quentin Tarantino. “Once it went to Miramax, it became a whole different thing,” continues
Anders, “because Quentin became a whole different thing.”
All four filmmakers collaborated on the script, and Tarantino handed in the first draft. “I was just kind of horrified,” Anders recalls. “I was like, Wait a minute—we haven’t finished this, we’ve barely worked on it yet!” But Miramax never asked for a rewrite. “The feeling was,” she continues, “Quentin had just won the Palme d’Or, and they couldn’t go wrong. Their attitude was, you can fix script problems in editing—but that’s very, very misleading. Because if you haven’t written it, you most likely won’t shoot it.”
Rooms went into pre-production during the fall of 1994, right at the time Pulp was exploding. Tarantino was becoming a star. How could they tell? For one thing, they discovered that no decisions could be made without his approval. Continues Rockwell, “I was the originator of the idea and one of the executive producers, but if I wanted to have a toothpick in the lobby or a coffee cup, there would be this, ‘We’d better check with Quentin.’ I was being second-guessed all the time.” It wasn’t easy to get Tarantino on the phone. Swept up in the publicity blitz for Pulp, he was always traveling. Rockwell continues, “I would find myself negotiating with Quentin’s third assistant. When you have all these intermediaries, they have nothing else to do but to make everything a big deal. So you had the first intermediary calling the second intermediary going, ‘Oh my God, Alex is freaking out because he thinks the hall should be painted blue. Find out from Quentin what he thinks. We have to do it quick because we’ve got to know by the end of the day.’ The second intermediary goes, ‘Emergency! Alex has timed it so you have only one hour to make a decision.’ Then, by the end of the day, it’s ‘Alex is an asshole because he wants the hall to be blue.’ The next day I would finally get a call from Quentin saying, ‘What’s going on? You went ahead and painted the hall blue? I heard the wall looks like someone puked on it.’ ”
Tarantino’s segment concerned a movie star spending New Year’s Eve surrounded by sycophants who are exploiting him for all they’re worth. It seemed transparently about his ambivalence toward his own post-Pulp fame. “It was very personal,” says Anders. “There is one moment where he is just totally fed up with people that are just hanging around, sucking off of his fame, drinking up all of the booze. And yet he’s there. This is who he’s ringing in the New Year with, like, people that he doesn’t even really know.”
She adds, “Quentin would joke, ‘My room should just be called “The One You’ve All Been Waiting For.” ’ And we’d go, ‘Oh yeah, very funny, fuck off.’ ” They may have treated him like an equal, but nobody else did. “His set was like four times the size of ours,” she continues. It wasn’t that his story demanded a huge set, “his head demanded a huge set. All of our rooms could have fit inside his. It was a metaphor for what was going on. We teased him about it, and he’d always laugh at himself that way, but there was a level at which people didn’t want to admit that he actually had that much more power than the rest of us. Which was not good for the film.”
When Four Rooms came in at two hours, forty minutes, the filmmakers’ hopes for the film came fluttering down like so many autumn leaves. Harvey, not unreasonably, pressured the directors to shorten it. But since Tarantino was untouchable and Rodriguez’s room was virtually shot without cuts, the brunt of the pressure fell on the two most vulnerable film-makers, Anders and Rockwell. Rockwell said to the Weinsteins, “Well, okay, I could cut my room—everyone is going to do some cutting, right?” They replied, “Who’s going to tell Quentin he has to cut?” Anders complains, “My room ran twenty minutes. Quentin’s room I think ran forty-five minutes. But we were the only ones that ever had to cut anything. Had Quentin not been so famous, had we just all been at the same level, he would have cut his down too.” Rockwell thought, This is working with friends? Maybe I won’t like these people at the end of this thing.
It didn’t help that Harvey was openly contemptuous of the two filmmakers. He told Rockwell, “You’re going to be an insignificant art film director for the rest of your life,” which Rockwell thought was funny at the time. It also got back to the filmmakers that Harvey said, “You know what the problem is with this movie? It’s working with two geniuses and two hacks.” Anders continues, “The truth is, I don’t think Harvey and Bob ever liked my stuff. The only reason I was included in the film was because Quentin wanted me. We had a lot of battles. Harvey would yell at me. I was scared, but I yelled right back at him, and then he would send me huge bouquets of flowers, and I’d be like, ‘Fuck that, I’m going to throw these out the fuckin’ window.’ But I’m a real sucker for flowers, and I never did.”
Weinstein played head games with Anders. She recalls, “He threatened me, said, ‘I’m gonna gather all your actresses and I’m gonna show ’em all your footage, what you are, naked.’ ‘Well, go ahead.’ (The only person who wants everyone to see all his footage is Quentin!) But the thing about gathering the actresses, like Madonna and Lili Taylor and Ione Skye, and Valeria Golino—I got really nervous about that, because he created this image in my head that was terrifying. I felt so exposed, and I thought, What’s he going to say—that she can’t direct her way out of a paper bag? That the film could have been better? It was absurd, something that would never happen in a million years, and later I thought, How fucking ridiculous is that? But he knew I was vulnerable, and somehow it was gonna scare me. He’d say, ‘Is that the cut you want me to release? Are you sure? I’m gonna release it.’ Even though that’s actually what I wanted, I’d have second thoughts. He made me doubt myself.”
Once, Harvey reached Rockwell while he was at the dentist. The film-maker recalls, “My dentist went, ‘There’s someone on the phone for you.’ I thought, Is there something wrong with my mother? Who calls you in your dentist’s office? I’m getting a root canal! Harvey got on, I said, ‘I can’t talk, I gotta go’—I was dodging him ’cause he wanted me to make cuts in my episode. So he said, ‘Lemme talk to the fuckin’ dentist.’ He told him, ‘Knock all his teeth out, I don’t give a good goddamn how much it is, I’ll buy him a whole new set of teeth if he makes the changes.’ ”
The quarrels over the editing of Four Rooms put a chill on the friendship between Tarantino and Anders. On October 3, 1995, the day O. J. Simpson was acquitted, she left for a Sundance-sponsored trip to China that included Tarantino, Geoff Gilmore, Ira Deutchman, Michael Barker, Ethan Coen, Liz Manne, and others. The purpose was to introduce the Chinese to indie films. She brought Mi Vida Loca, Coen went with Barton Fink, and Tarantino arrived a day late with Pulp Fiction, but the time they spent together there did little to change Anders’s feelings toward her erstwhile friend. “Quentin decided he was going to be the star in China, and he set himself apart from the rest of us,” she explains. “He was sitting on this panel next to me, and he told me that he just had this dream, that he was fucking this beautiful Chinese woman, and I realized that the woman was China, like, Quentin was getting laid by the country of China! That pretty much sums up what he set out to do, and it bothered me enormously. He likes that kind of idolatry too much.” The last night they were there, the Sundance group was invited to a ceremonial dinner at the Great Hall of the People. There was a large banquet table sumptuously appointed, but it quickly dawned on the guests that there weren’t nearly enough chairs for all of them. Then they realized that they were not meant to sit at the table and partake of the dinner, which was intended only for Tarantino, Gilmore, and sundry Chinese dignitaries. Deutchman said, “This is an interesting concept, invite people to a dinner party so they can stand around and watch other people eat.” Later, Tarantino confronted Anders, saying, “You were shooting darts at me while I was sitting at the table.” She replied, “Well fuckin’ A I was. Jesus Christ, where is your fuckin’ loyalty? You’re in a situation where the rest of the people who are your friends, your colleagues, are, like, standing?” (According to Coen, “Quentin was mortified.”)
When they returned to L.A., Anders plunged back into Four Rooms hel
l. “Bob Weinstein called me, and very matter-of-factly said they had done a cut of my room on tape,” she recalls. “I said, ‘You recut my piece? I have final cut on this movie. You’re joking, right?’ I honestly thought it was a joke. He said, ‘No, I’m serious. We’d really like you to have a look at it.’ This fucker, their post-production guy, Scott Martin, was recutting and recutting and recutting. Alex told me Harvey was going to send Scott out here to L.A., and I’m like, ‘Let’s meet him at the airport.’ And he goes, ‘I’ll dress up like a chauffeur, with one of those little cards that’ll say “Scott,” and flip the card down, have a gun and shoot him.’ I complained to Quentin at one point, but I think everybody was out for themselves.
“When Miramax tested the film, they repeatedly asked audiences and focus groups which room they liked best, pitting the filmmakers against one another, a perversion of the spirit that inspired the project in the first place. That was exactly what they weren’t supposed to do, and they did it every fuckin’ time. You want to make a movie with your friends, and you have this idealism, and the first thing they do is go, ‘This story’s better,’ or, ‘Skip this one and go to the next one.’ By the time it was all over, I was, ‘Yuchh, God, let me out of this nightmare.’ ”
Despite their high hopes, Four Rooms turned out badly. A film that was supposed to cost $1 million ended up costing $4 million. A film that was supposed to be without stars ended up with Madonna, Bruce Willis, Antonio Banderas, and Salma Hayek. A film that was supposed to have been created by equals ended up a creature of unequals. Four Rooms was released on December 22, 1995, and flopped theatrically (it grossed $4.3 million), although Lechner claims it eventually got into net profit. At the end, the four friends were barely speaking. Says Anders, “Quentin and I had a tough time. Fifty years from now, I will still want to be his friend, but he’s not going to grow if everyone’s just kissing his ass. I said, ‘Which do you want, we make a really great film, or we all kiss your ass? He said, ‘I’d like a little more ass-kissing, actually.’ The film was such a miserable experience for me, after a while, I just kind of shut off to it.” Anders was so bitter she refused to publicize the movie, refused to go with it to the Toronto Film Festival. She says Miramax gave her a first-look deal as a bribe just to get her to go—she went for one night—but they were never interested in any of her ideas. She calls it a “first-pass” deal.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 33
