Meanwhile, Dogma, Kevin Smith’s poke at the the Catholic Church, was ticking away like a time bomb. After the success of Chasing Amy, he figured it was now or never. The film was shot in Pittsburgh. Like Anderson, Smith was annoyed that Harvey didn’t deliver on a series of promises he’d made. “Bob is no bullshit, but Harvey will blow smoke up your ass,” he says. “After he read the script, he said, ‘We’re gonna get fuckin’ Roger Deakins to shoot it, Vittorio Storaro, I’ll call him personally,’ and you wind up with Bob Yeoman, who’s wonderful, but not them. He’ll promise you the sun, the moon, and the stars, and if you get a handful of earth, you’re feeling pretty good, never remembering, Wait a second, where are the sun, the moon, and the fuckin’ stars?”
When Smith emerged from the cutting room, he had a three hour and twenty minute cut. According to the filmmaker, Harvey said, “ ‘This is fantastic, you guys did a phenomenal fucking job, but I do think there’s about ten minutes we can cut outta there.’ We’re like, ‘All right,’ and we cut out ten, fifteen minutes, and he said, ‘Wonderful, it moves like a sonofabitch, but I really think there’s probably another ten minutes we can dig out of there.’ We got to two hours, and didn’t even notice. Then he wanted to keep going. His whole theory was, you need to program it as many times as possible in one evening. At ninety minutes, you get two screenings. We finally said, ‘No, this is it.’
“ ‘I’m telling you, five more minutes.’
“ ‘Harvey, there’s not five minutes to cut, we’re too close to the bone now.’
“ ‘No, I’m telling you, there’s five more minutes, you should get in there and do the work.’
“ ‘Look, you have to stop with the cutting. We’ve cut it to the point we’re gonna cut it, if you make us cut five minutes more I’m going to go to the press and scream like a raped child!’
“ ‘Okay.’ And that was that.” Harvey treated Smith, and his producer, Scott Mosier, a whole lot better than he had punching bags like Christopher, Shyamalan, Anderson, and the rest. Smith was family. Clerks was one of the last truly indie films Miramax had acquired. Says Smith, “You always read about people having horrible fuckin’ experiences with Miramax, and clashes of egos and shit like that. 54? Reshooting and reshooting and finally ending up with a movie the director doesn’t recognize as his own. From what I’ve seen, Harvey only takes movies away from people he has no respect for. We’ve never had that. He’s never lost money on us, he’s only earned off of us, and we’ve never gone through a period of defiance, ‘Fuck you, Harvey, I’m in charge.’ We always recognize that he is the man with the wallet that we listen to.”
But if Smith provided Harvey with a way to channel the Miramax of yesteryear, he also served as a reminder of how much the company had changed. Dogma was yet another film that threatened to put Disney on a collision course with Catholic pressure groups, promising a return to the bad old days of 1995, which Disney and Miramax had both tried to put behind them. As Roth remembers it, “I told Michael Eisner, ‘I don’t see this as the same thing as Kids, this is a parody, this is fun, it’s Ben and Matt and Chris Rock,’ but Michael just said to me, ‘I can’t take this pressure. You may be right, but I can’t take that chance here.’ ” Eisner called Harvey and told him, “If one person does not go to Disneyland because of this movie, that will be one person too many. I do not want you to release it.” Adds former Disney CFO Rob Moore, “It became very clear to Harvey that it would be a huge problem between him and Michael if he forced the issue, so he agreed to get rid of it. Ultimately he had to deal with Kevin and Matt and Ben, who were basically like, ‘We’re at Miramax because you’re willing to take these kinds of risks, now what’s going on?’ ”
Smith thought it was a tempest in a teacup. As Harvey recalls, “Kevin said, ‘What are you worried about?’ So I sent him ten thousand letters that had come into the office by truck.” They changed his mind. “We were in the middle of a shitstorm, with tons of hate mail,” Smith remembers. One letter, from the “Hispanic Coalition of Catholic Warriors” was typical. It said, in part, “You Hollywood Jewish sons of bitches, all you are interested in is money and money at any cost. I advise you to spend your billions of looted gold in flak jackets. We are coming for you, I promise we’ll get you somehow at office, at home, or anywhere you are seen.” Continues Smith, “The Catholic League went right for Disney. They didn’t even care about Miramax, so it was very easy to be like, I want to get as far away from Disney as I can get. Because it wasn’t about our movie anymore. It was about the controversy of our movie. Nobody had seen frame one. Dogma was a cluster fuck for all involved.”
Needless to say, none of the other studios would touch Smith’s film. “We had Ben and Matt following Good Will Hunting, a movie that made $125 million, plus won them a writing Oscar,” Smith continues. “MGM watched it and passed, Columbia watched it and passed. Universal watched it and passed. Edgar Bronfman, Jr., watched it himself, and was just, like, ‘There’s no way we can put out this movie without seeing our stock drop.’ The un-sung villain in all of this is Blockbuster Video. Because Blockbuster has made it their mandate that they won’t shelve an NC-17 film, and when you have a company that takes up 85 percent of the video business, maybe more, it’s tough. Every distributor who’s looking to the ancillary market to make more money or make up what the film didn’t make theatrically, has to take that into consideration.” The moral of all this, of course, is that when studios gobble up indies, it’s bad for the kind of freedom prized by these filmmakers and distributors. “Independent” became “dependent.”
QUENTIN TARANTINO never appreciated Jackie Brown as much as he should have. On the contrary, it seemed to be a disappointment to him. As one of his friends put it, “He thought he really fucked up.” Like Madonna, his antennae were always tuned to the twitches of the zeitgeist, aquiver with each ripple of the culture. Although he always claimed to be and behaved as if he were making his films exclusively for himself—refusing to tailor them to suit the Weinsteins’ wishes or the comments scrawled on preview cards—he felt he had let down his fans. Tarantino even got his first taste of bad press. He would stumble on phrases like “the dangerously over-exposed Quentin Tarantino,” and think to himself, You’re the mother-fuckers that overexposed me. “I got sick of the way journalists, especially in a profile, kill you with their adjectives,” he says. “He ‘lumbered’ into the room. ‘Gesticulating wildly.’ ‘Manic.’ You’re getting your ass kicked by these little adjectives. After you suffer through your school years, most adults go through their lives and never have to hear or read anyone making fun of them ever again. That is officially gone out of your life. All of a sudden I was getting self-conscious about what it is that makes me me. I was hearing people say, like, ‘He’s a motor mouth,’ ‘Shut the fuck up, dada.’ But that’s what made me famous in the first fucking place. I started to feel like a piñata. Maybe I overreacted, okay? ‘Fuck y’all.’
“The acting bug was very big on me at that time,” Tarantino continues. “I was really chomping at the bit because I wasn’t acting in Jackie Brown.” Soon after the film was released, director Leonard Foglia approached him about doing a revival of Wait Until Dark, on Broadway, taking on the role of a thug who terrorizes a blind woman, to be played by Marisa Tomei. Even though he hadn’t done live theater since he was a teenager, and then only a little, he jumped at it. The play opened in the first week of April 1998, to awful reviews. Tarantino in particular got killed. Slaughtered. Eviscerated. He compared it to being tied to the back of a wagon and dragged through town while everybody flogged him with whips.
In the best of circumstances, Tarantino does not relish criticism, even friendly, constructive criticism. As one of his friends puts it, “Quentin needs you to deal with him on a fan club basis. He just doesn’t like negatives. He’s got that American disease where everything has to have a positive spin.” But the reviews of Wait Until Dark were vicious. “It was tough,” Tarantino continues. “It was the morning after openin
g night, every other person in New York City is reading the New York Times. They look up from the New York Times, and there I am. They see me. Me. I’m the one whose acting sucks. You try not to take it personally, but it is personal.”
But the press was so bad that Tarantino began to wonder privately if the play hadn’t been a foolish move. Years later, on the set of Kill Bill, he brought up the subject with David Carradine, who plays Bill, and who happened to have seen Wait Until Dark. “Tell me the unvarnished truth,” Tarantino asked. “Don’t hold back. Do I have what it takes to make it on Broadway?” The actor answered, evasively: “I think it was very brave of you to do that, but there is something in the back of my mind.”
“What?”
“Why do you want to parade around on a stage in front of a bunch of blue-haired ladies who arrived on a bus? Because that’s what Broadway is. Whereas what you’re doing is making pictures that blow people away. What could you possibly get out of that compared to the other?”
Says Uma Thurman, who stars in Kill Bill, “You must never forget with Quentin that he wanted to be an actor. If somebody asked him to act in something while he was prepping Kill Bill, he would drop everything to go and act. His schedule was not being dictated by being a film director. He was much more interested in doing a guest spot on Alias.”
Says one friend, “Part of him understood that he’d done something that was wrong. You don’t just go from acting in little bit parts in your own movies to all of a sudden somebody taking advantage of you—although he was game for it—to make you the lead of a Broadway play. That was really horrible. He was like fodder, throw him up there to get the shit kicked out of him. He’s like a little boy, he shares his enthusiasms, they’re bubbling over, he trusts people, and he opens up and tries things, and then he gets burned, and he retreats. He was traumatized by that resounding slam that was delivered to him by the New York critics. He went into a tailspin. It scared him. He’s a very wounded guy in that way.”
Tarantino had rented an apartment in Greenwich Village for the duration of the play, but discovered that he couldn’t even walk around the neighborhood in peace. He asked his dowtown pals Thurman and Robert De Niro for advice. De Niro said, “You wear a baseball cap, sunglasses, you’re fine, people don’t recognize you.”
“Well, that doesn’t work for me,” Tarantino replied. “I look like me, in a baseball cap. I’m not really that famous, I’m that recognizable. If you know what I look like, you’re gonna know me when you see me.” To Thurman, he complained, “If I take a walk by my house, past nine o’clock, I’m gettin’ jacked all the time.”
“Quentin, you wanted this,” she replied, not very sympathetically. “Take your walks at eight!”
SCOTT GREENSTEIN was still riding high on the success of The Apostle. There was a deal with Albert Brooks for The Muse, at $15 million, a modestly budgeted picture with Angelina Jolie. Greenstein insisted on Sharon Stone instead. If Harvey had made a deal with Stone, he wanted her too. Even though the actress cut her salary, she—along with the addition of Andie MacDowell and Elton John—bumped the budget up $8 milllion to about $23 million. Almost overnight, The Muse went from a mildly amusing Brooks movie that was almost guaranteed to recoup on the basis of an estimated $20 million in foreign sales, to a not-nearly-funny-enough Sharon Stone vehicle that was almost guaranteed to lose money. Schmidt and Ray exchanged looks. Antically disposed, they had improvised a little ditty for the occasion. Set to the tune of “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls, it went, “I gotta movie heah/Our aim is very cleah/We gonna make it for a price that isn’t deah/Can’t lose, can’t lose/Our guy says The Muse can’t lose/And heah comes Albert B/he meets with Scottie G/and the next thing ya know the budget’s 23/Can’t lose, can’t lose/Our guy says The Muse can’t lose/So Scottie grabs the phone/Says, Get get me Sharon Stone/Ya know it’s time to throw CAA a bone/Can’t lose, can’t lose . . .” And on and on.
Already bad, the atmosphere in the October offices became acrid. Doors that had always stood open were now closed, and the sounds of shouting rocketed off the walls. Staff said, “Mom and Dad are fighting again.” Ray could feel the company slipping away from him, and he felt powerless to stop it. He thought, I’m losing, and I know I’m losing, and I don’t know what to do about it. He ran into Amir Malin in a mall in Toronto when they were both there for the film festival. Malin was on an escalator on his way to the top floor; Ray was on the adjacent escalator descending to the parking level. Ray was angry over something Malin had said in Premiere magazine, and as he passed him, he shouted, “Fuck you, you shithead,” and gave him the finger. Generally, people in the film business are rude when they’re on the way up. But this was Bingham Ray on his way down. Later, as his situation at October continued to deteriorate, the irony was not lost on him.
There were no secrets at October. Everyone spoke to everyone else, told everyone else what was being said. Greenstein talked to Chris McGurk nearly every day, said things like, “Bingham’s not a businessman. He doesn’t want to make money, he wants to make Danish-language art films, you can’t get this guy to step up and think in a commercial way.” No sooner would Greenstein hang up the phone than Ray would call, complaining that Greenstein was a Philistine, didn’t give a shit about independent film. According to one source, Greenstein wanted Ray to report to him, then openly urged McGurk to get rid of his partner. But there was no way McGurk was going to get rid of Ray. “Bingham was the creative essence of October Films,” he says. “You went to Cannes with him, you walked down the street, he was there in Bermuda shorts and people were coming out of the woodwork.”
It wasn’t like October was the only thing McGurk had on his mind. Universal was staggering through one of the worst dry patches in recent memory, a virtual Death Valley of would-be hits, bleached by the sun and picked over by buzzards. Says former October marketing head Dennis Rice, “It was one fucking disaster after another that made October look like the pimple on the elephant’s butt. McGurk’s ass was on fire and he had to take a phone call from Bingham, who’s bitching about the fact that we wanted a forty-two-inch ad instead of a twenty-one-inch ad.” McGurk screamed into the phone, “I don’t have time for this, Bingham, go figure it out. I don’t give a shit, enough with this petty garbage bullshit, you’re complaining about Scott, he’s only been in there a year, don’t you have anything better to do? Aren’t you doing your job? Don’t call!” McGurk was feeling less like a studio head than a therapist. Ray remembers, “Chris acted like I was Chicken Little, negative, not a team player, stuck in the old way, while Scott and John represented the new way.” Eventually, McGurk stopped taking his calls.
As the months passed, September giving way to October and then November, Ray arrived at work later and later, shut himself in his office chain-smoking, with the Grateful Dead cranked up to such ear-splitting volume that it practically stripped the paint on the walls. Always high-strung, he became a screamer. Recalls Ray, “It was the single most painful period of time I’ve experienced in this business.” He was still drinking too much, Absolut vodka martinis and single malt Scotches. “I was stressed out beyond all belief,” he recalls. “I started seeing a therapist.”
Meanwhile, storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. Decisions were being made in distant boardrooms that had nothing to do with October directly, but would affect its future. In 1998, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., had bought PolyGram for $10.6 billion, assuming a hefty debt. With Universal’s feature division bleeding cash, he put PolyGram’s film holdings on the block, as well as Gramercy, its speciality division. Greenstein went around dropping mysterious hints, telling favorites, “There’s some things in the works, I can’t really tell you about them, but hang in there, things will be fine, don’t worry, you’re in great shape, you’re doing a great job.”
Then, in the third week of December 1998, Greenstein waltzed into Schmidt’s office and said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is, Barry Diller wants to buy October. The bad news is, he
wants me to run it!” Schmidt was flabbergasted. Greenstein asked him not to tell anyone, especially Ray. Schmidt replied, “Whaddya mean I can’t tell anyone? First of all, you’ve got your partners, and number two you’ve got your board, Universal and the shareholders—it’s ludicrous.” He rushed into Ray’s office, exclaiming, “Barry Diller’s made an offer for October. He wants Scott to run it, and he wants us too. There’s no fuckin’ way I’m gonna work for Scott, and I know what your answer is going to be. But if it’s a serious offer for the company, we’ve got to see if it plays out.” Stunned, Ray looked at Schmidt and asked, “What? How has it come to this? This doesn’t smell right to me. Why would anyone on God’s fucking green earth think that I would ever, under any circumstances, report to this guy? It just would not happen. If I had no other job and no other recourse, and no other anything—as dumb as I am, you’d have to be dumber than me to do it.” He called McGurk, said, “What the fuck’s going on with this?” McGurk had been blindsided as well. Greenstein had told him nothing. Now, adds Donna Gigliotti, who would shortly work for Greenstein, “McGurk hates him. He spits nails when you mention Scott’s name.”
Greenstein had a weight problem, and according to a source close to him, was in the habit of taking long walks. It was during such a walk that he accidentally ran into Diller. He said to Diller, “Hey, howya doin’, I’m at October, we’re loosely affiliated, I’d like to sell The Apostle on the Home Shopping Network, ’cause I think it would have real good blue-collar appeal.” Diller thought it was a good idea, and a relationship began between the two of them. Diller called Greenstein when he was in Dallas at a meeting at Blockbuster. He said, “Would you be interested in me buying October?” Then Greenstein went to Schmidt and said, “We need to deal with this.”
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