Both Payne and Taylor felt that Dern’s performance was Oscar material, but from their point of view, Miramax had decided to put its money on Sling Blade and dump Citizen Ruth. Says Taylor, “I was shocked because some other movies that I thought were completely marginal made three times as much. It would have been nice if we were out longer and won some awards. But I didn’t feel I’d been gypped or cheated. I keep my expectations low.” Citizen Ruth only made $1.5 million. “I didn’t get one single protest letter from Citizen Ruth, not one,” concludes Payne, with surprise. “I hope that we are entering an age where films throw grenades, where they question, don’t just support the status quo, because that’s what we used to have in the ’70s, throwing grenades. It was like, What did I do wrong?”
Sling Blade was getting good reviews, but struggling nevertheless. The poster and ad campaign featured a picture of Thornton as Karl. The reaction was, “Who’s that? Yuchhh!” Recalls Harvey, “You threw that spot in front of people with Billy going, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh,’ and they went, ‘I’m not going to see that movie.’ I knew that any shot of him in character was death. The grosses were abominable.”
Miramax thought Sling Blade might pick up a nomination or two, but their brightest hopes were pinned to The English Patient, which began life in 1994 as a Saul Zaentz production. Zaentz’s company, Fantasy Films, is located in the Bay Area. Like the Weinsteins, he had begun his career in the music business; like Harvey, he was a ferociously independent character with a penchant for lavishly mounted but frugally produced upscale projects based on prestigious literary properties that appealed to the Academy, enabling him to scoop up Oscar nominations and sometimes, as in the case of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, the Best Picture Oscar itself. Says Bernardo Bertolucci’s producer, Jeremy Thomas, “Saul, like all of us, is a buccaneer, one of those beacons for others which I hope I will be one day.”
Zaentz was a man of strong opinions who saw the world in black and white. As he once put it, “My friends are my friends, and my enemies are my enemies.” One of his friends was Anthony Minghella. A short, squarish man who wears his head shaved and his eyes shaded by dark glasses, Minghella was born of Italian parents, and grew up on the Isle of Wight. Despite his British accent, he has a whiff of indeterminate ethnicity about him—he could be from anywhere but England—and after September 11 he couldn’t walk ten feet through an airport without being stopped and searched. Minghella is a cultivated man, a gifted conversationalist with a passion for music and poetry, cosmopolitan in the best sense of the word. Although Zaentz is pugnacious and Minghella rather more ingratiating, the two men had much in common. Like Zaentz, Minghella was a charmer, an animated dinner companion who spun spellbinding stories. Each saw himself half reflected in the other. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord had just opened catastrophically badly, and he was so strong, and so decent about it, I was impressed,” says Minghella, recalling one of his first encounters with Zaentz. “In a moment of profound failure, he said, ‘This film was many years of my life, it was a project I absolutely believed in, but the movie doesn’t work.’ He was very stoic.”
Minghella had just had a bitter taste of failure himself, and couldn’t help noticing that Zaentz did not blame Hector Babenco, the director, the way he sensed Warner Brothers had blamed Minghella for Mr. Wonderful, his second film. He had unwittingly walked down a road taken by many indies before him, allowing himself to be beguiled and then toyed with by a studio intrigued with his first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply. It had ended badly, and undermined his self-confidence. “The studio lost faith in my ability to make a movie fairly early on in the process,” he recalls. “I was in free-fall anxiety every second of every day. When I finished that film, I went home and made a decision that I would not make another movie unless I could make it on my own terms. That is why I instinctively gravitated toward Saul, because I knew that his whole mantra was to support directors, and in a sense the more of an outlaw the project was, the more he was attracted to it. The one special gift that Saul has is the ability to inject self-belief. He had no difficulty extrapolating from the small film that I had done to a bigger one that I might be capable of doing. Whereas I actually had a lot of difficulty imagining that.”
Zaentz asked Minghella if he would write and direct his new project, The English Patient, an adaptation of a difficult and stubbornly uncinematic novel of the same title by Michael Ondaatje. Zaentz had always financed his films himself, with some combination of his own money—usually the profits from his previous film—and foreign sales. He would then sell North American rights to the finished film to a studio for the cost of production, and take a percentage of the back end as profit for himself. But after Fields of the Lord, as Minghella puts it, he “had determined that he wouldn’t risk his own money in the same way again,” which meant he was almost entirely at the mercy of outside financing. From the studio point of view, The English Patient was a bad bet. It was an expensive ($40 million odd) period piece set in and around World War II with Italian and African locations. The director was inexperienced, and the cast—Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche—was conspicuously devoid of the Tom Cruises and Julia Robertses who make executive hearts go pitterpat. Then there was the story, about a badly burned man confined to his bed who tells tales to a French nurse in a ruined Italian villa. “Not a lot of laughs,” says Minghella. “We met with polite indifference everywhere. I myself wouldn’t have bought it.”
Zaentz started the ball rolling with $5 million of his own money, and, making the rounds of the studios, finally wound up at Fox. After bitter quarrels over budget, script, and casting, Mechanic bought English language rights for $20 million. The English Patient went into pre-production in the summer of 1995. Locations were scouted in Italy, costumes designed in London, and so on. As was customary on his pictures, Zaentz persuaded the crew and cast, which now included Kristin Scott Thomas and Willem Dafoe, to take deferments. They went along, as they always did, because he made quality pictures and had a reputation for honesty. Everyone from Fiennes down, including Oscar-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch and costume designer Ann Roth, halved their fees. All told, $7 million in salaries was deferred.
What happened next is shrouded in a fog of selective memory and long-burning resentment. According to Minghella, Fox kept reducing its level of support. Zaentz was unable to make up the difference by selling the rest of the foreign rights. Eventually, Fox pulled the plug, and pre-production ceased. Mechanic denies this, saying that Zaentz failed to raise the remainder of the financing, preventing him from going forward. Minghella’s friend and later partner, Sydney Pollack, and producer Scott Rudin called Harvey Weinstein. The brothers had already passed because they didn’t want to meet Zaentz’s asking price for the U.S. rights. But now the situation had changed. This was a fire sale. Says Pollack, “I called everybody in town when Anthony told me The English Patient was falling apart. Nobody wanted it. Harvey stepped up, spent the money, and promoted the hell out of it.” Recalls Elwes, who was involved because Minghella was a William Morris client, and takes a more cynical view, “Miramax had been buzzing around, waiting till it all collapsed so they could come in and steal the whole thing, a classic move.” He persuaded Fox to come back in. Elwes continues, “Once Miramax knew that Fox was about to close the deal, they went crazy, sent Scott Greenstein to L.A. to sit in our offices until the deal was closed for the whole film.” Miramax bought world rights for about $28 million. Harvey insisted on $2.5 million worth of further deferments, which meant that Minghella, for example, deferred nearly four fifths of his salary.
After the acquisition of The English Patient, when Weinstein and Zaentz were romancing each other, Peter Jackson, whose Heavenly Creatures had been distributed by Miramax, told Harvey he wanted to make Lord of the Rings, which Zaentz had owned for thirty years and wouldn’t sell. According to Jackson, Harvey said, “ ‘That’s fantastic, I know Saul well, I’ll speak to him.’ He did do what everybody thought was impossible.”
In Harvey’s words, “Saul was in love with me. I convinced him to sell the rights for it. He got a huge piece of the deal as the executive producer who didn’t invest a dime. I put $10 million into the development of the film.”
The plan was two three–hour films at $75 million for both, the first Miramax-Dimension co-production. Based on the budgets of their previous work, Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, believed they could do it. With Miramax’s money, they completed most of the preproduction—scouting locations, building models, design work, and two screenplays over the course of eighteen months. But after the screenplays were finished, it became clear the budget would be more like $140 million, way over Miramax’s cap. “Disney didn’t believe in it, wouldn’t give me the money to make the film,” says Harvey. Continues Jackson, “Miramax was in a state of panic. Bob Weinstein was enraged because they’d spent all this money, and they were on the hook. He didn’t understand the project and didn’t have any confidence in it. Bob’s lack of confidence was eating away at Harvey, who was trying to remain supportive. There were veiled threats of lawsuits against us, and I felt that Bob would have happily unleashed the lawyers on us, and tried to tie us up in some sort of legal hell, but Harvey moderated that.” Harvey had his people reduce Jackson and Walsh’s two scripts to one, saying, “We’re too far down the line to pull out of this now, but we can’t spend more than $75 million.” Jackson goes on, “Fran and I were horrified at this. We argued that you’d be presenting a movie that anybody who had ever read Lord of the Rings would be severely disappointed in. They didn’t want to hear that. Harvey said he wanted me to drop out of the script writing. Because he felt I was the impediment. He was going to send Hossein Amini, who wrote Wings of the Dove, to New Zealand to work on the script with Fran. Of course, Fran rolled her eyes and looked at me, This is never gonna happen. Then he said, ‘Peter, if you don’t want to be involved in this, then John Madden is lined up to step in and take over.’ He had a plan, where Hossein Amini would write it, and John Madden would direct. We got home, decided this was not something that we wanted to do. We knew that decision could end our careers, but we thought, We could do TV films.” The pair’s agent, ICM’s Ken Kamins, told Harvey, “They’re pulling out, but there’s one thing that you have to do: Peter and Fran brought this project to you. They worked on it for eighteen months. You have to at least give them a chance to shop the film somewhere else.” Harvey did the right thing, but he attached such punitive conditions that the chances of their succeeding were near zero. “I gave Peter the worst turnaround in the history of turnarounds. ’Cause I didn’t want to lose it. I gave him three weeks. And harsh terms, including 5 percent of gross for me and Bob, and more importantly, I said, I want all my money today! You had to pay me the $10.1 million back that minute. Which is never done on a turnaround. Usually you wait until the movie’s made. I told Peter, ‘Is this the worst deal you can possibly have?’ He said, ‘This is beyond horrible.’ I said, ‘Nobody’s gonna buy it.’ And then Bob Shaye said, ‘Yes to three movies!’ ”
In the barrage of press that accompanied The English Patient’s Thanksgiving release, the Miramax publicists successfully spun the tangled web that was the production history of this film into a seductive fairy tale—part fact, part fiction—whereby the courageous indie rode in on a white horse to save the fair maiden from the clutches of the foxy old studio king who was ready to ravish her. Recalls Mechanic, “All of a sudden, I was reading some article about how Miramax stepped in when Fox tried to fuck this movie, Hollywoodize it,” by demanding Demi Moore for the part that went to Kristin Scott Thomas. He continues, “I promise on my life—I am not a liar—Demi Moore’s name was never uttered, Demi Moore was never in a movie while I was at Fox, Demi Moore was never offered a movie, much less The English Patient. We’re not stupid.” Mechanic believes the Moore story was “a round of lies . . . probably more Miramax than Saul, although Saul went along with it, and then, being pathological, started believing it. Complete, total lie!” (Says Minghella, “I know that Demi’s name was always mentioned in the context of alternative casting.”) Mechanic is still bitter: “Anthony would smile and say, ‘It’s not me.’ But to me he was culpable, he could have told the truth. And if you asked Saul right now, he’d say we screwed them.” But it would quickly become apparent that if Zaentz was screwed, which remains to be seen, it was not by Mechanic, but by Miramax.
Eight
Swimming with Sharks
1996–1997
• How Dimension screamed its way to box office gold. Robert De Niro ignored Harvey Weinstein’s script pages, while October sold out to Universal, and Steven Soderbergh hit bottom.
“ Scream’s opening weekend was a turn in the road that showed where Miramax/Dimension was going, showed why no one can talk about their vast contributions to cinema culture any longer. They were going to out–New Line New Line.”
—JOHN PIERSON
While Harvey was launching Sling Blade and The English Patient, Bob Weinstein was hard at work at Dimension, putting out movies like The Crow sequel, The City of Angels, at the end of August 1996, which would gross $8 million, and Hellraiser IV, which grossed $9 million. Meanwhile, an agent with whom Cary Woods had once done business gave him a spec script called Scary Movie by Kevin Williamson. Woods was not a fan of horror movies, but people in his office loved it, said, “Don’t worry, it’s not horror, it’s really funny. It makes fun of the genre.” He thought this script would be perfect for Dimension. He called Bob and said, “You gotta buy it.” Bob took it off the table for $500,000, and Woods gave the script to Drew Barrymore, who committed immediately, to the part eventually played by Neve Campbell. With Barrymore on board, it was a green-lit movie, and they sent the script to Wes Craven, the legendary writer-director of A Nightmare on Elm Street, who was then ice-cold, as was the genre he practically invented, the slasher film.
Barrymore agreed to play the lead, then changed her mind, decided she wanted to play Girl 1, who’s on-screen for two seconds before she’s killed. Bob didn’t like the title, Scary Movie. Craven, who was trying to crawl out from under the rock called “the horror guy,” passed on it twice. But he loved the irreverence of it, the note of parody it struck, and finally relented. Recalls Cathy Konrad, who was still working at Woods Entertainment, “Bob felt strongly that in marketing the movie you had to play to the strength of Wes Craven, his core audience, and you couldn’t sell humor in this kind of movie. We were just going, ‘No, you don’t understand,’ and he was like, ‘No, I do understand, you guys are just getting lost in yourselves trying to play it cute. I’m playing it smart.’ He was very right.”
“I didn’t want it to be a parody,” Bob recalls. He met with Williamson, the writer, and said, “Kevin, I want to make sure I bought the script that I think I bought. Is it a funny movie with scares? Or is it a scary movie with humor?”
“It’s a scary movie with humor.”
“Good, that is the way I saw it. But you got the wrong title.” Bob continues, “My brother came up with the new title, from a Michael Jackson song out at the time.” Scary Movie became Scream.
But Bob, who had not yet hit his stride as a producer, didn’t trust Woods, Konrad, or Craven, and hired B. J. Rack to watch his back. Smart and tough, Rack had been around the block and then some, having produced, among other pictures, Terminator 2. She had a background in editing and special effects. Her skills were useful to the Weinsteins, they liked her, and since the early 1990s they had used her now and again as a hired gun. Rack similarly liked them, although she found Bob hard to deal with. “He has peaks and valleys that are really extreme,” she says. “One second, he’ll say to you, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’ and then, like that, without breaking eye contact, ‘I hate it,’ like a switch. His moods churn—they go in one direction and then in another direction. He can be charming and focused and great for hours, and then he can be negative and nasty. I was brought in as a hatchet man on Scream, to shove that budget down, go tell them to sh
oot it for less money.”
Bob hated the rushes, thought they were flat, more pedestrian than frightening. During the second week, while Craven was shooting Barrymore, he started calling Konrad, who was supervising the production. Bob said, “I’m scared, I don’t know about this.” He started picking at details. Why was Barrymore wearing a sweater, shouldn’t it be racier? Her wig looks terrible. Cary Granat, who headed Dimension, was a friend of Konrad’s, owed her his job. He warned her, “Bob is not happy. This isn’t going to get better, it’s going to get worse.” She replied, “What do you want me to do?” There was no answer. One day, Craven was shooting a scene with Liev Schreiber, who was doing a cameo as Cotton Weary, and Bob called the set, said, “Let me talk to Wes.” Konrad interrupted Craven in the middle of a shot and said, “Bob wants to talk to you.” She recalls, “Bob told him that he thought Wes could do better. Wes said to me, ‘What kind of studio head calls a filmmaker in the middle of shooting and kicks him in the balls and expects him to work the rest of the day and do good work?’ ” Twenty minutes later, Granat phoned Konrad, saying, “Bob just saw the stuff with the mask, and he thinks it’s a joke. And he says he never signed off on the mask.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 37
