“Harvey the monster,” says Weinstein with heavy sarcasm. “We spent $42 million on P&A. Did we want the Academy Award? Yes! Did we overspend? Yes! We did whatever we had to do. What has irked Saul to this day is that I presold the foreign. I had never written a check that big for a movie, my hands were shaking, and I had to protect myself. In retrospect, that was one of the stupidest decisions anybody ever made, not only for Zaentz, but for us. As a result, the money that he thinks is there [isn’t]. He keeps saying we owe him money. But he hasn’t sued us. It’s much more fun to dine out in the press all the time. What else are they going to ask Saul Zaentz about? His last movie? He will make $100 million personally on Lord of the Rings. Harvey made him a hundred fuckin’ million bucks. If he thinks there’s $5 million that he owes his crew on The English Patient, he should raise his hand and say, I made a fortune on Lord of the Rings, here’s the fuckin’ money. Just shut up already, and write the check.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of corn?” Zaentz retorts. “We have to pay ’em, but we have to get the money from him to pay ’em.” He says in fact he plans to sue Miramax: “We’re gonna do it. I wouldn’t have spent the money we’ve spent or get lawyers like we have. He’s full of shit as always.”
It is, of course, possible that Miramax is right. The English Patient was acquired in a distress sale, and the Weinsteins no doubt drove a hard bargain. As Jeremy Thomas puts it, “You push the boat out, and often when you need a lifeline, you’re incredibly weak and get into terrible jams.”
Zaentz says Harvey “is a pushcart peddler who puts his thumb on the scale when the old woman is buying meat. When I talked with him about it, he says, ‘I am a filmmaker; I’m not an accountant.’ ” Walter Murch, the gifted editor of Godfather III and Apocalypse Now, who won two Oscars for The English Patient, says he is still owed one third of his deferred salary. He describes himself as “angry slash philosophical” about his predicament, adding, “As far as the Oscars went, The English Patient won the Super Bowl that year, which was a very big thing for Miramax and Disney. Well, that was made possible not only by their own publicity machine, but by the people who made the film! And you would think that when you win the Super Bowl, you get a bonus or you get your ring, or something, and not only did we not get anything other than the Oscar—which I’m very happy to have—but we didn’t get the money that we deferred in order that this wonderful film got made. So now we’re all blinking in the daylight thinking, Oh, it’s that trick again, it’s the same old song. It was the first time I’d ever worked for deferments, and I got stung.” Murch went on to edit The Talented Mr. Ripley, which Minghella directed and Miramax co-produced (with Paramount). “At the point that I agreed to do it, it was a little less than a year after The English Patient had come out. The idea was the money was coming, just hang on,” he says. “I would have second thoughts about doing Ripley again.”
The irony is, of course, that the people who are exploited in these situations are not the hacks or journeymen, but the good guys, the idealists, the passionate few for whom film is not just a job but a calling. The artists’ best selves are turned against them. Says Murch, “Our dedication to the material always supersedes our own financial self-interest. If we didn’t care, if we were just in it for the money, then we wouldn’t get victimized.” Miramax offered to pay Minghella the deferred salary he was owed, but the director refused to accept the money. “I have a very clear position on The English Patient in terms of money,” he says. “I am not interested in getting my money until I know that my crew has been paid. I couldn’t look at them on a film set knowing that I had some money and they hadn’t.” In 2000, Minghella signed on to direct Cold Mountain, a picture that Miramax was producing with MGM. Did the lingering, unresolved situation with regard to The English Patient color his approach to this project? He says, “It certainly makes it more difficult for me to go to my own crew, who I feel an enormous responsibility for, and say, ‘We’re doing Cold Mountain, would you consider deferring some of your fee.’ I wouldn’t ask them to do that. So there is a consequence to the fact that no money’s been forthcoming, and it’s an unfortunate consequence. Let me say, however, that the first round of deferments were at Saul’s request, not Miramax’s. However, the irony is not lost on me that had Saul financed The English Patient, I would be a very wealthy person now.” Would Zaentz work with Harvey again? “No! Billy Wilder once said, about someone everybody disliked intensely, ‘Don’t even bother to ignore him!’ He’s abusive to everybody that he has a chance to be abusive to. He’s an abusive man.”
The critical and commercial success of Minghella’s historical romance defined the “Miramax picture” for the rest of the decade and beyond. After Pulp Fiction, it looked for a while as if that’s what the Weinsteins would do, pictures that were too cool and too hip for the studios. But Priest and Kids put an end to that. As much as the Weinsteins might love Tarantino, Pulp Fiction was never going to win an Oscar; it was just too weird. But The English Patient could. The Weinsteins would provide a steady diet of high-toned, Masterpiece Theater–style, Oscar-grabbing pictures often adapted from prestigious literary works. Miramax mined Jane Austen like a truffle-sniffing pig, and turned out frock pieces like Emma and Mansfield Park. Emma had been released on August 2, 1996. It was a delivery vehicle for Gwyneth Paltrow—the classy blonde who became to Harvey what Grace Kelly was to Hitchcock, a star he could parade in front of the public to burnish his own reputation. He used to refer to her as “the First Lady of Miramax.” Tarantino noticed what was going on right away. He says, “Harvey knows that I hate that shit. Unwatchable movies from unreadable books. I told him, ‘You really need some NC-17, or people will really think you’ve lost your balls.’ But the thing is, Harvey made his name with Enchanted April as much as he made it with Kids.” Tarantino may have derided Emma as “shit,” but to Miramax that shit was smelling sweet.
Nine
Ace and Gary
1997
• How a couple of kids from Boston named Matt Damon and Ben Affleck launched Good Will Hunting, while October beat Miramax to The Apostle and found Happiness.
“The mainstream sucks, and it always will, is the bottom line. Because they don’t understand how to make movies—they went to Wharton. They’re selling widgets. The thing I love about working for Harvey is that it’s like the old studio system. He tells you right to your face to go fuck yourself.”
—MATT DAMON
Good Will Hunting began in the early 1990s as a writing assignment Matt Damon turned in to his Harvard class in directing. Damon grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The family lived on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, in Central Square, worlds away culturally and economically from nearby Harvard. A wannabe actor struggling through one disappointing role after another, he shoehorned his career into his on-again off-again stint as a Harvard student. He finally did what many actors in extremis do—he wrote a role for himself, and enlisted Ben Affleck to help him do it.
Damon and Affleck were childhood friends. Two years younger than Damon, Affleck was born in 1972. His parents were ’60s people, antiwar activists. When he was growing up, they tried to take him to films they liked, mostly foreign. “They dragged me to movies where nobody spoke English,” he recalls. “They wouldn’t take me to movies that other kids were going to, that were fun. To me a real movie was, like, The Terminator. Or Star Wars. When I was five years old, I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever been done. It was the equivalent of The 400 Blows or The Bicycle Thief or whatever it was that made Scorsese fall in love with movies. I just thought, anything my mother likes, with her outdated view of the world, like Truffaut, or any of that boring shit, can’t be good.” Affleck’s father, Tim, himself a sometime actor, used to ask Ben and Matt, “Why the fuck do you guys want to be actors? It’s the stupidest fucking job in the world.” But they ignored his advice, as kids will, and hopped onto the Hollywood merry-go-round.
When Rick Linklater cast him i
n Dazed and Confused, Affleck had few credits, mostly TV movies and one Hollywood feature, School Ties. “My agent said it was by the guy who did Slacker. I saw Slacker at an art theater in Waterville, Maine, when I was eighteen. I thought, This is a strangely nonlinear movie, experimental. I should like it more than I do, but you have to understand that at that time, Lethal Weapon was my favorite movie. It was the bad guy part. I didn’t want to play the bad guy, but I figured I would do it anyway. Then Rick sent out the script with a note that said, ‘If this movie is realized as scripted, it will be a massive underachievement. I want to solicit contributions from everybody,’ and he was true to his word. I would write stuff, and it appeared in the movie. I felt empowered to have a voice in that, and it gave me the notion that you could make movies this way.”
Dazed and Confused showcased an array of up-and-coming actors, and it gave some of them, like Matthew McConaughey, a leg up. But, recalls Affleck, frowning, “It didn’t do anything for me. I was the only unlikable character in a movie full of likable characters. I was completely forgotten.” He was losing parts to his peers—McConaughey, Chris O’Donnell, Brendan Fraser, whoever. He figured, There has to be another way. It was at this point that Damon brought him the concept, saying, “A movie where a kid from Southie is a savant would be cool.” Affleck was familiar with indie films, thought, Yeah, Clerks was out there, Slacker, that didn’t cost a lot of money. This seems, like, easy to do. “To me indies were a new way for guys to make your own shot,” he explains. “You didn’t have to sit around and wait for somebody to decide to cast you in Billy Bathgate, or as Robin in Batman. To do all these things that people like Brendan or Matthew were breaking with. You could make an end run, do a movie on your own, and then maybe someone will give you a shot to work with one of the great guys—De Niro, Scorsese, Coppola, Pacino, Hoffman.”
As Affleck makes clear, for him, indie film had devolved into no more than just another way of getting your foot in the studio door. Good Will Hunting was never a pure blue flame burning in Damon’s breast, a story that demanded to be told, a vision calling for expression. Although based on his experiences growing up as a townie in a university-dominated community, the script was simply a means to an end, intended to get them work. But it wasn’t that the young filmmakers coming up in the late 1980s were more opportunistic than their predecessors, or that they didn’t care about doing good work. A new generation gap had opened up. When Dazed and Confused flopped, Affleck noticed that Linklater just shrugged it off. After all, it was a studio film, and from where Linklater was standing, the studio blew it. Born in 1960, Linklater had that old-time religion, which is to say, that Us/Them, anti-studio mentality. “Rick’s older’n me,” Affleck observes. “He had a ’70s deal going on, a kind of anti-authoritarian, throwback mentality, like, It’s not about the money, man, people liked the movie. I really didn’t have that, since I grew up in the ’80s, with Reagan. My perspective at the time was, there is no ‘Man,’ nobody’s holding you down. That worldview seemed anachronistic to me—‘Get over it!’ ”
Affleck had never bought into idea that indie films are necessarily superior or more virtuous than studio films. He aspired to do good work too, but for him, the question wasn’t indies versus studios; it was good pictures versus bad pictures. Good pictures could be made inside the studios or outside, just as bad pictures could. A studio logo in front of a movie didn’t automatically mean that he was going to reach for a tomato. After all, the great directors and actors he admired had entrenched themselves within the system. In fact, they were the system. Like so many of the younger film-makers of his generation, the children of the flower children, he was oblivious to the bitter political and cultural battles waged in the 1960s and 1970s that put them there. He took the way things were for granted. It was the go-go ’90s, and everything seemed possible. Like Quentin Tarantino, he thought, There’s this brass ring out there, and it’s exciting, glamorous, and fun—and you can be an artist too.
Not everyone, even in Affleck’s generation, agrees. Says Ethan Hawke, who is only two years older and has acted in many of Linklater’s films, “Ben’s right in that art is valuable if its aim is true, even if it’s inside the studio system. There’s no rules about it. But it’s not only that there are good movies and bad movies, but it’s how the movies are made and what they’re like that’s important too. For me, the job of the artist is to be a maverick. If you cease to be a maverick, then you become Coca-Cola. I resented working for Time Warner when I did Training Day. It bugged me. I don’t think it would bug Ben. Rick has an interest in being subversive, but I don’t know how subversive Ben wants to be.”
In any event, Affleck told Damon, “Yeah, guys are making these kinds of movies now, we can do this for $1 million.” The original script they wrote was an amalgam of their favorite movies: Midnight Run, Beverly Hills Cop, E.T., and Searching for Bobby Fischer. They knew they needed a good guy, a bad guy, a girl, and that it had to be cheap, people in rooms talking. The story had an action overlay that they thought would attract studio financing.
Damon and Affleck were inspired by other nobodies who had sold first scripts with themselves attached as actors. Of course the most celebrated example was Sylvester Stallone, who some two decades earlier had managed to star in his own script, Rocky. Recalls Damon, “We’d just say, ‘Stallone, Stallone,’ because he had $103 in the bank and a pregnant wife, and they offered him thirty grand if he would bow out and let Ryan O’Neal play Rocky, but he stuck to his guns. When the studios would balk, and go, ‘Who the hell are these guys and why should they be in the movie?’ at least our agent had some leverage to say, ‘It’s not a first-time thing, this happens.’ Our feeling was, Don’t let them draw a line in the sand, you do it, why not ask for it, demand it, insist on it—and maybe they’ll give it to you.”
Affleck and Damon’s “I can do that too” pictures were not only Slacker and Clerks, but Reservoir Dogs. “I mean, this guy Tarantino worked in a fucking video store,” says Damon. “It just made it doable, and it was shortly after seeing Reservoir Dogs that we started writing.” But it was not so much how Tarantino made it as how he got to make it. “We heard the story about how Lawrence Bender had given Harvey Keitel the script in his acting class, and his name got that movie made,” Damon continues. “It was worth $500,000 or a million bucks or whatever they got—because of Harvey Keitel. We said, Jesus, we need our Harvey Keitel.” They tailored the part of the therapist to a Hollywood star, any star, gave him the best lines, made it small so he could fit it into his schedule. “We called it our Harvey Keitel part,” Damon goes on. “We figured any great actor could step in and make it theirs. If it were Morgan Freeman we’d make the guy from Roxbury, or if it’s a white guy, we were going to make him from South Boston. If it’s Meryl Streep, that’s a different kind of tension. But our mantra was, Keitel and Stallone.”
Despite the Stallone precedent, nobody at the studios was thrilled with having to buy a ticket on the Damon and Affleck bus. Says Damon, “I’m sure these guys read the script and went, Oh, fuck, if we could only get rid of these two jackasses.” All the two wannabes heard was “Brad and Leo, Leo and Brad.” Director Michael Mann loved the script, but only with “Leo and Brad.” During their first meeting with Castle Rock, Rob Reiner, who didn’t know that they wanted to act in it, said, “This will be great, and we’ll get Leo and Brad.” One of the other executives jumped in and said, “No, no, it’s these guys, it’s these guys.” Reiner’s eyes widened and without missing a beat he said, “It’s these guys? Even better, even better!” They could almost hear the wheels turning in his head: We won’t have to pay for Leo and Brad! Paramount flirted, but Mark Wahlberg told Affleck that an executive there confided, “We got a great movie for you, we’re just gonna buy their script, ice them, and put you in it.” Wahlberg passed.
Affleck continues, “We agreed with whatever anybody said to us, went in and just said, ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes, we have some problems—it’s not finished
. We know we need a movie star, we know we’re not famous, we’re just happy to be here.’ ” In Hoop Dreams, there’s a scene in which the father of a basketball prospect who has just been kicked out of prep school is being wooed by a recruiter who is giving him a song and dance about how his school builds character, and finally the father says, “Ah’m jus’ happy somebody want da boy.” And that was their mantra. They would say, over and over, “We’re jus’ happy somebody want da boy!” Still, Damon and Affleck had no illusions about the studios and expected, eventually, to go the indie route. But the problem was, the indies were passing too. Cary Woods had turned it down for Miramax.
While Damon and Affleck were writing and rewriting, their acting careers were showing signs of life. Affleck was trying out for Smith’s studio film, Mallrats. “I wanted to meet Kevin Smith, although I still hadn’t seen Clerks, but I thought maybe I could learn something about how they did that,” he recalls. “I thought the script was really funny. Maybe that means I just have bad taste, I don’t know. I got cast as another dumb bad guy—that was lame. I was thinking, No one’s gonna like me. But I was so awestruck to be working with a director my age. The first day of Mallrats, at wrap, Kevin turned to the first AD and said, ‘What’s the protocol here? Shall I start grabbing boxes and stuff? And carry them downstairs?’ The guy just chuckled, ‘No, no, no, you’re the director, you don’t do that!’ ”
Damon went up for Courage Under Fire and got the part. De Niro–like in his zeal for prepping his role as a junkie, he lost forty-five pounds, threw his adrenal system out of whack, messed up his electrolytes, and nearly died. Afterward, he left L.A. and returned home to Cambridge. He thought, Fuck it! If that’s what I gotta do to rise up in the pecking order of these fucking idiot young actors, then I don’t care anymore. I’m killing myself. It was six months before he was ready to even think about another picture.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 42
