“Done!” By the time Bowles got back to the Miramax office, Scott Greenstein and Elwes at the Sunset 5 theater, where the L.A. screening had just started, were nearly done with the negotiations, tying up loose ends. Elwes took Meistrich out of the screening over to the Morris office to sign the contract, and then he returned to the theater as if nothing had happened.
Thornton, too antsy to sit still, was hanging out at the Wolfgang Puck Cafe in the Sunset 5 mall. He was so anxious and depressed about the prospects of his film that he was entertaining the notion of moving back to Arkansas. Elwes and Meistrich took him downstairs to the parking garage beneath Virgin Records. Meistrich said, “Cassian’s got something to tell you, Billy Bob.”
“What’s that?”
“We sold the movie.”
“Really? How much for?” He figured, like a million or two million, if he were lucky.
“Ten million.” Thornton, who grew up dirt poor and wasn’t a whole lot better off now, didn’t believe them. Then he went white and burst into tears. The screening had just ended, with all the buyers really revved up, when word came back that Miramax had already bought the movie. The buyers flew into a rage. It was The Piano all over again. After all the bullshit about arranging screenings on the West Coast and East Coast, Elwes had tricked them, wasted their time. He had brought off a coup, but there was a cost. From that point forth he suffered a reputation for being in Harvey’s pocket, and he would pay for it the following year. Harvey himelf was on the speakerphone at 4:00 A.M. talking about one distributor who was particularly incensed. Harvey chuckled, went, “Heh, heh, heh, you gotta be really quick to keep up with the fat man!”
Up to that point only a handful of agents bothered putting together packages and repping indie films, but the Sling Blade deal, coming as it did on the heels of the Spitfire Grill acquisition, created a frenzy. “The impact didn’t really hit me until I was lying in bed that night,” recalls Elwes. “I just kept thinking to myself, $10 million, an outrageous number, I’ll never repeat this. But it woke me up to the fact that I had to be involved in the selling of these rights, because if we can get a percentage, then we can make a fortune from this. Because up until then, the agencies thought, Well, indies—the film’s gonna be made for $3 million or less, the client gets paid $250,000, we make $25,000, what’s the point? This showed there’s a real business in this thing. And not only that, we could make stars out of our indie clients. This guy was a B TV actor and a writer, and now he’s a multimillionaire. Sling Blade changed the way people perceived the acquisitions business. It also got the studios to pay attention to these films, as opposed to just reading the scripts and saying, ‘Yeah, maybe, no,’ whatever.”
As soon as the deal was signed, however, the trouble started. Some of the press coverage was critical of Harvey for overpaying. As Harvey admits now, “It was stupid, nobody was going to go to $10 million anyhow. I paid way too much.” Stung by the bad publicity, and convinced that the film was too long, Harvey was determined at the very least to cut it. “Billy made it clear to me as a negotiating point that final cut was very important to him, and Harvey gave it to him,” Meistrich recalls. “The next day Harvey decided he wanted to take that back. It was, ‘You gotta cut twenty minutes.’ That didn’t go down well. Miramax is a company that plays leverage. It’s like, ‘Well, I want you to do this, and I’m gonna give you that, but if you don’t, I’m gonna do this to you.” Thornton didn’t want to cut his film, so the first thing Miramax did, according to Meistrich, was torture them over the delivery of the picture, stretching it out as long as it could, perhaps because once it accepted delivery, it had to pay up. “The Shooting Gallery had a production services business,” Meistrich continues. “We were hired by other people to deliver, we knew what delivery was, we weren’t freshmen. They just didn’t want to pay. They’d come back with grammatical problems in the contracts, ‘You gotta make this a semicolon, not a colon,’ crazy shit like that. [Then it was,] ‘We want three more movies from Billy.’ It was a constant negotiation, and then they still insisted on cutting it. Getting Billy to agree to that made for a brutal summer. I was in the middle between two lunatics.”
Weinstein recalls, “We had one of those audience research screenings that was just like you wanted to cut your own wrists, much less the movie.” But in Thornton he’d met his match. The director was an angry, unhappy, depressed man, just like Harvey. Continues the Miramax co-chairman, “It was a tempestuous relationship. I was Angelina Jolie before Angelina Jolie. Fights like fucking no tomorrow.” Weinstein, who often talks about himself in the third person, says, “If Harvey was the fastest gun in the West, he had to shoot me three times. I said, ‘Can’t you just shoot me once?’ ” Adds Bowles, “Billy Bob is a very ornery, stick-to-your-guns guy. If you tell him to do something, he’s gonna go, ‘Fuck you.’ ” Harvey would call Thornton in the middle of the night, threaten to lock the film away in a vault where no one would ever see it. He screamed, “I’m a big, fat, hairy Jew worth $180 million”—or some such sum—“and I can do whatever I want.” Says Elwes, “Weinstein said, ‘I’m gonna sell the picture to HBO. You’re not gonna get a Best Picture.’ Billy Bob replied, ‘Ah don’t give a sheet. Ah made the movie fo’ me, not fo’ anyone else, ah’ve seen it and ah’ve enjoyed it, so fuck yuh. Yuh can fuckin’ dump it onto video and yuh can bury it fo’ever, ah don’t care.’ ” Thornton used to call Harvey and say things like, “Ah’m going to stick a fork in yo’ neck, motherfucka. Yuh not so tough, ah’m Billy Bob, ah’m gonna kick yuh ass, take yuh out to the wagon and whup your butt.”
“You’re a redneck, an ignorant piece of shit.”
“Ah’m gonna cut off a horse’s head and put it in yuh bed.”
“This is because I’m Jewish, right? Tell the truth, Billy.”
“It is. Yuh one a’them Heebrews. Yuh from that tribe. An’ down heah wheah ah come from, we don’ like Heebrews.” To hear Harvey tell it, at this point they both started laughing. These antagonistic relationships, like the one he developed with Daniel Day-Lewis, resolve themselves with hugs and kisses. But, according to Meistrich, this was not the case. “The fights were not happy hugs and kisses at the end of it,” he says. “It was a series of very long, ugly battles. There were threats and threats and threats on both sides. It even got physical. They got into a stupid shoving match in a hotel, and me and the manager had to break it up.”
Eventually, Harvey convinced Thornton to cut several minutes. “It was a war of attrition, a never-ending battle,” Meistrich continues. “Billy was starting to move on to other things.” In truth the film, which proceeded with all the speed of blood moving through a cholesterol-choked artery, did need twenty minutes out, at the very least. But Harvey never managed to get the rest of the cuts he wanted, and Thornton never did stick a fork in his neck. Explains Elwes, “They needed Billy to promote the movie. Plus they wanted to have a relationship with him, so they could manipulate him for the rest of time.” Someone else who was close to the situation puts it this way: the Weinsteins “pay people to like them. They paid Billy to like them. It was, ‘I’m going to fuck you, but I’ll pay all your bills for three years.’ ”
Sling Blade wasn’t the only picture sucked up by Miramax, whose acquisitions team was working overtime. Trainspotting had been a big hit in England, and Harvey acquired the North American rights. Fox bought the rights to filmmaker Danny Boyle’s next picture, A Life Less Ordinary. Harvey had no claim on Boyle, but he wanted a piece of the new film. Bill Mechanic, still head of the studio, got a call from Jeff Berg at ICM, who represented Boyle. According to him, Berg said, “Harvey wants it, would you relinquish the rights?”
“I don’t care what Harvey wants,” Mechanic replied. “He didn’t buy it, I did.” Mechanic thought, This is an idiotic request, stupid. Berg asked, “Just as a favor, just talk to him. So I’m doing my job.”
“Jeff, it’s not gonna end well, but okay. He can call me.”
Harvey did.
�
��We deserve half this movie. Split the rights.”
“I don’t even have all the rights. I only have America and a couple of territories.”
“Well, split whatever you have. We made Danny Boyle, we deserve them.”
“With all due respect, Harvey, you had nothing to do with this guy.” (PolyGram had financed Trainspotting, and Miramax had not yet opened it in the U.S.)
“Well, we won’t release the movie!” said Harvey, thinking this would damage A Life Less Ordinary.
“Well fine, go fuck yourself. I don’t care. That’s your problem, not my problem. I got a love story, you got a drug movie, and what you do has nothing to do with what I do, and if you choose to throw away your money, go ahead.”
“Then we won’t do any Oscar campaigns!”
“Great, I don’t care.”
“I gotta have half the movie, I gotta have half the movie.”
Mechanic remembered that when he was still at Disney and Miramax had released The Piano, Harvey had taken an option on Jane Campion’s next film. He said, “Okay, you still have the rights to Jane Campion’s next movie? I’ll give you half of A Life Less Ordinary, whatever that means, and I want the international rights to Campion’s next movie.”
“You’ll make that deal?”
“Yeah, I’ll make that deal.”
“Lemme call you back.”
Says Mechanic, “Of course I never heard from him again. He does this all the time. Over the years, Miramax got more and more pushy. Bad behavior doesn’t get punished in this business, and theirs certainly doesn’t. People just ignore it and say, ‘They’re good at what they do,’ which they are.”
On July 19, Miramax released Trainspotting, which grossed a very healthy $16.5 million.
In late summer, the 1996 edition of the New York Film Festival invited Sling Blade. As soon as the Miramax marketing team discovered Thornton’s backstory, they knew they’d landed a live one. Thornton was—or could be made to seem like—a barefoot auteur, the “hillbilly Orson Welles,” as his pal Duvall called him, more riveting by far than the film, his schmaltzy white trash anthem. With his shambling gait, aw-shucks drawl, veritable road map of tattoos (memorializing his ex-wives—“I can blame almost every one on Bushmills,” he said), kit bag of behavioral tics, and gift for sound bites, Thornton was ready-made for the late-night talk circuit. The beauty of it was that most of the color was true.
Thornton was forty-one when Sling Blade hit. He indeed sprang from the hills and hollers of Arkansas, a small town called Malvern, and even there he was an oddball. “We were raised in the woods,” he said. “We didn’t really fit in. We’re kind of like the Addams Family out there.” Growing up, he wasn’t too different from Karl, whom he plays in Sling Blade, geeky and strange, with glasses thick as ice cubes and a malocclusion straight out of Francis the Talking Mule. His boyhood pal and writing partner Tom Epperson used to call him “Silly Slob.”
In 1981, Thornton and Epperson lit out for Hollywood. They didn’t have friends in the industry, a cousin at Warner’s or an uncle at an agency, so they nearly starved to death, and the black cloud that always seemed to hover over Thornton’s head didn’t make things any easier. His older brother died of a coronary, and he himself developed a hard-to-diagnose heart ailment. Then his house burned down. “I don’t know why I’m so unhappy all the time,” he wondered, rhetorically. “The human struggle or some shit. . . . I’m a chronic worrier, and a lot of my decisions were based on my level of worry. . . . Sometimes I start screaming, angry shit. Curses. I’ll be in a theater, watching a movie, and then I’ll be on my feet, shouting. Got a touch of Tourette’s on top of it all, I guess.” At one point, he was so broke that he lived on potatoes for weeks at a time.
Thornton paid his dues playing bit parts in schlock like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown or cable movies like The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains. It wasn’t fun. One day he went into his trailer and looked in the mirror. “I was full of self-loathing,” he recalled, “and I was making faces at myself and saying, ‘What are you doing out here? Why did you take this stupid job? You’re just a failure—you’re never gonna get anywhere.’ I always felt like an outcast, and I always felt a lot uglier than I am.” It was out of this toxic brew that Karl emerged like a homunculus.
Slowly, Thornton and Epperson rose through the sludge. They wrote One False Move, which also got made, in 1990, with Thornton playing a dope dealer. He recalled, “We worked our hearts out making One False Move, did everything for free, tried to make it good. Then it comes out, and a week or so later these agents are calling, saying, ‘Great news! TriStar wants to remake One False Move with stars!’ I had no option but to scream back, ‘You fucking idiot! Do you have any clue what an insult that is?’ The guy said he couldn’t figure out why I was so upset. . . . I’m no Hollywood rebel, but the place sucks.”
Sling Blade was joined in the New York Film Festival by Mike Leigh’s new film, Secrets & Lies, distributed by October, which also had acquired Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. Bingham Ray had sat through a five-and-one-half-hour opus by the eccentric Danish director, called The Kingdom, at the Berlin Film Festival in February of 1995, when all the other buyers had stumbled out during the break, bleary-eyed and bored. With no idea how he was going to sell it, he bought the film for $150,000, thus adding von Trier and his Zentropa Films to October’s growing stable of filmmakers, which by that time included Leigh, David Lynch, and Abel Ferrara, who was enjoying a brief time in the sun.
On the strength of The Kingdom, Zentropa sent Ray the script for Breaking the Waves. It was a bizarre story of an innocent girl whose life measures the short distance from rapturous love to sexual degradation. Ray knew that von Trier idolized Carl Dreyer, and saw this as his Passion of Joan of Arc. “Which intrigued the hell out of me,” he says. “And it also fit the profile of the company. There was nothing else gonna be like this. One of a kind.” Neither Amir Malin nor John Schmidt got it, but Ray insisted, “We’re doing this fuckin’ movie,” and at Cannes that year he plunked down $800,000 of October’s hard-won money for North American rights. One plus was the cast: Gerard Depardieu was slated to play Jan, the male lead, and “HBC” (Helena Bonham Carter), as Mike Leigh called her, was going to be Bess, the emotional center of the film. But about a week after Cannes, Zentropa called with bad news: HBC had dropped out, and if October wanted to do the same, they would certainly understand. Ray asked von Trier, “Who are you gonna replace her with?”
“I go for unknown.”
“Which unknown?”
“English actress. I like her audition tape, Emily Watson. Emily Watson is going to be Bess.” He couldn’t supply a glossy of Watson, didn’t have a bio, nothing, which didn’t much bother Ray. “Having seen Linda Fiorentino’s career resurrected by The Last Seduction, I always found it much more exciting to work with filmmakers and actors who no one’s ever seen before or haven’t seen for a long time,” he explains. “They’re brand spanking new, and for me that’s the best.” He went ahead.
Nine months later, Ray flew from the 1996 Berlin Film Festival to Copenhagen to see Breaking the Waves, which was finished. “That movie blew me away,” he recalls. “There’s no one there with you, and you just know you’ve got something really special. What it was, how it would do, if we’re gonna lose money or make money, all I knew was it was gonna be a terrific ride.”
October submitted Breaking the Waves to Cannes, along with Secrets & Lies. Both were accepted, and both were acclaimed by critics and jury members alike. Says Ray, “Going into Cannes, we were one kind of outfit, and coming out we were totally different.”
In September 1996, Secrets & Lies opened the New York Film Festival and got enthusiastic reviews. Leigh’s film was released on September 27. It did strong business through the rest of the year. Breaking the Waves opened weakly in November at a big Loew’s theater, got kicked out after two weeks, and moved to Talbot’s Lincoln Plaza, where it played for months.
Miramax released Sling B
lade and Citizen Ruth in December, for Oscar consideration. Although the brothers were still acquiring potentially controversial films like Trainspotting and Citizen Ruth, it was with considerably less enthusiasm, and often, like Citizen Ruth, they failed to release them in a timely fashion, if at all. Miramax held Citizen Ruth for almost a year, until after the 1996 presidential elections—because, suspected Jim Taylor, Payne’s screenwriting partner, Harvey felt the subject was so controversial it would somehow embarrass Bill Clinton, for whom Harvey had conceived a fiery passion. Weinstein, a lifelong Democrat, had started to see himself as a player on the national political stage. He had joined Bill and Hillary’s circle as a fund-raiser after the New Hampshire primary, and had begun to see them socially during summers on the Vineyard.
As the release date approached, the Miramax marketing department tried to sell the film as a wacky comedy. The ad, for reasons best known to the company, featured Dern as the Statue of Liberty, wearing a big smile and holding aloft a can of glue instead of a torch. Says Payne, “They send you stuff to look at and then they do what they want. It’s, ‘We did this film, we did that film, don’t tell us what to do.’ The director is the last person to know. I mean, people ask, ‘What is the budget of your movie?’ I still don’t really know, they never tell you. All their machinations are cloaked. Okay, maybe they know something I don’t, but I do know that the bait and switch rarely works, and I know that by putting a happy face on darker, more realistic films—I feel that realistic merely means dark—films which don’t buy into these prettified myths of how people live, you turn off your true market. In the case of my films, egotistically speaking, the genre they’re in is Alexander Payne films, and I love the idea that my films are difficult to categorize. It’s unfortunate that they also become difficult to sell.”
Adds Konrad, “I do think Harvey made promises about promoting the movie and promoting Laura Dern that he didn’t ultimately make good on, but at the same time, how can you expect someone to keep putting money into something when it’s not getting any traction. The marketing is the most crucial moment in the film’s life. Films live or die by somebody’s ability to create a world for them to come out into. What Harvey was famous for was taking movies that no one knew how to sell and making them gold. He had an amazing ability to take the darkest films and somehow make it seem like if you missed them, you missed out on the event of the century. So you wanted to believe that he was gonna spin that magic with your movie, and when he seemed to be doing a better job for other people, it was hard to understand. You’d ride the ‘I know what I’m doing’ wave for a while, but something’s gnawing at you, something’s making you feel like he ain’t really delivering, but it’s not like I had a solution, or Alexander had a solution.”
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