When all was said and done, Good Will Hunting grossed $138 million domestic and $226 million worldwide, excluding network, cable, and video. With its modest budget of $20 million, the picture was phenomenally profitable for Miramax, one of its most profitable movies to date. Robin Williams had a huge chunk of the first dollar gross, starting at 10 percent and escalating to 25 percent when the film hit $100 million. Van Sant, who received no more than his directing fee, had approximately 2.5 percent of the adjusted gross, increasing to 7.5 percent. “If I was to guess, I’m sure there was a couple of million dollars owed me,” says Van Sant. Replies Harvey, “Van Sant received everything he was entitled to under his contract.”
If Van Sant didn’t see anything from his cut of the adjusted gross, there was no way Damon and Affleck, who only had net points, were going to receive any money. Nevertheless, Affleck was incensed. He says, “The movie had done enormously well by then, but we had gotten an accounting statement that said the movie was $50 million in the red, and it was just like, This is fucked! You had to do some great accounting to hide net profits on that movie.” With his acting fee added to his writing fee, Damon had been paid $650,000, Affleck a little less. Good Will Hunting was a film that Damon conceived, co-wrote, and starred in. While he was working on Rounders, before Good Will Hunting was released, Weinstein called him and Affleck, asked them to meet him at the apartment Damon was renting on Spring Street in lower Manhattan. Harvey said, “All right, guys, you ever seen a million dollars before?”
“No.” They were thinking, Holy shit, he’s gonna give us each a million bucks.
“Here it is, Happy check!” It was two checks for $500,000 each, a million dollars together. He obviously thought, This is gonna make a big impression on these guys. They’ve never seen this kind of money. And it did. They were disappointed, but happy, especially since neither of them had a lot of cash.
It costs a lot to audit, and few are able and willing to go it alone. Van Sant says, “Matt and Ben weren’t interested in auditing. They were in the Miramax camp, so whatever was going on with them was, like, in-house.” Affleck retorts, “Gus is full of shit. He was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll audit.’ We were, ‘Gus, I dunno, man, you never get any money out of these audits, nobody gets net points, the last movie that paid out net points was Three Men and a Baby!’ It was like we were gonna have to pay for the audit and we weren’t going to get anything. Besides, Gus had already made a ton of money off the movie, and he was getting $5 million to direct Psycho.”
Given how much money the Weinsteins made from Damon and Affleck, Harvey could just as well have given them checks for $1 million each or even $2 million each, and still made a fat profit. Five hundred thousand dollars was small change, but Damon doesn’t see it that way. “For two kids from Boston it was huge,” he says. “When you’re in a movie that big, your salary goes way up. Even if he hadn’t given me a bonus check I wouldn’t feel ripped off. Maybe if I had never worked again after that, I would feel, Jesus, I invented something in my garage and a big company patented it and sold it and made all the money. But it wasn’t a one-time thing. I’m still benefiting from that experience.”
Damon went on to get his $800,000 for Rounders, a sum dictated by his Miramax contract, $1 million for The Talented Mr. Ripley, and a big bump up to $5.5 million for All the Pretty Horses. Most often, actors who make a big score double or triple their asking price, and show no particular loyalty to the executive or company who gave them their shot. But by the force of his personality, and his aggressive use of options, Weinstein folded Damon and Affleck into the Miramax “family” (he used to refer to them as his “little brothers”), along with Quentin Tarantino, Gwyneth Paltrow, Wes Craven, and Kevin Smith, and by so doing was able to control their careers—at least in the beginning—and keep their salaries low. Says Damon, “He’ll call me up and say, you’re doing this movie, this is what you’re getting paid, and he knows that he has the relationships with people that they’ll [accept it.] Besides, you can make a deal with Harvey, and business affairs will get everything back.”
It was the old story: they were going to make their payday on the next movie. As Van Sant puts it, “Those guys went from nowhere to everywhere. I went from somewhere to the next step up. Miramax worked hard. I don’t think I would have been nominated without their push. If the film was going to get any nominations at all—it might have gotten three—they made sure it got nine. They get you that, they know it, they want something in return, and what they get in return is not paying [you] any more money. Obviously, it allows them to feel okay about keeping it. Except that it’s a business, and when you think about it as a business, it’s not right. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. It was easier for me to just do another movie than it was to try to get my money out of Miramax.” Most people, like Billy Bob Thornton and Larry Meistrich, who have found themselves in Van Sant’s position feel the same way, and the brothers know it. Still, when Weinstein offered Van Sant a three-picture deal, the director turned it down. “I wanted more independence,” he explains. “I felt like I was going down a road that three years later, I’d come out at the end, having wasted time. Maybe made some money and done some movies, but maybe not the ones I’d wanted. I didn’t want to be Lasse Hallström.”
Adds Affleck, “The exchange is, they’ll spend money promoting the movie, they’ll spend money on an Academy campaign—they’ve had a movie nominated every year—and their reputation is they make better movies. But they’re a nightmare to make a deal with. It’s harder to make deals with them than anywhere else in town. If your movie fails, you can’t make a deal because it’s, ‘Fuck you, you’re a failure,’ and if you’re a success, they want to hang on to it and they’ll fight you tooth and nail anyway. It’s not a place you want to work if you want to get rich. It’s a trade-off. And you know what? You don’t have to work with them. It’s like that scene in Hollywood Shuffle, man, there’s always work at the post office! So yeah, we kinda got screwed, but when it came right down to it—it worked out great for us.”
Still, there was a bitter aftertaste. Affleck and Damon had agreed to appear in their pal Smith’s Dogma, but when Weinstein tried to get the two actors to work for scale, they balked. Affleck recalls, “What pissed me off with Dogma was, I thought, This is where we’re supposed to get a better deal, this is the next movie. We realized that he knew we thought we owed Kevin, and I didn’t like that he was using our friendship with Kevin to get us to do the movie without having to negotiate with us, putting us in a position where he could say, ‘The guys are being difficult, they don’t want to do your movie, Kevin,’ forcing Kevin to call us. First of all, he had options on us, and if they have some leverage they’ll use it. And if they don’t have to pay, they won’t. I was used to it, and I just assumed, if you want to get the money you have to battle like a bastard. So I called him and said, ‘This is bullshit, man, look at how much stuff we’ve done, whoring for the Oscars, this is crazy. You dudes have made so much money off Good Will Hunting, we’re not gonna see any of our net points, we’re gonna have nothing to do with Dogma, we’re not gonna promote it, we’re never gonna work for you again! Unless we’re paid $1 million each. In cash!’ ”
According to Affleck, Harvey got on a plane and showed up in L.A. carrying a Jackie Brown tote bag filled with Monopoly money. It was like, “Here’s your $2 million, you greedy fucks!” Affleck thought he’d actually brought cash, until Weinstein threw the bag at him, yelling, “I’m not gonna give you assholes a bag of fuckin’ cash.” Whipping out checks, he said, “Here’s two million dollars! You fuckin’ happy now? Don’t say I never did anything for you.” The actor adds, “We were happy. We were very happy. I thought we should have asked for four. Who knows, he probably wrote it off by billing it against some other poor guy’s movie.”
Reflects Smith, “Ben is far more business-savvy than Matt. Matty’s more about the art, the performance, he’s a true actor. Ben is more of a movie star, and thinks like a movie
star, and he definitely thinks about his paycheck. If you catch Matty on the right day, it’s, ‘I fuckin’ hate Miramax too.’ You catch anybody on a bad day, and they’ll talk shit about Harvey. Because there’s shit to talk. It’s not like they’re creating fiction. But I’ve never met anyone who breeds the kind of allegiance that he does. It’s a real love-hate affair you have with the Weinsteins. So Ben to this day is smarting over the fact that they didn’t kick them more cash on Good Will Hunting, and that he had to hold our movie hostage. That he had to get down to what he feels is their level. And threaten them.”
A week after Miramax opened Good Will Hunting, Dimension released Scream 2 on Friday, December 12. On the following Monday, the company reported that it had grossed $39.2 million over the three days, thereby grabbing the number one spot, and breaking the record for the biggest non-summer opening, held by Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, which had earned $37.8 million in November 1995. Rankings and records had become marketing tools because, as Spike Lee puts it, “People are going to see movies based on how much money they were making. You pick up the newspapers on Monday, and they give you the top ten grossers—not just Variety, but the New York Times, the Post, the Daily News.” They were so important that the temptation to fudge was almost irresistible, at least for Miramax, which was caught padding the figures. On December 19 it backtracked, revising the gross downward to $33 million, claiming it counted 449 theaters more than the picture actually played in, and that it was an honest mistake. “I don’t know how anyone misplaces 450 theaters and overreports $6 million,” said Barry Reardon, head of distribution for Warner’s. According to Joe Roth, former Disney Studios chairman, “Dick Cook told them after the fact that we felt they were overstating” the grosses. Variety reported “that it was well-known in distribution/exhibition circles that Miramax had inflated both playdates and grosses for Scream 2. . . . The company was probably legally obliged to make the disclosure, being part of the publicly traded Walt Disney Empire.”
On Christmas Day, Miramax released Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s spin on Elmore Leonard’s thriller Rum Punch. The director turned Rum Punch into a homage to the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s he had grown up on. The two most substantial roles went to Pam Grier, a fixture in those pictures, then nearly fifty, and Robert Forster, best known as the photographer in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, released in 1969. Grier and Forster had plenty of help, including Sam Jackson, Robert De Niro, and Bridget Fonda, but hanging a picture on two less-than-A-list actors who had seen better days was a gutsy thing to do, especially in Pulp Fiction’s wake.
Jackie Brown had been a long time coming, four years after Pulp was shot. Although Tarantino seems to be a stranger to self-doubt, his friends came to believe that he had been almost paralyzed by the vexing question: What next? As one of them put it, “Quentin had done the movie that’s launched a thousand films. It was Welles after Citizen Kane.” There were distractions everywhere. He had always wanted to be an actor, now he had his choice of parts, like playing Richie, a psycho, in From Dusk Till Dawn. He moved out of his ratty apartment on Crescent Heights into a grand home in the Hollywood Hills near Universal, which some of his friends derisively referred to as “the castle.” The place was filled with memorabilia from his films—posters, toys, stills, and models of his characters. Like many movie star homes, it became a shrine to himself, or at least his work. Recalls Rodriguez, “Quentin spent most of a year designing and building this home theater. He said, ‘All my friends made a movie this year, I made a theater.’ ”
Tarantino also started making regular visits to Rodriguez’s hometown, Austin, Texas, where he’d hang out with him and his filmmaker buddies, Rick Linklater and Mike Judge. Breezing into town like a latter-day Elmer Gantry of the Church of Movie Geeks, he’d get a room at the Omni, registering under the name of some B movie actor. Austin has a thriving film and music scene, and he quickly made his own contribution, holding ten-day-long, more or less annual “QT Fests,” where he introduced and screened films from his collection, the obscure work of obscurer actors and directors, like Arthur Marx (son of Groucho) and Cy Endfield (Zulu). He resurrected William Witney, who directed many of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans pictures, and conceived a passion for the couple and their horse, Trigger, whom he could talk about for hours—what a great horse Trigger was, what an amazing presence Trigger has, how Trigger owns the screen—and even Trigger, Jr., who appears in one of his favorites, The Golden Stallion. He wanted to name his first child Trigger and had been heard to say, “Trigger is the Uma Thurman of horses,” or, “Uma Thurman and Trigger have pretty much the same profile!”—in his mind, flattering to both.
“I’d go over to his hotel room and talk movies,” recalls Louis Black, publisher of the Austin Chronicle and a self-confessed film geek. “Rick, me, Harry Knowles, Quentin, and a couple of others. Everybody was kinda equal, you weren’t dealing with Quentin Tarantino superstar. But if we were in a public place and a bunch of attractive women showed up, then it became the Quentin Tarantino Show, and we didn’t really count anymore. The spotlights came on, the marching band arrived, and Quentin performed.”
Tarantino had a friend in Austin named Dulce Durante. She scoffs at the idea that Tarantino had OD’d on celebrity. “He loved it,” she says. “It was one motivation for him coming back to Austin. He’s such a star here, he couldn’t go anywhere without being stopped. He ate it up.” She recalls that on one occasion, he told her, “ ‘If I take you shopping, you can help me pick some stuff out, because I have no sense of style, and I’ll buy you a pair of shoes,’ because he’s got a huge foot fetish. He was always trying to get my shoes off. He wanted to stick my toes in his mouth.” Recall the famous foot massage debate between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction, or the scene in From Dusk Till Dawn in the camper where the camera lingers fondly on the feet of Juliette Lewis, or the Thurman toe fest in Kill Bill. Durante continues, “He did buy me a nice pair of shoes, from this store called, interestingly enough, Fetish.”
Tarantino was an inveterate pot smoker. Some of his friends joked about it, in the vein of, “So I called Quentin, and he said, ‘Well, I’m working on my new script, phttt, phttt.’ ” After a couple of years of doing bit parts here and there, hanging out, visiting Austin, fixing up his new house, they began to suspect that, as one Austin friend puts it, “he would do almost anything not to have to make another movie, because he was nervous about doing a follow-up.”
At least partly in response to the blizzard of attention to which he was subjected, and the incessant demands and requests, Tarantino went through periods of withdrawal. He’d hole up in his new home, stay up all night watching movies and smoking weed. “This was not Martin Scorsese watching Michael Powell’s movies, where there’s a reason to get excited by it,” says an acquaintance who occasionally joined him. “I’m not even talking about something that’s kitschy or trashy, an AIP picture. These were lousy made-for-TV movies, flat, one-dimensional, and still his eyes would be glued to the tube. After a while, I realized you could literally be showing him anything, you could turn it upside down and put it out of focus, and he’d be watching it like a kid with a pacifier, a lonely little boy in his living room, where he was safe. It was sad and beautiful at the same time.”
Tarantino ducked out on commitments, driving people crazy who were depending on him for this or that. “There was a lot of volatility,” says former agent Rick Hess. “He’d be gone for three weeks, and no one was quite sure where he was.” As one friend puts it, “He’s a genuinely nice guy. I’ve never seen him be mean or vindictive. But he’s Quentin, and he does what he wants to do.” Or, as Jennifer Beals puts it, “Quentin is not Jimmy Stewart. The shadow side is definitely there, and he lets it out only when he needs it, like some kind of beast that gets fed every now and again, and then gets put back. That’s what makes the films great. That’s where his genius is.”
Every once in a while, the beast would escape. Two months before Jackie Brown was slated to op
en, Tarantino ran into producer Don Murphy (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), with whom he had a tangled and troubled history that went back a decade. Says Tarantino, “Before I was famous, I didn’t have people like Don Murphy, who started a career as my arch-enemy. He was always in the press making fun of me. It was kind of crazy, just short of stalking me. I’m just not a guy you do that to. I don’t play by any Marquis of Queensbury rules Hollywood has. I thought about going to his house and fucking him up, but at the same time I thought, You know what? Hollywood’s a real small place. I don’t have to go knock on his door and propel myself into trouble—one of these days I’ll walk into some place and he’ll be there. And that will be the day I’ll take care of it.”
In the third week of October, Tarantino entered Ago, a hip Italian restaurant on Melrose in West Hollywood, where he was to lunch with Harvey. Murphy was seated on a couch near the entrance, waiting for a table. As Tarantino tells it, “I beelined right over to him. He stood up, and said, ‘Hi, Quentin.’
“ ‘Don’t give me any of your fuckin’ “Hi” shit.’ ” (Tarantino explains, “Whenever I get violent I turn into a black male.”) “ ‘What’s all this shit you’ve been talking about me?’
“ ‘I think you know.’
“ ‘No, no, you tell everybody on the planet, I’m standing in front of your face now, tell me.’ ” Tarantino recalls, “He started to talk for just a second, and I shoved him down, took one hand and grabbed him by his hair, and then slapped the piss out of him with the other hand. I just bitch-slapped him three times. And after the third slap, they started yanking me off of him.” Tarantino slapped Murphy so energetically that his watch sailed off his wrist. The cops showed up, and shoved him into the back of a sheriff’s car, from whence he blew kisses at Murphy, and he would have been taken downtown had not Weinstein intervened, convincing him to apologize and Murphy not to press charges. A few days later, Tarantino reenacted the incident as shtick on The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show, telling Wayans, “A little bitch slap don’t hurt nobody.” Murphy sued the filmmaker for $5 million. It was eventually settled out of court. Tarantino thoroughly enjoyed the whole episode, the fight, the press, the TV appearance.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 47
