As spring 1998 rolled around, Kernochan was feeling pretty good. The film was locked, she thought she was finally going to get her 1,600 theaters. She met with the Miramax publicity department, Deutchman met with the marketing people. In April, Miramax sent her artwork for comment. Kernochan wrote an upbeat memo to Harvey in which she said, “I’m a lot like Pinocchio waiting for the Blue Fairy—I’m waiting for the legendary magic of Miramax marketing to give my film, at long last, its life.” But alas, the Blue Fairy was otherwise engaged—perhaps in pre-pre-production for Spielberg’s AI. May went by, June turned into July, and still there was no publicity. There were not even any plans for publicity. By the middle of the month, Kernochan finally realized there was never going to be any publicity. Miramax gave her release date to 54.
Alliance was humiliated. Lantos “felt very much like he had his balls cut off,” says Kernochan. In a blistering letter to Harvey, he wrote on July 17, “We release thirty of your pictures theatrically per year . . . winners and losers. We do not junk the pictures we don’t like. We get behind all of them. . . . The one time you have the opportunity to get behind one of our films, you choose instead to flush it down to the nearest video store. That is after five months of reediting, rescoring, and retitling to your specifications at our expense. . . . Furthermore, you have not paid us the minimum guarantee due on delivery.” He referred to Harvey derisively as “the great champion of independent films.”
54 finally opened in Kernochan’s theaters on the weekend before Labor Day 1998. It opened to mixed, but generally scornful reviews. Whether Christopher’s cut would have worked better than the film Miramax released is besides the point. Miramax, wrapped in the indie mantle, behaved like the studios at their worst. 54 did indifferent business, and as a result, Christopher’s promising career went into turnaround. The Mayor of Castro Street, which he was supposed to direct for HBO, was canceled. Says one person connected to the film, “This whole thing was so painful, it sucked so badly, it almost made me leave the film business. I’m embarrassed to be associated with it.” Editor Lee Percy concurred. He says, “After 54, I was ready to leave the business.” The only thing Christopher will say is, “No comment.”
While 54 was being shot down in the U.S., Harvey was at the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of Rounders, directed by John Dahl and starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton. As was its habit, Miramax intervened during casting, trying to get Dahl to hire actors with whom Harvey wanted to forge relationships or who would help the picture overseas, but who weren’t right for the parts. For the John Malkovich role, which demands an actor who can just sit at a table with a deck of cards eating cookies and still project menace, Harvey wanted an action star. When Dahl remonstrated, the Miramax executive on the film would say, in a shaky voice, “I don’t know if Harvey is going to like this. He really wants this actor, why don’t you just cast him. We shouldn’t make Harvey mad.”
“Well, if Harvey’s going to get mad, have him call me, I’ll talk to him about it.”
“You don’t want to get him on the phone, do you?”
Says Dahl, “When you get a phone call from Harvey Weinstein, I swear to God you’d think the president of the United States was calling. They try to use the threat of actually talking to Harvey like it’s going to scare you.”
On the whole, Dahl says he had a pretty good experience with Weinstein: “I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. He’s not afraid to put his money where his mouth is. Unlike a lot of movie executives, he’s not just trying to keep his job. They [Miramax] have a great handle on the testing process, they try to do what they can to improve the movie, at the same time they don’t overreact.” Rounders has an unconventional ending where the guy and the girl, played by Damon and Gretchen Mol, go their separate ways. To Dahl’s surprise, Miramax left it alone.
“We did really bump heads over the music,” he says. “I had found an old Miles Davis piece that I loved from the French film Elevator to the Gallows. They just freaked out. It was like, ‘Oh my God, jazz, we can’t have that.’ I just said, ‘Gee guys, I don’t want to bore anybody but this is what seems right to me.’ ”
Damon was in the audience, seated near Harvey, when Rounders was screened in Venice. He recalls, “At the end of the movie the lights came up, and he turned to me and handed me a videotape. He said, ‘Now that you’ve seen that, this is the real movie!’
“ ‘Whaddya mean?’
“ ‘I’ve changed 320 sound cues. All that jazz is gone.’ ”
Rounders turned out to be a terrific film, under-appreciated by the reviewers, full of great performances. “To me, Rounders was a classic, brilliant Harvey production,” Norton says. “Matt, Malkovich, John Turturro, Martin Landau, and me, and it was an $11 million movie. Nobody else could pull that off.” But Damon thinks Miramax dumped it, which may be the reason it didn’t make more of a splash. “Shakespeare in Love was their Oscar movie that Christmas. I’m sure they said, we’ll put our eggs in that basket, and let’s just throw Rounders into this slot and see what happens with it.” Nothing happened with it. Rounders died, after grossing $23 million.
After Venice, Harvey segued to the next big festival, which was Toronto, in the middle of September. The hot film that year was from Germany, Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer. Harvey had not yet arrived, and the Miramax acquisitions staff, Amy Israel, Jason Blum, and Andrew Stengel, had managed to keep the Lola gang in a hotel room in a marathon negotiation that went on for ten or twelve hours. “They try to get you into a spiderweb, and then at the end, Harvey just comes to pick the cherry,” explains Tykwer. “There was huge pressure on us to immediately decide for them, but it just felt like a gamble.” Eventually, the Lola team walked out.
When he arrived the next day, Harvey was furious, told them, “We need to meet, we need to meet.” Tykwer continues, “When I got to the meeting, the air was thick and tense, not a nice situation. It was obvious that here was someone who wanted something, and if he wanted it, got it, and now he wasn’t getting it, and was extremely upset about it. He was suggesting that this could mean real trouble for us. Legal trouble.” According to Tykwer, Harvey said, “You’ve been sitting with us in a room for twelve hours, and you dare to walk away even though we made an offer and you already accepted our proposal.”
“No we didn’t.”
“Oh yes you did.”
“We didn’t sign anything.”
“Who gives a fuck about the paperwork. If we sit down at the table together, this means we are partners.” Tykwer goes on, “Harvey stood up and started to scream at Stefan Arndt, my partner. I stood up and screamed back. I felt like an actor in one of those mob movies spitting out lines like, ‘You’re insulting my family.’ I took Stefan and the lawyer and I said, ‘We’re going. Nobody screams at us.’ We left, and I heard these footsteps coming down the hall behind us, boom, boom, boom. We got into the elevator, and these hands grabbed the doors at the last moment and forced them open. It was like Terminator 2 coming back at us.”
Tykwer proceeded to meet with Sony Classics. He hit it off so well with Michael Barker that they quickly came to terms, even though Sony’s was a lower offer, $600,000 as opposed to the million or so that Miramax had floated. “Sony did a great job,” concludes Tykwer. “And we even got money on top of the purchase price from the revenues. I don’t know if that would have happened with Miramax.”
Later, Harvey vented his displeasure on Blum, flicking a lit cigarette in his general direction. By chance, it landed on Blum’s shirt, and the Miramax co-chairman apologized, saying he was aiming for the wastebasket.
Meanwhile, Harvey was getting ready to release Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful on October 23. Despite stiff competition later from Chocolat, this film has to be considered the lushest bloom of Miramax’s kitsch period, its largely successful campaign to inject glucose into the veins of middle-brow American culture. At one time, the spectrum of Miramax’s releases was broad enough to include both a Cinema Par
adiso and a film like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and do well with each. But as American indies gobbled up a bigger share of the market at the expense of foreign films, only the sentimental, accessible ones survived. Explains Mark Tusk, the brothers have “strangled the same market that they’ve promoted.”
Life Is Beautiful was the Holocaust version of Weinstein signature films like My Left Foot and Sling Blade, where being Jewish in Mussolini’s Italy is the ethnic equivalent of cerebral palsy or mental retardation, and is no less anodyne. It is a film of such breathtaking moral imbecility that it makes sugarcoated studio efforts to deal with the Final Solution, like Schindler’s List, look bold by comparison, up there with the truly great cinema of the Holocaust, such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, or the giants of documentary, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Owen Gleiberman, writing in Entertainment Weekly, called Life Is Beautiful “the first feel-good Holocaust weepie,” while in Time magazine, Richard Schickel wrote, “Sentimentality is a kind of fascism too, robbing us of judgment and moral acuity, and it needs to be resisted. Life Is Beautiful is a good place to start.”
The real beauty of Life Is Beautiful lies in the way its premise so witlessly mimics the realities of the movie business. When Benigni’s character, Guido, and his son, Giosué, find themselves imprisoned in a Nazi death camp, Guido conceals the awful truth by cocooning Giosué in a fantasy. He convinces him that the camp is a game, which will be won by the first player to accumulate 1,000 points. When Giosué hears that children are being gassed, Guido assures him that it is a lie intended to convince him to drop out of the game. Substitute the soothing Life Is Beautiful itself for Guido’s fantasy and, say, $60 million in grosses for the 1,000 points, and you get the picture. If the price is right, Harvey, the self-professed tough Jew who told the New York Times that he preferred Jews who fought back to Jews who marched off to the camps, had no qualms about flakking a film that endorses the state of mind—denial—in which millions of Jews did just that, comforted by the same delusion this film sells, that, somehow, everything would turn out all right.
Driven by Miramax marketing, Life Is Beautiful would gross $57.6 million, way more than any Italian language film ever had before in the United States. Shakespeare in Love followed, going into limited release on December 11, and becoming an instant hit, racking up a domestic gross of $100.3 million, significantly less than Good Will Hunting, but remarkable nonetheless. (It did $50 million more in foreign, to Universal’s delight.) But it is well to remember that out of the thirty-six pictures Miramax released in 1998, there were only two real hits.
SUNDANCE 1999 represented a distinct falling off from the previous year. There was no High Art, no Pi, no Smoke Signals, no Buffalo 66, no Opposite of Sex. Bingham Ray didn’t see much that he liked. He walked out on one film, called The Blair Witch Project, snorting, “It’s a piece of shit.” Later, Artisan bought it. Never one to forgo the last word, Ray quipped, “The only thing scary about The Blair Witch Project is how much Artisan paid for it.” (Blair Witch was “a piece of shit,” but it grossed $145 million.) The hot picture was Happy, Texas, a mindless comedy starring Steve Zahn, Jeremy Northam, and Bill Macy about two bank robbers in a small Texas town masquerading as a gay couple. Cassian Elwes repped it, and he provoked a bidding war between Miramax and Fox Searchlight, the outcome of which provided a wacky end to the acquisitions bubble. Weinstein rode the bidding bronco, ultimately paying $10 million for the picture. But times had changed, and it was no longer cool to spend that much money for that kind of film. Harvey just looked silly, and actually tried to pretend in the press that he had spent a fraction of that, $2 million. Nobody believed him, especially when Tony Safford, now at Fox, went public with the truth, piling embarrassment on embarrassment. But Harvey was impossible to embarrass, and he turned around and picked up another clinker, The Castle, for $6 or $7 million.
After Sundance, encouraged by the rejection of Diller’s offer by the October board, Ray and Schmidt continued to beat the bushes for a white knight. The good news was that October seemed to be hitting its stride. Ray was excited by his fall schedule, which included David Lynch’s The Straight Story and Mike Leigh’s latest, Topsy-Turvy, his biopic about Gilbert and Sullivan. “I thought we were gonna kick serious ass,” he says. But Topsy-Turvy had come in at three hours, nineteen minutes, and Ray wanted Leigh to cut it to two hours, thirty minutes. Ray told him, “Look, Mike, this is a great film, might be your masterpiece, but it’s way too unruly to release theatrically and give us a shot at earning the money back.” Leigh had final cut if the version he submitted did not exceed 120 minutes. Ray continues, “I had very specific ideas about what could go. And that’s what Mike resented. Because I’m not a filmmaker, I’m a distributor, I’m not qualified to make these kinds of comments to people like Mike Leigh. He dismissed my suggestions as being ignorant or uninformed, or completely wrong, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Mike is very dogmatic. Abrupt. He knows what he knows, and no one else knows as much. He was very upset. We had a lot of unpleasantness. Mike said, ‘What’re you, Bingham Scissorhands?’ ” Ray refused to accept the film at three hours plus. Leigh threatened to take his name off it if he were forced to cut it. Eventually, Leigh got it down to a length that he could live with.
But Ray’s battle with Leigh was moot, because it quickly became clear that there was not going to be an October Films to release Topsy-Turvy. Bronfman had told McGurk, “The company is going one way or another, what the hell is your problem?” On February 25, McGurk took Ray to lunch at the Grill in the Universal commissary. The Universal executive felt that he had to give Ray a reality check. When he had something unpleasant to impart, he’d just blurt it out, no preparation. In this case, he said, “Bingham, you should get the special, the soft shell crabs, and by the way, we’re selling October Films!”
Diller came back with a slightly higher offer, $24 million, and the October board approved it. It was all over. Diller combined October with Universal/PolyGram’s Gramercy to form USA Films, headed by Greenstein. Not everyone was sympathetic to Ray and Schmidt. Says Donna Gigliotti, “For a smart guy, Bingham must have been really stupid to have lost his company to Scott Greenstein! He didn’t help himself by drinking as much as he was doing. He was too old to be doing that kind of stuff. He needed to grow up. It wasn’t the ’80s anymore.” Adds Stacy Spikes, who had left October a year or so before to head up the Urbanworld Film Festival, “No one was ever gonna walk into Miramax and take their company from underneath them. The brothers would put a match to it before you’re gonna touch it. Bingham should have thrown a fit, ‘Fuck you, I built this, I don’t care what the paperwork says, tell the law to come in here and pry my dead cold hand off the helm!’ In nature, the things that survive have claws and very sharp teeth. That was missing at October.”
To some degree, Ray and Schmidt were just victims of bad luck, a regime at Universal run by a man, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., more interested in music than in film, and in the end, uninterested in either. In eighteen short months, the Universal executives who had godfathered the deal with October —Biondi, McGurk, and Silver—would be gone. As Schmidt puts it, “We had no protection.” But in other ways, there was a logic, an inevitability to the decline and fall of October. As Eamonn Bowles puts it, “October had a bunch of private investors who wanted a return on their money. At the end of the day, money is always going to beat art.” And of course, pace Spikes, Ray and Schmidt did not have nearly the power over the fortunes of their company that the Weinsteins had at one time over theirs. The truth is, October wasn’t really their company. Once Ray and Lipsky took on investors, whether Allen & Co. or the studio, the name of the game became profit, and when the company had a few hits, it was the wrecked-by-success story all over again. The iron laws of the marketplace, especially the go-go ’90s version, dictated that the company
dared not stand still, but had to move forward, get to the “next level.” And to do that, it had to attract studio money dispensed by studio executives, carriers of studio values that infected and transformed the culture of October as they had Miramax before it, so that before long the company became unrecognizable. “It’s a paradox,” says Schmidt. “To continue to grow and capitalize yourself, that’s a requirement for success. But to do that is to basically endanger the very nature of the company.” October either succeeded in becoming another Miramax and lost its soul, or it fell prey to corporate hustlers and became no more than a chip in a grander game of media poker. Either way, it was going to lose. Would Ray have done it the same way if he’d had it to do over? “I would have kept it private,” he says. “I would not have said yes to Universal or to Bain.” But, as Schmidt puts it, “If we hadn’t done the Universal deal, and then released Lost Highway, we would have become extremely private, sitting at home with no place to go. We would have been out of business!”
IT WAS ONLY A DECADE since the brilliance of Miramax marketing had pushed sex, lies into the multiplexes of suburban malls and changed the business forever. But the assumption then was that mallrats, far from being the core audience for indie films, were gravy, icing, the difference between a $5 million film and a $10 or $25 million movie. That’s a big difference, and a decade later, the sweet smell of success stung Harvey’s nose like a line of coke, and made Miramax turn this formula on its head. By 1998, the multiplexes were no longer gravy; they were his company’s meat and potatoes. As the misfortunes of 54 and other Miramax films showed, they were being tailored for malls. Harvey wasn’t going to be satisfied until he demonstrated that he could churn out teen movies with the best of them. Miramax began to release pictures like She’s So Lovely (1997) and Senseless, a Marlon Wayans comedy, co-released with Dimension in 1998.
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