The deal was, Universal quietly did what needed to be done under the table for Good Machine to secure a bank loan that allowed it to distribute Happiness. The film played the New York Film Festival on a Saturday night in October and opened the following day. Despite a huge amount of publicity, most of it good, it grossed only about $3 million. Ray sat on the sidelines. “I’d cut my throat nine thousand times, I was all bled out,” he says. Solondz made next to nothing. He was paid $30,000 for writing and directing Happiness, about $15,000 a year for two years’ work. Says Vachon, “We weren’t distributors. We didn’t have the money or the muscle to really drive it all the way home. Bingham was worried about his reputation, Good Machine was worried about, Is our relationship with Universal going to be damaged by this? Everyone was getting absorbed by their places in the Greek tragedy, Oh, how does this reflect on me? and no one was saying, There’s this movie that has two years of life and blood in it, let’s get the movie out! It was really rough. Good Machine had a horrible time doing it, it was a big money suck, a lot of work for a little return. We so could have had a screenplay nomination, and we maybe even could have gotten Dylan Baker a nomination, but we didn’t do a real Academy push. It was a missed opportunity.”
This experience further alienated Ray. Greenstein didn’t much care, saying, “There are other fights to fight, let’s move on.” Ray’s attitude was, “Fuck that! When are you gonna stand up and fight the fight where if you lose, there is no tomorrow.”
IN THE SPRING, a $1.4 million class action suit was filed against Miramax by former employees for unpaid overtime. Working conditions there were no better than they had been in the 1980s, and in some ways they were worse, despite or because of the Weinsteins’ success. It was still an exciting place to be, especially for celebrity-starved New Yorkers. With the company’s name in the papers every day—Liz Smith, “Page Six” of the New York Post, Rush and Molloy at the Daily News—staffers felt like they were at the center of the universe. Go to the men’s room, and there was Sean Penn peeing in the next urinal. Step into the elevator, and there was Madonna. Sharon Stone wandered the halls looking fabulous. “I loved to drop the name ‘Miramax’ in a bar,” says former marketing assistant Peter Kindlon. “It was very cool.”
But whereas the old Miramax was small enough for everyone to crowd into a screening room, see a potential acquisition, and be grilled on their opinions, the new Miramax was big and impersonal. Harvey liked to think he had the common touch, traded on the fact that he was the son of working people—“I was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens, in rent-controlled buildings, didn’t have the niceties of life,” etc., etc.—but assistants, interns, floaters, and temps were treated like they didn’t exist, or worse. Says Kindlon, “If Harvey and Bob didn’t have to talk to you, they wouldn’t. Harvey certainly knew who I was, but I could be in an elevator with just him, and he’d never acknowledge me.” Robin Rizzuto, an assistant to Mark Gill, adds, “You could work at the company for three or four years and never really be acknowledged. If Harvey wanted something from me, and I was standing there, he never would have used my name. He’d say to Mark, ‘I need an ashtray,’ and Mark would say, ‘Robin, could you get Harvey an ashtray.’ ”
Harvey had a driver who was devoted to him. One time, he was driving Harvey in from Teterboro Airport. Another car from the car service, Prime Time Limousine, left at the same moment headed for the same destination. Harvey noticed that the other car had beaten his to the city. He became furious with his driver, couldn’t understand how the other driver had beaten him. He browbeat the man, shouting, “Just because you’re merely a driver, don’t you have any pride? Don’t you care about the work that you do?” As one person who witnessed the incident put it, “It was as if he was trying to demean the fellow because he was a driver and not some fucking studio mogul.”
Says former marketing coordinator Amy Hart, “I had worked at New Line, and if there was a hit, like if Austin Powers made a gajillion dollars on the first weekend, there was a champagne breakfast for us Monday morning, and everybody shared in the success. At Miramax, after working our asses off to win twelve [nominations] for The English Patient, we got an e-mail saying, ‘No more expensing your lunches, no more car service home.’ Our thank you was a big ‘Fuck you!’ That left a real bitter taste in your mouth, and that’s why there was such a huge turnover. At the assistant level we just felt exploited. There was such a nastiness.”
The atmosphere around the office was still abusive. Says one assistant, “The way to get respect in the office was to yell at people on the phone, a messenger fucked something up, a FedEx didn’t arrive, you had to show how much of a prick you could be. People went, ‘Oh, man, that was great, that was great.’ It was a really sadistic environment.” At another assistant who incurred his wrath, Harvey yelled, “You’re a dildo! You are a dildo. Say it, ‘I’m a dildo.’ ” The assistant did. Hart continues, “One time a floater, working for Harvey—he had three other assistants—really had to go to the bathroom. She waited and waited. Finally, she stood up, and he went, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’ ‘You work for me now, siddown.’ ” He told one employee, “I hate the sound of your breathing.” He told publicist Dennis Higgins he had to make something or other happen, adding, “Do you know what’s going to happen if you don’t?” “You’re gonna fire me?” “I’m gonna kill you.” Says Gill, “Every year at Miramax felt like a dog year, for mental distress and emotional cruelty.”
The staff learned quickly enough that although Miramax may have been at the center of the universe, Harvey and Bob were at the center of Miramax. Life there revolved around them. “I remember waiting for Harvey to get off a plane or in from the airport, the whole place would shut down,” Kindlon continues. “For hours, we’d just sit there in a meeting and wait. Then he would walk into the room, and God forbid you were laughing—the room would stop, everybody shut up.”
People took huge pay cuts to work at Miramax. Martha Kirkley, who worked in Harvey’s assistant pool, had been earning $150,000 a year at IBM before she went to work at Miramax for $27,000 a year. Hart, a single mother, was expected to make ends meet in New York City on $25,000 a year. Not only was it impossible, it was galling, “especially when you knew,” says Hart, “that they were just throwing money out the window, $100,000 for Gwyneth Paltrow to have a weekend in Paris just for the hell of it. He got her a private jet from New York to Paris, got her a Mercedes so she could have fun.”
The brothers expected their staff to work long hours. Says Kindlon, “I literally went to my desk at 9:30 A.M. and never left it before 11:00, 11:30 at night. I was burned out, exhausted.” Adds Hart, “It was like factory labor in a Third World country. We never got lunch breaks. Unless you smoked you never left that building.” Even if you finished work by, say, 7:30 in the evening, it was considered bad form to leave, so staffers killed time for another couple of hours. Consequently, virtually nobody had a life outside the office—families, girlfriends, boyfriends. Vacations made the Weinsteins crazy, especially an extended weekend or a few days off during the winter holidays, admittedly a busy period for the company. It was always, “What do you mean you’re going on a trip? People work here for a living. You go, don’t come back!” People were recalled from the airport as they were ready to board planes headed for sun and sand. One woman is said to have postponed her wedding. Says a source, “It was a question of control. When they lost the control, they lost you as a loyal player. And didn’t want you there anymore.”
Then there was the fear factor, still. Employees worked under the constant threat of losing their jobs. In a typical incident, Bob called a staffer who had just been hired in a senior position, whom he had never met. Her temp didn’t know who Bob was, and she was on the phone with a director. Still, it took her no more than twenty seconds to pick up the call. He said, “Don’t you know who I am? You never keep me on hold. You’re fired.”
“I have a temp who didn’t know, Bob,” the st
affer remonstrated.
“Well, fire her.” Abuse coming from the top was handed down the line. Says Hart, “Harvey has this negativity and ferocity, and it trickled down. People who left would say, ‘I was turning into the biggest bitch in the world.’ ” Adds Kindlon, “There was a feeling at that time that if you didn’t like it, there were plenty of people who would. I had a window, and I could look out on Greenwich Street, and I always imagined thousands of young people holding résumés yelling, ‘Pick me, pick me!’ ”
In 1997, the Labor Department had investigated Miramax’s employment practices for seven months. A settlement was reached without the agreement of the plaintiffs, which allowed them to go to court. In early spring of 1998, attorney Merri Lane, whose daughter Stacy was a former Miramax employee, gathered some thirty-five people in a midtown office and told them that she was going to launch a class action suit against the company. Kindlon remembers, “She looked around the table and asked, ‘Is anyone willing to put their name on it?’ Dead silence. Most of the people in that room, all of them except me, were afraid of retaliation, afraid to be associated with anything against Miramax. I raised my hand, because having been out of there for a while, I realized how much they had exploited me, and I knew I was doing the right thing. I said, ‘Put my name on the suit.’ I would never have done it if I had still been working there. I’m not that courageous.”
On April 9, the suit was filed on behalf of about two and a half dozen former employees charging that Miramax owed back wages for overtime. The amount in question wasn’t huge, but it was embarrassing and generated the thing the Weinsteins hated almost as much as losing money: bad press. “They intimidated everybody,” says Lane. “None of the people who still worked there would sign up. They were convinced that they would be fired, be blackballed, that terrible things would happen. There were people who sent in consents to me and before I could have them filed they withdrew. There was one poor young woman whose father called me constantly saying that she wanted to join but she was terrified, and I couldn’t guarantee that nothing would happen to her.”
The case was settled for an undisclosed amount. Kindlon says he received about a year’s salary, $25,000. Hart, who was also a plaintiff, recalls that she got between $7,000 and $10,000. By that time, Kindlon was at Fine Line. His salary was almost doubled, and he arrived at the office at 9:00 A.M. and left at 5:00 P.M. But, he says, “Fine Line was horrible at marketing films. I really loved working at Miramax.”
Eleven
The Bad Lieutenant
1998–1999
• How Scott Greenstein sold out October, Harvey Weinstein won an Oscar for Shakespeare, made Rosie O’Donnell and M. Night Shyamalan cry, but got his knuckles rapped by Michael Eisner.
“I was a fuckin’ stone idiot. Total moron. You don’t get any stupider than that, not to have had the wherewithal to navigate these very tricky waters. I was in a canoe going around a whirlpool with no paddle and just getting sucked down by the whole thing.”
—BINGHAM RAY
While 54 was being pinched and pulled to raise its scores, a Miramax executive told the filmmakers not to worry, they had fixed problems like this before, they had even solved Wide Awake. Wide Awake was an insipid, sugary piece of cotton candy, a prequel of sorts to Touched by an Angel, notable only for being the second feature of M. Night Shyamalan. Says Jack Lechner, who joined Miramax after it had already been shot, “Why did it ever get made? Beats me!” The saccharine script appealed to Harvey’s sentimental side, now, apparently, ascendant. He thought it would be a huge family movie. Meryl Poster characteristically championed the project, and became the executive in charge. Shyamalan’s conceit is that a twelve-or-so-year-old boy in a Catholic prep school, grieving over his grandfather’s death, becomes obsessed with finding God, and actually succeeds in doing so. The story is semiautobiographical. Shyamalan, born in Madras, India, the son of two doctors, attended such a school as a child in Philadelphia. In the film, however, the surrogate for young Shyamalan is, naturally, fair-skinned, with blue eyes and tousled blond hair. So much for diversity in indie film.
In fact, Miramax had come a long way since Harvey wanted to open Priest on Good Friday, and executives were not only worried that the story was silly, but worse, it was blasphemous, likely to agitate Catholic watch-dog groups best left sleeping. The solution was to replace God with a more modest hierarch, and they arrived at an angel, over Shyamalan’s objections. The executive, proud of the fix, told the 54 gang, “See, isn’t that great? We’ve maintained the essence of his movie.”
Right away, Shyamalan made himself unpopular by condescending to the Miramax folks. Even then, without a hit, Shyamalan was arrogant and stubborn. To them, his attitude was, “I’m Steven Spielberg, and this is a pit stop, and I’m going to blow past you guys. I’m writing a movie right now, called The Sixth Sense, which is going to be a $100 million film, and that’s the business I’m interested in.” The Weinsteins returned the favor. “They treated Shyamalan like shit,” says a source. When Harvey and Bob first saw Wide Awake at the Tribeca screening room, Bob, according to former Miramax production head Paul Webster, told the young director, “I don’t think this movie can be saved,” while Harvey “made Night cry. Destroyed him, in front of everybody.”
As was their custom, the Weinsteins slashed the budget way beyond a point that was reasonable, tormented Shyamalan for exceeding it, and then when their self-fulfilling prophecy was fulfilled, threw money at post-production, allowing Harvey to flex his producing muscles. Adds Lechner, “There was cut after cut, reshoots, rescoring, revoicing, but it was fucked from Day 1. It wasn’t a good script, it wasn’t a good movie, and you could have worked on it for another ten years and you wouldn’t have made it into a good movie.” Says Joe Roth, “Harvey was recutting it behind him. Shyamalan had a terrible time.”
Rosie O’Donnell had a small role, a nun. Her television show became a hit during the course of the post-production marathon, and she was hot. She loved the director, loved the movie. Shyamalan called O’Donnell, said, “Help me.” On the speakerphone to Harvey, Shyamalan, Poster, Cathy Konrad, who was one of the producers, and others gathered in the conference room at the Tribeca offices, O’Donnell said, “Listen, Harvey, you can’t steamroll this poor filmmaker, you gotta live with what you make, I don’t want you to release it unless it’s Night’s version. He’s an artist. I’m an artist. You’re just the guy who sells it.” She didn’t mean it in an insulting way, but she inadvertently pushed Harvey’s we’reproducers-not-just-distributors button. Says Konrad, “There are these moments where you can actually see smoke come out of Harvey’s ears. He just snapped. He lost his mind.” As a couple of people in the room remember it, he roared, “You’re some fucking artist! You’re just a fucking talk show host! Like you would fucking know. You bitch! You cunt!” Konrad recalls, “Rosie burst into tears. I was like, Excuse me, Rosie O’Donnell is crying?” (According to one source, Harvey called her “a big fat fucking cow.” Harvey says, “I never used ‘cunt’ and I never said ‘cow.’ ”) Konrad remembers him continuing in that vein, looking around the table and screaming, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. I can take your film and put it in a closet with a lot of other films and it will never see the fucking light of day! And you know why I can do that? Because I have a lot of money. So you need me more than I need you. And the way I’ll show you that is I will make your work that’s important to you invisible to everybody.” She adds, “It was heartbreaking.” Afterward, of course, there was a lot of backpedaling. Harvey was just in from London, he was jet-lagged, he wasn’t prepared for the call, etc., etc. He sent flowers. But she was furious, said, “I want Double Wish”—another project she had at Miramax—“out of there. To my grave I will go, I will never speak to him again. I will never work for that man again. And I will not do press for that movie.” Of course, not doing press for Wide Awake was an empty threat, because Miramax dumped it—which, actually, was a public service. And as for the
rest of it, as Konrad says, “Everybody has this moment where they say they’re never gonna talk to him again, they’re never gonna make anything with them again, and then of course we all do. Because he’s smart, he’s a cinephile, he knows more about films and filmmaking than most people in Hollywood. It’s a love-hate thing with Harvey.”
Several years later, when Joe Roth took on The Sixth Sense at Disney, Harvey told him, “You can’t let that guy direct that picture, look at the terrible job he did on Wide Awake.” Still, Harvey had hired him to do a polish on his Freddie Prinze vehicle, She’s All That. “I thought I had a good relationship with him,” Harvey says, “but once The Sixth Sense got really really big, he let me know how he felt. I said to him, ‘Why don’t we restore Wide Awake to your original cut? Every scene just the way you wanted it! That way I can show what I had to deal with.’ He didn’t want to do that.”
Explains Lechner, “The weirdness of being at Miramax was, on one hand, you have in the works at the same time, The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Good Will Hunting, where everyone agrees on what the movie is up front and you let the filmmakers get on with it, everything Miramax does helps it to be better, and it makes a zillion dollars. But ultimately, everyone at Miramax ended up spending more time on Wide Awake, 54, and Talk of Angels, which was in post for three years.”
Indeed, it seemed that almost every picture in 1998 was a problem. Although Harvey had paid a fortune for Next Stop Wonderland, he made director Brad Anderson reshoot the ending. “Miramax will steamroller over you, if they can,” he said. “I’d never been through that before. My assumption was that you sell the movie and that’s the movie they buy. But they look at it as a product. A product needs to be reworked or altered in order to fit the consumer’s needs. And you’re just the obstacle in their way. . . . And of course, you don’t get that shtick when they’re buying your movie. It’s like, ‘We love it.’ ”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 51
