Luckily, Damon’s agent sent Good Will Hunting out just at the time the town was in a frenzy over spec scripts. Everything screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) put his name to was fetching millions of dollars. Eventually, using the proverbial smoke and mirrors, the agent created a bidding war over the screenplay. “The first thing we found out was somebody wanted to buy it for $25,000,” Damon recalls. “We were like, ‘We’re fuckin’ rich!’ ” Quickly, the price escalated. Linklater had a deal with Castle Rock and at his urging, Damon and Affleck accepted their offer of $600,000 in November 1994. Recalls Damon, “We were broke. That money changed our lives.” They even got their pictures on the front page of Daily Variety.
Affleck had just broken up with his girlfriend and was sleeping on Damon’s couch in his tiny apartment on Curson in West Hollywood. It was, “We need an advance, man, we gotta move outta this apartment, it’s too small,” he recalls. They found a bigger place on Glencoe Way, off Highland near the Hollywood Bowl. Affleck continues, “But we didn’t have any credit, so in lieu of credit, we took the copy of Variety to the landlord, pointed to our pictures, and said, ‘See we’re good for the money, these checks are coming.’ ”
But the boys felt like their car had stalled at Castle Rock. Says Affleck, “We developed the script for a year there, which seemed like ten years. Things were going sideways in a big way. We went from euphoria to finding out how fast you can spend $600,000.”
Each one got $300,000, down to $150,000 after taxes, down to $135,000 after the agents took their cuts. They bought matching $35,000 Jeep Cherokees. Affleck continues, “Top-of-the-line, the Sport Pac, because we were rich, right? With the leather, the CD player—‘I want the kind that goes, “Whoop, whoop!” when you try the key.’ We both wanted the same car, the black one. We knew this was just wayyy too Ace and Gary—the sketch on Saturday Night Live, the two guys, superhero pals but obviously gay, ride motorcycles together—we can’t have the same car, it’s too his-and-his, but neither one of us wanted to back down, so we flipped. Matt won, he got the black one, mine was green. Once I realized that other guys were going, ‘Soo, you guys both have the same car?’ it was worse than hisand-his, it was his-and-hers!”
The place on Glencoe Way became party central, Animal House. “Our million buddies instantly moved in with us, because it was high times on the hog,” Affleck goes on. “We spent all the money buying beer and playing poker, and we would play video games and stay up until the wee hours. A guy named Bubba lived with us, and one time he just got up from the poker table, leaned over the balcony, vomited, and sat back down. It wasn’t really a drug scene, it was a heavy drinking scene, because that was the way we grew up in Boston, you’d go out and drink all the time, mostly beer. When everybody turned twenty-five, all of a sudden we’re all twenty pounds heavier than we used to be and we all bought treadmills.”
Damon and Affleck were getting impatient. The two writers suspected the Castle Rock guys were not even reading what they’d been giving them. In one draft they put in a scene where the “Harvey Keitel” character, a psychiatrist, gives Damon’s character, Will Hunting, a blowjob in his office. Recalls Affleck, “Nobody at Castle Rock ever said anything to us about it, and we were like, ‘All right, I guess the blowjob scene works.’ It was demoralizing.” The screenwriters thought the script was there, but they were getting the three-billy-goat treatment. It was always, “The next draft, the next draft you’ll get a director.” Finally, one day, the song changed to, “Congratulations, we’re gonna make the movie.”
“Great! We have a list of directors we’re gonna go to,” They had in mind their favorites, Scorsese, Coppola, Redford, Gus Van Sant, Martin Brest, Peter Weir. They figured they would all pass, but you gotta try, right?
“Don’t worry, we’re not gonna need to go to directors. Good news, Andy Scheinman wants to do it!”
“Whaddya mean, Andy wants to do it? You told us we could go to directors.” They didn’t even know Scheinman, one of the Castle Rock partners, was a director. They thought that he was Reiner’s producer.
“Watch Andy’s movie.”
Andy’s movie was called Little Big League, a kids’ picture, not exactly what they had in mind. Both Damon and Affleck were fans of a novel by Cormac McCarthy called All the Pretty Horses. In it there’s a scene where a thirteen-year-old kid named Blevins gets his horse stolen, rides into a strange town to find the thief armed with a pistol bigger than he is, and gets himself killed. One of the other characters observes, by way of a testament, “I’ll say this for ’im, he wasn’t gonna stand by for no sonofabitch hijacking his horse.” Says Affleck, “We knew that we would rather do the movie the way we wanted to do it and fail, than do it somebody else’s way. No sonofabitch was going to hijack our horse!”
Castle Rock put Good Will Hunting in turnaround. “We didn’t know anything about turnaround, but we found out soon enough,” Affleck says. “It was standard practice to bill a lot of other overhead costs against the movie so the turnaround cost to another studio becomes [prohibitive]. The price they were asking was in excess of a million dollars. They gave us thirty days to sell it, after which it reverted to them. Andy would make it and we were gonna forfeit our right to be in it. We’d be lucky if we got tickets to the premiere.” Undoubtedly, Castle Rock regarded this as a ploy to get rid of them. “It had to be bought by somebody who was willing to put me and Ben in those two roles, and fork over $1 million for what looked like a $3 million movie, and it just didn’t make any sense,” adds Damon. “Castle Rock thought that we wouldn’t be able to make the deal, and they were almost right.”
Universal’s Mallrats was released in October 1995. With a budget of $6.1 million, it grossed only $2.1 million and got miserable reviews to boot. “It was yet another ugly disappointing failure that I was involved with,” recalls Affleck. “Anybody in that movie with a line was on the poster. Except for me. I’m sure my character tested the worst. I was the anal rapist, whatever, and Sherman Oaks doesn’t look fondly on anal rapists.” Smith got blasted by his indie peers for “selling out.” At the time, Smith was stung, although now the phrase has a quaint ring to it. It springs from the days, long gone, when indies and their films manned the barricades against Hollywood. Increasingly, through the second half of the decade, the barricades were sold off to make room for condos, and “selling out” lost its meaning. It was Affleck’s view, not Hawke’s, that prevailed. In any event, Smith called Affleck, said, “I think you can play a leading man, nobody’s ever given you the chance. I’m writing a movie for you about a guy who falls in love with a lesbian.” Affleck didn’t believe him, thought, This has gotta be some kind of jerkoff joke. But to Smith, he said, “Well, great, I’ll do it, I’m in!”
With Good Will Hunting in turnaround, the clock was ticking. All the companies that were ready to kill for it the year before passed. As Affleck puts it, “It’s like, you thought you were going to the prom with the girl you really liked, when all of a sudden she drops you, and you’re going back to the girls you said no to.” It began to look like they were trapped in the Hollywood version of Chutes and Ladders, landing back at square one. Affleck continues, “The deadline was approaching, we were getting really depressed, we were three or four years into this thing, and now we were going to be screwed out of our movie. We couldn’t believe it.” But in the best tradition of tinsel town happy endings, just when prospects looked bleakest, the sun broke through the clouds.
In a desperate Hail Mary, Affleck gave the script to Smith, who had indeed written a film for him. After the failure of Mallrats, Smith famously called Harvey and said, “Can I come home now?” He made his deal for Chasing Amy, at Miramax. “Chasing Amy could never have been made at a studio,” says the filmmaker. “At a studio, the boy and the girl would have wound up together at the end, and it would have had a lot less of the harsh subtext, where Ben’s character proposes a three-way with his friend and this girlfriend. The studio would have been, like, ‘Are you high? That’s
ridiculous.’ ” Chasing Amy almost wasn’t made at Miramax either. Executive Meryl Poster called Smith, scolded him for casting Affleck: “This is business, Kevin, it’s not making movies with your friends.” But Smith stood his ground, and for the privilege of making movies with his friends, he had to agree to do it on an astoundingly low budget of $250,000. (When it was released in April 1997 it grossed $12 million, making the Weinsteins a tidy profit. Smith was golden.)
Affleck pleaded with him: “We’re having trouble with Castle Rock. Please, Kevin, you have a deal at Miramax, direct this movie. Please, man!” Smith read it, replied, “I loved it, I cried on the toilet, but I’m not gonna direct it, I don’t want to direct anything I don’t write, I don’t think I’d do a good job, but what I can do, I can walk it into Harvey’s office.”
It was a very long shot. First, Woods had already thrown the script in the wastebasket. Second, Damon and Affleck were wary of Miramax. Recalls Damon, “Everyone warned us, they said, He’s Harvey Scissorhands, he’ll bite your head off.” Their young producer, Chris Moore, who hid a considerable shrewdness under a goofy exterior, told the boys, “What I hear about this guy Weinstein is, you’re going to hear everything you want to hear, and you get off the phone with him and you’ll feel like your life couldn’t be any better, but it remains to be seen what you’ll get.” Says Damon, “True to form, Harvey called up and said every single thing we wanted to hear, which was, ‘I don’t know who the fuck you guys are, but I love this fuckin’ script, Kevin loves it, it’s really fuckin’ good, but this is too much money these guys at fuckin’ Castle Rock want me to shell out, like, it’s Breaking Away? And there’s one thing’—beat—‘you can’t be giving him a fuckin’ blowjob at the office, okay, guys? You think you’re funny, you’re not that fuckin’ funny.’ ” Adds Affleck, “Immediately we loved him. He pulled the trigger.” Within a day of getting the script from Smith, Weinstein offered $1 million for it, with Damon and Affleck attached. He did what he does best—he saw the potential, accepted the risk, met their price, and executed with lightning speed.
From the Miramax side, it looked like another one of Harvey’s foolish impulse buys. “It was tainted goods,” says former Miramax development head Jack Lechner. “You had to commit to let these two unknown actors star in the movie, you had to pay Castle Rock all their costs and then you had to spend another $18 million to make the movie. People thought he was crazy.”
Harvey wanted to tie up Damon and Affleck with options for two future scripts and two acting gigs, for which Damon would be paid $600,000 and $800,000, and Affleck somewhat less, $350,000 and $500,000. Damon’s agent told them, “You don’t have to accept this many options.” But film-makers who are so desperate to make their film that they will do anything, even work for nothing, are like clay in Weinstein’s hands. Damon thought, Well, Jesus, $600,000 is a fortune, way more than I’ve ever been paid, or I probably will ever be paid. If we’re complaining about getting that much money in two years for a movie, then that’s a pretty high-class problem, and shit, I’d like to do every movie for Miramax anyway, because Harvey is the only person crazy enough to buy the script. He told his agent, “We don’t give a shit how many options they want, let’s get this movie made.” With no other offers on the table and about to lose the film to Castle Rock, it was a no-brainer. Says Affleck, “We knew that he supposedly fought with filmmakers, and it wasn’t that we hadn’t seen that side of him—‘You fuckin’ guys, you got your heads up your asses’—but I didn’t mind it, I preferred it to the smiling and shaking hands and fucking you later MO of Hollywood. I liked Harvey, I thought he was funny, I got along with him. Besides, beggars can’t be choosers, and we were jus’ happy dey wanted da boy.” In the fall of 1995, Weinstein bought the script.
Grateful as they were, Damon and Affleck weren’t quite so pliable as Miramax imagined. They had a relationship with Van Sant, whom they both admired. Van Sant had just finished the sensational To Die For when Mark Tusk showed him the Good Will Hunting script. Van Sant loved it. But Harvey didn’t want him. Miramax production head Paul Webster told Harvey, “Harvey, let’s hire him, he’s perfect. He makes movies with good-looking boys very well!” Harvey said, “I don’t think so,” and started looking in earnest. But nobody wanted to do it with two unknowns. Finally it came back to Van Sant—at a quarter of his asking price. Van Sant was nervous. He had talked to Tarantino, who expressed little sympathy for the directors Weinstein had steamrolled, saying, “A lot of these guys, they can’t fight for themselves, they just get pushed around, it serves them right. They’re not standing up to him.” Van Sant thought, Quentin is the type of guy who can stand up to him. I don’t know if I can do that or not. Probably not. He decided to insist on final cut. Harvey refused.
At a meeting in the Tribeca offices, Harvey casually informed Damon and Affleck, “I just want you guys to know we offered the movie to Chris Columbus.” They were stunned. Columbus was an okay director forever enshrined in box office heaven for Home Alone (and later the Harry Potter s) but if it wasn’t going to be Van Sant, the boys wanted a director whose films had played at the Orson Welles in Cambridge, where they had grown up. As Harvey rattled on, saying, “I offered him $5 million to direct, and he almost did it. He read it three times before he passed on it,” Damon interrupted him, said, “Well, you’re lucky, ’cause you would have been out $5 million!” The room fell silent. This was the first time they had ever talked back to him. The Miramax drones looked down at their notepads. As Damon recalls, Harvey went ballistic, shouted, “What? Who the fuck do you think you are? How fuckin’ dare you talk to me like that? You’re a nobody!” Through gritted teeth, Damon replied, “I’m a nobody, but I’m a nobody with director approval.”
Weinstein continued to look in vain for a director, because he wasn’t willing to give away final cut. At one point, Mel Gibson expressed interest. They met at the Four Seasons in New York, Gibson, Damon, Affleck, and Weinstein. According to Affleck, Harvey said to Jon Gordon, yet another of Harvey’s former assistants who was climbing the executive ranks, “Wait in the hall, Jon,” and Gordon did so while the others sat down at the conference table with Gibson. Then Gibson said, “Harvey, I just want to talk to the guys.”
Harvey paused for a minute and said, “I know, I love these guys.”
“No, just me and the guys.”
“Okay, Mel, I understand, no problem, I mean, great,” and he walked out in the hall to wait with Gordon. (According to Miramax, Gordon wasn’t present.) Two weeks later, Gibson passed. Unable to find a director, and doubtless annoyed that the two wannabes were still insisting on Van Sant, Harvey turned his attention to other things. Like releasing The English Patient. “The thing sat for a year,” says Damon. “You could just feel that the heat around the movie had dissipated. It was a horrible time. Our careers were going nowhere. We’d moved back to Boston to get ready to do the movie, it was the season to do it, and Miramax wouldn’t make the deal. We were flipping out.”
Then Damon caught a break, got cast in The Rainmaker, based on a novel by John Grisham. Damon sent Weinstein a fax telling him the news. Harvey called him up, said, “What the hell does that mean?”
“The Coppola movie.”
“The GRISHAM?! Every one of those makes $100 million.”
“Well, I’m gonna do it. I’m gettin’ in my truck and going to Knoxville, man,” where he intended to research his role. Webster had continued to press for Van Sant, and by the time Damon arrived, the next day, Miramax had met the director’s price, a million and a quarter. Good Will Hunting finally got its green light.
Robin Williams had been talking to Van Sant about doing The Mayor of Castro Street, the Harvey Milk story. He liked the Good Will Hunting script and agreed to play the therapist. Bingo! Good Will Hunting was fast-tracked. Recalls Damon, “Once Robin got involved, a lot of the stuff just went so smoothly, because suddenly they had this movie they were making for a price with one of the biggest movie stars around. So they were
thrilled.”
Harvey tried to bump Chris Moore, Damon’s and Affleck’s friend and producer, off the project. He hired Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender, instead. When the two writer-actors protested, he agreed to keep Moore on as associate producer, but the damage had been done. “I love Lawrence,” says Jack Lechner, who was involved in the film on the Miramax side. “He’s a brilliant guy, but he’s not Mr. Tact, and he didn’t kowtow to Gus, and he certainly didn’t kowtow to Matt and Ben, who were not yet Matt and Ben. Lawrence wanted to do more work on the script.” Damon, who had been working on it for over half a decade, shouted, “FUCK OFF, Lawrence, we’re not changing it, it’s good how it is.”
“Well, I called Quentin, and Quentin agreed—”
“Fuck you, I don’t care about Quentin, I don’t think you had anything to do with those movies.” Bender wanted to fire them, give the script to Boaz Yakin (Fresh) for a rewrite. Affleck and Damon threatened to walk, and Weinstein had to choose between the producer and the nobodies. He chose the nobodies. Damon finished shooting The Rainmaker in February 1997. By April, he was in Toronto on the set of Good Will Hunting.
EVER SINCE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Sue Weil had been dumped in 1991, the Sundance institute had functioned without an executive director until the arrival of Ken Brecher, hired in 1997. Brecher was a cultural anthropologist who came out of a museum background and knew nothing about film. Redford seemed to enjoy filling slots with people who had little or no experience to qualify them for whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. It seemed to be a way of keeping Sundance in turmoil and maintaining control over the organization. Although Brecher may have been a film illiterate, he seemed skilled at managing Redford, and he was the first director since Sterling Van Wagenen whose tenure exceeded the life of a fruitfly.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 43
