“Cary, that’s just complete and utter horseshit. You’re the president of the fucking studio, we sent you sketches of the mask. That mask was found by a location scout in a woman’s attic, it is not a new revelation, and we all talked about how great it was, and how it looked like Munch’s [painting] The Scream. I don’t get it.”
“Bob just doesn’t like it.”
“We’re not shutting down!”
“Well, ahh, I’m gonna have to fly out there.”
“I don’t give a shit. Fly out here, but until you guys can tell us what we should be doing differently and so much better, we’re just gonna keep doing what we’re doing.” A couple of hours later, Granat called again, saying, “Bob wants to review—do you know where all the other masks are that you submitted for consideration?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Bob wants Wes to continue filming, shooting each scene with four different masks until he can decide which one he wants.”
“Go to hell!”
Craven was mortified, asked, “What am I supposed to do? How do I tell an actor, we’re gonna do this four times, with different masks.”
Says Rack, “They treated him very badly. There’s no such thing as autonomy, except if you’re Quentin. I’ve seen Bob bully Robert Rodriguez,” who he was convinced was the new Spielberg. Adds Konrad, “They were trying to get us to keep shooting around the problem. We were going, ‘You can’t do that. The whole rest of our shooting schedule is around Ghost-face. We are crippled without approval to shoot that. What do you want to do, shut us down?’ ”
“I thought the mask was goofy,” Bob recalls. “People would laugh at it. I thought Wes was crazy. They told me they bought it in a store. I said, ‘You bought it out of the store somewhere? You didn’t design a special mask?’ Because I forgot the Mike Myer’s Halloween mask was actually a William Shatner mask that John Carpenter had bought out of a store. Had I been a smarter guy I woulda just said, ‘Ah, Jesus, history is repeating itself.’ We were going mask after mask after mask, choosing this and that, and finally I just relented. These guys were right, I was wrong.”
In any event, Granat got on a plane for California. When he arrived, he convened a meeting in Craven’s hotel room at midnight that included Konrad, the line producer, and a couple of assistants. Announcing, “We have reached an impasse,” he told them how they could placate Bob. Konrad thought he was being disrespectful to Craven. Interrupting, she exploded with, “Wait a second. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? You hired a guy who created the genre, basically, and you’re telling him how to make the movie? The guy’s made thirty-some odd movies, this is the most insulting thing I’ve ever seen in my entire fucking life! And frankly, you’re not offering us any help. You’re just telling us how to keep beating around the bush until someone who’s invisible decides they like what they see. This is no way to make a movie. It’s gonna cost a fortune, it’s stupid, and we’re not gonna do it!”
“Right, we’re not going to do it!” Craven chimed in, as everyone in the room stared at them.
But Konrad realized, I can’t just flat out say, “No, come and get me,” because they will. I’m going to have to offer something in return. “Look, no one’s understanding what they’re seeing,” she went on. “So the only way I know to solve problems when no one understands what they’re seeing is that we cut together the first footage that we have, and if you like what you see, we never hear from you again. But if you don’t like what you see, then we’re going to all walk away happily, and you guys can make this movie with whomever and however you want to make it.”
“That’s a great idea,” replied Granat, and flew back to New York. They cut together what they had, sent it to Miramax, and continued shooting. Pacing back and forth in front of the production office wondering, Are we going to live or are we going to die? Konrad took a call from one of Bob’s assistants, who gave her an Elvis-has-entered-the-building play-by-play of the proceedings: “The footage is in the office . . . the footage is on its way down to the screening room . . . the footage has reached the projection booth . . . the footage is being threaded . . . Bob is on his way down . . . Harvey is now with Bob, they’re both seated . . . the lights have gone out . . . they’re starting—I’ll call you back.” Konrad was shaking. Craven poked his head in three or four times, asking, “Have you heard? Have you heard?” Then, ten minutes later, Bob called Konrad. He said, “That was fucking great, that was fucking great, Harvey levitated across the theater, it was unbelievable, Jesus Christ. You guys were right, I was wrong, I was so wrong it’s fuckin’ amazing, anything you guys want, anything!” She recalls, “That was it, we never heard from him again. I have to say it was one of the greatest calls I’ve ever received from a studio chairman in my life.”
(Bob remembers it differently, says he never saw an assemblage until later, when Wes wanted [another] $400,000.) “He showed me forty minutes. I said, ‘Yes, I like it, here’s your 400 grand, it’s great.” From then on, adds Rack, “Wes was God. He was absolutely golden. When they get their comfort level up, they’re fine.”
By the summer of 1996, Dimension was a veritable beehive—perhaps roach motel is more accurate—of activity. While they were in post on Scream, they began work on Mimic, a horror movie that featured outsized cockroaches skittering about the New York City subway tunnels. It was brought in by Michael Phillips, best known for being half of a powerful New Hollywood producing team with his then-wife, the late you’ll-never-eat-lunch-in-this-town-again Julia Phillips, who gave us The Sting, Taxi Driver, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Guillermo del Toro was attached to direct, with Phillips onboard as executive producer. Del Toro, a gifted young Mexican director, had made a stylish horror film called Cronos, distributed by October, which won the Grand Prize in the Critics’ Week, 1993, at Cannes and nine Mexican Academy Awards. Stuart Cornfeld was slotted in as a producer. Bob called Rack. He asked if she wanted to work on Mimic. Unbeknownst to him, however, she was close to del Toro. She thought she might be able to watch his back. And she was also friends with Cornfeld. She asked, “Don’t you already have a producer?” Bob said, “Well, I think there’s room for you on the picture.” Rack agreed. She had had plenty of experience working with abusive men. “I’ve worked with Paul Verhoeven and I’ve produced a Jim Cameron movie, but Mimic was the hardest professional experience I’ve ever had,” she says. “I felt like I was in a prisoner of war camp.”
Rack understood what she was getting into, or should have, and she has no excuses. As she puts it, “I knew everything, enough to have really failed that IQ test by coming onboard. Once they signed my deal, they asked me to fire Stuart.” (Cornfeld eventually stayed on in a titular role.) Less than an hour into the very first meeting with all the principals, Phillips discovered that it wasn’t the 1970s anymore when, after he had presented his notes on the script, by del Toro and his writing partner, 1970s veteran Matthew Robbins (*batteries not included), Bob told him to be quiet, that they were the stupidest, shallowest notes he had ever heard. Recalls Rack, who was present, “Bob said, ‘What are you talking about, that’s stupid,’ and then he said, ‘You guys have to leave. I want to be alone,’ and just shoved people out the door. When they were out of the room, he said, ‘He’s off the picture. I don’t care what it costs, I never want to see his face again.’ And he hardly had said anything.”
Scream had come in at about $16 million, From Dusk Till Dawn at about $17 million, so at $22.5 million, Mimic was a stretch for Dimension, especially for a genre picture with a young, relatively inexperienced director. Bob wanted Rack to bring the budget down to $15, $16 million. Based on her reading of the script, she concluded that in fact $22 million, which included $3 million for special effects, was about right. She recalls, “Bob screamed at me, hung up the phone on me, and that was in the honeymoon period when he kept saying he loved me. It was incredibly brutal. Normally, I would just say, ‘I’m quitting,’ but I could tell I was too deep into a co-d
ependent relationship. I’d pick it up again and say, ‘Listen there’s a way to fix this, take all these effects out. It doesn’t have to be Alien. It can be Jacob’s Ladder. Then I can get it down to 16 if you work with me.’ It was, ‘No! You’re not listening to us, and we’ve asked you to deliver a budget for 16 and you’re refusing. We’re firing you.’ There was no communication, I couldn’t get anyone on the phone, and if I did, it was just screaming and yelling. There was so much chaos I couldn’t organize meetings, I couldn’t have conversations because somebody was screaming. When you say something Bob doesn’t want to hear, he tells you, ‘Shut up, shut up, stop talking, stop talking.’ Harvey physically shoved me out of the room and into the elevator and made me go back to L.A. after I had made some innocuous statement that set him off. It was not like they were necessarily targeting me, they were just angry all the time, and screaming because it was not the way they wanted it. They’re bullies.”
Technically, Disney supervised the whole process. Rack’s office was on the Disney lot, she submitted budgets to a Disney executive. They co-signed checks. After she produced a preliminary budget, she gave a copy to the woman at Disney to whom she reported, and sent one over to Bob. He called her, screaming, “I can’t believe you sent this to them, how dumb are you?” He was so angry, she thought, If I was anywhere near him he would murder me, adding, “Bob and Harvey never dress up their act. They can’t control their language, they can’t control their bodies.” But it worked for them, in that it seemed to Rack that the Disney people were afraid of them.
The script sessions, which took place in the cramped conference room at the Tribeca offices, were like nothing she had ever experienced before. There were five or so writers who worked on the screenplay, which changed continually throughout the production. The participants, some of whom had been flown in from the West Coast and put up at expensive hotels, were picked up by a car service at, say, 9:00 A.M., and delivered to the Miramax offices at 9:30, where they’d cool their heels in the tiny reception area opposite the elevators for a couple of hours until Bob and Harvey waltzed in at 11:00 or 11:30. Fifteen minutes into the meeting, Bob turned to an assistant, and speaking rapidly in his Queens-inflected sing-song voice, puled, “A lox platter, okayyeee?” A few minutes later, the bagels and lox appeared from the deli around the corner. Harvey, who only attended occasionally, smoked cigarette after cigarette, filling the room with smoke and stubbing the butts out in the lox. If he was all out, he would pick up butts and relight them. The food sat around for hours because every time an assistant appeared to take it away, he or she got screamed at. When the platter was finally removed, Harvey began eyeing the leftovers on people’s plates. He would turn to someone, ask, “Are you gonna finish that? No?” and help himself. Eventually, they would order lunch, which, like the bagels and lox, sat on the table for hours while the assistants who tried to clear it were shooed away. By four in the afternoon, Harvey was looking for leftovers again, asking, “Do you wanna finish that sandwich?” before reaching over and grabbing it. Dinner arrived around seven, and the meeting that had started eight or so hours earlier might continue until midnight.
But in the course of the process, Rack came to appreciate the Weinsteins’ strengths. “They are incredibly good at what they do,” she says. The kinds of studio story and script meetings she was accustomed to maybe lasted two hours, they’d talk in generalizations, and then they were over. The first meeting she went to with Bob and Harvey went on for eleven hours. She looked around the room, and saw that they had brought in everyone, vice presidents, assistants, people who had been there for a decade and people straight out of film school who arrived the day before. It was like a focus group. She thought, Well, we’re just gonna breeze through, I’ve got my script notes, the director has his, the writer has his. But Bob started on page one, the first line, and then the second line, and he’d go, “Hey wait a minute. Would a female really be working down in the sewer? Could she really have a job as an anthropologist if she’s only second year in college?” “Real questions,” Rack recalls. “I had never seen that level of detail at a studio.” According to former development head Jack Lechner, “Bob will talk for much longer, and in more detail about the script than Harvey will. There’s a reason why Mimic went through that pileup of writers. That’s never happened at Miramax.” Adds Kevin Smith, “Bob is like, ‘I wanna know exactly what I’m gonna get.’ Harvey’s whole thing is, ‘Shoot it, and if something goes wrong, we’ll fix it, we’ll throw money at it.’ Harvey works the talent more than Bob. Bob’s movies are generally not talent-driven. He serves the concept, serves the genre.”
Rack continues, “As soon as they got to something they didn’t know, they’d scream, some minion would come in, and they’d yell, ‘Go look up the MTA code for whatever.’ Or we’d be at a story point and they’d scream, ‘Go get Alien and give me a catalogue of the scares and at what minute in the film they come,’ and then twenty minutes later they’d go, ‘You don’t have it? Why not? Get it right now! Get ten tapes of Alien, get ten people to take different parts, have ten more people type memos,’ and forty-five minutes later it would be in front of them, so that they could use it as a reference: Alien, every single scare, bump #1, bump #2, bump #3. It’s kind of impressive. Because for all the antics, for all the craziness, they have a lot of resources and they use them. And they just keep going, on to the next page, pounding on every detail. A lot of good things come out of pulverizing every line of the script, because those details always come back to bite you in the end anyway. It’s not really a power thing. They didn’t do that on Scream because the script was perfect. And even though they often don’t know what they want, they recognize it when they see it. If Bob likes something and Harvey likes something, and there’s that resonance between them, it’s generally a brilliant idea. And you feel it. Because as badly as they treat their employees, they respect their opinions. And when everybody in the room is saying, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea,’ they go, ‘Okay, great,’ and they turn the page. They’re tireless. Like, after the first two hours of the meeting, you think, Okay, we’ll probably be taking a break, go to a really nice restaurant—no. They both remain focused in that stifling, stinking hot conference room, where you’ve had three meals in the last ten hours, and they’re still pounding away at it. People are crying, people are screaming. They just shove and push and berate until they get what they want.”
At one meeting that went on and on and on, at 10:15 or so at night, Bob or Harvey said, “Oh shit, turn on the TV, channel whatever,” and he went, “Damn, they didn’t put it right after the end of the show before the commercial like we said. They did it after the commercial, before the credits.” It was a promo for Scream. They called the guy at home, woke him up and said, “You fucked us, why didn’t you put it where we asked you to put it.” Rack continues, “In other words, they’re so on top of it, that they know exactly when the promo is supposed to go on, what channel, where it’s supposed to fall on the show, and they know the guy’s home number. That’s the level of detail and control you want when you’re distributing a picture, and that’s why they get the venues they want, that’s why the posters are right, why the commercials are right. They’re really good at what they’re really good at. Actually, they’re good at everything.”
Robbins who, with del Toro, was the original writer and did several drafts, based on a chilling short story about oversized, mutant cockroaches who walked upright and were easily mistaken for men in dark overcoats, was not amused by the process. “From the first day, every rough edge, every original notion, was attacked,” he recalls. “The tenacity of Bob Weinstein is such that you really don’t have any choice in the matter. He is all will power and no originality. People in Hollywood are very susceptible to the exercise of will, because most of them are too timid to have an opinion. This is not Bob’s problem. What’s disarming about him is his self-deprecation. And his excitement. He would say, ‘God damn, this is going to be so great!’ It is
rare for an executive to expose himself like this. They’re usually too guarded. He created the illusion that you are collaborating with him, and yet at the end of the day, in draft after draft, the idiosyncratic and unusual elements just disappeared. To this day, Miramax has the caché of encouraging individual voices, and yet when you are in the room, it is that aspect that is most under suspicion. Any young filmmaker that goes into that factory is subject to the same grinding process. And if the filmmaker is susceptible to any private doubt, they will instantly locate that and play upon it, take charge of the project, and claim authorship afterwards: ‘We made that picture what it is today.’ Bob has enormous envy for creative people. He’s like somebody who’s bought the most beautiful piano in the world, a Bösendorfer, and can’t understand why he can’t play it as well as Vladimir Horowitz.”
The script and budget turmoil continued, even after production on Mimic started in Toronto, a favorite Miramax location because it was cheap and could be made to look like New York. Bob would call Rack at four in the morning to complain that the dailies weren’t scary. Del Toro was making an atmospheric, moody, cinematic movie, more like Seven than the Dimension staple, the Highlander series. At the beginning of the film, there’s a noirish overhead shot of a hospital ward where children, infected by a disease spread by the cockroaches, lie in beds draped with towering tents of netting, lit from within, pools of yellow glowing in the shadows of the darkened room. Bob went ballistic, because, he insisted, no hospital in New York looks like that.
“Bob had a vision for the movie that was a B-picture,” says Robbins, who had written dense characters appropriate to del Toro’s style. They were eviscerated. “The final film was much more of an action film, chases, shootings, and explosions. Bob kept asking, ‘Where’s my war?’ Given that it was a Dimension film, I’m sure it was totally appropriate.” Despite all the meticulous prep work, the hashing and rehashing of the script, he and del Toro were making different pictures. Rack looked at the clock, said, “I have to go to sleep, ’cause we’re filming tomorrow.” Bob continued as if she hadn’t said a word, talking about how you had to move the camera like this, you had to move the camera like that. “Make the camera go phoom! Go phoom!”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 38
