As he became more and more successful, Harvey fell victim to a fatal ambivalence. “Harvey fell off the tracks when he started making a lot of money,” says producer Peter Newman. “He began picking films that were tweeners, halfway between indies and the studios. The scores were almost good enough—in the 70s—and if you could get them to 80 or 90 you could make a lot of money. So he would shred the things that made the movie individualistic to try to broaden them out.”
The filmmakers desperately wanted to believe that Harvey knew what he was doing, convinced themselves, “Okay, Harvey is very successful, he’s made some really good movies, he must know what he’s talking about.” But eventually, Christopher refused to shoot the additional scenes. He threatened to take his name off the movie. Miramax came right back, counterthreatened to fire him. By this time he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. As Donna Gigliotti puts it, “Harvey gets personal with people. And if you’re susceptible to it, you’ll begin to believe that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that you don’t have any talent. He only wants to work with people that he can control. He’ll rarely work with a final cut director. ’Cause he is just a frustrated director himself!” Eventually Christopher reluctantly agreed to oversee the shooting of the new scenes. When Christopher showed up at the sound studio to oversee the mix, he had not even seen the final cut.
Lechner was out the door before 54 was released. “Miramax had changed a lot by the time I left,” he explains. “It was becoming more of a studio. I wanted us to do Election. It’s a very edgy movie, an old Miramax movie, and Harvey, having had a rocky experience with Alexander Payne on Citizen Ruth, said, ‘Let’s let Alexander make his second movie somewhere else and he can come back and make his third one here.’ I think Alexander was relieved. He didn’t want to go through it again. I wanted to do American Beauty, but I passed on it because I felt, This isn’t where we’re at now. One day I just looked at the projects I was working on and I realized, I don’t care about a lot of these things, they’re just not my taste.”
Cathy Konrad wanted to make Election as well, through her producing deal at Miramax. “Harvey read the script, but he passed. I was exclusive to Miramax, and I started feeling the exclusivity was hurting my chances to be involved with material I felt passionate about, because if he said no, I had to drop it. I didn’t know what they wanted. One day they’d buy something obscure, the next day they’d buy something mainstream.” Konrad left.
OCTOBER’S JOHN SCHMIDT is a nice guy. He can get along with almost anyone, and likes to think the best of people until experience teaches him otherwise. The first time it dawned on him that there might be something amiss with Scott Greenstein was in March 1998 at the Academy Awards, where Robert Duvall was up for an Oscar for The Apostle. “That’s when it went bad,” he says. “In poker you look for the ‘tell,’ the little gesture or the tic or the eyeball movement that tells you this guy’s bluffing. For Green-stein, this was the tell.” One of the October publicists called from L.A., said, “I don’t know if you guys know about this, but Scott has asked to sit with Duvall at the Oscars.” Says Ray, “In the Secrets & Lies year, we sat in Row 21, in the middle. Sumner Redstone was sitting two rows away. He’s Sumner fucking Redstone! He’s not sitting down in Row 3.” It was like the time years before when Harvey tried to take Alison Brantley’s seat next to Daniel Day-Lewis. According to Ray, when asked, Greenstein explained, “Oh yeah, Bobby asked that I sit with him. One of us has gotta be there, one of us has got to sit in the front row where Harvey is.” Says Schmidt, “I checked with Bobby and his producer, Rob Carliner, and Rob said, ‘Fuckin’ bullshit, Scott just took my date’s seat.’ ” According to Carliner, “It had nothing to do with Duvall. Bobby’s an outsider. He would never ask to sit near a quote unquote suit under any circumstances. It was Scott working on me to sit in that row.” Schmidt rarely lost his temper, but he did so now, exclaiming to Greenstein, “I can’t believe you’re fucking doing this. You should be sitting with us. You want to be on TV that much?” But Greenstein insisted, “got red-faced crazy,” says Ray, and Schmidt thought, The three of us are partners in this company, but Scott is really out for himself, he’s about Scott Greenstein, not about October. It’s a real asshole thing to do, a complete Harvey move.
For Ray, it had been a long, hard road to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that year. At Chris McGurk’s urging, October hired Jack Foley, who had exited Miramax two years before, figuring he would be more aggressive getting the films into theaters, as well as Dennis Rice, formerly of Buena Vista Home Video, and the marketing mind behind the phenomenal performance of Miramax’s titles on video. Ray grudgingly went along. When the October team had returned from Toronto after the acquisition of The Apostle in September 1997, his relationship with Greenstein, already frayed, proceeded to unravel completely. As one source puts it, “Bingham would yell at him. He wasn’t coy about it. If he thought something was wrong, he would say it to his face, ‘That’s a stupid-ass, shitty idea.’ He’s just a person who doesn’t have a governor.” The two men clashed often and bitterly over the marketing of Duvall’s film. As Schmidt explains, “If you look at two camps in the business of marketing independent films, you have Sony Classics’s Bernard and Barker in one camp—the slow rollout, small ads, build your audience—and in the other, Harvey, which is push your budgets as high as you can, crowd out the market, take as many screens as possible, build the hype, in short, play more of a studio marketing game. Bingham was more the Sony Classics kind of marketer; Scott was more the Harvey kind of marketer. That was a fundamental issue which ended up tearing October apart.”
Looking for the cheese, Ray, the old Sony rat, careful and conservative like Barker and Bernard, and Greenstein, the new Miramax rat, aggressive like Harvey, threaded their ways through the maze—until Greenstein knocked the box off the table. Because if Greenstein learned anything at Miramax, it was not so much business skills or marketing strategies, it was disregard for the rules of the game—anything goes.
Inside the company, the conflict between Ray and Greenstein played itself out in weekly marketing meetings, where they debated ad nauseam the number of screens, the size of ads (14” or 24”), whether to allocate an extra $10,000 or not. Where Greenstein wanted to spend, Ray wanted to save. When Ray objected, Greenstein threw up his arms and exclaimed, in his best Jersey accent, “It’s pennies!” This became Ray’s mantra. Every time somebody would complain about some expenditure, say, “That’s another $6,000,” Ray, from the other end of the table would throw up his arms and spritz, in a high-pitched whine, “It’s pennies!” expelling the “p” from his mouth like a BB from a BB gun.
But they were divided by more than philosophical differences. According to several sources, Greenstein was actively working to undermine Ray and Schmidt. Says October executive Susan Glatzer, “Scott was always talking on his cell phone, and he’d go, ‘I’m your guy, okay? Everybody else hates you, but I’m your guy. You gotta problem? Come to me!’ ” Adds Ray, “Scott was systematically, not just with talent, but with agents as well, saying, ‘You gotta question? Come to me. Don’t talk to Bingham, I’m your guy.’ ” Agrees Carliner, “Scott was an unabashed manipulator in that sense. He had the loudest voice and was certainly the pushiest. But when the dust settled, it was clear who really knew the indie scene and who didn’t. It was Bingham who actually knew how to market a film and position a film, and Scott knew how to hustle. Bingham and John didn’t really know who they were getting into bed with with Scott.”
Although Greenstein had picked up Orgazmo the previous September at Toronto, Trey Parker and Matt Stone put a parody of him on their South Park CD, the parental advisory version. A dead-on impression of Green-stein’s voice, identified as that of “Sid Greenfield,” says, “Hello, Matt? This is just you and me talkin’ here. I’m sitting here bleeding out of my ass. You want to know why? It’s because of this Mousse T track.”
“ ‘Horny, Horny, Horny?’ ”
“It’s got
ta go on the South Park album.”
“Oh, no, we’ve already talked about this. We hate that song.”
“I know you hate it. Everybody hates it. I’m the only one who agrees with you. I’m your guy. This song is the best song ever written!”
“How can you say that?”
“What did I say?”
“This song is the best song ever written.”
“I agree with you, Matt. It is a great song. I know that.”
“Hold on, Trey?! Trey! They want to put that Mousse T song on the album.”
“No, dude, we said no.”
“OK, Matt, listen. This is just you and me talkin’. Fuck Trey!”
“This is Trey! That song sucks, man.”
“You know, I agree with you. I always agree with you. You said no, so I’m not going to put it on the album. You know why? Because I’m your guy.”
According to some sources, Ray’s filmmakers and Greenstein’s filmmakers were entirely separate. (Greenstein had made deals with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn.) One person who knows Greenstein well says, “Scott never said ‘I’m your guy’ to a single filmmaker Bingham had because he never got to talk to them.” Adds Sandy Stern, head of Michael Stipe’s company, Single Cell, “That never was an issue with Scott, because my relationship there was with Bingham. I wouldn’t have thought of talking to Scott.”
The Apostle opened in December 1997 and became October’s biggest hit, grossing about $23 million domestic, and twice that worldwide. October made about $5 million from foreign sales, and something like $12 million from video. All told, the company probably reaped a roughly $10 million profit from the film. Says Rice, “Nothing could have hurt Bingham more than that the Apostle campaign was successful. There was a sense that the world as he knew it at October was gone forever.”
A large share of the credit for the film’s success has to go to Greenstein. The picture badly needed cutting, and when Duvall refused to trim a frame, Greenstein came up with the idea of hiring Walter Murch, whom the director trusted, to lighten it by twenty minutes. In addition, “The Apostle benefited from the aggressive, multiple hundreds of screens, Miramax-type campaign that Scott orchestrated,” says Schmidt. “He was really good at publicity. Bobby Duvall was everywhere, in places like Parade magazine. That eventually translated into playing for weeks and weeks and weeks in the heartland. Being able to do that was part of the formula that McGurk and I had envisioned when Scott came in. If his style and Bingham’s style could have coexisted, we would have had a great deal more success, but you had two bulls in the paddock, and they tore each other apart. It wasn’t, Stand back and let’s do the right thing for the film, it was two guys digging in their heels to protect their turf, which was bullshit.”
FOR MIRAMAX, Shakespeare in Love was the Good Will Hunting of 1998. It began life as a light bulb that went off in the head of writer Marc Norman (Oklahoma Crude) in the late 1980s. Norman’s idea was that the Elizabethan theater, with its neurotic writers, producers, and agents, its feuds, lawsuits, and backstage machinations, was just like Hollywood, and with it, he wrangled Ed Zwick, a friend and neighbor. Norman would write; Zwick, who had created, with Marshall Herskovitz, one successful TV series, thirtysomething, and had directed the critically acclaimed hit Glory, would direct, and the two of them would produce. Zwick didn’t like the script that Norman turned in, but Julia Roberts did, and agreed to play Shakespeare’s muse, Viola. Zwick brought in Tom Stoppard to rewrite Norman, who managed to hang on as co-producer. In late 1991 or 1992, the picture went into pre-production at Universal, where Zwick had a deal. They started making the costumes and building the Globe Theatre at Pinewood Studios, near London. Roberts had Shakespeare approval and wanted Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis, however, had committed to Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, and had already turned them down. Roberts was confident she could change Day-Lewis’s mind. She said, “Let me try,” and along with Zwick and Norman flew to Dublin to see Day-Lewis over a weekend. She sent him flowers and commenced to woo him, but Day-Lewis remained firm, and on the following Monday, she flew back to L.A. and withdrew from the picture. While Universal head Tom Pollock is supposed to have quipped, “Couldn’t she have waited to fuck him until we had his name on a piece of paper?,” according to press reports at the time, the relationship amounted to no more than an innocent flirtation. Six weeks from the start of principal photography, Universal decided not to make the picture, but didn’t want any other studio to make it either, and therefore put a staggering $9 million price tag on it in turnaround, half in hard costs, and half in soft. Zwick hit the pavement with the script, but of course none of the studios would bite. To them, it was an art film, and an expensive one at that.
Zwick, who proceeded to direct Legends of the Fall for Sony, had the Shakespeare script sent to Miramax, and screened his new picture for Harvey as a sample of his work. Harvey, who loved the Shakespeare script, professed to love Zwick’s movie as well. Zwick recalls, “He flipped over it, said, ‘Ohmigod, we’re gonna do this, this is fabulous.’ He picked up the phone, called Sony and told them, ‘This movie is so wonderful, what can I do to help it? I want to attach a trailer to every Miramax movie.’ ” According to Zwick, he looked him in the eye and shook his hand, while assuring him that he would direct and produce Shakespeare. Harvey then tried to buy the script in turnaround, but he and Universal could not agree on terms, and the impasse lasted for several years until Harvey found himself with some leverage. Universal wanted Peter Jackson to do a remake of King Kong, but Harvey had an option on Jackson dating back to Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, which he had released in 1994. Harvey raised his hand and said, “I’ll give you Peter Jackson if you sell me Shakespeare in Love.”
By that time, Pollock was out, and Frank Biondi was in. Casey Silver was running the studio. They knew that if the film was any good, the Weinsteins would steal the glory—the credit and the Oscars—while they would get nothing. McGurk argued, “Who cares about their reputation? Let’s ride on the shoulders of these guys, and we’ll make a lot of money.” Generally, in a turnaround deal, the buyer pays 10 percent down, in this case $900,000, and the rest later. But Universal was holding Miramax up for $2.25 million, probably because they didn’t want to sell to the Weinsteins. “They were being greedy,” says former Miramax executive VP John Logigian, who was negotiating with Silver. When Logigian informed Harvey, “He went a little nuts, said, ‘That can’t be,’ ” adding, “ ‘You know what, I’ll get the number down.’ ” In his mind, Silver was a pisher, and he was Harvey Weinstein. According to another source, he got Silver on the phone, shouted something like, “You know, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. I’m a chairman and you’re just a president or something. Casey, let me tell you how to do your job. If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll go to Frank Biondi,” whereupon Silver hung up on him. He knew Biondi would back him up, and he did. The word back was, “The hell with you, now the number has doubled,” $4.5 million. (Silver doesn’t recall the details of this conversation.) Logigian told Harvey, “That phone call cost us $2.25 million!” He recalls, “Then Universal said, ‘There’s one thing we have to put in this deal.’
“ ‘What is that?’
“ ‘You cannot take this from us and put a big star in the movie.’
“ ‘What’s a big star?’
“ ‘Like a Julia Roberts.’ A lot of people would have said, ‘Ohmigod, I wanted to make this with Meg Ryan or Demi Moore,’ but it didn’t faze Harvey, because he didn’t feel he had to have a big star to make it work. He deserves a lot of praise, because he stuck with it even when Universal stacked the odds against him, raising the price to $4.5 million, and then limited the type of stars he could put in the movie. Most people would have run for the hills.” Harvey adds, “It’s the most incredible amount of money I’ve ever paid for a script or a project or anything else. It took guts to say, ‘I’m gonna make it.’ ”
Zwick heard third hand that Miramax had bought the script
and that he was out. “I don’t think anyone was enthusiastic about Ed directing it,” says Gigliotti. “I know I wasn’t. Harvey wasn’t. The truth is, we were all hiding behind the fact that we didn’t think he could do it for the price, when in fact nobody wanted him.” Zwick hired the powerful Hollywood attorney Bert Fields. In a meeting at the Peninsula Hotel with Zwick and his agent, ICM’s Jeff Berg, Harvey was gracious and accommodating. It was carrot, not stick time. He apologized, said that he had been bad, that Zwick was an artist, a great artist, and that his role developing the script with Stoppard would be front and center of the marketing campaign. He offered him Chicago to direct and an Elmore Leonard property, Rum Punch, to produce. Zwick’s producer credit was reinstated. He says, “Harvey was so contrite and so seductive, I chose to just believe it.” Subsequently, Zwick was frozen out of the project.
Legend has it that Paltrow saw the script on Winona Ryder’s coffee table and asked, “What’s that?” but in fact, she had just done Emma, and didn’t want to do another British period piece. At the time, she was all over the women’s magazines—she loves clothes—and had a devoted following, but she was realistic about her career and recognized she had no more than a limited shelf life—not as an actress, but as a star. She was hot, and she wanted to take advantage of it. But, as usual, Harvey prevailed. Paltrow had been paid $3 million to play opposite Michael Douglas in A Perfect Murder, but Harvey knocked her salary down to $2.5 million, and she got a small percentage of the gross.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 49
