“What do you mean exactly, ‘phoom,’ show me the shot, what do you expect me to do? Tell him exactly how to shoot it?”
Bob started coming to Toronto himself. Rack had begged him not to have a tantrum in front of all the actors. He sat twenty feet back from the camera delivering his instructions for del Toro to her in a loud voice, whereupon she ran over to the director and told him what he was saying. “He really wanted to direct every shot,” she says. A particular room would be dressed in a certain way. Bob questioned it, asked, “Why doesn’t it look like that?”
“Well, because we were thinking of this.”
“Well, I think it would be better like that.”
Says Rack, “It wasn’t like one idea was better than another, it was just, he always wanted his idea. I had just finished producing a movie that Sally Field had directed. I knew I could tell her, ‘We really can’t go two more hours into overtime because we don’t have the money,’ but I couldn’t tell her, ‘Can you do the dance number faster.’ Bob would say, ‘Do the dance number faster.’ There’s no boundaries for their input.”
During one particularly acrimonious meeting in Bob’s penthouse suite, Rack got angry because he wasn’t listening to her, started raising her voice, and Bob, she recalls, “picked up a Coke bottle from the table, and pulled his arm back really fast, and made like to throw it at me, and caught it just before he let it go out of his hand. He looked at it and said, ‘You make me so mad I almost threw a Coke bottle at your head. What the fuck is that? How could you make me so mad?’ Bob used to come up and kind of punch me, and say [to Harvey], ‘She makes me so mad I want to kill her, just like you and me fight.’ And then to me, ‘I’ve never gotten as angry as I get with you.’ Like he was trying to compliment me. He kept saying, ‘You’re like part of the family.’ ” She thought, I have my own dysfunctional family, but they don’t throw Coke bottles at my head.
Bob got into the editing room and looked at the rough assemblage before del Toro was able to work on it and decided it wouldn’t do. He continued to call Rack from New York every night, waking her up, screaming at her until she turned her phone off, whereupon he would send one of his executives staying at the same hotel to pound on her door, waking up everyone on her floor. He flew up to Toronto yet again, this time to fire del Toro. He summoned the director to a meeting in his hotel room. Bob told him, “You’re just not cuttin’ it, and we have to let you go, I’m sorry I trusted you, I thought you were the right guy, that was my mistake, you’re not the right guy.”
Del Toro was crushed, said, “Maybe we’re making two different movies.”
Bob replied, “No, you’re not making a good movie. That’s it, you’re going home tonight, we’re gonna pick up the pieces tomorrow with somebody else.”
But Bob was worried that this wouldn’t sit well with the actors, who often rally to the side of their directors in these situations. Mainly, he was worried about Mira Sorvino. After her Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite, which Miramax had released the previous year, she had become the brothers’ flavor of the week, a regular in films like Beautiful Girls and Smoke. She was also going out with Quentin Tarantino, who was an occasional visitor to the set, so Bob had to be careful. In spite of having just given del Toro the boot, Bob wanted him to head off any potential resistance. “Mira’s downstairs in the lobby, and you’re gonna tell her that you couldn’t cut it and that you’re withdrawing from the movie,” he instructed his now exdirector.
Rack said, in a loud voice, “That’s not fair, I’m not going to let him go down there, he’s in a state of shock over this, you can’t put him up to this, he needs to get his agent.” In effect, she was telling Bob he had to Mirandize del Toro. Bob yelled at Rack to shut up, instructed Dimension executive Granat to remove her from the room. She refused to budge, said, “I’m not leaving.”
“You are leaving.”
It went on like that for a while, then Bob changed tack, said, “Okay, we’ll all go down together,” because he didn’t want her to go alone and contaminate Sorvino. Downstairs, del Toro walked up to the actress like a zombie and intoned, “I can’t cut it, I’ve got to leave the movie. I just can’t do it.”
She saw through it immediately. According to Rack, without missing a beat, Sorvino, who had a lot to lose by antagonizing the Weinsteins, threw a spectacular tantrum, screamed at Bob, “You motherfucker, you’re not doing this to him, you’re not doing this to me, this is not the way you make movies, I’m not coming to the set tomorrow without Guillermo directing the movie. I won’t work for anybody else. I’ll split.”
“You have to, it’s in your contract,” replied Bob.
“Well, then we’re just gonna get into a big old fight! And you might win, but the movie ain’t gonna get made.”
Sorvino implied that she would get Tarantino to intervene if Bob sacked del Toro. Rack called him. “He was really supportive,” she recalls. “He helped a lot, really terrific.” Tarantino phoned Harvey.
“It was better to talk to Harvey about it, so I wouldn’t have to confront Bob, and make him feel he was getting it from all sides,” Tarantino recalls. “I said, ‘Harvey, you did this [picture] for Guillermo, you liked his stuff, what’s he doing that’s so bad?’ ” But regardless, Bob hired another director, Ole Bornedal, a Danish filmmaker who made Nightwatch for Dimension, and then Robert Rodriquez to help him. The next day, Sorvino’s agents flew in, and she carried the day, insisting, “This is not going to happen until we see an assemblage of the film, and we all sit down and make this decision together.” Del Toro spent a weekend in the cutting room, putting his own cut together, flew to New York with his reel, and showed it to Bob and Harvey. Harvey turned to Bob and said, “I like the look. I wish our other pictures looked that good.” Bob replied, “Yeah, okay.” But Bob reportedly tried to make him work with Bornedal. Del Toro refused, and Bob gave in.
Says Tarantino, “Mira saved his job. She wanted to work with an auteur, put herself in the hands of a really good director. She wouldn’t have done this movie in the first place if it hadn’t been for Cronos. So if he were to get fired, there was no point. [For Bob], it was more of a reflex, this is something we can do, and she took that option away. She was able to do that because they weren’t that against Guillermo. Because Bob’s a tough guy, and if Bob really wanted to get rid of Guillermo, he would have gotten rid of him. He would have kicked Mira’s ass for the fun of it, and reshot everything just to prove the fuckin’ point.” (Del Toro could not be reached for comment.)
Konrad had segued directly from Scream into Cop Land, based on a script by James Mangold that she had convinced Bob to buy in 1994 while she was producing Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. Like Denver, Cop Land benefited from the guys-with-guns frenzy created by Pulp Fiction, but it lacked Pulp’s veneer of hipness. Mangold stood firmly in the tradition of American social realism, next door to James Gray, whose Little Odessa, a powerful portrait of a Brighton Beach (Brooklyn) Russian-Jewish family in decline that cuts so close to the bone it’s almost painful to watch, had been released in 1994 by Fine Line. Cop Land was the small-town version of Sidney Lumet’s big-city morality tales set in the sordid world of crooked cops—Serpico or Prince of the City meets Fargo.
Mangold, the son of Robert Mangold, a well-known painter, had grown up Jewish in Washingtonville, a conservative small town in the Catskills that seemed to be home to every angry white-flight cop who didn’t live in Staten Island. Precocious and creative, he went to Cal Arts at seventeen and landed at Disney with a deal at the tender age of twenty-one. Eisner signed him, but Katzenberg let him go after he refused to fire his assistant when he was asked to. Cop Land was his way of going home again, as Little Odessa was for Gray.
“Pulp Fiction had just happened, and Miramax had this tremendous prestige,” Mangold recalls. “I was excited that I wouldn’t be working at a studio. Everyone wanted to be in the next Pulp, so I was able to meet almost anybody.” Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, John Travolta, all e
xpressed interest. But “Harvey was out to do what he had done with Pulp,” Mangold continues. “He didn’t want to pay full freight for any of these actors.” His edge lay in making films at a price, making it possible for Miramax to produce pictures like an indie, but reap profits like a studio, the former the cause of the latter, which was the beauty of it all. Indeed, he had been very creative adapting the financial strategies he had learned in the indie trenches to more expensive movies, laying off the risk in co-productions and/or foreign presales. (The downside, of course, was that he had to sacrifice a chunk of his profit.)
But no matter how much heat was rippling off the company, actors were not so willing to cut their rates. Mangold and Konrad went down to Florida to meet Travolta at the Church of Scientology. Travolta said, “Look, I love the script, Harvey’s talked to me about it, but he wants me to do it for no money because he thinks I owe him for Pulp Fiction. But I’d like to believe that I had a little something to do with its success, and I’ve already set aside the things I’m willing to do as a labor of love, and this is not one of them. I’ve already told Harvey he has to pay me, and if he doesn’t, it’s just too bad.” Harvey wouldn’t pay him, and Travolta didn’t do the movie.
But there were plenty of other falling stars who needed the Travolta makeover and who would slash their price. Sylvester Stallone came on-board to play the lead, a none-too-bright, deaf-in-one-ear small-town officer who has to decide whether to throw in with the bad cops or do the right thing. Stallone was loaded down with superstar baggage, but Mangold gambled on his doing for Cop Land what Travolta had done for Pulp. When Stallone signed on, what had been a small film became a much bigger film, especially when Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Michael Rapaport joined the cast as well. “I had wanted to make a smaller movie, but I had the feeling that independent film was like a floor that was giving way,” explains Mangold. “Unless I had a vaultful of cash, which some filmmakers do, I didn’t know how I could have remained outside the system. It had taken so long to get my first film, Heavy, I knew that was a hard road, and the kind of cynicism of the independent game had become depressing, so it wasn’t something to cry over that I was suddenly cutting my teeth with big actors, and larger budgets. Here was a real opportunity to change the movies that were being fed to the general public, as opposed to changing the movies that were being fed to a kind of rarefied independent audience.” But it wasn’t long before Mangold decided he might have been better off working for a studio.
First, according to the director, Harvey called him up and told him that he had to hire an actor named Malik Yoba, who’d been featured in a Fox Network series, New York Undercover, to play a supporting role to De Niro’s character. But Yoba wouldn’t read for the part, and Mangold thought his show was awful. Harvey insisted, said, “He’s the next Wesley Snipes, he’s a friend of De Niro’s, Bob’s worked with him before, Bob loves him.”
Mangold called De Niro, asked, “Have you ever heard of this guy Malik Yoba?”
“Malik what?”
“Malik Yoba, you worked with him before.”
“I’ve worked with a lot of kids. Who?”
“He’s the next Wesley Snipes, he’s on New York Undercover. You don’t know him?”
“I have no fuckin’ idea who you’re talking about. Why’re you asking?”
“ ’Cause Harvey wants him to play the guy who works with you, and he won’t read, and—”
“Well, fuck ’im!”
When Harvey found out that Mangold had involved De Niro, he was furious: “You fucking asshole, you fucking prick, I’m trying to help you.” Explains the filmmaker, “Because the thing that threatens him, the thing that pressed the button, is that he loves his relationship with talent. To them, Miramax is benevolent. It’s a place that makes your dreams come true. Our responsibility, as directors or producers, is to keep the heavy combat secret from the talent. So when I involved one of the angels, and made him aware of what goes on behind the scenes, I broke the code, I tarnished Harvey’s image, I committed a huge betrayal, especially with Bob De Niro, someone he truly adores. So then you get the call, ‘You’re gonna hire this guy, because I will fuck you on the next role if you don’t play with me on this one.’ Malik Yoba’s in the movie.”
But sometimes Harvey couldn’t control himself, even with movie stars. As one Miramax executive put it, “He was desperate to be in the Al Pacino star-fuck business,” and he frantically tried to acquire Looking for Richard, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a production of Richard III, which the actor had directed. But Pacino gave the film to Fox Searchlight. He got Pacino on the phone, said, “Why didn’t you give me the movie, I’m more passionate about this than anybody, I’m in New York, I know about these things, what do they know, they’re Hollywood people.”
“Well, my advisers felt that blah blah,” replied Pacino, trying to be politic.
“I don’t listen to advisers, I listen to me, and finally, you’re the client, you’re the one who has to decide. Why don’t you just admit it, you’re the one who didn’t want to go with me.”
“Well, my advisers thought it would be better if . . .” Harvey was getting angrier and angrier, and finally just lost it. “You know what Al? I’ve fuckin’ had it with you. You suck!”
Cop Land was in production over the summer of 1996, while Mimic was still shooting in Toronto. Mangold shot the climactic gunfight between Stallone and the bad guys, in which Stallone loses his hearing in his good ear, in slow motion. While Mangold was cutting the picture, Harvey found out that he had never covered it in real time. Harvey was afraid it might be too slow and wanted to investigate the possibility of digitally speeding it up to normal. Mangold didn’t want to hear about it, but Harvey wouldn’t let it go, and it became a big issue, with Harvey calling and calling, insisting he wanted to see it at a faster pace. “Most studios don’t get as intimately involved in every single decision,” says Konrad. “Harvey will pop into the middle of a process that’s already in midstream, he will undo decisons that are made, or that you believe were made, that everybody had said was okay, and then suddenly it’s not okay.” Mangold was so sick of his interference that he told his editor to remove the hard drives from the Avids. The director recalls, “I got on the subway, went up to my apartment, and called Meryl Poster.”
Poster was a production executive who, like several others, began as Harvey’s assistant. As attorney David Steinberg, who worked in acquisitions for two years, puts it, “You have to be able to completely subordinate your own vision of right and wrong in order to succeed there. Grown-ups have a hard time doing that. That’s why most of the senior people there started off as either Bob’s or Harvey’s assistants.” She was “absolutely fearless, shockingly blunt, and the only person who could get Harvey to change his mind,” says Lechner, but some neither liked nor respected her. According to Donna Gigliotti, “She didn’t like film and didn’t understand anything about it. She liked movie stars.” Behind her back she was known as the “Bride of Weinstein.” But in this case she rose to the occasion. Mangold continues, “I said, ‘Meryl, we’re ceasing work on the film. I don’t know what’s going to happen to your post schedule, but I ain’t coming back until these issues go away.’ Meryl went, ‘Okay, I understand.’ I got a call a minute later, ‘I just caught Harvey in the elevator, he’s says it’s fine, the gunfight’s fine, whatever.’ There’s all this brinkmanship, but if he likes you, sometimes he’ll give in.”
Mangold, says Konrad, “found a way to tap into the part that we all say we love about Harvey. Threats never work, you have to appeal to the film-maker side of him, compare your idea to some film classic, some golden oldie. But you have to make sure you know what he likes and what he doesn’t like before you get into a meeting, because if you bring up something that he thinks is a piece of shit, it’s a bad meeting.” Expands Mangold, “You have to be careful of your examples. You can’t use a movie that bombed. You never want to say, ‘It flips back and forth in time li
ke Go.’ The exec will say, ‘Oh yeah, like Go, great! Gotta make it!’ And you can’t cast aspersions on a hit. If you say, ‘Oh, you mean like, the reshoot of Fatal Attraction?’ ‘That would be a problem making a movie that made $150 million?!’ ”
Then the test screenings started. Mangold remembers, “For me the most intense day in a movie’s history is not a meeting with a star, or the first day of production, or the first screening for the studio, the most pivotal day is the test screening. It will determine whether you’re stuck in that cutting room for the next year or whether you will be able to get out alive. It was frightening. The invitations to the screening said, ‘Do you want to see the new Sylvester Stallone movie?’ I stood in the back row of this theater on Long Island, and heard, ‘Rock-y, Rock-y, Rock-y.’ As Sly put it, ‘My fans want me to pick up a gun and shoot the bad guy. They don’t understand dialogue. It’s the World Wrestling Federation crowd evaluating this movie.’ My stomach twisted, because I knew, Rocky’s gonna sit on his hands for the next ninety minutes in a paralysis of confusion.” It scored in the low 40s. Harvey was ashen. Mangold continues, “The movie was written in my mind to play to a much more select audience than it suddenly was playing to—it ended with almost everyone dead, and our hero deaf. There wasn’t much of a way around that reality.”
But there was no way Harvey was going to let his Stallone movie, with Keitel to boot, and De Niro, especially De Niro, go down in flames, so Mangold was sent back to the editing room to tinker and trim. (One cut that Harvey insisted on was a low-angle shot of Stallone that Harvey thought made his butt look too big.) There was only one scene between Keitel and De Niro. The two actors had not been in the same picture since Taxi Driver in 1976, not since they’d become stars, and it seemed like putting them together a few more times might pump up the film. But Keitel nixed the idea on the grounds that if they someday did a movie built around the two of them, this would undermine its cachet.
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