On Oscar night, Anthony Minghella had invited Steven Soderbergh to the Miramax party, said, “Oh, you’ve got to come.” Soderbergh had returned from Baton Rouge but had only been back in town for a couple of months. He was still looking for a distributor for Schizopolis, and neither that nor Gray’s Anatomy, his subsequent film, had come out. He had worked on a polish of Mimic, was supposed to fix the romantic relationship between the two leads, but eventually he begged off, on the grounds that he was not qualified to write good relationships. He was also struggling in vain to set up a Charlie Kaufman script called Human Nature (since made by Michel Gondry) with a tiny budget, $9 million. He says, “That nobody wanted to make that movie at that price was a sobering moment, an indication of how cold I was.”
The day of the Oscars he’d been shooting second unit for his friend Gary Ross on Pleasantville. “I got to the Miramax bash, circulated for a while, but couldn’t find Minghella,” he remembers. “Then I saw him through the glass in the special VIP section. The security guy wouldn’t let me in. I said, ‘There’s the person who invited me.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’ He was telling me there was no fucking way I was getting in that room, and literally, on a forty-two-inch screen behind his head inside the VIP room they were playing Miramax trailers from all their past films, and I was watching the trailer for sex, lies!” Soderbergh turned to his date, producer Laura Bickford, and said, “Yuchh—that’s the sign that we’re supposed to leave, we have to go now!” Soderbergh had skidded a long way downhill. He had just hit bottom.
Sling Blade’s two nominations helped drive the domestic gross to $24.4 million. (Traditionally, it is the nominations more than the Oscars that boost box office.) Says Harvey, “We sold 240,000 cassettes. Sold foreign for $7 million. We made $20 million profit on the movie.” The profit participants, of course, had net points, not gross, what Eddie Murphy once famously described as “monkey points,” because studio accounting methods make it unlikely that net participants see any money, no matter how much the picture makes. Miramax was no different. “When you got a production statement, they’d claim millions of dollars in losses,” says Larry Meistrich. “Which was a joke. I don’t believe there were losses.” Neither Thornton nor Meistrich ever saw a share of the profits. Says Elwes, “Harvey’s like Pac-Man. He has to eat everything.” Meistrich strongly considered suing, but decided against it. “In this business, it’s not worth it,” he continues. “I wasn’t in it for how much I could squeeze out of that particular film. I moved on. Billy and I made another movie with Miramax, Daddy and Them, and I didn’t want to hurt Billy’s opportunity to do that. I preferred to take the fees I made on Daddy and Them than spend money on accountants fucking around.” Retorts Harvey, “Meistrich didn’t see any money because we paid him $10 million for the rights to a film that cost $1.1 million, giving him a $8.9 million profit up front.”
Only three weeks after the Oscars, Thornton was again splayed all over the tabs and gossip columns, more grist for the Miramax publicity mill. On April 8, Pietra sued for divorce, charging that during their four-year marriage, he punched her in the face, choked her, tried to suffocate her, and bit her ear, making her fear for her life. According to the complaint, she said that he told her, “I’m going to kill you and then I’m going to prison and the children will be orphans.” Thornton denied it and countered by claiming she threatened to kill him. So far as the biting was concerned, he said it was sexual fun. “His Marv Albert defense isn’t going to work,” she said. “I never once claimed he bit me during sex. . . . He maliciously bit me out of anger. Quite frankly, our sex life was pretty dull.” One of the gossip columns reported he hit her with his Oscar, but he denied it. Pietra moved out to a new home in Malibu, where she devoted her time to praying. “Believe it or not, I’m a very devoted Christian woman,” she told the press. “I probably read the Bible more than most pastors. All I talk about in the house with my kids is Jesus.”
LIKE A LAB EXPERIMENT gone horribly awry, little October became the crucible in which volatile reagents—art against money, indies against studios—acted and reacted until they ignited, blowing the company to bits. Compared to Miramax’s grosses on The English Patient and Sling Blade, October’s figures for Breaking the Waves and Secrets & Lies barely made a ripple. Says Bingham Ray, a little defensively, “Those two films were the last films we handled in the old-fashioned way, the way I was schooled in, and we were profitable in both of them. Maybe they were stand-up doubles or triples sliding into third, but I considered them home runs, profitability-wise.”
Still, with their nominations and awards, Secrets & Lies and Breaking the Waves put October on the map, and Ray justifiably could claim credit for both. Success, even modest success, has a way of changing the landscape of expectations. In the deathless words of Woody Allen in Annie Hall, relationships, like sharks, have to keep moving forward or die, and film companies are no different. As Ray explains it, “We had a breakthrough, and John Schmidt and Amir Malin started talking about how to ‘grow’ the company. We needed more financing to get to the ‘next level’—I hated this expression, but I heard it every single day.” Replies Schmidt, “It wasn’t greed. The reality is, when you’re an independent film distributor, you have to bring money into the company to continue to acquire and distribute films aggressively. New Line did it, Miramax did it. If you don’t raise the capital when a window opens, you’re a fool.” The partners either had to get new investors to come in, thereby watering down their already diluted shares even further, or swim into the mouth of a bigger fish. Moreover, October was about to lose $6 or $7 million on David Lynch’s Lost Highway, which Ray had convinced his partners to acquire. “All the goodwill and all the profit we had earned in ’95 and ’96 went out the window,” he says. Adds Schmidt, “If we did not do a deal, we would have been gone in three months. We couldn’t afford to take a hit like that.”
Of all the studios, Universal seemed like the best fit. Schmidt lived in Riverdale, an affluent zip code just north of Manhattan. One of his neighbors was Frank Biondi, CEO of Universal Pictures, whose wife was best friends with his wife, Wendy. Schmidt’s partners told him, “If you’re going to play the Frank Biondi card, now’s the time to do it. Call Frank, John. Get him on the phone and see if he’s interested.” So in February 1997, the sheep called the wolf to ask if he was hungry. He was.
Chris McGurk, who baby-sat the Weinsteins at Disney, had joined the exodus from Disney at the end of 1996 and become COO of Universal Pictures. “I had a lot of experience with the upside you could generate in combining a studio with a specialty film company that employed a way of doing business—creative and marketing skills—that no longer existed in the big studios,” he explains. “But I also saw how Miramax had begun to get away from the core business they had done so well with, that they were stepping up and producing movies for $15, $20, $30 million, making some really big bets, because Harvey didn’t want to be just Harvey Weinstein, he wanted to be Louis B. Mayer. I saw that a void was being created. Add to that the fact that he and Bob had really aggravated everybody due to their dominance, and there was even more ill feeling toward them in Europe than there was here, and therefore Harvey hadn’t penetrated that market as well as he could have. We saw an opportunity to take October Films and position it as the anti-Miramax, the Bingham Ray alternative, with Bingham the more talent-friendly Harvey Weinstein.”
There was also interest from another quarter as well, Bain Capital, a hugely successful private equity group based in Boston. Bain, always on the lookout for companies to buy, had recently been sniffing about Los Angeles. Faced with a choice between the leather lingerie business or the video business, that is, Frederick’s of Hollywood or Live Entertainment, it chose Live. Live owned a sizable library cobbled together from the inventory of defunct companies such as Carolco and Vestron. It contained a lot of junk, but it also had some gold, including Dirty Dancing, Reservoir Dogs, the Rambo s, and a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger films, like Predator and the Ter
minator s. Bain thought this would make a good fit with October. This was a business plan Malin understood very well, and he aspired to a bigger role than just flipping movies to video.
Schmidt and Ray, on the other hand, preferred Universal. Even though Universal was like West Point compared to the October playpen, it was preferable to Bain. Ray was sick of investment bankers, and from his point of view, Bain was run by a bunch of arrogant guys in striped shirts and suspenders who drank a lot of Heineken beer. The plan was to sell 51 percent of October to the studio and use its deep pockets to grow the company.
The principals from the two companies celebrated their new partnership at a dinner in a private, upstairs dining room at Prego. The meal was over, they were sipping grappas. As Malin stood at the window looking at the twinkling lights of Beverly Hills, McGurk shouted, “Amir, so, listen, when this is all done, are you looking forward to running distribution?” As McGurk well knew, Malin’s aspirations were much grander. Schmidt started to giggle, but, he recalls, “it was a knife to Amir’s gut.”
Then Malin did a stupid thing. Or at least it seemed like a stupid thing at the time. Through one of his friends on the board of October, he approached Universal CEO Ron Meyer, asked if he was the key man in the deal, if, in other words, were he not to go along, would they go ahead without him? Meyer, Biondi, and McGurk thought that this was a strange question. At the very least, it indicated to them that Malin had been negotiating elsewhere, most likely with Bain. They said something like, “We’d say you’d have to deal with your partners on that, that’s not our business.” McGurk and Malin had never liked each other. McGurk called Ray and asked, “What in hell does he think he’s doing? I wouldn’t want him to be my partner.” According to Malin, “Bingham feared that by having gone in this circuitous way to Ron Meyer, I might have torpedoed the whole fucking thing.” He says his intention was the opposite. “I did not want to see a scenario where if I decided to leave the deal might not happen. I just wanted to know that the deal would still go on.” Once he was assured that it would proceed regardless, he felt free to leave.
Nevertheless, Ray and Schmidt were furious. They felt that Malin had tried to make an end run around them. “Whatever his intentions were, he backdoored us,” says Ray. “It really pissed me off. His ego was always telling him, You’re the key man here, fella, and if Universal had said, ‘If you opt out, we’re not gonna make this deal,’ he would have tried to use that to restructure the whole partnership: ‘That means I’m in charge. Fuck John, fuck Bingham, fuck October.’ But he read the tea leaves wrong.” Schmidt saw it the same way: “It was a destabilizing move. If Meyer had said, ‘We won’t make the deal without you,’ he had the ammunition to make a move on us.”
In any event, Ray continues, “I wanted to act swiftly to cut that fuckin’ cancer out. I saw an opportunity, with Universal’s blessing, to blow this fucker out.” Says one Universal executive, “Amir took a well that was poisoned and made it toxic thirty days after we had made the deal. So then it was, Let’s get rid of him.” Ray phoned Schmidt at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying in L.A., asked for his blessing as well. Schmidt said, “Well, whaddya wanna do?”
“I say we move on him. Right now. Lemme go fire him. I’m going down the hall!”
“Right now? I’ll be back in the office tomorrow. I want to do it with you.” They hung up. Five minutes later, Ray called again, said, “Like, right now! I’m gonna strike, right now!” Ray thought, John would rather not be ugly and confrontational, but I don’t give a shit. I love confrontation, baiting people into confrontation. Schmidt told him, “Okay, I’m not going to stop you,” and Ray marched into Malin’s office, the big corner one, the largest on the floor, and closed the door behind him as dramatically as he could short of slamming it. As he tells it, “I sat down in that overexpensive, overstuffed, bullshit leather Italian chair in front of his pretentious glass-topped fucking stupid Italian knockoff desk, and I said, ‘I just heard a very interesting story. That disturbs me. And John. Greatly. And I think we have to talk about it.’
“ ‘Wha . . . wha . . . what would that be? What story? What did you hear?’ At first, of course, his instinct was to deny.
“ ‘Amir, I think you know what you have to do.’
“ ‘What do I have to do?’
“ ‘I think there’s only one course of action for you to take, because we know exactly what you’ve done, what you’ve tried to do.’
“ ‘Whaddya talking about?’
“ ‘Don’t make me tell you all of what you’ve been doing in the last ten days. Let it suffice to say that I know everything, John knows everything, and we both are in agreement that you should leave.’ He tried to deny it, and I stopped him. ‘Like I said, it’s not working. No one, no one is going to let you off this hook. You’re going to have to live with the consequences.’
“ ‘Okay, I’ll go, all right, I’ll go.’
“He was afraid of me, like I was going to hit him. He’s one of the biggest pussies of all time. He was whimpering. He was trembling. He’s a trembler. I’m gonna make a movie, call it, The Trembler: The Amir Malin Story. So we fired him. You know, there was a warm glow going up my spine that was what I imagined a heroin addict would feel when they’re shooting up. I was taking a great amount of satisfaction sitting there in front of this fuck and doing him in. No one had done this fucker in before, and he’d done lots of people, good and bad, rightly and wrongly, mostly wrongly, and now he was getting his. He had tried to take us out, he got Lipsky, but he couldn’t do the rest, and now he was falling on his own sword. It was one of the happiest days of my fuckin’ life. I called John. I said, ‘The deed is done. Satan is dead.’ ”
Malin maintains that he chose to leave October voluntarily. “I sat down with Bingham when I made my decision, and we talked,” he says of his meeting with Ray. “It was not an easy discussion. But it was not a confrontation.”
Then forty-five years old, Malin would pack his bags and leave for Live Entertainment, which would be renamed Artisan. Universal paid a paltry $14 million for 51 percent of the company. October had been the largest and most successful of the genuine independents. Now it belonged to a studio. But the deal enabled it to bump up its bank line from $25 million to $100 million, and the hope was to morph into a powerhouse so that in five or six years when Universal bought out the remaining 49 percent, the investors would make a killing.
October’s future looked bright. The company had been the subject of a high-profile feature in New York magazine, where it was called—guess what—“the new Miramax,” irritating the Weinsteins. When the distributors converged on Cannes in May of that year, right after October’s deal with Universal had been announced, the inevitable occurred. Ray walked into a screening to find Harvey already there, three seats in from the aisle. “For years, everyone was more or less treated the same,” recalls Ray. “Then this big division grew up between Harvey-the-mogul and the rest of us. The reps on the pictures were always sucking up to him shamelessly. It was just insane—they had seats, rows, saved for Miramax. I was standing in the aisle, and he turned to me and went, ‘I guess we’ll see how good you are now, eh?’
“ ‘Harvey, what is it about me that just kinda sticks in your craw? Whaddya, afraid of me?’
“ ‘What? Hah!’ All of a sudden I was aware that the place had become deathly quiet. He shouted, ‘I’m not—whaddya talking about, scared of you?’
“ ‘Harvey, why don’t you just go fuck yourself, ya know? You start off, say hello to me, then boom, you’re bustin’ my chops. Go fuck off.’
“ ‘FUCK OFF? YOU TOLD ME TO FUCK OFF? YOU PIECE OF SHIT! Now we’re gonna see if you’re really talented, you piece of fucking shit slime. I’m gonna kick your ass all over town.’ He was trying to get up, but he’s a big guy, the seats were small, and he just couldn’t get up to get in my face. I yelled, ‘Can’t you get up? GET UP!’ But he could not get up. Afterward, as I came out of the movie, Tom Bernard walked past me. Be
rnard had never talked to me in his life except to give me shit in passing, and he said, ‘Harvey was down, he couldn’t get up. You should’a hit him!’ ”
THE ENGLISH PATIENT was turning into a money machine, grossing $78.6 million in the U.S. and $150 million foreign, for a total of $228.6 million worldwide. The ancillary markets, mainly video, piled on even more millions. But the picture, recall, was Zaentz’s baby, and six years later, Zaentz complained that he hadn’t seen a penny from Miramax, other than the $5 million Harvey had paid to the talent, but not Zaentz, early on. (On the day of the Golden Globes, Miramax reimbursed talent and crew for $2.5 million they were owed for the deferments Miramax had requested.)
Although Harvey wondered, rhetorically, in the Los Angeles Times, “Why should filmmakers live out of a sack and crews defer their salaries just because they work in the independent arena?,” the crew and cast of The English Patient have never seen a penny of the remaining $7 million. Minghella was paid about $750,000 for writing and directing. Amortized over the four years he worked on the film, his remuneration amounted to $187,500 a year, half of which he deferred. He says, “I haven’t had a cent since then.”
According to sources, over the course of the six years, payment was always just around the corner. “You’ll be paid in October.” October came and went. “You’ll be paid in April.” April came and went. In the fall of 1999, Zaentz audited Miramax to determine, among other things, how much the company made from the ancillaries in order to determine when the film actually went into profit. Zaentz threatened to sue Miramax. Harvey’s response was always, “Go ahead. We’re the Walt Disney Co., we have two hundred lawyers here sitting around at their desks with nothing to do. You wanna pay $1 million to hire a lawyer? Be my guest.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 41
