Greenstein’s deal with Miramax had expired, and he was dying to leave. There was no room for him to move up, and he was the target of nonstop abuse. But the brothers were apparently under the impression that they were negotiating with Greenstein to renew his contract, while he was using the skills he learned at Miramax to job-hunt. Says Bill Mechanic, “Scott came to see me at Fox, told me he was the third Weinstein, wanted me to fire Lindsay Law, who was head of Fox Searchlight, he should have Lindsay’s job, and all that. That was the end of the conversation. He obviously went back to Harvey—or however it got back to Harvey—and said I offered him a job, which I didn’t, and I got one of those calls from Harvey, ‘How fuckin’ dare you steal our people . . .’ I said, ‘You’re being played.’ ”
Claiming he had an offer from Mechanic, Greenstein had also been knocking on Universal’s door, where he got a warmer welcome. “Scott is a good dealmaker, he’s got a real nose for talent, he’s a good publicist, there are real things he brings to the party,” says McGurk. “It made sense on paper. We were taking somebody who was the number three guy at this company that had increased its value tenfold over ten years, so he must know what the hell he’s doing.” Since Ray and Schmidt liked and trusted McGurk, when McGurk said, “Look, meet this guy, he’d be good for you. His contract is coming up, he’s gonna be a free man, other outfits are all over him,” they agreed to see him.
Greenstein was terrified that the Weinsteins would discover that he was talking to October, so on a weekend in June he drove up to Riverdale to meet with Ray and Schmidt in Schmidt’s kitchen. Ray tried to recall what he’d heard about Greenstein. He says, “He was Harvey’s hatchet man, ball-buster, dirty guy, like, Harvey doesn’t want to lower the boom on some folks, Scott was the hammer.”
Ray got there early. He wanted to figure out what kind of questions to ask, wondered how truthful they could expect Greenstein to be. He was apprehensive, didn’t want to make a mistake with him the way he had with Malin. He had expressed his doubts to McGurk, who thought he was asking too many questions and had too many impressions, he didn’t want to process that much information. He just wanted him to do what he wanted him to do. He said, “Stahhhp! Stahhhp! Meet this fucking guy. I want you to like him.”
Greenstein drove up in a big, black GMC Yukon, chrome wheels. He was casually dressed. Schmidt made coffee, listened. Greenstein asked, “What have you heard about me?” Ray replied, “This is what I’ve heard . . .” Explaining away his role at Miramax, Greenstein essentially told them, It’s unfair to call me the hatchet guy. I was cleaning up Harvey’s and Bob’s messes. I was the peacemaker. I was the one, when there was a problem, who tried to patch it up. He flattered them, claimed they were a burr under Harvey’s saddle, but said nothing weird or offputting. Ray wanted him to be obsequious and fawning, an easy-to-say-no-to asshole, a Uriah Heep, but he wasn’t. On Monday, Ray called McGurk, who asked, “So you guys hooked up, whaddya think?” Ray replied, unenthusiastically, “He seems okay, you can’t tell after one meeting, John thinks you never know about a guy until you work with him.” They called some people, did some homework. The report came back, he’s in an unfortunate situation, the third Weinstein, he’s really a good guy and he’s not a film guy, won’t get in your hair, and so on. He was the hatchet man for two hatchet men, so nobody could separate the hatchets from the men, what Greenstein did at Miramax from what the Weinsteins made him do. Still, Ray and Schmidt were filled with misgivings. They wanted to run October themselves, they didn’t want another Malin. Says Schmidt, “Based on McGurk’s comfort with it, we signed off on it.” They were going to try to make it Enemies—A Love Story, but it would turn out to be more like Sleeping with the Enemy.
Meanwhile, there was work to be done, films to acquire and produce. A few weeks earlier, Ray and Schmidt had gotten a script from Killer Films and Good Machine called Happiness, to be directed by Todd Solondz. Sony Classics had done extremely well with Solondz’s previous film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. It had grossed $4.7 million—so much for Hollywood’s fatwa against unsympathetic characters—and Solondz had been widely praised as an original talent. Solondz is short and slight. His voice rises and falls in a high-pitched, singsong cadence that is not unpleasing, although comparisons with Woody Allen are inevitable, and he dresses the role, geek chic, which is to say, slightly retro, with yellow socks and argyle sweater vests. A receding hairline has left him with a high forehead, and he wears industrial-strength glasses with heavy, black frames, behind which his eyes swim like guppies in a fishbowl, giving him a bewildered, lost look. He doesn’t like to make eye contact, and his characteristic expression is a slight frown, as if he senses a headache coming on or has taken a bite out of something bitter. Solondz looks like someone out of a Wes Anderson film, The Royal Tenenbaums, perhaps, although colder, more calculating and self-protective than Anderson’s hapless heroes.
Solondz grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, which he regarded at the time as “the ugliest place on the planet, the embodiment of banality, an aesthetic void,” until he realized that almost everywhere else in America was the same. Talking about his childhood, he has said, makes him “sick.” The son of a builder, he recalls his parents planting an imperfect privet hedge that failed to grow together and thus never quite managed to shut out the neighbors. He’s still obsessive about his privacy, screens calls, doesn’t like to be photographed. He sees a lot of movies, hates pretty much everything, is competitive with his peers. Pace his goofy, dazed, and confused demeanor, however, Solondz is as tough, wily, and as controlling as directors with longer track records and far greater success. Even his age comes as a surprise. Despite his adolescent look, he was thirty-seven when he made Happiness.
At NYU film school, Solondz made a short that got him a three-picture deal at Fox. Fox wanted him to direct Revenge of the Nerds II. Needless to say, he declined. Instead, he came back to New York and made a film whose title seems to sum up his world view, Fear, Anxiety, and Depression, which he hated so much he gave up filmmaking, only to return in 1995 with Dollhouse. Solondz’s unprepossessing appearance and clumsiness at sports made him a classic shnook, and he transformed the pain of his own adolescence into a biting, often unforgiving Diane Arbus–like vision of middle-class America at century’s end, way darker than Kevin Smith and Hal Hartley, the other leading practioners of the East Coast mall school. Next to Solondz’s theater of cruelty, Alexander Payne’s Election or Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl or even Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World and Paul Thomas Anderson’s surreal visions of the San Fernando Valley seem benign. In short, in an era of feel-good, over-the-rainbow uplift, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and smiley faces like Sandra Bullock, Solondz makes feel-bad films. In the indie coal mine, Solondz is the canary. So long as someone whose voice is as dystopian as his can continue to be heard, there’s still hope.
The Happiness script had been making the rounds of distributors, but with its masturbation scenes and not altogether unsympathetic treatment of pederasty, everyone realized it would have to go out unrated or NC-17, and that made them nervous. (Even the Farrelly brothers—There’s Something About Mary—called Happiness “sick.”) They all said, “You gotta get rid of that child sex thing.” Solondz didn’t even bother with Miramax, because word that Harvey was no longer interested in controversial material had finally leaked out.
Ray and Schmidt had chased Dollhouse after it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance the previous year, and even though they lost it to Sony Classics, they thought that they had connected with Solondz. He told them, says Schmidt, that he “didn’t like Amir,” and that was the reason Dollhouse didn’t go their way. The two men read the script of Happiness immediately and loved it. It was dark, almost painful—and nearly impossible to get made. But anticipating difficulty getting an American distributor, Good Machine’s David Linde—he had moved over from Miramax in 1997—had already covered half the budget by selling foreign rights. Ray’s reaction was, “This is right up our street, exactly the
kind of film we should be financing, let’s go get it.” October sent the script over to Universal, which approved it. October told the Happiness folks, “The rating will not be a problem for us. We have total autonomy from Universal in what we want to do.” Later, someone quipped, “The one mistake October made when Universal told them that they had total autonomy was they actually believed it!”
Like Ray, Christine Vachon was a fan of Dollhouse. “It was one of the few movies that I’d seen that I wished I had produced,” she says. She had called Solondz, and invited him to lunch at the Time Cafe, near the Killer Films office, one day during the summer of 1996. At the end of the lunch, Solondz told her that he wanted her to produce his next film, which turned out to be Happiness—with Ted Hope at Good Machine. According to Vachon, October approved a $5 million budget, with Patricia Arquette attached to play the Cynthia Stevenson role, the child molester’s wife. But Arquette abruptly dropped out in June because her mother was sick. “The next day, Ted and I woke up to an extremely skittish October,” Vachon says. “These were the same people who’d said in Cannes, ‘We want to be in the Todd Solondz business. We don’t care who’s in this movie.’ Suddenly, it was all about who was in the movie.”
The script went out to twelve to fifteen actors to play the part of the pederast, including Jeff Bridges, William Hurt, Gary Sinise, John Goodman, and Bill Pullman. Uniformly, the reaction was, “It’s compelling and interesting material, BUT—” “A but as big as Mount fuckin’ Rushmore,” says Ray, as in, “I’m a father myself, a father first and an actor second.” Each one took weeks to decide, and Solondz wanted to start production on August 1. He couldn’t get a straight answer out of October regarding the casting, and he began to feel the movie turning to sand and sifting through his fingers. Malin was still around, a lame duck. Says Vachon, “When we were dicking around going out to every A list star that existed, Amir was the one who gave us a figure,” says Vachon. In desperation, Solondz finally asked, “How much will you let me make this movie for and not have to worry about this nonsense?” Malin instantly said, “Two point two million.” Solondz replied, “Fine, then that’s what I want to do.” Continues Vachon, “Amir had a terrible reputation, but my feeling was that his assholeness was right there in front of you, which I’m fine with. Besides, I had enormous respect for Bingham, and I figured whatever was going on in this unholy alliance, Bingham would protect us.”
Malin, according to Schmidt, “didn’t want to leave. He called McGurk, and he said, ‘I’m haunted by what I did. You’ve got to undo this.’ McGurk replied, ‘I can’t. You did what you did.’ ” Greenstein joined October on August 14, 1997. It became clear very quickly that his exit from Miramax left a wound that was anything but clean and bloodless. When Harvey found out that the third brother, his lord high executioner and favorite punching bag, had wriggled under the wire and enlisted with a competitor, he nearly had the coronary everyone was expecting. Says one former Miramax executive, “I’m surprised that they let him get away. He didn’t just know where the bodies were buried, he put them there. It was a real personal affront to Harvey when he left.” According to Variety, Weinstein locked him out of his office and had him escorted from the building by security, which forced him to spend his last week working from home. As Ray describes it, “When Greenstein came over to join us, it was open war for eight months. Any defection from Harvey is a big deal. If you’re a lowly little grunnybug, he gets pissed off. But if you’re living in his pants for four years and the CFO—he gets nuts.”
Right away, the phone on Schmidt’s desk lit up as if it were on fire. It was Harvey, who, according to Ray and Schmidt, unleashed a baroquely inventive stream of profane taunts and threats, causing Schmidt to hold the phone at arm’s length. He remembers, “Harvey just screamed obscenities and idiotic comments for forty-five minutes at the top of his lungs, things like, ‘Our missiles are aimed at you! The rockets will be launched! You won’t know what hit you! You open a film, we’ll open three. We will put you out of business.’ ” It was too good not to share. Schmidt put down the phone on his desk and went to find Ray, shouting, “You gotta come in here, you gotta come in here right now.” Ray recalls, “Standing in the door of John’s office, you could hear Harvey yelling through the phone. He said things like, ‘We’re gonna bury you, Schmidt! That equity in your company that you love so much is not going to be worth shit. We’re gonna take that company and we’re going to fuckin’ destroy it piece by piece. If you have one talented person there, I’m gonna raid you, and I’m gonna steal everyone you’ve got that you like there, and in two weeks you won’t have a fuckin’ company. And after we fuckin’ bury your piece of shit fucking company, when you climb out of the rubble of what used to be October, John, then you can come crawling back on your hands and knees here and then maybe Bob and I will think, We like John, we’ll give him his old job back. And Bingham, you worthless piece of shit, you think you’re good at anything? Fuck you. You suck, I could blow you away with one of my weakest farts.’ ”
McGurk had always been loyal to the Weinsteins. He championed them to Disney executives like Dick Cook, who hated them, and he was then in the midst of lobbying Universal to sell them Shakespeare in Love. All of this counted for nothing. Bob called McGurk, threatened to break his legs, said he’d never work in this town again. As producer Larry Meistrich observed, the Weinsteins are all about leverage, and they cleverly provided entry-level slots for the children of some of their friends—Anthony Minghella and director John Madden among them—a practice that smacked equally of generosity and hostage taking. At the time Greenstein defected, Universal chairman Frank Biondi’s daughter was working at Miramax as an intern. Biondi says that Bob threatened to throw her out on the street. Greenstein was petrified of his former bosses. According to Susan Glatzer, who ran October’s West Coast office, “I’ve never seen him afraid of anyone except Harvey and Bob. At the Gotham Awards, he was terrified he was going to run into them.”
Whereas Malin had operated in the shadows, avoiding premieres in favor of an evening at home with the wife and kids, Greenstein was a party animal, a backslapper and gladhander. Whereas Ray and Schmidt ran a casual, low-key operation—they prided themselves on taking the subway to screenings uptown, sort of a guerrilla mentality—Greenstein insisted on a limo and a driver, the way Bob and Harvey did it. “I could see where it was going,” Ray says. “It was the Miramaxization of October. And I was an immediate and extremely vocal opponent.”
Every September, the indie world flocks to Toronto for the film festival. The hot film that year, the film that no one had seen—no rushes, no rough cut, no twenty-minute reel—was The Apostle, written and directed by Robert Duvall. Duvall was—or pretended to be—a real cracker, and he was fascinated with things redneck, like charismatic preachers. The Apostle was the story of a flamboyant man of the cloth—the big house, flashy white Cadillac, expensive white suits, patent leather shoes—struggling with his demons. A tortured soul, part con man, part man of God, with one eye on Jesus and the other on the ladies, he had a streak of violence that ran down his back like an interstate highway. Duvall had written himself a great part, and he was desperate to make the movie.
But he was having trouble getting financing. The endless, 160 page script, full of eye-glazing fire-and-brimstone sermons, was not likely to quicken pulses in the movie business, and it had been making the rounds in L.A. and New York for thirteen years, to companies like Miramax, even October, with no takers. Duvall was represented by the Morris Agency. One day, Cassian Elwes was sitting around with Duvall, his agent, Todd Harris, and Duvall’s lawyer. Elwes told Duvall, “I think you should put the money in yourself.” He felt a kick under the table coming from the direction of Harris, who gave him a look that said, Cassian, that’s the dumbest thing an agent can say to a client. We’ll lose the fucking guy. But Elwes had committed himself, and he blithely continued, convincing Duvall that he could make the money back in foreign sales alone. Duvall thought about it, d
ecided Elwes was right. The Apostle became an all-Duvall show; the actor wrote the script, played the lead, and paid for the movie, to the tune of $5 million.
The new October team went up to Toronto, their purses fat with Universal coin, eager to make a killing. Despite his misgivings, Ray was putting the best face on the Greenstein situation. Cary Woods bumped into him there, said, “Bingham, let me give you a little hint: Watch your back!” and mimed getting stabbed in the back. Ray brushed him off: “Oh, no, you’ve got it wrong, everything’s working out great.” Privately, however, he wasn’t so sanguine. “There were flagpoles upon flagpoles of red flags going up, one after the other,” he recalls. “And Toronto was the place where there was one too many fuckin’ flagpoles.”
There were enough agendas colliding in Toronto in 1997 to have flummoxed a session of the United Nations Security Council. In Greenstein’s mind, The Apostle was the film Harvey wanted to buy, because his spies at Miramax had told him so. As Eamonn Bowles puts it, “Scott was trying to get out from under his former bosses and prove himself on his own. If they were interested in something, he was automatically interested in it. He had an incentive to beat Miramax.” Although Greenstein was not famous for reading scripts, and if he had read any of The Apostle, he most likely had not read all of it, Ray had read it twice, and didn’t like it. He thought, Being a godless individual, this kind of Middle American Bible-thumping stuff is not really me. Regional American shit doesn’t play well foreign. Sling Blade did not play well foreign. So right from the start, he and Greenstein were on a collision course. Elwes, who was repping the film in Toronto, had his own potential nightmare. He was competing against himself, his big score on Sling Blade the year before, and, having encouraged Duvall to finance the film himself, he now had to make sure that at the very least, the actor got his money back or risk losing his agency a good client. Harvey was a wild card. He wanted The Apostle, and he also wanted to screw Greenstein, which he could do either by outbidding him for the film, or driving the price up so high that Greenstein could never make a profit on it. And last but not least, instead of being grateful to the man who had given him the inside track on Sling Blade, he doubtless blamed Elwes for making him look bad by inducing him to overpay for it. So he may have been out to settle that score as well.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 45
