Ironically, it was Eisner himself who tried to call a halt. On the last weekend in January 1999, Miramax released She’s All That, the Freddie Prinze picture, and won the weekend. On Monday the 30th, Harvey was in the ABC television offices conferring with Eisner, ABC Group chairman Bob Iger, and Kevin Smith on a pitch for an animated series based on Clerks. Smith had already had an offer from UPN for twelve episodes with an on-air commitment. Eisner proposed buying six episodes with no guarantee to run all of them. Smith was leaning to UPN, but Harvey told him to go with ABC. He said, “We’re all in the same family, so it’s in their interest to do well by the show. It’s money out of their pocket into their other pocket. Go for it.” Smith plumped for ABC.
According to the filmmaker, “Harvey was incredibly proud” of She’s All That. Eisner said, “Congratulations on the top spot. You did $16 million on that movie, and nobody’s in it.”
“You see that?” Harvey replied. “I wanted to prove to them that I can make a piece of shit and compete on their level. And I did.”
“Yeah, but I really think you should have done that movie through Dimension, at the genre label. Because your label means something. Miramax has value, a certain level of quality. We had the same thing with Touchstone back in the beginning. Then we started making really bad movies, and Touchstone didn’t mean anything anymore. If people start to think that Miramax produces stuff like She’s All That, you’re fucking with the brand name.” If Eisner understood anything, it was branding. He had a substantial investment in the Miramax name, and he knew that Harvey’s ego had committed a crime against the brand—that was stupid and potentially costly.
Smith listened to this exchange with his mouth open. He continues, “It was really weird to see the guy who you consider the king of the world being lectured by his employer. Harvey listened, as opposed to, ‘Oh, eat shit, fuck you!’ It was more, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s your theory.’ There was an air of ‘Say what you want, I have the number one movie this week.’ ” The box office spoke louder than Eisner—She’s All That ultimately earned $63 million, domestic—and his words had little apparent effect. “Miramax, which many consider the hallmark of indie film, functions like a studio,” says Smith. “It’s no longer the home of independent film, seat-of-your-pants or garage band filmmaking. It’s not really a low-budget filmmaking operation anymore. The outlaws have become the in-laws, or better, the law.” Or, as Spike Lee puts it, “Miramax tries to play this, We’re the little guy shit. They’re a studio.”
(Ultimately, ABC pulled Clerks after two episodes. “They fucked us,” says Smith. “We tried to go back to UPN, and they weren’t interested.” Subsequently, ABC also bought and canceled another Miramax show, Wonderland, written and produced by Kevin Williamson.)
Not only was Harvey doing the indie world a disservice, he was sabotaging himself. By virtue of going toe-to-toe with the studios, Harvey began to deny himself the very advantages that had contributed to Miramax’s success in the past. As McGurk puts it, “The original business model was founded on them doing movies where the total investment was less than $15 million, and generally less than $10 million, and if they found a diamond in the rough, like The English Patient, they could spend a lot of money in marketing and their overall investment would still be lower than the average. Now the average cost of a Miramax movie has got to be $30, $40, $50 million. As they’ve gotten bigger and bigger, the old model might just as well be thrown in the wastebasket.”
Take Kate & Leopold, the fish-out-of-water time travel romance which Cathy Konrad resuscitated by convincing Jim Mangold to rewrite and direct it. It represented a dramatic change of pace for a filmmaker who usually gravitated toward darker material, like Cop Land. Mangold had seriously mixed feelings about working for Miramax again. “The level of creative interference is so much more intense at Miramax than anywhere else,” he says, “and it doesn’t come with a brush and a beret, either. It’s the most base kind of interference—about test scores, and ‘This person is unlikable,’ and so on.” Still, he owed the Weinsteins two pictures, and this seemed like a painless way to burn off one of his commitments. But nothing at Miramax is ever painless. While he was writing Kate & Leopold, he left the nest to write and direct Girl, Interrupted for Sony in 1998, which won an Oscar for Angelina Jolie. Harvey didn’t appreciate his boys winning Oscars for other studios, and when Mangold finally handed in his script, Weinstein complained, “It took you two and a half years to deliver this.”
“Where’s Quentin’s World War II movie?” Mangold snapped, referring to Tarantino’s yet to be finished sceenplay, Inglorious Bastards.
“That man made this company!” Harvey yelled. “So you don’t compare to him.” But when Meg Ryan expressed interest in Kate & Leopold, all was forgiven. The old Harvey would have balked at her $15 million price tag, the way he had refused to meet John Travolta’s price for Cop Land and turned to Sylvester Stallone instead. But times had changed. Says Konrad, “It used to be, talent would do his movies at bargain prices because he was doing risky projects no one else would make. But when you’re doing a romantic comedy, you’re in Meg Ryan’s wheelhouse. Why should she give him a bargain for something she gets full freight on at six other studios in town? Where’s the deal?”
Everything that the success of Pulp Fiction had augured had come to pass. Transforming itself from an acquisition-driven company into a production-based company, Miramax was forced to lay out more money for fewer films, turning away from its high volume strategy, and therefore losing the protection afforded by the law of large numbers. Miramax had built its success on taking risks, but the costlier the pictures, the more risk-averse the company had become. Says Konrad, “At that point they were casting movies around who got talk shows. Harvey wanted anybody from Saturday Night Live.” Paradoxically, however, the more Miramax attempted to avert risk by protecting itself with expensive casts, the more risky the pictures became.
Harvey had once been quoted as saying, “Michael Eisner can’t tell me anything,” and he never ceased trying to prove it. After he hit the jackpot with She’s All That, he used that as a yardstick to measure other films, including Dogma. Says Smith, “Harvey’s become very score-centric. When we tested Dogma, all he was talking about was the quadrants. After one screening, he said, ‘Okay, we’re killing these two quadrants, what we don’t have is these quadrants up here, with the young girls. We’re gonna need all four if we’re gonna do what we did with She’s All That.’ ” Smith, his voice rising on an updraft of disbelief, says he asked, “Did you just compare this movie on any level whatsoever to She’s All That? Are you seriously talking about marketing this film in a way that you would market a throwaway teen movie? It’s apples and oranges, man.”
Under pressure from Disney, Miramax sold Dogma to Lion’s Gate, the Canadian distributor. “Harvey had his chance to put it out on Good Friday, but he was more than happy to get rid of it,” Smith adds. Although, he says, Weinstein nevertheless managed the marketing campaign: “I think a blind eye was turned to the fact that he was working on it.”
Good Will Hunting had just finished its run, and Harvey wanted to splay Affleck and Damon all over the ads. “We had had all these deals governing how we appeared, and they totally screwed us over,” Damon explains. “We said, ‘This is an ensemble movie, don’t put our names above the title, that’s cheap and misrepresenting it, but they made me and Ben really large anyway. At the end of the day they were just doing what they were doing. It’s appropriate to approach any relationship with Harvey with a healthy amount of cynicism, because he is what he is.”
When Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back came out two years later, in which Damon had a walk-on, it happened all over again. Says Damon, “They offered me a whole lot of money to do a scene in the movie and appear on the poster. I said no because of what happened with Dogma. Also, I thought the cameo would be funnier if it’s unexpected. ‘The deal I’ll strike with you is, I’ll do it for free, if you don’t use me on the poster.’ Th
ey go, ‘Okay, great,’ because they don’t have to write a check. So, deal! Six months later, I was in Argentina doing this indie movie with Gus Van Sant. We started getting these frantic phone calls from Miramax. Gus was laughing, going, ‘Uh oh, they want something from you.’ They said, ‘We want to use you in the trailer.’ I said, ‘Guys, the whole point is that it’s a surprise, so no.’ Then the movie came out, and I got frantic phone calls— when Harvey wants you, he will find you no matter where you are. They said, ‘We want to use you in the TV spots. The cat’s out of the bag, everyone knows you’re in the movie now, so your argument doesn’t hold water anymore. Do it for Kevin.’ On the one hand, I wanted to say, ‘No, no, no, because that was what we agreed on.’ You don’t want to reward that kind of behavior, but on the other hand I wanted to do what was right for Kevin. Harvey is very in tune with who’s friends with who—‘Just do it for him, help him out, it’s not for me, I don’t need this.’ Then that way, he doesn’t owe you a favor, the other guy owes you a favor. I caved. I went, ‘Jesus, fine, just go ahead.’ The next day, I’m flipping channels, and I saw the ads. They already had ’em cut and out.”
Lion’s Gate released Dogma on November 12, 1999. The film, which cost about $10 million to make, grossed $30.7 million domestically, and sold a phenomenal one million DVDs. “Harvey and Bob made out like fuckin’ bandits on Dogma,” says Smith. “The rumor was, they personally made $20 million. We had our salaries up front, but we never saw a dime of that money. They’ll send you profit participation statements where you’re looking at it and going, ‘Okay, on paper I can see that your byzantine labyrinthine logic has proven that I owe you money, somehow, for the movie that I know you fucking profited off of. I’m not stupid, I know that there’s a lot of money we’re not seeing. The Chasing Amy P&A, which they said was $7 million, I could never understand how, because we never went that wide, no more than five hundred screens. We didn’t buy a lot of TV ads. They’ll charge you for all manner of things, throw anything into your account.” Responds Miramax, “Dogma incurred $20 million in production costs, including interest and overhead, and $16 million in distribution costs. In addition, Miramax had to pay distribution fees to other distributors. It performed weakly abroad. Kevin was paid everything he was entitled to. The P&A costs on Chasing Amy were almost $9 million, including $3.3 million on TV advertising.”
Every time Smith reached the end of his rope, Harvey, a master of the extravagant gesture, managed to reel him in. “The kindest thing I saw that man do had nothing to do with business,” he recalls. One night, Smith found himself in Harvey’s company, flying out of Burbank on their way to New York in the Miramax jet, accompanied by his pal, actor Jason Mewes, who regularly plays Jay to his Silent Bob. “It came out that Jay’s mom was HIV positive, flat out dying of AIDS, and had been for a few years,” Smith continues. “Harvey said to him, ‘When we get home, I’m gonna give you my number, and you call me, and we’re gonna set your mother up with the best HIV doctor in the city, if not the world. We’re not going to let your mother die.’ I was blown away. Here was a dude—Mewes is not a real big earner for Miramax, he didn’t know from fuckin’ Mewes, and he certainly didn’t know from fuckin’ Mewes’s mother. Most of us were waiting for her to kick, because she was a horrible woman, would send him out to deliver drugs when he was a kid, took him out stealing credit cards out of mailboxes when he was six, seven years old, got him into drugs and shit. So on the one hand, I was going, ‘You’re saving the wrong person, man, use it for somebody who really deserves it, not this horrible woman who’s fucked this kid’s life up from day one.’ But for a guy in his position to give a shit about this dude’s mom, I was floored by the gesture, because it wasn’t a gesture, it wasn’t, ‘Gimme a call, we’ll see what we can do.’ He followed through, sent a fuckin’ limo to pick her up, bring her into New York from New Jersey, set her up with the doctor. The humanity on display at that moment was displayed for nobody, it wasn’t for show. It was the one moment I’ve seen him be him without having an ulterior motive or like, the world is watching—it was just three guys on a fuckin’ jet in the middle of the night. Moments like that, I went, ‘All is forgiven!’ These people gave me a career. It’s not even like they saved me from the studio system. Without them picking up Clerks, nobody picks up Clerks and I’m still working at the convenience store paying off that movie saying, ‘I can’t believe I put that on credit cards.’ To me it’s never been about cash. Call it loyalty, call it Catholic guilt, whatever. So I always feel like, rather the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
This was by no means the only time Harvey helped friends, relatives of friends, and mere acquaintances in life-theatening situations, and the beneficiaries of his medical largesse are grateful and not about to look the gift horse in the mouth. But whether these gestures are as selfless as Smith likes to think is debatable. For someone as ego-starved as Harvey, it gives him the ultimate high: the power over life and death—or at least the illusion of it. Harvey had already placed himself at the center of a vast web of favors rendered and received by which he exercises a degree of control over a sizable sector of people who matter, and by extending his hand in this way, he merely ups the ante. Nor is he shy about calling in the chits. In the midst of a heated argument with, say, an employee whose child he has directed to a doctor or whose care he has paid for, he is perfectly capable of asking, “And how’s your kid doing?”
Not everyone felt like Smith. It was getting harder and harder for Harvey to keep his young directors on the reservation. “He was giving us a break that others hadn’t,” explains Jim Mangold. “There’s this incredible debt you feel when you’re a first-time filmmaker, and Harvey plays on that. I felt sometimes that I was working with a historic character, some kind of Selznick or Zanuck. But the problem is the second you get some respect for yourself, you realize that some of your decisions work, and some of the things he was sure were asinine get a laugh he didn’t think they would—and you understand he’s fallible, and you’ve got to stand up to him. So the next time around, when other people would like to hire you, you don’t quite feel so beholden that you go, ‘You’re right, Harvey, I owe you everything.’ It’s not Frank Sinatra with the Don anymore, and you don’t have to play Vegas this year if you don’t want to.”
ON FEBRUARY 9, when the Academy Award nominations were announced, DreamWorks’s Spielberg-directed Saving Private Ryan, a powerful and in many ways bold departure from cookie cutter war films, despite occasional backsliding, was widely regarded as the front runner, picking up eleven nominations. Shakespeare rang up a surprising thirteen. (Miramax had two Best Picture nominations, the other being Life Is Beautiful, while several other Miramax films got one each, bringing the company’s total to a record twenty-four.) The battle royal between the two companies, led by old friends Weinstein and Jeffrey Katzenberg, was only slightly less brutal than the images of carnage on the beaches of Normandy offered up by Spielberg’s epic, and kicked off a long-running feud between Miramax and DreamWorks.
On March 15, 1999, film journalist Nikki Finke published a column in New York magazine. Calling Shakespeare “froth,” she charged, “Miramax pays a fleet of ultraveteran Hollywood publicists (who also happen to be Academy members)—including Warren Cowan, Dick Guttman, Gerry Pam, and Murray Weissman—not to generate press coverage but to schmooze their prominent Academy colleagues. As cronies of the Academy’s graying voters, they are paid not just during the five-month Oscar season but nearly year-round—a practice unheard of elsewhere in the industry.” She also called attention to how much Miramax was spending. “True independents might spend up to $250,000 on an Oscar campaign; the majors, $2 million,” she wrote. “Miramax is estimated by competitors to have spent at least $5 million on its campaign for Shakespeare.” Worse, she accused Harvey himself of launching a Richard Nixon–style dirty tricks campaign against Ryan by telling critics that Ryan “peaks in the first twenty minutes.” Weinstein denies it. “It is complete bullshit,�
� he says. “I love that movie. I called Steven two days after I saw it and said that to him.” Miramax believed that DreamWorks was behind Finke’s piece, in particular DreamWorks VP Terry Press. “I always think that Terry Press is behind everything,” he continues. “These people, they have to win everything. Me? I’m happy to be in the race, I’m that scrappy player who got invited into the game and was happy to shake things up. The point of it is, when I lose, I’m not a sore loser. I’ve spent my entire life coming up from nowhere, winning, losing, whatever. We never malign somebody else’s movie.”
In L.A., Cowan, the elderly former head of the powerful publicity firm Rogers & Cowan, arranged a series of dinners for Benigni with his influential clients and friends, including Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon, and Elizabeth Taylor. Says former publicist Mark Urman, “Benigni moved into L.A. for a month during the peak of the voting period, and every night somebody was having a party for him. Roberto made a lot of friends, and it won him an acting Oscar even though I think history will tell us that it was perhaps not deserved. He won it for his dinner performances.”
The Academy Awards were held on March 21. By this time, Shakespeare had a poker hand of producers, Harvey, Gigliotti, David Parfitt, Marc Norman, and Ed Zwick, altogether too many for Harvey, who was trying hard to convince Norman and Zwick to drop their credits. He called Zwick in the middle of the night. According to Parfitt, his argument was, “Everyone knows you weren’t there, didn’t do anything. It’s an embarrassment, people will laugh at you.” Harvey thundered, “I’m going to ruin your career in Hollywood, you’ll never work again. You don’t know how many enemies you have in this town, you don’t know who you’re dealing with, you fucking . . . ,” and so on. Norman recalls that Harvey, who believed that everybody had a price, offered him about $100,000 to withdraw his producing credit, and threatened to attack his writing credit as well. But both men held on.
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