Between Christmas and New Year’s 1999, Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, along with McGurk and his wife, Jamie, converged on the Rays’ home in Mount Kisco for dinner. It was all very festive. The tree was up, the kids were running around. The McGurks brought a nice glass ice bucket as a gift. According to Schmidt, McGurk was contrite, said, “I made a mistake. Bringing in Scott was the worst thing I could have done. He’s an opportunist, a backstabber. Scott has ambitions that make Amir’s pale by comparison. He wants to run the company.” No one could figure out why Diller wanted to buy October, what he thought he was buying. Nor did they believe that Greenstein had run into Diller by accident. Says Schmidt, “I think they might have run into each other on the street, but I would assume one of two things, that Scott waited on that street corner for maybe three weeks until Diller walked by, or he really bumped into him and used it as an opportunity to say, ‘Lemme come by and talk to you.’ But either way he was looking for an opportunity to set himself up. Which he’d probably been doing from day one.” To him, it didn’t make any difference whether Greenstein suggested that Diller buy October or the reverse. “The right kind of partnership is all about sitting down with your partners and discussing, ‘Hey, we’ve got a possible offer, should we pursue it?’ Unless you want to promote yourself at the expense of others.” According to Diller himself, “It may be a bit apocryphal that we ran into each other on the street. I have no memory of his talking about The Apostle and HSN. It could have happened, but it seems unlikely—it’s such a weird idea. But I had the desire to build a film company, because the TV part of USA needed product. I had heard about Scott. I asked him to come and see me, and we started exploring purchasing the company, because it was kind of imploding. Maybe Allen & Co. brought it to us rather than Scott—I don’t remember—but Scott was a bright guy and incredibly energetic. He will go anywhere, knock down any wall, call anyone, do anything, and I’m an admirer of that. We decided to back him instead of Bingham Ray.”
However it happened, during that dinner, Ray managed to turn around both McGurk and Schmidt. They all understood that they had to fight. They even had Malin’s support, who was still a partner, even though he had moved on to Artisan. “When basically Scott sold out the company from undeneath Bingham and John, I sided with them,” he says. “I called up John and told him, ‘It strikes me the wrong way, you and Bingham can vote my vote for what you think is right.’ ”
Schmidt recalls, “We all came away from that dinner reaffirming the things we believed in deeply in terms of the kind of company we wanted, the morality of the company, what it stands for, how we treat people, friendship and loyalty—things that count more in the balance than taking a three quarter of a million dollar a year job from Barry Diller. I would have been the COO or the president of the new company, and Bingham could have been set up in his own division. That was a future that we basically said ‘Fuck it’ to that night, a future where there would be security for our families, the possibility of continuing to do what we did, but it was just wrong. Scott did something I regarded as dishonorable. You don’t report to a guy like Greenstein, given where he came from. That was an intolerable ethical position.”
In January, Diller offered $20 million for October, with a couple of hundred thousand dollars going to Ray and Schmidt after seven or eight years with the company. To the partners, it was an insult. None of the minority shareholders thought it was a good offer, but they were afraid to turn it down, afraid of saying no to Bronfman’s friend Diller, embarrassing him. Nevertheless, they did turn it down. Greenstein apparently hadn’t realized that the minority shareholders had the power to veto a sale, and for a moment, it looked like he might have overplayed his hand. He was on the verge of cleaning out his desk. He would come into Schmidt’s office, say, “Can’t we work something out?” Ray, who carried The Godfather around in his head like a metal plate, saw himself uncomfortably seated across a red checked tablecloth from Sollozzo, expecting to be shot at any moment, when suddenly the man says, “What are you worried about? I am the hunted one.” Except he couldn’t figure out whether he was Sollozzo or Michael Corleone.
Still, even though Greenstein was momentarily checked, the fate of October rested on a knife edge. Ray and Schmidt tried to carry on business as usual. They understood that Bronfman would probably find a way to sell their company one way or another, and that they had to locate a white knight. “Once you’re put in play, alarm bells are going off. Die! Die! Die!” Ray says. “We were under the gun, because the company was weakened in the light of all this activity. Even idiot Bingham got that. But we went to Sundance.”
“MIRAMAX IS BRILLIANT at publicizing its successes, but it’s even more brilliant burying its failures,” observes Dennis Rice. Many films, with titles changed once, twice, sometimes three times, tiptoed out on video, with maybe a cable airing as well. The company released, half released, or sent straight to cable and/or video a string of under-performers and outright disasters, including not only 54, Velvet Goldmine, Next Stop Wonderland, Wide Awake, Talk of Angels, but A Price Above Rubies, Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence (released as The Very Thought of You), and The Wisdom of Crocodiles (starring Jude Law, released as Immortality), etc., etc.
Some of these films were homegrown productions developed at Miramax, some were acquisitions. It didn’t seem to matter much. A case in point is the sad tale of The Hairy Bird, or at least that was the title its writer-director, Sarah Kernochan, gave it—it would have three titles all told. Kernochan, a tall, poised blonde, is married to playwright James Lapine. She won an Oscar for co-producing one of the big documentaries of the 1970s, Marjoe, the story of a young, charismatic preacher. (In 2002, she won another for a documentary short called Thoth.) Subsequently, she turned to writing scripts. “I was on the bottom of the A list or the top of the B list,” she says, having written the excellent Impromptu, with Judy Davis and Hugh Grant. She had written for Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg, who handed off one of her scripts to Robert Zemeckis. Zemeckis made it as What Lies Beneath, for which she got a credit. She recalls, “I had no problem getting work. I said no all the time.”
As a teenager, Kernochan had attended Rosemary Hall, an exclusive girls school in Wallingford, Connecticut, that was subsequently absorbed by Choate. At a reunion in the late 1980s, she found herself saying to her former classmates, “I’m going to make a movie about us for our daughters.” She thought this would give her the opportunity to direct, as well as write. She finished the script in 1990, and five drafts later, she was ready to send it around town.
The Hairy Bird is an attempt to capture the secret life of adolescent girls at that fleeting, combustible moment when they experience the three-way collision between the rush of hormones, their own sense of empowerment, and the looming constraints of the adult world. Or, as Kernochan once succinctly put it, the film is about “the incursion of the penis in young girls’ lives.” Drawing on her own experience, Kernochan created a vivid, sharply etched picture of the highs and lows of life at a girls prep school with the canniness of an insider. As Miss Godard’s School fights a takeover by St. Ambrose, the boys school nearby, her characters transcend their privileged, whitebread circumstances. The script weaves an unlikely tapestry of idealism and raunch, and in the process deftly touches on issues of family, class, adolescence, and education without allowing any of them to torpedo the high spirits of the narrative. The title comes from an exchange between two of the girls, in which one confesses, “I want to be an ex-virgin.” The other inquires, “What have you been doing with Dennis all this time? Dry humping?” The first replies, “No, I ate the hairy bird!” meaning, of course, she gave her boyfriend a blowjob.
Kernochan finally connected with Ira Deutchman, who had partnered with producer Peter Newman to form an outfit called Redeemable Pictures. Deutchman and Newman persuaded Atlantic Alliance, a Canadian company that had deals with both Miramax and New Line, to finance the film. Kernochan cast Gaby Hoffman, Kirsten Dunst, Heather Matarazzo
, and Rachael Leigh Cook, all of whom were virtual unknowns at the time, with Lynn Redgrave as the headmistress of Miss Godard’s.
The Hairy Bird was shot in Toronto in the summer of 1997, and Kernochan brought it in for a modest $1.5 million. Alliance thought it had a commercial film, and Kernochan was pleased. In November 1997, Harvey was making one of his periodic visits to the set of 54 in Toronto, which went into production after The Hairy Bird wrappped. While he was there, he picked up David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law. Perhaps as an afterthought, he also bought The Hairy Bird for $3.5 million. Alliance may have shown him Reel 5, the one that contained the drinking, barfing, sex, and fumbling attempts at sex during a dance Miss Godard’s hosts for the St. Ambrose boys. Just as Harvey looked at 54 and thought, Saturday Night Fever, he probably looked at The Hairy Bird and thought, Porky’s!
“I was jumping up and down,” Kernochan recalls. “I’m an Academy member, so I’m on the receiving end of the Miramax Oscar campaign every year, I admired how they would bully themselves into people’s awareness, and I was rooting for them. Because no writer really likes the major studios, and I thought independence means what it says, ‘independence.’ And Miramax, of course, was the king of the independents.” It didn’t hurt that Weinstein had plunked down more than twice the budget of the movie. Kernochan couldn’t help noticing, however, that Deutchman and Newman did not look overjoyed. They wouldn’t meet her eye, and she could see that they were steeling themselves—against what, she didn’t know. She said, “What’s the matter with you guys?” They replied, in unison, “Let’s see what happens.”
What happened was that Harvey insisted on testing the film at a mall in Mountainside, New Jersey. Nervous, Kernochan arrived at the theater before Weinstein, whom she had never met. By the time he finally emerged from a limo, followed by his marketing team, he was late, but had somehow found time to acquire a jumbo bucket of popcorn and was shoveling the contents into his mouth when her producers tried to introduce them, saying, “Harvey, this is the filmmaker, Sarah Kernochan.” Harvey just brushed past her without a glance, saying, “C’mon, c’mon, let’s go.”
After the screening, as crowds of suburban Jerseyites milled about, he turned his back on her and huddled with his marketing team. This is standard operating procedure. Before the distributor chats up the filmmaker, he polls his own people, and gets the numbers. The numbers were bad. He began to lecture Alliance head Robert Lantos, executive Andras Hamori, and Deutchman and Newman about all the changes they were going to have to make, and when he was finished he said, “This was good, we’ll have a meeting tomorrow, talk more about this, and when we take eight to ten minutes out of this thing, it’s really gonna rock. Is 9:00 A.M. okay with everybody?” He still had his back to Kernochan, who was contractually entitled to final cut. She said, coolly, “Yes, and I’m very curious to know about all these changes we’re to be making. I don’t know where you’d find eight to ten minutes to cut.” Whereupon he wheeled around, purple as an eggplant, and yelled, “Fuck you!” Building up a head of steam, he continued, “Fine, if you don’t want to benefit the way—” and he threw out the names of several directors—“did, fine, fuck you, I don’t need this, I’m a rich man, I have enough money. You filmmakers are the last people anyone should consult about how to market a movie, you don’t know anything. We know, we’re the experts, that’s why they pay me the big bucks!”
Kernochan felt like she’d been hit by a truck, and when Harvey noticed her eyes darting to Deutchman and Newman as in, “Help me!” he bellowed, “Don’t look at your producers, ’cause they’ll roll over!” Then he pointed to them, shouting, “And you, you may be willing to roll over for these filmmakers, but I don’t roll over for filmmakers, that’s why I’m successful, and you’re not. I’m so fucking rich—and you know what, I own your fucking movie now.” In case anyone was feeling left out, he turned to Lantos and Hamori and continued, shouting, “You don’t wanna play ball with me? I’ll put it on TV. Because it’s just another Canadian made-for-TV movie. See you on TV, Robert!” And he stormed off.
Recalls Kernochan, “I was dumbstruck. This man had never said hello to me, paid me any respect at all, or even acknowledged me. And it was my movie! He wasn’t even the producer, just the U.S. distributor. The Canadians and Ira and Peter were totally silent. Nobody leapt to my defense.”
The next morning, they met for breakfast at the Stanhope Hotel, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kernochan hadn’t slept. She recalls, “I dreaded seeing him face-to-face. Whenever I saw him my stomach just tightened up.” Everyone was smoking cigars, to which she was allergic, but in the spirit of conciliation—“as if I’d done something wrong”—she pledged her cooperation. Harvey was effusively apologetic. He sent flowers, said, “I’m so sorry, this is a habit of mine, it’s a terrible thing, I’ve been working on not having that happen, please forgive me.” He explained, “Don’t take this personally, I do this to everybody, except for Quentin Tarantino. I do it because I’m passionate about movies.” Says James Ivory, who has had reason to think a lot about Weinstein, “He’s passionate about films in the same way a dog is passionate about meat. Harvey has a canine appetite for dismembering his own movies.” Adds someone close to the film, “That’s always his excuse. ‘I might have lied, I might have killed one of your children, I might have hijacked an airplane, but I’m passionate about movies!’ Temporary insanity. It’s part of his manipulative technique. He tries to scare the shit out of people, and the next day he sends the flowers.” The source continues, “At one point, his nanny even showed up with his baby girl for a brief moment of, ‘I love you honey, Poppa’s with you,’ before she was whisked away. It was echt Harvey—warm, sentimental, spontaneous. On the other hand, it seemed like a scene from a movie, scripted to make Harvey appear human. It was either, it was both—you never knew.”
At breakfast, Weinstein turned on the charm, said everything Kernochan had been waiting to hear: “Your movie has a real teen appeal, but it’s classy, it’s got a message, it’s empowering, it’s gonna have a real effect on girls.” She was thrilled that he “got” her film, listened raptly as he warmed to his subject, “This movie’s gonna be so big, I’m gonna put it in hundreds of theaters, sixteen hundred theaters!”
Kernochan’s mantra was, “He is not my enemy, he is my teacher”—which she repeated to herself several times a day. During the next few months, the two exchanged a lengthy series of faxes, which made it clear that Weinstein was giving the movie minute attention, watching it over and over again, cut by cut. The protocol of these communications involved insincere flattery on both sides, followed by insistent requests for excisions on Harvey’s part and restorations on Kernochan’s. The changes Harvey wanted were by no means confined to pacing. He wanted to alter the essence of the movie, recutting to a specific demographic. At one point he said, “We have to appeal to young males too, because the girls’ audience is not big enough.” She protested, “But this movie is written for girls. I put in enough interesting underwear so that the boys can have fun too.” She adds, “Even though he said the test screenings don’t tell the whole story, for him they do. He loves the game of seeing the scores go up. He’s hooked on the numbers, almost like a gambler. It’s a God thing.” But the scores were not going up. It was clear that the Miramax fixes were not working.
Eventually, it became clear to her that Harvey was losing interest. It took longer and longer for him to respond to her faxes, sometimes as much as a month, although he still kept asking for changes, more cuts. It was as if he were second-guessing every one of her editing decisions, remaking the film vicariously through her. Says Kernochan, “It’s not enough for him to be a great distributor. Now he thinks he’s a great producer. He sees himself in the David O. Selznick mold. He wants to horn in on every decision. He wants to be the auteur.”
Indeed, Playing for Keeps had done nothing to dampen Weinstein’s ardor for directing. (In a New York Times piece pub
lished in 2001, he confessed that he wanted to direct a Leon Uris novel called Mila 18.) At the very least, he sees himself as the filmmaker’s partner. In one fax to Kernochan dated February 19, 1998, Harvey wrote, “Virtually all of the films with the Miramax banner are the result of collaborative efforts with film-makers, myself, our post-production team, etc.” He complained that he never got credit for his contribution. “Our work is always anonymous,” he wrote, “and almost always unacknowledged.” Harvey was in a bind. Publicly, he had to defer to the filmmakers. Privately, he craved the credit he believed was rightfully his. Even Tarantino was not immune. Recalls Spike Lee, “He told me himself, he’s the one that cut Pulp Fiction. ‘I cut Pulp Fiction.’ I’m not lyin’. He probably cut Citizen Kane too, right?”
The degree to which Miramax releases represented a “collaborative” effort was, of course, debatable. How collaborative could it have been with Harvey pressing the straight-to-video gun against Kernochan’s temple? Weinstein’s initial “Fuck you!” outburst had established the ground rules under which she labored. But there was some truth to Harvey’s claim. His suggestions were not capricious; he had a rationale for every one, and to a degree he was amenable to reason, occasionally restoring footage when he recognized that his cuts hurt the picture. Says Kernochan, “I actually learned quite a lot from him in terms of editing. Not only did some of his cuts improve the momentum, but Harvey paid for a day of reshoots, which the Canadians never would have done.”
Weinstein treated Lantos and Hamori with contempt. They had been paying for Miramax’s test screenings, paying for Kernochan’s editing team to stay on and implement Miramax’s changes. Harvey was doing what he often does with genres he’s not used to: he goes to school at someone else’s expense.
Eventually Alliance grew fearful that this process would never end and pulled the plug. Then everything changed. Weinstein was not about to continue fussing with the picture on his own dime. Alliance set a date for the Canadian release. Harvey agreed to open it in the U.S. one week later, the last week of August 1998.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 53
