Harvey wanted Affleck to play Shakespeare. But the actor had a conflict; Dogma was shooting at the same time. Harvey told him, “Forget about Dogma, do Shakespeare.” But Affleck was loyal to Smith and refused. (Harvey denies that he wanted the actor to play Shakespeare.) Harvey tried to persuade him to do a bit part as Ned Alleyn, which he could do after Dogma wrapped. At the time, Affleck had just finished his first mainstream picture, Armageddon, and this was a step backward, a small supporting role. The night Affleck and Matt Damon failed to win the Writers Guild award for the Good Will Hunting script, they drowned their sorrows at Elaine’s with the Miramax co-chairman. When the subject of Alleyn came up, Damon argued against it. It was a bad idea, bad for Ben’s career. Besides, Ben and Gwynnie were an item, and everyone would say, “You’re going to work on this movie just to be with your girlfriend? It’s her movie, you’re just the sidekick. Don’t put yourself in that kind of place.”
Turning around to address Affleck, Harvey retorted, “Forget all that Hollywood crap, this is about, you should show that you can be a leading man and a character actor too. You’re funny. It’s good for you to do a part that shows you can be funny. Rupert Everett’s not worried about not playing the lead. He doesn’t give a fuck. He knows he’s not going to be Shakespeare, he took a bit part, he knows he’s going to kick ass.” Affleck gave in.
Miramax produced Shakespeare for a mere $24 million, and it looked like it cost twice that much. Harvey took a producer credit. According to former Miramax publicity VP Marcy Granata, he “was involved in every detail. He even knew what the leading lady should wear. He produced everyone else to produce. It was Selznick!” But studio executives rarely took producer credit, and Zwick, for one, was appalled.
According to Norman, the first time Harvey watched the picture with the titles, he became enraged when he saw Zwick’s producer credit, shouting, “Get his name off the picture.” His lawyers told him he couldn’t do it, but Harvey found another way to make his point. In the title sequence, Geoffrey Rush, who plays the impresario Philip Henslowe, the Elizabethan version of a desperate Hollywood producer, is chasing around London looking for Shakespeare. At the moment the production credit for Bedford Falls, Zwick’s company, flashes on the screen, Rush steps in a pile of horse shit.
Shakespeare tested well, near 80 in the top two boxes. But in Harvey’s opinion, it could do better, and he told director John Madden and Gigliotti, who thought they were finished, to keep working. He said, “You have a good movie but not a great movie.” Madden, unlike some of Miramax’s other directors, was happy to comply, and he became one of Harvey’s favorites. Says Lechner, “This was one case where the Miramax process functioned at its absolute best. The test screenings allowed us to focus in on what was holding the audience back. And we fixed it.”
Test audiences complained that the film was too long, so it was cut. They couldn’t understand why Viola didn’t just run off with Shakespeare, why she had to marry Lord Wessex. This was clarified by means of revoicing. Every time someone turns his or her back, lines were inserted that explained that if she didn’t marry Wessex, her family would be stripped of its lands and Shakespeare killed. The tests also revealed that the ending wasn’t working, didn’t have sufficient emotional punch. Audiences needed to feel that this was the love that changed Shakespeare’s life, made him “William Shakespeare.” Madden did an earlier scene over, where the two lovebirds are punting on the river, making the romance between them carry heavier emotional freight. Paltrow needed to be softened, she needed to cry, she needed to smile. Miramax was panicking. The opening was five weeks off and still there was no ending. Harvey pressed for a happy ending, where Shakespeare and Viola get together, completely at odds with the tone of the script. He kept saying, “We need more jokes, we need more jokes.” Gigliotti understood that the female audience had to cry, that the film was, in the last analysis, a tear-jerker. Stoppard thought the ending was fine as it stood and refused to write a word. Harvey badgered him, flying back and forth to London. Eventually, the playwright grudgingly reworked it, they reshot it, reshot it again. Finally, Stoppard came up with the ending they went with, where Shakespeare complains, “I can’t write anymore.” Viola, with tears in her eyes, replies, “Here’s the idea for the next play,” which persuaded the audience. Eventually, the changes pushed the film into the 90s. But by the last test screening, at the end of November, the numbers were down. Weinstein was nervous, contemplated a limited release. But Gigliotti had heard the women sobbing at the test and was convinced the picture would work.
VACHON AND HAYNES were at Cannes in May of 1998 with Velvet Goldmine, the film Weinstein had cited during the 54 contretemps to prove that he wasn’t homophobic. Although he wouldn’t make wholesale changes in Goldmine the way he had in 54, doing that film for Miramax was not an entirely happy experience for the filmmakers. Goldmine was a snapshot of the glam rock era focusing on the career of a David Bowie–like musician. Ewan McGregor, white hot off Trainspotting, was attached, as were Christian Bale, Toni Collette, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and Eddie Izzard. Shot in England, it was a difficult production. Vachon, who is famous for her formidable temper, was reputed to have terrorized the British crew. Some even compared her to Harvey. Haynes disagreed. “No! That’s not true,” he said. “There is no cruelty in Christine for the sake of cruelty. And there is in Harvey, believe me. She just doesn’t kiss ass.” Weinstein was eager to buy the North American rights, and he sat down with Haynes and Vachon, told Haynes what a brilliant filmmaker he was. He went out of his way to portray himself as a friend of gays, told them a story—something about homosexuals getting beaten up in a bar, and how their assailants were the kind of people who should see The Crying Game. Vachon thought it was a nice touch and found herself wondering, Did he get up this morning and go, All right, I’m meeting Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon, I gotta think up something good.
But the director and producer were ready to become believers. Although they had partial financing from CiBy 2000 and Film Four, they were desperate to make their budget, eager to take his $2 or so million off the table. As was his custom, Weinstein kept his hands to himself while Haynes shot the picture in London. Harvey “has a reputation for being homophobic, but he never pressured us to cut anything that was ‘gay,’ ” says Vachon. “Miramax’s notes were not stupid. They were constructive, and they were presented in an atmosphere of give-and-take. He really did not impose his will. He didn’t threaten, he wasn’t a bully. And he was extremely respectful of Todd.”
But, also characteristically, post-production was another story. In an effort to extract more money from Miramax, Vachon showed the picture to Harvey, probably before she should have. He was under-impressed, insisted on testing it. Vachon’s attitude toward test screenings was no different from that of any other indie. “Screenings are about ‘the numbers,’ ” she says. “So trying to fit Todd’s kind of round peg into a square hole made me feel horrible,” adding, “Those NRG15 screenings were probably the last nails in the coffin.”
In the late spring of 1998, right before Cannes, Haynes and Vachon were summoned to a meeting in the Miramax conference room with Lechner and a few others. Haynes was wary, but Vachon gave him a pep talk: “Don’t be threatened, don’t be freaked out, just keep an open mind, like, Who knows? If it can make the movie better, then let’s do it.” The Miramax folks proposed various cuts that amounted to maybe thirteen minutes, but at some point, Lechner said, “Well, actually what we did was we—we thought the easiest thing to do would be to do the cuts on the film and show them to you. Right?” This was standard operating procedure at Miramax, but Haynes had never experienced it before. Lechner shoved a “cut/uncut” tape into the VCR, which showed a version cut by the Miramax post-production team, followed by Haynes’s cut. Haynes had a well-earned sense of himself as an auteur, but he was nicely brought up, good manners, not the kind to blurt out, “What! You cut my movie? Are you out of your fucking mind!” So he said, “Okay,” and they ran t
he tape. As Haynes watched, his eyes filled with tears. “Todd cried,” says Lechner. “He cried because no one had ever touched his movies before, and I realized as soon as we did it, like, We have really been rude and insensitive.” But the damage had been done. Vachon winced, thinking, Oh, God, this is just so not the right way to do this with Todd. This is going to backfire! Suddenly, Haynes interjected, still polite, “You know what? It’s kind of difficult for me to really concentrate with you all in the room. May I just take the tape and go home?” And they were, “Oh sure!” Says Vachon, “It was awful. Because Todd is obsessive. He’d thought about every single cut, every single frame, and to him, it was like somebody was taking his movie and just mashing it. It wasn’t that their ideas were all wrong. It was just that they didn’t have the sensitivity to really understand that you just can’t do that to a filmmaker who is as much an auteur as Todd is. He was absolutely incensed, beside himself.”
Vachon told Miramax, “That was a really bad move.”
“Well, you know, we spent a lot of time on that tape, like John from post spent his whole weekend on it.”
“Todd spent the last four years of his life on this.”
When Haynes calmed down, he cut three or four minutes out of the film. Goldmine went to Cannes, and got a mixed reception—despite winning a Special Jury Prize. “There had been a certain sense of excitement about the movie [at Miramax] that literally seemed to evaporate,” recalls Vachon. “I’d heard how when Miramax is 100 percent behind you, how wonderful it is, and I know that when a movie does badly, it’s easy to blame the distributor, but I just felt that there was not a great deal of passion for it. Was it that they had too many movies? Was it that there was a concrete ceiling of what they thought the film could do, so why spend so much money on it? Todd wasn’t pressured, but maybe we paid a price for that. The Goldmine experience was really awful. It’s the tragedy of my life—it broke my heart.”
Miramax was right; Goldmine wasn’t working, but cutting was not going to help it. Vachon watched while Goldmine sank in a bath of lukewarm praise, but she had another bullet in the Killer Films chamber: Happiness. Generally speaking, October left Todd Solondz alone during production and post-production. Solondz had final cut up to two hours, but his version ran two hours, twenty minutes, and Ray felt it was too long. He kept after Solondz to trim it. But, unlike Miramax, October did not have a post-production facility, did not make Solondz test the picture in a mall, and Ray did not threaten to bury Happiness if he didn’t get his way. Solondz did make a couple of cuts, tried this and tried that, but he usually ended up restoring the footage. Says Vachon, “It was like Ted Hope and I had to drag him in to have the will-you-cut-the-movie conversation. He dealt with the pressure by trying to avoid it as much as possible, trying very hard not to have himself in the room with the person making the request. You can’t make Todd do anything he doesn’t want to do. You just can’t.”
Ray finally agreed to let Solondz show his director’s cut at Cannes. Happiness created a scandal at the Directors’ Fortnight. Whether people loved it or hated it, it was the most talked about film of the festival. It was another triumph for October, which, with the success of The Apostle, Duvall’s Oscar nomination, and High Art, was on a roll. It looked like McGurk’s gamble was paying off. Ray says he thought Happiness was a work of genius, and he invited the Universal brass—Ron Meyer, Casey Silver, McGurk et al.—to a screening. But, he says, “They were there to open something real epic, like Blues Brothers 2000,” and they never bothered to show up. Happiness walked away with the Critics Prize, and when they got back to the U.S., the picture was invited by the New York Film Festival.
Solondz ran the film again for the October guys. According to Ray, during one of the scenes between Bill-the-pederast (Dylan Baker) and his son, Greenstein’s eyes started rolling around in his head like marbles, and he said, “Ronnie’s gotta hear about this,” referring to Meyer. Ray replied, “No, he doesn’t. This has nothing to do with them. This is our movie, our business. We sent them the script, they’ve read it, and if they haven’t read it, they have it, they know we’re making this movie. We’ve been nothing but up front with them. Plus, the budget is so totally under their radar.” Although he couldn’t prove it, Ray suspected that Greenstein in fact alerted Meyer.
If he did, he needn’t have bothered. On June 3, The Hollywood Reporter published an article drawing attention to the fact that October had four films on its slate—Happiness, Orgazmo, Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration—that could draw NC-17 ratings and lead to a potential clash with Universal. To Ray, it read like October was being branded as a renegade division making pornography; he concluded he was being set up by one of his competitors. Universal suddenly demanded to see Happiness. For reasons best known to himself, Ray thought this would be an easy problem to finesse. After all, Happiness was the kind of film October had been involved with in the past. “My atttitude to Universal was, buyer beware. Tough shit, Sherlock, fuck you, you read the script, you knew the kind of company we were, this was the kind of film that you should celebrate, not censor. You should be embracing us, you shouldnt be kicking us in the ass. It was totally naive on my part.” Meyer was quite conservative on issues of taste. Universal refused to buy Arlington Road because it opens with the image of a kid whose hand is burned. According to a source, Meyer saw Happiness and went crazy at the ejaculation scene. He said, “We can’t release it. Sell the movie,” and walked out of the screening. Meyer was furious with October because he thought it was courting controversy to raise its profile, the old Miramax trick. He exclaimed, “I don’t want to understand the mind of a pedophile.” He was appalled when he found out that Ray had allowed Solondz to use a snapshot of his young son Nicholas (named after Nicholas Ray the cult director) in the scene where Baker’s character plays with himself in the back seat of the car, looking at a photo. Says Ray, “Ronnie thought I was a degenerate. He said, ‘Bingham Ray must be a sick twisted fuck.’ My feeling was, it’s just a movie. Is it going to have a traumatic effect on my son for the rest of his life? No. Does it mean that I’m a pedophile, the New York chapter president of NAMBLA, the Man-Boy Love Association? No. But do I want to help a low-budget film because I believe in it? Absolutely. I thought it was kind of funny, to tell you the truth. No one else did! All of a sudden, people were saying, ‘How could he put his son through that?’ It wasn’t like Dylan Baker was jerkin’ off into his face. Come on.”
By July, Ray continues, “the whole thing had unraveled into this ignorant, controversial, bullshit issue.” Vachon got a call in the evening at home from Hope. He said, “Are you sitting down? I just talked to McGurk. Edgar Bronfman says Universal will not let October distribute this movie.” Ray’s response to Universal was, “We can release NC-17 films if we want, it’s in the deal.”
“No, it’s not in the deal,” replied a Universal executive.
“You’re the studio that invented the NC-17 so that you could release Henry and June.”
“Things have changed. It’s a shareholder issue now; Seagrams shareholders should not be subject to this kind of entertainment.” Ray thought, Hey, you don’t need me to drive the stock down. You’ve got Edgar for that. He says now, “It went down with all the aplomb of a fuckin’ anvil. The fish stinks from the head, and that fuckin’ stunk. Happiness was when the boat hit the iceberg. This is where we bottomed out, where the ideal was corrupted, the dream of being able to work within the studio system as some maverick, autonomous independent—it was just total horseshit. And if you’re me, it was debilitating and disillusioning. ‘Bingham, you don’t get it.’ I heard it eight thousand times in one month. Malin, at Artisan, was probably laughing through his asshole, saying, ‘Ahh, I warned you.’ Because if we had been private, no connection to Universal, there would have been no ratings issue, no anything issue. Nuthin’. It was awful, just torture. I was drinking too much, moody, inconsolable.”
Ray was so addled he concluded
his only alternative was to provoke Silver into firing him, whereupon he would distribute Happiness on his own. “If these guys didn’t want that picture, I would do my own version of Kids, get the fuck outta Dodge, get fired from that shithole place,” he recalls. That same month, after leaving the Holly Springs, Mississippi, set of Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune, another October film, he called Silver on his cell phone from the baggage claim area of the Memphis airport. He yelled into the phone, “You ignorant piece of shit—you’re just a fucking scumbag, asshole idiot, you never even read the fucking script, and you didn’t see the fucking movie. How can you make a determination on a movie you didn’t see? Only fucking scumbag Hollywood shitheads do that. I’m the one who doesn’t get it? No, I don’t think so, you don’t get it!” Silver, who rarely lost his temper, lost it now. He hung up on Ray, burst into McGurk’s office, saying, “I’m gonna fire that motherfucker.” McGurk calmed him down, saying, “Casey, hang on a second, this is Bingham Ray we’re talking about. What he’s trying to do in his Fred Flintstone–like way is to get you so out-of-control mad that you fire him, because that’s really what he wants. We can’t give him what he wants.”
Ray continued to protest, “You might as well just fuckin’ eighty-six us right now, just put a fuckin’ shotgun to the company’s head and pull the trigger, because you’re just gonna waste whatever credibility we have left. There’s going to be a shitstorm in the media.” The studio came back with, “No, there won’t be a shitstorm in the media if you don’t contribute to it, and you won’t be able to contribute to it because you’re gagged. Todd and Christine and James Schamus and Ted Hope aren’t going to contribute to the shitstorm because they want what’s best for the picture, and we’re going to do a deal with them, and everything’s going to be hunky-dory.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 50
