In 1997, Redford again disappeared from Sundance, this time to direct and star in The Horse Whisperer. The Horse Whisperer was co-produced by his feature film company, Wildwood, which had also been involved with Soderbergh’s King of the Hill and Redford’s own Quiz Show. Wildwood was run by Rachel Pfeffer, late of Castle Rock, whose claim to fame was that she had been executive producer of that company’s hit Tom Cruise vehicle, A Few Good Men. Pfeffer was apparently not a favorite of Redford’s. He was characteristically and unfailingly punctilious toward her—he would never raise his voice nor utter a harsh word to her face—but he constantly complained about her behind her back, saying things like, “Wildwood is such a mess, I have to do something about it.” But he never did. Instead, he acted as though she didn’t exist. His office scheduled meetings at half-hour intervals beginning mid-morning. However, he rarely drove his Acura down from his home in Malibu to his office on Montana, in Santa Monica, until one or two in the afternoon, at which point there would be a waiting room full of supplicants who had been cooling their heels for hours. By that time, Pfeffer, who, after all, ran his company, was frantic to see him. Her office faced the front door. But Redford sometimes used the rear entrance, slipping in and shutting his door so that she never knew he had arrived. After it dawned on her that he was in fact in the building, she would beg his longtime assistant, Donna Kail, “I gotta talk to Bob, I only need five minutes with him.” Kail would reply, politely, “Okay, I’ll tell him,” but he would eventually leave—through the back door. Says a former Redford employee, “Why didn’t he just fire Rachel when he said he wanted to? That was a pattern with everything: it would take forever. People were always asking him for things, and you knew the answer was going to be no, but instead of him just saying no, he would always say, ‘Hold on, I’m not sure,’ and then these people would call back later and say, ‘Well?’ And you’d say, ‘He’s not sure.’ And then the process would get dragged out, and these people would be strung along forever.”
In the third week of August 1997, Redford announced another ambitious and long-cherished initiative, a deal with General Cinema Corporation, which owned theaters in twenty-five states, to create Sundance Cinemas, a chain of movie houses devoted to indie film. Thanks in part to the institute’s own success, and abetted by a booming economy, there seemed to be more than enough money to finance indie films; if anything, there was a glut on the market, making for fierce competition for screens. The days when a film could sit in one theater for weeks and build an audience through good reviews and word of mouth were long gone. With the chains consolidating, theaters traditionally devoted to indies were being bought up or squeezed out. Exhibition had become a bottleneck, potentially limiting the growth of the audience for specialty films.
Redford envisioned the construction of a chain of theaters in the U.S. and even internationally over the next decade, with work to start on the first few as soon as possible. The theaters, to be designed by top architects, were intended to be satellite Sundances, oases of film culture amidst suburban popcorn deserts, replete with piazza-like open spaces in which filmgoers could sit and talk, debating the fine points of the latest Coen brothers film; restaurants serving healthy food; art galleries; video facilities; space for panels and lectures; and last but not least, an (independent) bookstore. Think New York’s Film Forum or Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive designed by Frank Gehry, catered by Alice Waters, programmed by Gilmore or Richard Pena of the New York Film Festival, with L.A.’s Book Soup next door. It was typical Redford: visionary and inspired, and it would have been wonderful—had it worked.
Redford’s attitude toward any co-venture was that the potential partners should be thrilled to participate. What that meant in practice was that Sundance would supply the stardust, and the partner would supply the cash. But, according to Gary Meyer, one of the founders of Landmark Theaters, the pioneering art house chain, whom Redford had hired as a consultant, “Getting General Cinema in there as a partner was a big mistake.” Many of its theaters were either inconveniently located for the patrons of art films, or in such poor shape that it would have taken as much money to renovate them as it would have to start from scratch. Sundance had a golden opportunity to buy Landmark instead. Says Meyer, “If they had, they would have been instantly in business with a successful company, 150 screens, and a management team in place, ready to go. By the time they finally decided to buy Landmark, they were literally two days too late. Silver Cinema bought it. And that was the case throughout the history of it, which is that everything [Sundance did] wound up being too late. If you’re traveling around the world making movies, like Redford, it’s pretty hard to be there to hear a plan or see a location. But he’s a control guy, he wanted to be involved in those things. That meant that everybody had to stop and wait until he got back.”
At one point, they had the chance to redo a General Cinema multiplex in Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City, in an area that was under-screened, with lots of parking and an adjacent building available for the café and whatever else Sundance wanted to pluck out of its goody bag. Meyer, realizing that it was a perfect location, exclaimed, “Man, let’s grab this place right now.” But Gordon Bowen, Redford’s pooh-bah du jour, had to approve the site too. According to Meyer, he said, “No, there’s a Borders bookstore across the parking lot. We don’t want to be anywhere near a chain,” and they passed on it. Meyer adds, “Bowen may have known something about branding, but he knew nothing about the business that Bob wanted to get into and he wasn’t willing to learn. Clearview took it over, and they’re running it today as a successful art house.” (Clearview is the exhibition arm of Redford’s bête noir, IFC.)
In the same way that the institute was now run by a man with no background in film, and the Sundance Channel was launched by two executives similarly clueless, so the cinema project began, bizarrely, without anyone who knew anything about exhibition, let alone indie exhibition. “What really killed it was some of the people who got hired to actually run the business,” says Meyer. “Doofuses!’ ” Redford always described himself as an artist jock, and he hired a former football player named Bill Freeman who worked for ESPN Zone. Freeman was a restaurant guy. Says Meyer, “Freeman thought because he’d created ESPN Grill, Fuddruckers, and a bunch of other pieces of shit, that he knew everything. Freeman didn’t want anybody who knew anything about the business around, because he didn’t want anybody to know more than he did.”
Ground was actually broken at two sites, one in Portland, Oregon, the other in Philadelphia. Portland already had a perfectly good art house. Instead of opening a dialogue with the community, Sundance just came in and started building, a competitor, rather than a partner. “It was arrogant,” says a former staffer. Like out-of-control movie productions, the construction on both theaters immediately fell behind, while Redford complained that design-wise, they were not what he intended. Concludes Meyer, “The stuff Redford wanted to do was fantastic. Anybody who loved movies would have said, ‘This is where I’m gonna spend as many nights a week as I can.’ But unfortunately, he didn’t look at the bottom line. His scheme was too grand for the reality of the business world.”
AS LONG AGO as 1993, in the aftermath of the Disney deal, skeptics wondered whether the Weinsteins would turn out to be as effective developing and producing films as they were acquiring them. Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Scream, Good Will Hunting (and later, Shakespeare in Love), all picked up in turnaround, did little to answer the question. Or maybe they did: perhaps the answer was, Harvey didn’t need to develop and produce. “The movies that Harvey has done well with have not been developed by Miramax,” says Cathy Konrad. “They were labored on at other studios for endless years, with a lot of money and a lot of passion, and he came in when he could get them cheap.” Harvey let the studios do the heavy lifting while he reaped the rewards. He had become Hollywood’s most skilled ambulance chaser.
But there wasn’t enough in turnaround to fill a forty-film slate. As M
iramax increasingly turned toward production in the second half of the decade, it did more and more of its own development. But, says Lechner, “Harvey is not as interested in development itself. He is not someone who goes out and plants a seed and waters it every year, and is willing to take ten years to let it grow into a healthy tree. He comes out of an acquisitions background, and the closer it is to being a finished film, the more excited he gets about it and the easier it is to sell it to him. The next easiest is a half-completed film, and the next easiest a screenplay with elements attached.”
Moreover, Harvey is not a patient man. He doesn’t have the temperament for development; he likes his gratification quick and cheap. He always boasted, “We don’t develop movies. We make them.” It was true, and it was a problem. “My biggest frustration as a producer with that company was that they were really bad at development,” says Konrad. “So either you found something that you could shoot right away, or you didn’t make anything.” Adds Paul Webster, “Harvey is not the best developer in the world, and he’s not good on script. When I made The Tall Guy, which Miramax distributed, on the very first day of principal photography, Harvey sent me and the director the same present—Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen’s When the Shooting Stops the Cutting Begins. In other words, his message was, ‘I’m gonna be there at the end.’ Nothing’s changed.”
When he did develop, the results were often dismal. Take 54. Webster brought Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights—a dark, downbeat exploration of L.A.’s porn underground—to Harvey in the late summer of 1995. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Miramax had just emerged, bruised and battered from the Priest/Kids fracases and, with or without an assist from Michael Eisner, Harvey was determined to avoid future dustups. Still, Webster walked into Weinstein’s office determined to take full advantage of the fifteen minutes he had to make his pitch. “This is fantastic, this is a great script,” he began, before Meryl Poster interrupted him. She said, “Harvey, don’t even read it, it’s disgusting, it’s about pornography.” Weinstein replied, “Oh, it sounds obscene, I don’t want to do it.” Webster recalls, “She was one of the few people that Harvey always listened to, and she has very sentimental taste, very soft. It was the porno thing that made him reject it out of hand. Harvey never read the script. Those controversial films don’t make much money, and the direction of the company through the period I was there up to now was toward doing much more commercial stuff.” (Boogie Nights was ultimately produced by New Line to great acclaim.)
54, on the other hand, was regarded by Miramax as Boogie Nights Lite. Written by Mark Christopher, just out of Columbia film school, it was a script about the glory days of Studio 54 in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was the epicenter of the gay cultural explosion in New York City. The script was full of raunchy sex and not-so-nice characters. It is the tale of Shane, a kid from New Jersey who sleeps his way to the top of the 54 pecking order, which means that he becomes one of the shirtless bartenders for which the club was notorious, golden boys who flexed and preened for the clientele of both sexes, occasionally deigning to grant sexual favors in return for money or drugs.
54 was just the script to bring out the worst in Miramax. It contained all the elements Harvey used to like—it was sexy, transgressive, and hip—but now these virtues had become vices—they scared him—creating a fatal ambivalence. In the gay community, Harvey was regarded with some suspicion, despite his very visible support of organizations like GLAAD and amfAR. A lot of people thought he was homophobic—there were only a handful of openly gay employees at Miramax—and the word on the street was that any gay-themed project would have a tough time there. Harvey had insisted on cutting a coda from Flirting with Disaster showing two guys in bed. “There was always a little question about homosexual content in Miramax movies,” says Mark Tusk, his out-of-the-closet acquisitions executive. “Harvey and Bob weren’t really homophobic, they just felt more comfortable around people they could watch the Super Bowl with. Harvey’s a guy’s guy. And when they realized that it was a niche audience, and that there was money to be made, they grinned and bore it.” But in the grip of a dream come true, the filmmakers put their fears aside. After all, everyone knew Christopher was gay, the script was filled with gay material. Miramax was the fearless company that released Paris Is Burning, Priest, this, that. What could go wrong?
Trouble came quickly, disguised as good fortune. The filmmakers knew it was a tough, uncompromising script that was not for everybody and not particularly commercial. It was aimed at a young, sophisticated urban audience. For that reason, they wanted to keep the budget down, $4 million. But Miramax wanted a bigger movie at double the budget, $8 million. The filmmakers feared that a bigger budget would necessitate a bigger marketing push to attract a bigger audience to pay back Miramax for the bigger budget and bigger marketing push. A bigger audience would necessitate script changes to broaden the film’s appeal, as well as “casting up” the picture. But more money is more money, and this was Christopher’s first feature. Like Jim Mangold, he found it hard to say no. Christopher met Harvey, who, as he always does when he comes a-wooing, told him everything he wanted to hear, that he loved the script, and added something like, “We’ll do it by Christmas.”
Indeed, at the beginning, everything went smoothly. Christopher had the benefit of good producers—Dolly Hall, who had just finished Lisa Cholodenko’s extraordinary High Art, and Ira Deutchman, who had exited Fine Line and was trying his hand at producing. While Harvey’s career had flourished, Deutchman’s had had its ups and downs, and although there was a time, during the dark days of the early 1990s, when Harvey was feeling so defeated he asked Deutchman to take over his company, he now treated him with condescension. Deutchman was somebody he’d left behind. For his part, Deutchman seemed to be looking to Harvey for some sign of respect.
Christopher also had the benefit of the Weinsteins’ development and production teams. But what was Miramax’s golden talent bank one minute became Miramax’s revolving door the next. First Jonathan King left, who had brought in 54 in the first place. Alan Sabinson was brought in over Webster and Lechner. His story became famous within the company. He had sterling credentials, was working as VP of original programming at TNT in Los Angeles when the brothers approached him. Sabinson was happy where he was and knew he would not be a good fit with the Weinsteins. He told them, in essence, that he wasn’t like them, he was a nice guy with few enemies, and he probably wouldn’t fit in. They replied, “That’s exactly what we want. We want to soften our image.” Against his better judgment, he uprooted his family, his wife and two young children, and relocated to New York, with a three-year contract. As it turned out, Sabinson was right. The brothers didn’t like him. Harvey would set him impossible tasks, like convincing Kevin Spacey to trim Albino Alligator after Harvey himself had given Spacey final cut. There was no way the actor was going to listen to Sabinson, and when the executive reported this to Harvey, he shouted, “You’re a fuckin’ moron, an idiot. What am I paying you for? Get outta my office, I don’t want to see you here, you’re a piece of shit.” The Weinsteins quickly decided to get rid of him. Remembers Webster, “The poor guy was literally tortured. I witnessed him being slaughtered on a cross-country plane trip. Belittled. Harvey completely disregarded anything he said.”
Eventually, Sabinson gave up, but he wanted them to settle his contract. They didn’t feel like it. When he insisted, they threatened, “We will torture you, and it will be sport for us! We’ll wake up every day and go, How do we make your life miserable? We will keep you in Hong Kong, you’ll be on planes all the time, flying all over the world, you’ll never see your family.” Sabinson believed them and resigned. Says marketing VP Mark Gill, who watched it all go down, “It was a kill or be killed environment, and he was never a person who wanted to kill, so he got killed all day long. The guy was target practice.”
Then Webster left, in 1997, to head Film Four in England. Sabinson was succeeded by Poster, who was qu
ickly moving up through the ranks. Deutchman was fired, and 54 fell into Lechner’s lap. Miramax battled Christopher over the casting. The most important role was Shane, the kid from New Jersey. The filmmakers wanted to use an unknown, but Poster objected, shrieking into the phone, “We need to cast someone we can book on Leno, on Letterman!” Finally, they settled on Ryan Phillippe, a relative newcomer. Salma Hayek was cast as the female leg of the triangle. Continues the source, “Then we got Neve Campbell shoved down our throats. She is one of the nicest gals you would ever want to know, but she can’t act her way out of a paper bag with a flashlight. She makes Salma Hayek look like Meryl Streep.” Campbell had appeared in Scream. Harvey used to say to actors like Campbell, “Work for Dimension and you’ll make your payday, then work for me on a labor of love.” Her presence virtually guaranteed a big TV sale, so that even if the movie tanked theatrically, they wouldn’t lose money. “It was more of a studio mentality—familiar faces,” says Lechner. But Campbell’s part was small, and the filmmakers figured they could live with her. And, in a stroke of good luck, Mike Myers, fresh from Austin Powers, agreed to play Steve Rubell. It was a great part, gave him a shot at a serious role, allowed him to stretch. When Myers signed up, Harvey green-lit the movie.
NO MATTER HOW MUCH the press touted October as the “new Miramax,” it was still a small New York company whose successes—infinitesimal by Weinstein standards—were directed by relatively obscure foreign filmmakers from England, Denmark, and elsewhere. McGurk thought October could use a new Amir Malin. Not someone who could squeeze nickels and dimes out of the library, but an impact player who could help take the company to the “next level.” There was a guy at Miramax McGurk knew well. He’d be perfect, McGurk thought. His name was Scott Greenstein.
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