Only two years earlier the first deals had gone down at Sundance, when Goldwyn paid $450,000 for Go Fish, and Miramax $227,000 for Clerks. “Nineteen ninety-six, the Shine year, was a nodal point, the year in which more things were sold in six days than had been sold the whole year and a half before,” says Gilmore. “It inspired the kind of buzz and interest where the industry and filmmaking community says, ‘This is great, this is a door, something I can walk through.’ ” The energy, buzz, and press that in the past had swirled around the discovery of talented young directors or exciting new films now went instead to the flame of money burning through hot product. The dollar frenzy encouraged filmmakers, agents, and producers’ reps to treat Sundance not as a place where they could find a distributor—that increasingly occurred before the festival started—but as a springboard from whence to launch films. Sums like this—insignificant by studio standards—dumped by the majors into this market through proxies like Miramax, Fine Line, and Castle Rock, shattered the economic foundations of the indie business, rendered acquisitions increasingly irrational, and further pumped up the bidding bubble. With the exception of Sony Classics, the studio-affiliated indies dramatically upped the ante, escalating the level of paranoia, aggression, and desperation already endemic to the acquisitions game. The days when Miramax could bend back the fingers of Fine Line and others like it were over. Harvey had shown the way to the promised land of megabuck profits, but the question was, would his competitors harvest the profits before he did. Aquisitions wasn’t fun anymore, it was a deadly serious business, and blowing one film, as Safford did Shine, could cost you your job.
The festival was so crazy that year that even Soderbergh turned up, with Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers, which he had co-produced and Sundance had rejected. Says the other co-producer, Nancy Tenenbaum, who also executive-produced sex, lies, and later Meet the Parents, “Being rejected by Sundance was the kiss of death for that movie. It had this negative tailspin, where everyone then thought the movie was not very good.” The filmmakers suspected that Daytrippers had become a victim of Soderbergh’s feud with Redford. But the film was accepted by Slamdance, then in its second year. Slamdance had been started as an unofficial, guerrilla venue to fill the vacuum left when Sundance became gentrified. Running in Park City during Redford’s festival, it accepted first films only, and only those without distribution. Redford had not reacted graciously to the upstart. The actor sourly complained that Slamdance was “a festival that’s attached itself to us in a parasitical way.” Said former Sundance staffer Lory Smith: “It’s no secret Sundance tried to muscle Slamdance right out of Park City. . . . They went to the City Council to propose an ordinance that would preclude holding two film events at the same time. They tried to suggest that Park City couldn’t cope with the influx.” To some, Slamdance held aloft the flag of the old festival, before it became indistinguishable from a Mercedes dealership.
Soderbergh had been boycotting Sundance since his contretemps with Redford over Quiz Show and King of the Hill. He had stayed away in 1993, 1994, and 1995. “I responded to the whole sort of garage band attitude of [Slamdance],” he recalls. “Sundance’s official reaction to it was inappropriately strong and negative: ‘Oh, they’re a parasite, blah, blah, blah.’ I thought, Whoa, whoa, whoa. The whole idea behind independents is not waiting for permission, and not taking no for an answer. This was how the satellite events at Cannes started, so I didn’t get it. When Sundance turned down Daytrippers, I said, ‘Lets go to Slamdance.’ ” Soderbergh’s participation lent the guerrilla festival instant credibility and provided a small measure of revenge for the Daytrippers gang. But it was short-lived. Daytrippers, as Tenenbaum puts it, then “got fucked again. We got an offer from Trea Hoving, who said something like, ‘You have an offer, there’s no question, it’s definitely gonna be at least a million, possibly more, we definitely want to release this movie.’ Then Harvey saw it and passed. We had based all our strategy on the Miramax negotiation, and then we couldn’t give the movie away.”
The repercussions of the Shine debacle lingered for months. Safford had been a favored child at Miramax, but afterward it was never the same. His contract was about to run out anyway, and he was ready to make a move. “I got tired of bringing in projects that would either languish on the shelf or fail to get the push they needed in the marketplace,” he says. “It was not the way I wanted to conduct business. I saw so many films and film-makers treated poorly. At the opening of Cry, the Beloved Country, Harvey embraced the producer, Anant Singh, on the stage and said, ‘This man is my brother.’ The last straw for me was when I witnessed an attempt to go around Anant’s back to get rights to a project that he had announced that he had, but didn’t quite, and there was an opening for Miramax to blow through and get the rights. It was a bad thing to do to a good guy. I would see how Harvey would treat people, the insults, I’d see him reduce very good executives to tears.”
The brothers, who valued loyalty above all things, never looked kindly on those who fled the bunker. It set a bad example for the ones who remained, and they were convinced the runaways were sure to feed trade secrets to the enemy. Feeling more sinned against than sinning, that he had been unfairly blamed for the loss of Shine, Safford had not bothered to inform the Weinsteins of his imminent departure.
The American Film Market in the third week of February is a mecca for every foreign buyer in the world, every distributor, every wannabe filmmaker, as well as scores of reporters. In other words, it was not a place to be embarrassed in front of your ill-wishing competitors by some pisher who works for you. Weinstein and Safford were sitting next to each other on a sofa in the Miramax suite when Harvey said something like, “I’ve heard you’ve taken the Fox job.” Safford replied, “Yes, I’ve taken the Fox job.” Furious that Safford would leave without giving notice, without giving him the opportunity to match the offer, Harvey erupted, ripping off Safford’s badge, which was pinned to his lapel, and taking a sidearm swipe at him, clipping him on the chin with the back of his fist, after which he unleashed a string of invective. (“I acted badly again,” says Weinstein. “I did take his ID badge off him, but I never touched him.”) Then both Safford and Weinstein hit the phones. Safford called his lawyer. Harvey called McGurk, at Disney, to put out the fire. Many would have regarded this incident that involved the co-chairman of Miramax as an invitation to a lifetime annuity, but much to Harvey’s relief, Safford surprised everyone by settling for next to nothing. “They dumped my files, locked me out of my office,” Safford says. “All I left with was my Rolodex and my personal effects.”
IN FEBRUARY, about a month after the festival ended, Redford unveiled his new Sundance Channel, a joint venture of the Sundance Group, Showtime, and PolyGram. The idea was to bring foreign films to quality-starved audiences who were suffering from the prohibition on subtitles that radically limited foreign film distribution on cable and video, as well as expose indie films to viewers in small-town America who otherwise would never get a chance to see these films. Like all Redford’s ventures, the Sundance Channel proceeded at a snail’s pace, and when it finally launched, a year after the announced start date, it found itself playing serious catch-up to IFC, a vigorous, edgier, and younger-skewing spinoff of Bravo that had debuted two years before and serviced a similar audience. At one point, the two channels had almost reached an agreement to enter into a joint venture, one channel instead of two. “But Redford wanted creative control, approvals over everything,” says IFC president Jonathan Sehring. “In this business, you have to move fast, and here’s a movie star, who’s also a director, who’s also going to be paying attention to the day-to-day issues that networks face?”
The Sundance Channel’s handicap was worsened by the fact that it was run exclusively by cable people who had zero knowledge of or connection to the indie world, save for Gilmore, who was onboard as a part-time consultant. Says one former executive, “They were clueless.” Nora Ryan, the president, came from Showtime, and Dalton D
elan, the VP of programming, came from the Travel Channel.
Redford indeed tried to micromanage the channel, involving himself in the most insignificant decisions. Gilmore always complained that Redford, an artist as a young man, obsessed over the graphic design of the film festival poster, the look of the program, and the Sundance promos that preceded the films, while showing little interest in the films themselves. Similarly, at the channel, he was more concerned with the design of the on-air elements, the menus, trailers, and so forth, than he was with the programming. On the one hand, it was a blessing that he left the programming to the programmers, because had he obsessed over the selection of films the way he did over the posters, there simply would have been neither a festival nor a channel. On the other hand, says one programmer, “A huge element of what I was doing, which I thought was enormously creative, was almost invisible, like it didn’t exist. It was demeaning.”
John Pierson had come up with the idea for a weekly show about the wild and woolly world of indies called Split Screen, intended as a feisty collage of interviews and clips, anchored by himself, and dedicated to the proposition that filmmakers will do any loony thing they can think of to get their pictures in the can. He was unable to get Sundance’s attention until he opened negotiations with IFC, and then, after being promised by Redford himself, he says, that the show would be “his vision” and would air on MTV as well as the Sundance Channel—Pierson wanted to preach the indie gospel to kids under twenty who had never seen a real indie film—he cast his lot with Sundance. In the pilot, one desperate director confessed he had staged a traffic accident to collect insurance money that he then put into his film, while another described how he launched his career with a phony résumé. The pilot also contained some footage from a work-in-progress Pierson was excited about called American Movie, Chris Smith’s pitiless documentary about the crude attempts of a filmmaker named Mark Borchardt to launch his first feature, a stupefyingly awful horror movie about a coven of witches. The footage showed Borchardt shoving an actor’s head through a kitchen cabinet door.
“It was obviously great material, and obviously funny,” Pierson says, but “I couldn’t get an answer [from Sundance], they were like a black hole.” And far from finding the car crash anecdote amusing, Redford seemed to be afraid that the channel would be seen as endorsing the strategy of bilking insurance companies to finance movies.
Although Redford is blessed in many ways, a robust sense of humor is not one of them. He was smart enough to know that the channel had to be irreverent and hip, but irreverence and hipness did not come easily to him. Whenever channel executives tried, he criticized their efforts as “sophomoric” or “juvenile.” He would always say, “Be funny, like Chekhov!” He used to cite the J. Peterman catalogue as an example of the kind of sophisticated writing he found clever. At their wits’ end, they found a copy on eBay, but it wasn’t much help.
After a three-month wait, word came back from Redford via Delan, referring to American Movie, “ ‘that this is not the kind of filmmaker we want to help promote,’ ” Pierson continues. “And then, of course, flash-forward three years, American Movie is finished, goes to Sundance, and it’s a major sensation, somehow becoming a poster child for the spirit of independent filmmaking against all odds, the same spirit that Sundance presents itself as the embodiment of. All Redford wanted to do is chum around with Chris Smith and trade his war stories about how hard it was for him to make Downhill Racer.”
Redford was less an artist-manqué than an advertising-executive-manqué. When he insisted, as he always did, that he wanted “creative” control over the entities under the Sundance umbrella, it seemed like he meant control over the look and image, that is, the packaging. Split Screen, Pierson’s proposed program, was just a bad commercial for Sundance.
Eventually, Pierson and Sundance parted ways. He concludes, “I spent six months in the Sundance family, tearing my hair out.” Delan, falling just short of a classic Sam Goldwynism, announced, “We pulled the trigger on stopping development.” Just before Thanksgiving 1996, Pierson jumped to IFC, where Split Screen had a four-year run. (Pierson wound up using the car crash as a virtual logo for his show.) If you called Pierson’s company around that time, you would have heard this message: “You have reached Grainy Pictures, the place where the words ‘Sun’ and ‘dance’ are never to be used in the same sentence.”
BOB WEINSTEIN’S DIVISION, Dimension, was beginning to rack up huge profits. Just as the 1996 Sundance festival was getting underway, Dimension released Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood in one thousand theaters. It went on to gross $20 odd million, and then a week later, on January 19, he opened From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Rodriguez from an old Tarantino script, which before the year was out would gross even more, $26 million. It seemed like everything Bob touched turned to gold.
For Harvey, however, the year couldn’t have started less auspiciously, with the humiliating loss of Shine, the ridiculous and very public dustup with Taplin, and then Safford’s big “fuck you.” But then Harvey stumbled onto a film that would more than heal the wound left by Shine, a specimen of Southern gothic called Sling Blade, written and directed by an original named Billy Bob Thornton, who also played the lead. Sling Blade was shot on an $890,000 budget in twenty-four days during the late spring of 1995. It tells the story of Karl Childers, a man for whom—before the age of political correctness—the term “village idiot” would have been appropriate. Karl has been consigned to a “nervous hospital” for decapitating his mom with a sharp instrument “some folks call a sling blade” when, as a child, he stumbled across her copulating on the floor of the kitchen with the town stud. But, appearances to the contrary, we quickly learn that Karl is a gentle soul, a bit of a holy fool, a misunderstood cornpone Frankenstein. Despite his homicidal bent, he’s a bleeding heart liberal down deep, improbably befriending the town homosexual (John Ritter). He also strikes up a friendship with a cute, towheaded little boy who happens to have an attractive mother (Natalie Canerday), in turn plagued with an inconvenient boyfriend, an abusive, drunken lout played by Dwight Yoakam. Every once in a while, Karl gives vent to lines like, “I reckon I oughtta eat some biscuits. Thankee, uh-hum,” the “uh-hum” being his mantra, punctuating his speech like the ticktock of a cuckoo clock. Yoakam’s bad-guy boyfriend is the only character with any wit whatsoever, and when he screams early on, “If y’all don’t shut up, I’m gonna go outta my mind,” it’s hard not to sympathize. When Karl finally takes a lawnmower blade to Yoakam’s carotid artery—which in the moral universe of this film is oddly sanctioned—after two hours or so of “uh-hums” from somewhere deep inside Thornton’s throat, we miss him.
Sling Blade was executive-produced by Larry Meistrich and his company, the Shooting Gallery. William Morris agent Cassian Elwes, who had been involved in launching the project and securing Morris client Robert Duvall’s participation in a small role as Karl’s father, was repping the picture. Bowles, who had liked the script and heard the buzz, pestered Meistrich to let him see it first. The producer finally agreed. When the competition screeched in protest, Meistrich and Elwes changed their minds, scheduling two screenings, one in New York and one in L.A., for all the buyers. Like the other Miramax staffers, Bowles was terrified of Harvey. He pleaded with Meistrich, “Larry, do you want me to get my head handed to me? You told me you’d do this for us early, I passed this on, now you’re saying you can’t? And not only that, Harvey’s gonnna be in Paris when your screening’s going on. This is insane, like, I’m getting screwed here.” Elwes and Meistrich set up the screenings in New York and L.A. for the same night. They agreed to run off a PAL tape for Harvey and courier it to him in Paris at 12:30 A.M. so he could see it at the same time as the buyers in New York.
On the big day, Meistrich turned to Elwes and said, “Okay, now it’s your turn, dude, sell the movie.”
“How much do you want for it?”
“I can’t really take i
t off the table unless it’s a really high number, because I asked everybody to come out. L.A. hasn’t started yet, I’d burn a lot of bridges. Let’s ask for the most amount of money that we can possibly think of.” The highest amount that had been paid up to that point was the $10 million Castle Rock had just shelled out for The Spitfire Grill.
With its we’re-all-human-under-the-skin message bleeding from every frame, its sentimental streak as wide as the Arkansas River, and its strict adherence to the ugly duckling formula laid down by My Left Foot, Muriel’s Wedding, and Shine, Sling Blade was tailor-made for Miramax, and Harvey loved it. He thought, Whatever it costs, I’ve got to get this movie. Oscars dancing before his eyes, he must have seen a chance to kick Fine Line’s butt. He called Bowles in New York from Paris, barked, “I’m a half an hour into this, it’s fantastic! An American classic. We gotta get ahold of this.” Then Harvey called Elwes in L.A., said, “Whaddya want for it?”
“Say a number.”
“You say a number.”
“Fox Searchlight, Paramount Classics, they’re all bidding for it, seven, eight million.” Harvey thought, He’s bluffing me like crazy. “What’ll it take right now?” “Ten million.” Harvey started to laugh, as in, “Fuck you, you must be—” Elwes interrupted: “All right, then we’re gonna wait until it screens in Los Angeles.” The man who lost Shine wanted to close the deal before the rest of the buyers saw the film. “I’m gonna call you back.” Harvey did call back about ten minutes later, saying, “I’m shakin’, I’m shakin’, but you got a fuckin’ deal.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 35
