Harvey insisted on reshoots and new scenes. “I thought I had been plunged back into this hell of studio filmmaking again,” says Mangold. “There was pressure to inject some buoyant feeling at the very end, show that everything turned out okay, and the bad guys were punished. A scene was tacked on to that effect.” At one point, he claims, somebody from Miramax called him up and told him, “Harvey has written a scene that he’d like to read to you.”
“He’s written a scene for the movie?”
“Yeah.”
“But we’ve already agreed what we’re shooting. I’m not getting into this.” It was a feel-good scene in which De Niro, who plays an internal affairs investigator, gives Stallone an NYPD badge at the end. Mangold continues, “I found this scene awful, and everything I feared was suddenly coming to pass. The creative energy of this guy is insane, strangling. But I had learned a very big lesson, which was, Why play the bad guy?” Mangold called De Niro, and said, “Harvey has this scene he wrote.”
“What is it?”
The director described it. De Niro just grunted, “Uh-huh,” then asked Mangold, “Do you like it?”
“No.”
“Well, I don’t like it either.”
“What do I do? He wrote it. He’s gonna want—”
“We’re not going to do it.”
“What if he offers you more money than he paid you for the whole picture to do that scene? He wrote it, Bob.”
“I won’t do it.” Mangold hung up thinking, There’s no way that scene’s gonna happen. He was right. To Harvey, he said, “If you can get Bob to do it, I’ll think about it.” But it never came up again. This was by no means the first time Harvey had written scenes and tried to get directors to include them. During Wayne Wang’s Blue in the Face, a partly improvised spinoff of Wang’s and writer Paul Auster’s Smoke, set in a tobacco shop in Brooklyn, he woke up Auster, who was in Europe, in the middle of the night, and exclaimed, “It’s Brooklyn, there’s gotta be Jackie Robinson!” Initially, he wanted the whole Dodgers team to crowd into the shop, but Wang and Auster talked him down to just Robinson. It’s the stupidest scene in a generally tepid picture, and once, when it was tested, someone piped up with something like, “That’s pretty dumb.” Knowing how Harvey revered testing, the filmmakers, who wanted to get rid of it, used this comment against him, but he dismissed it, saying, “What does he know.”
Cop Land would be released on August 15, 1997. It ended up costing about $29 million, more than three times as much as Pulp, bad news for the Miramax business plan. Although it did pretty well, grossing $45 million, Mangold recalls, “I walked around feeling pretty shitty.”
While Cop Land was in post, Scream was poised on the runway. Throughout the fall, it had been burning its way through test screenings. “It was a love-in,” recalls Bob Weinstein. “The scores in the top two boxes were in the high 80s, 90s. ‘Excellent and very good.’ The ‘definitely recommend’ was in the high 80s. Usually you’re excited when it’s in the 60s. There was nothing to do, no notes, no meetings, no anything. We had a monster on our hands.”
Says Konrad, “Harvey didn’t pay a lot of attention to Scream, honestly didn’t believe in it. He would always say, ‘I don’t really know what Bob’s doing over there. He plays in his sandbox, I have mine.’ ” The combustible mixture of love and anger that one brother felt for the other was a constant fact of life at Miramax; it was the background noise, the elevator music against which all the other dramas played. As Bob built Dimension into a division that would eclipse Harvey’s profit-wise, the noise became harder to ignore. Says Foley, “I think it’s a spiritual/chemical thing, where what one likes the other one doesn’t. There were occasions when they got into shoving matches with each other, like little brothers, in the middle of the conference room or in front of the staff at a meeting.” Harvey intimidated Bob with his knowledge of the creative side of the business; Bob intimidated Harvey with his facility with numbers. Staffers noticed that the brothers couldn’t bring themselves to look each other in the eye. Putting them together on the phone was next to impossible, because Harvey would never hold for Bob, Bob would never hold for Harvey. They would go for days without speaking to each other. Bob had to sign the checks, and when they were having a particularly bad spat, he wouldn’t do it, bringing business to a halt.
But no matter how hard they fought, they always made up. They were knitted together, as tight as tweed. “I fight with my brother all day long,” explains Harvey. “My dad ingrained us in this whole John Kennedy/Bobby Kennedy thing—we had to be John and Bobby—he Svengalied us, said, ‘You fight, and you forgive.’ That’s why I get into trouble all the time, because I fight and I don’t mean it.” Which is why, Tusk observes, “The worst thing anyone could do was try to play one against the other. They could be arguing in the hallway about something you were involved with, but if you tried to say something like, ‘Oh, I only did that because Bob’s office told me,’ then Harvey, the same person who was bitterly arguing with his brother a moment before would turn and go, ‘Baahb? Is that true?’ ‘No!’ Then suddenly you had the two of them at you.” Adds Foley, “Despite the fraternal psychodrama that goes on between them, they’re only one person, always, always, always. It’s primordial, before the sky and the earth were separated. And there’s no one that’s gonna get in between them and push open from the inside. It just ain’t gonna happen.”
Distribution was one of the worst jobs at Miramax. As Bowles puts it, “You can’t do anything right. You have six screens in a complex, they want seven.” Says Foley, “You’d open a Bob film, and you’d be going through hell with Bob, and then Harvey would enter your life, and he’d be doing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday quarterbacking. Second-guessing everything we did.” Foley was ready to quit. “What I was dealing with was, every time I’d pick up the phone [with them], I’d be bleeding from my ears afterward for something or other, Bob or Harvey ripping my head off,” he continues. “Then I’d put the phone down and another call would come in, one of the hundred or so I’d be getting every day, saying, ‘You got a problem with this distribution situation in San Francisco or Seattle,’ after I’d just been in a head-on collision. I’d just say, ‘Oops, sorry, I know I’m bleeding from my aorta, but I gotta deal with this.’ You were like a psychological playground for them. It was like the Invasion of the Psyche Snatchers. They played with you, they owned you, they crippled you, they broke you. Harvey would say these totally spurious things just to antagonize you, little things, seeking to demonstrate your ineffectiveness and ineptitude.” When Foley arrived at Miramax, he had a spring to his stride. He was a snappy dresser, always seemed on top of his game. After a while, he acquired raccoon eyes and a hangdog expression. He lost weight. His clothes looked like they were three sizes too large for him, and his belt was cinched up to the last hole, the waist of his trousers gathered in bunches like beads on a necklace.
Harvey had been taunting him for weeks about a Dimension film called Supercop, with Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, that had not performed to expectations. One night at a Scream test screening in Secaucus, New Jersey, Foley recalls, “He said to me, ‘Do you know what such-and-such theater grossed on Supercop?’
“ ‘No, I don’t.’
“ ‘Well, I do, ’cause I know everything. I read it on vacation.’
“‘Great, glad you could take a vacation, I haven’t taken a vacation in three years. You’re gonna nail me on some fuckin’ theater in the middle of nowhere? What’s that?’ It was that viciously predatory thing.” While Foley was sitting in the theater stewing, Bob or Harvey got up and walked out, giving him a look as he passed, walked back in again a few minutes later, got him out of the screening, and said, “We’re checking you out.” Foley thought, I’ve had it, I’ve had it, and said, “Fine, great.”
“We’re gonna pay out your contract.”
“Fine.” Foley knew that the brothers fired employees one day and rehired them the next, and that
they generally returned. He thought, I’m gonna come back to work, and Harvey’s gonna go, “See, I can treat you this way, I can degrade you”? No. I’m gonna draw a line. “That’s why I left,” he says now. “I didn’t have another job, but it was the last straw, because going back there, that ownership thing becomes demonic. When they die, people are going to talk about what great people they were. And they’re not, they’re cruel people. They’re very, very sick people. They have contempt for humanity.” Foley never did go back.
Bob had conceived the idea to open Scream Christmas week. “The [conventional wisdom] was, OK, Christmas—Christmas fare: the prestige pictures, the family-oriented movies, the softer, gentler kinds of things,” he explains. Christmas is the time “every Miramax quote unquote prestige movie comes out. My attitude was, There’s nothing for teenagers to see. Great, I’m going against The Piano.” Wonders Lechner, “Who releases a bloody slasher movie on Christmas Day? Everybody in the company, everybody outside the company, everyone thought he was crazy.” Bob said, “Everybody’s telling me I’m wrong, Wes’s agents, CAA, ICM, they’re all calling me. But, we’re doin’ it.” Adds Konrad, “Bob was adamant about it, and he had done his tracking. That guy knew everything about every movie. He had looked at all the competition and he had analyzed those numbers—his office was like the New York Stock Exchange. Counter-programming, niche programming—no one was thinking that way at Christmas.”
One of Bob’s most vocal critics was Cary Woods. Says Kevin Smith, who didn’t like Woods, “Cary did the worst fucking thing imaginable, which was argue with Bob vehemently, and also publicly, about the release date of Scream. Bob can be a bigger bastard than Harvey if you fuck with him. Cary fuckin’ tore him a new one, started saying, ‘I’m gonna go to the press, and fuckin’ tell them what an idiot you are. You’re gonna kill it.’ Cary was a star-fucker, he was worried about his relationship with Drew Barrymore. Scream opened Christmas, went on to make 100 million fuckin’ dollars, Cary looked like the idiot, and Bob looked like a genius, and they let him go. ‘We’re not renewing his deal.’ Then just to fuckin’ turn the screw, which I really respected, ’cause ultimately, if you’re gonna be in the business, you gotta play it personal sometimes, they kept Cathy Konrad, who was his number two, and she went on to make two more Scream s. Here are two guys who shouldn’t make it personal because they’re running the studio, but they still had the presence of mind to be like, ‘Fuck him, let’s keep Cathy just to fuck with him!’ And they did! That was pretty ingenious. I can get behind guys like that.”
Scream, which cost a mere $15.3 million, eventually did a good $173 million worldwide. Dimension was responsible for about 37 percent of the studio’s total gross that year, $93.4 million on five films, or $18.7 million per film. Harvey, on the other hand, released forty-two films that grossed $160 million, or $3.8 million a film. Says Tarantino’s attorney, Carlos Goodman, “You can almost look at Miramax as pre-Scream and post-Scream.” As Bob’s remarks indicate, he must have gotten an extra jolt of pleasure by going up against Harvey’s “prestige” Christmas offerings and beating them. Indeed, while Harvey was playing in his own sandbox, Bob was building castles in his, and it wouldn’t be long before Harvey tried to play there, too.
THE SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL of January past had been a watershed, what with the image of Harvey backing Jon Taplin up against the bar at the Mercato burned into everyone’s brain. The 1997 installment was a real snoozer, especially since the previous year’s star, The Spitfire Grill, had been a resounding flop, while Shine, despite the sound and fury, had failed to break out into the huge hit Fine Line expected. Over at Miramax, the core of the acquisitions team had left or was leaving, starting with Safford’s abrupt departure in the spring of 1996. Mark Tusk, who had joined the company in 1988, left a few weeks later on April Fool’s Day, unhappy with the changes at the company. “Two thirds of the time Harvey wasn’t moving on the films I was recommending,” he says. “It had become more difficult to corner him, to sit him down for a movie, get him to focus, because he was busy with all sorts of things.” Trea Hoving, who had been there since 1989, followed in June of 1997. Amy Israel and Jason Blum moved up to replace them.
Still, if in retrospect it seems clear that as the sun set on the careers of the crack Miramax team, the Golden Age of acquisitions was over, it was not apparent at the time. Buoyed by the previous year’s bidding wars, the agents and reps were increasingly reluctant to display their wares prematurely, hoping to spur a buying frenzy at the festival. Geoff Gilmore himself discouraged filmmakers from previewing their films before the festival, precisely, it seemed, to promote the Bloomingdale’s-on-Presidents’-Day climate that increasingly pervaded the event. Buyers turning the Sundance soil could still find gems. Fox Searchlight picked up The Full Monty, which it released on August 13, 1997, to the tune of a $45.9 million profit. Neil LaBute’s sulfuric portrait of single males on the prowl, In the Company of Men, which was acquired by Sony Classics, grossed a respectable $3 million, a momentary setback for the emerging consensus for feel-good films like The Brothers McMullen. But most of the films that were snapped up flopped, fueling the growing conviction that festivals were a poor indicator of commercial success. Says Sony’s Michael Barker, “Those movies that were bought at Sundance lost so much money, it was a lesson for all of us.”
After a disappointing pre-Christmas opening, Miramax had another go with Sling Blade in January. Dan Talbot had intended to boot it out of his Lincoln Plaza Theater, where it was playing to empty houses. Weinstein was in St. Bart’s on vacation with his family. He called Talbot, said, “I don’t care what the critics think. I don’t care what anybody thinks, I don’t care if I have to carry this movie on my back, I’m not giving it up. You cannot get rid of this movie. You’ll see that audiences will come.”
He redid the campaign, showing Thornton out of character, looking as little like Karl as he could be made to look. “I made TV spots of Billy in a work shirt against a gorgeous background, talking about Sling Blade over scenes from his movie.” Thornton became the first director since Tarantino that Miramax made into a star from nothing. As Smith puts it, “They created instant recognition around a guy who made one movie. You don’t look at Sling Blade and think, What a masterfully made film. Suddenly, it was, ‘Oh my God, Billy Bob’s interested in this movie, he’ll bring some of that Sling Blade magic to it.’ That was taking the marketing of the director to the next level. Not to say he’s not a fantastic actor, but Billy Bob Thornton is an absolute fuckin’ creation of Miramax.”
Continues Weinstein, “The TV commercials ran in L.A. on cable as part of the Academy campaign, and grosses started to go up. Word of mouth started to build. Then I went to network. It turned around, went crazy.” The film became a phenomenon, with people going around clearing their throats, Karl-style, grunting Uh-hum, uh-hum. “I think that if we hadn’t sold it to them for $10 million, they would never have bothered to rerelease the movie, and it would have gone straight to video,” observes Cassian Elwes. “I have to give it to Harvey, for as crazy as he is, and unpleasant as he can be, he really is masterful when he wants to be in terms of marshaling his troops and forcing them to really focus on how to get a movie out.”
Thornton’s fortunes received another bump when the Oscar nominations came out in February 1997. He received two nominations for Sling Blade, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay, while The English Patient racked up twelve, including Best Picture. Altogether, Miramax films picked up a phenomenal twenty-one nominations, only one fewer than in 1994, the Pulp Fiction year. The remainder were sprinkled among Emma, Trainspotting, Marvin’s Room, Ridicule, and Kolya. But despite Miramax’s muscular performance, the big news was that little October—only three years old in 1996—did just as well for its size, picking up six nominations, all in major categories, five for Secrets & Lies, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Brenda Blethyn, and one for Breaking the Waves, Best Actress for Emily Watson. For the first time, indies vi
rtually monopolized the nominations. In addition to Secrets & Lies and The English Patient, the other Best Picture nominations went to the Coen brothers’ Fargo, and Scott Hicks’s Shine. Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire was the only studio picture to win a place at the head table. The message seemed to be clear: Cinderella had eased her foot into the glass slipper.
Thornton walked down the red carpet on Oscar night in March with his wife of four years, Pietra, twenty-seven, clutching his arm. She had posed for a nude spread in that January’s Playboy, and now raised eyebrows by wearing a skintight dress that barely contained her ample bosom. “God gave me this body, and I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. I’m a mother, not a loose person or anything,” she explained to the press. “I just had breast surgery—they used to sag to the floor—so I’ve got these great new breasts and suddenly everyone’s looking.” But they didn’t help her that night. At 4:00 A.M., she went home in a limo with Thornton’s mother, leaving her husband behind at the Oscar party. The tabloids reported that he hooked up with Laura Dern.
When the ceremony was over, The English Patient walked away the big winner, with an astonishing nine Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress (Juliette Binoche), with two for Walter Murch, Best Editing and Best Sound Editing. Thornton won for Best Adapted Screenplay. He quipped, modestly, “It’s like taking one of those tests where one thing doesn’t belong with the others. They’ll have four kinds of fruit and, like, a buffalo. Well, I’m the buffalo here.” Miramax won twelve Oscars in all. October won nothing. Bingham Ray was upset. Universal invited the October folks to sit with them at the Governors Ball, but he announced, “We’re losers. I’m going to go back to the hotel.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 40
