When Jackie Brown was done, it was running two hours, forty minutes. Harvey thought it was at least a half hour too long. But in Tarantino’s mind it was just right, and he and Harvey nearly got into a fistfight in the lobby of a Seattle multiplex at a test screening one rainy night. The filmmaker emerged from the screening elated, said, “Wow, it played great!” Harvey, who had been asking people, “Whaddya think? Whaddya think?” shot back, “That’s not what the audience thinks.”
“Fuck you!”
“You gotta cut the movie.”
“I’m done with it.”
“Well, fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
“Okay, fine, go make movies for New Line. I don’t need this shit anymore, I’m too rich.” Harvey was screaming, “Try this, try that,” while Tarantino just repeated, “No, no, no, no.” As Tarantino recalls, “I probably started it, flying off the handle. But he was in there in a nanosecond, the minute I was. With me or Harvey, it always threatens to get physical. When it started to go that way, Bob got in here, and Lawrence [Bender] got in there.” Bob’s feeling was, it’s not worth it. Even if this one’s just okay, we’re not losing money, we’re keeping him happy, keeping him in the family. He sat Tarantino down, said, “Okay, Quentin, here’s the deal. You cut it down to two hours, we make $70 million with this movie. You come out this long, it’s going to affect the box office. Are you okay with that, Quentin? Are you going to blame us when we don’t make $70 million?”
“No.”
“You accept that deal?”
“Yes.”
The filmmaker did, and made a brilliant job of it. Jackie Brown contains some of his best writing, with two scenes qualifying for those all-time best lists: one in which Melanie, Fonda’s Valley girl, follows Louis (De Niro) across a parking lot, ragging on him for losing his car, until he turns around in a fit of thug pique and shoots her. In the other, Ordell (Jackson), in a dazzling display of verbal tap dancing, convinces a reluctant Beaumont (Chris Tucker), to climb into the trunk of his car, whereupon he pops him. And that’s not counting the bravura opening sequence where Ordell and Louis sit on a sofa watching a chicks-with-guns video while Melanie languidly does her nails and smokes a joint. (The camera, needless to say, lingers on her toes.) All in all, the film is a more mature work than either Reservoir Dogs or Pulp; thanks to the performances of Grier and Forster, it’s quieter and gentler, but Tarantino gets more deeply into his characters, gives the relationship between the two a resonance all the more moving for being unexpected.
Once again, as in Pulp Fiction, the n-word was used liberally, most often by Jackson. The spectacle of black actors calling one another “nigger” for a white director was too much for Spike Lee. He actually had an intern count how many times the slur was uttered. “I’m not saying he couldn’t use the word, but the excessive use of the word was disturbing to me,” Lee explains. “Just in that scene between Sam Jackson and Chris Tucker, it was like thirty-eight times or something. It was ‘nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger.’ ” Lee had used Tarantino to good effect in the opening of Girl 6, playing a piggy director who bullies an actress into baring her breasts in a casting session. “Quentin was very good-natured to play that part knowing that he was basically playing himself,” says Lee. But now Lee took him to task, attacking him in the press, calling him “ignorant,” and accusing him of wanting to be “an honorary black man.” Jackson sprang to Tarantino’s defense, to which Lee responded, “I’m sorry, if he wants to defend Quentin Tarantino, he can. But for me, it’s a lot like the house Negro defending the massa.” Likewise, the Miramax co-chairman couldn’t resist injecting himself into the fray, asking rhetorically, “Does [Lee] have anything nice to say about anybody’s work but his own? I’m getting sick of this. . . . If Spike wants to take the gloves off with me, come on.” According to Lee, all Harvey was worried about was the grosses. He said, “Spike, you gotta stop talkin’ about Jackie Brown. You’re hurtin’ me.”
Three years later, in his two-thirds brilliant, biting media satire Bamboozled, Lee revisited the issue by including a fatuous white network executive, energetically played by Michael Rapaport and clearly based on Tarantino, who thinks he’s more black than the black writer (Damon Wayans) who works for him. He tells the writer, “I grew up around black people my whole life. If the truth be told, I probably know niggas better’n you. And don’t be gettin’ offended by my use of the quote unquote n-word. . . .I don’t give a goddamn what that prick Spike Lee says. Tarantino was right. ‘Nigger’ is just a word.”
According to Lee, “That’s something Quentin Tarantino actually told me. I didn’t make it up. I was in the Angelika Theater, waiting with my wife to see The Blair Witch Project, and he came up to me, gettin’ in my face like he was gonna kick my ass or somethin’. Tough guy.” Tarantino recalls, “He stuck his hand out, and I said, ‘I’m not shakin’ your motherfuckin’ hand.’ ” Lee goes on, “He told me that he knows black people better than me: ‘I grew up watching black exploitation films, I’ve always lived among black people, my mother had a black boyfriend . . .’ So I just laughed at him. Then he tried to wriggle out, sayin’, Well, I didn’t write that stuff, it was ad-libbed. Well, you can’t put that shit off on somebody else, because the director decides what goes in, what goes out. He’s the director. The guy’s a good filmmaker. He tapped into something, but then it became something else—too much ‘nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger.’ ”
From Tarantino’s point of view, “It was almost like Don Murphy. He was workin’ it. He was getting his name in the press a whole bunch. Which I think is what it was all about anyway. I took issue with the fact that if he genuinely had a problem, then he should have called me before he called the press. I thought he handled it like a real wuss. One of these days I’ll walk into a place and he’ll be there. And that will be the day that I take care of it.”
Tarantino defended himself further, saying, “More or less every single thing I’ve ever done in film is about the division between black and white in this country. And how this division actually is a sham. . . . The poor blacks in Chicago have more in common with the poor hillbillies in the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee than they have with affluent blacks living in Pasadena, California. They’re at the same place.” It’s almost shocking to hear Tarantino ascribe a class analysis to his own work, after creating a cottage industry out of baiting and scandalizing liberals for most of his career, but it’s not just posturing. He does in fact present a world where class trumps race, just as there is a message about class stratification buried in Clerks, or a disquieting look at the politics of the family marbled throughout Spanking the Monkey.
In any event, raising the flag of political correctness in the face of the Tarantino hurricane was like spitting in the wind. Jackie Brown, which cost $12 million, grossed $40 million. But Bob was right. And because it didn’t do Pulp business and was overshadowed at the box office by Good Will Hunting and Scream 2, it was regarded as a failure.
DARREN ARONOFSKY was a kid from Harvard who had put in his time at the American Film Institute’s film school and then gone into a tailspin. In January 1996, he had gone to Sundance to give moral support to a pal from AFI who had a film in competition. While he was there, he saw Welcome to the Dollhouse. He says, “I thought it was such a unique, weird film, that it really gave me the courage to go back to New York and just try to throw something together.” The film he threw together he called Pi. He figured he could raise $20,000, and did, by asking everyone he knew to invest $100. (Ultimately, it cost $60,000 to get it into the can and $120,000 to get it ready for theatrical exhibition.) By November of that year, he was shooting. “Our goals were very low,” he continues. “Because it was an edgy black and white movie, we thought maybe we’d have a shot at being a midnight show at Sundance. The day the decisions were to be announced, I couldn’t handle it, so I ran back to Brooklyn to my mom and dad’s house. If I didn’t get in, I just wanted to cry in my parents’ arms. It was get
ting later and later—I had heard most people were finding out in the morning, now it was five, six o’clock at night, seven, I figured, It’s all over. The phone rang, it was someone from Salt Lake City—‘Can you fax over that information?’
“ ‘What are you talking about?’
“ ‘Oh my God, no one’s called you to tell you?’
“ ‘No.’
“ ‘Oh, you’re my first first.’
“ ‘Whaddya mean?’
“ ‘You’re the first person I’ve been able to tell, You’re in Sundance!’
“I was convinced it was a joke, one of my friends, I asked him, ‘What’s your area code?’
“ ‘Eight-oh-one.’
“I looked it up, then I started screaming. It was one of the great moments of my life.”
Pi was a psychological thriller shot in high-contrast black and white. Talk about a cinema of poverty! But Pi had style, a distant echo of the between-the-wars German expressionism of Fritz Lang. In places it felt like an indie version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Pi was a disturbing, unpleasant, audience-unfriendly, virtually impossible-to-market film, but undeniably original and a great showcase for a director with real visual flair.
Aronofsky refused to show Pi to distributors pre-festival. He hired a publicist, and a rep, an attorney named Jeremy Barber. Aronofsky analyzed Sundance the way Pi’s “hero” tries to suss the stockmarket: one of the Pi gang actually prepared a booklet, How to Behave at Sundance, and they met beforehand to brainstorm about getting the film sold. One strategy was to “pi” Sundance, that is, plaster little stickers featuring a red pi on a white background all over Park City.
Aronofsky’s film was screened first in a theater at the Sundance resort, forty minutes from Park City. “It was an all-industry screening,” recalls Aronofsky. “It was following Next Stop Wonderland, a big hot film that Harvey went to see. I saw him in the bathroom afterward. A legend. The thing was to have Harvey buy your movie. He couldn’t figure out how to turn on the faucet. But I was too scared to say anything to him, invite him to our film. And it became clear to me that by 1998, Harvey wasn’t in that business anymore, the Clerks business, of taking a weird edgy film and selling it. He refused to even scout our film. After Pi was screened, there was little applause, if any, and I went up for a Q&A. There was not one question. I was devastated. Bingham Ray hated it, walked out.” Eventually, Pi was purchased by Amir Malin et al. at Artisan, which did very well by it, and became a home for the filmmaker. “Amir treated me like a son,” he says. “He was a mentor for me.”
Sundance 1998 was a definite improvement over the year before. The features included Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art, which October acquired, and Don Roos’s wonderful picture The Opposite of Sex, picked up by Sony Classics. Miramax paid a staggering $6 million for Next Stop Wonderland, a not quite funny enough romantic comedy directed by Brad Anderson.
Weinstein looked at a two-hour rough cut of 54 in February 1998. The film, shot in Toronto, had wrapped in the fall of the previous year. During the shoot, Mark Christopher and company were more or less on their own. As Paul Webster puts it, at Miramax, “when you’re in production, you’re left entirely alone to make the movie. The company influence is felt most keenly during the casting, and post-production.” Harvey flew up occasionally to kiss the stars. While he was there, he complained about the Studio 54 bartenders, asked, “Can’t there be some girls behind the bar? Why can’t these guys keep their shirts on?” Conversely, he reportedly wanted Hayek to remove her shirt in a scene where she and Shane make love in the bathroom. She refused.
When the lights came up, the Miramax co-chairman congratulated the filmmakers on the quality of their work, and painted a rosy picture of future success, especially since Ryan Phillippe was no longer an unknown. While 54 was in the editing room, his teenage slasher movie I Know What You Did Last Summer, written by Kevin Williamson, had grossed a cool $72 million, domestic, for Columbia. Suddenly, Phillippe, along with Mike Myers and Neve Campbell, made for a hot cast.
Harvey smelled money. Instead of an edgy film by a first-time queer director, 54 was going to be Miramax’s summer blockbuster. Says Ira Deutchman, “In Harvey’s mind, 54 was going to be a teen movie that could cross over to a wide youth audience for which the film was never intended.” Weinstein test-screened 54 in a mall on Long Island early in 1998. Because the film had never been intended for mallrats from the ’burbs, the filmmakers were upset, and indeed the preview cards were terrible, with particularly poor ratings for Shane, who seemed unsympathetic. Says a source, “When a movie tests badly in the malls, nobody thinks, Okay, we tested it in front of the wrong people. They think, We’ve made the wrong movie.”
The 54 gang was devastated. Harvey told Christopher to get rid of any suggestion of bisexuality in his lead character. Webster recalls, “Everybody miraculously became straight.” It seemed clear that Weinstein was retrofitting the film for an audience of heterosexual suburban teenagers. To Miramax development head Jack Lechner, homosexuality was not the issue. “The fight was about how do you get anyone to give a shit about these characters,” he recalls. “It was particularly unfortunate that the most explicitly gay scene in the film where Shane kisses his roommate and his roommate freaks out was badly acted, badly directed, just not believable. The audience burst out laughing. The problem was, you couldn’t say that without someone coming back and saying, ‘You’re being homophobic.’ ”
In fact, this is exactly what the filmmakers suspected. Weinstein insisted that he wasn’t homophobic and tried to get the filmmakers into a screening room to watch another Miramax film, Velvet Goldmine, produced by Christine Vachon and directed by Todd Haynes, that had just been completed. He explained that he had kept his hands off it, in his mind proving he wasn’t reworking 54 because he was uncomfortable with the material. The very same day that Weinstein met with the filmmakers to purge the picture of the bisexual ambience that surrounded Shane, he accepted an award from GLAAD.
In any event, instead of trying to realize the director’s vision and reshoot the kiss, Miramax took the film in the opposite direction. Continues Lechner, “The decision was made to make Shane nicer, but there was no point making a nice version of that story, because who wants to see a story about nice people at Studio 54, and that’s not what was shot. If it had been my responsibility, I would have tried to do it better, instead of changing it.”
But Lechner doesn’t have much sympathy for filmmakers who go through the Miramax blender. “People moan and complain about Miramax’s ruthlessness in recutting films, but for the most part, these are people who didn’t make the film well enough in the first place. They blame Harvey because they don’t want to blame themselves. When he’s working with something that actually is good to begin with, his amazing attention and passion can help it to be great, but his weakness is that if it’s lousy to begin with, he’ll work as hard or harder, and it just never will be any good, because you can’t turn a turd into gold. You only get a really polished turd. If you’ve made a lousy movie, you’re better off at a studio, where they’re not going to take the time and trouble to make your life hell.”
At the studios, development is the Bermuda Triangle into which scripts can disappear forever, the no-man’s-land known as Development Hell. A studio, continues Lechner, “would have ground the life out of it before it ever got shot. At Miramax, they let the filmmakers make their films,” and then they grind the life out of it. It was Post-Production Hell. Films would languish in post for months, sometimes years. Harvey would pour so much money into post-production that by the time he was finished, the films were too expensive to make their money back, and rather than throw good P&A money after bad (post-) production money, he would either give them a token release or put them on the shelf before casting them into the netherworld of ancillaries like video and cable.
Throughout the second half of the decade, so many films were stalled in post-production that the gridlock resembled Times Square at rush hour.
Recalls James Ivory, “An editor friend of mine went up to their editing room once, and there were like eight broken films lying on these various tables like plane crashes all around the room.”
Meanwhile, the mantra of the Miramax executives was, “There’s a $50 million film in here somewhere, we just have to find it.” Then the filmmakers discovered that Harvey had given the film to his post-production department to recut without informing them. Christopher’s crack editor, Lee Percy, who had cut Kiss of the Spider Woman and would go on to do Boys Don’t Cry, resigned. Also, unbeknownst to the 54 folks, Harvey hired a second writing team, and even Dispatches author Michael Herr, who wrote the narration that rescued Apocalypse Now from incoherence, to fashion a voice-over. Christopher was locked out of the editing room. The new writing team produced twenty-five additional pages—nearly a quarter of the film—fleshing out the romance between Shane and Neve Campbell’s previously minor—but straight—character, for whom Shane develops a sudden crush.
How could a script that gestated in the womb of the studio’s development division for a year or more have needed such radical surgery in post? “The root of everything was that Mark’s vision of the movie and Harvey’s vision of the movie were two different things,” Lechner explains. “Harvey thought he was going to get Saturday Night Fever. He was reading that script and imagining it the way John Badham would have directed it, with John Travolta. When he reads the script, Harvey’s looking at it as a potential acquisition, thinking, How am I gonna sell it? He’s not as concerned with detail until he actually sees the movie.” If, despite that, your film tests well, you’ll be fine, but if it doesn’t, at the very least it will be shortened, and at the most reconceptualized as the film that Harvey himself would have made—in fact, the film that he will now try to make, recut, revoice, rework in every respect, additional footage added as needed—with himself as the auteur.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 48
