As the ceremony was coming to a close, Harrison Ford walked onstage to award the Oscar for Best Picture. A friend of Spielberg’s, he seemed visibly shocked when he opened the envelope, and spoke the three magic words: “Shakespeare in Love.” The picture’s five producers trooped up onto the stage to accept the Oscar. There had been plenty of discussion among them about handling the logistics onstage in the event that the film won the brass ring. Zwick understood that Gigliotti would speak first, then himself, then Harvey. But, says Parfitt, “There was never an intention to let Zwick speak.” Indeed, according to Norman, “Harvey came on like a line-backer from the backfield just as Zwick was moving toward the microphone, pushed him out of the way, and grabbed the mike.” By the time Zwick regained his composure, the music had come up and Harvey was beaming like the Cheshire Cat. The image of Weinstein regnant, basking in the refulgence of the bejeweled audience before billions of viewers worldwide, said it all: at last, as Smith put it, the outsiders had truly become insiders.
Terry Press was in the audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. She was confident that Ryan would win Best Picture. When she saw the Oscar awarded to Shakespeare, she felt her face begin to burn. She was convinced that the system had been manipulated and that an injustice had been done. (Miramaxers just scoffed. From their point of view, Shakespeare was an actors’ piece, and the actors, who make up the largest voting bloc in the Academy, threw their weight behind it.) Afterward, as Press approached Harvey to congratulate him, she exchanged a glance with Katzenberg, her boss, and muttered, “Never again!”
John Madden found himself a very hot director, but Miramax held options on his next two pictures. In the movie business, options are currency, like frequent flier miles. Most studios show some flexibility in enforcing them. If a director wants to do a picture somewhere else, they “suspend and extend,” explains former Fox CEO Bill Mechanic, “suspend for the duration of whatever movie they take [elsewhere], and then the option is extended out. When you enforce a relationship, more often than not, you burn bridges. So you don’t use a hammer.” Not Harvey. Madden had two projects at Miramax, but neither was ready. He got excited about a script, Shanghai, by Hossein Amini. It was owned by Sony, and Mel Gibson was interested. In exchange for allowing Columbia to use Madden, Harvey wanted to partner. But, according to Mike Medavoy, whose Phoenix Pictures had a share of the movie, “Sony didn’t want Harvey,” and cashiered Madden rather than join Miramax.
“In some ways it’s an old-fashioned feudal system,” observed the director. “One doesn’t like to think of oneself as a bargaining chip. I like to think of myself as a filmmaker.”
Then Universal offered him Captain Corelli’s Mandolin after the director of choice, Roger Michel, had a heart attack while the picture was well into pre-production. Universal stood to lose milllions, with the star, Nicolas Cage, signed to a pay-or-play deal. Miramax demanded an assortment of distribution rights, as well as domestic rights to Bridget Jones’s Diary, even though Miramax held no options on the director or any of the actors on that film. According to Working Title’s Tim Bevan, who had a piece of Corelli, Universal chairman Stacey Snider “didn’t want to give up domestic [on Bridget]. She didn’t want to give anything to Harvey.” But she was backed into a corner. Observes Mechanic, “They gave up half the movie, which is insane. For me, you just move on to the next director.” One studio’s blackmail is another’s—well, opportunity. Weinstein’s option strategy nicely supplemented his skill at picking up projects in turnaround. If he couldn’t develop films himself, he could attach himself, limpetlike, to films developed by others. As he put it himself, sounding very much like the cat who swallowed the canary, “It’s a wonderful opportunity. We get to do big movies with no risk.”
Norman, who originated Shakespeare in the first place, walked away a happy man. He won two Oscars, but he failed to benefit from the success of the film. He had 7.5 net points, more than any of the other net participants. “Miramax spent a lot of money promoting the picture, and a lot of money on the Oscar campaign, and their argument has always been, ‘We spent all the money,’ ” he says. “I came close to auditing them, but nobody was interested in going into it with me. All I know is, a picture that makes $300 million worldwide does not provide money for people with net points. I’m going to put that on my tombstone.” Harvey, on the other hand, says, “I made a small fortune on the movie.”
October’s Oscar party was held at the Chateau Marmont, in the garden, tented for the occasion. It was a peculiar affair, a celebration for some, a wake for others, not unlike October’s Thomas Vinterberg picture, The Celebration, in which a family gathering marking the birthday of the patriarch is transformed into something of a scandal. The winners—Greenstein and his loyalists—were shaking hands and quaffing champagne, while the losers—Ray, Schmidt, and the October gang—spent the evening looking the other way.
In July 1999, Ray made his exit from the company he had founded with Jeff Lipsky eight years earlier. Eight months later, on Monday, April 10, 2000, at 10:30 in the morning, a little more than a week after that year’s Oscars, he drove his black Audi A4 into a tree less than a mile from his home in Mount Kisco, New York. Ever a child of the 1960s, he had been out late the night before at a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion concert at the Meadowlands. He had been drinking, but his blood alcohol level was within legal limits. Six weeks earlier, however, he had quit smoking, and was taking Zyban to keep himself off cigarettes, which may have been a factor. In any event, he drifted across the narrow country road and into a tree. He was going no more than twenty-five or so miles per hour, but he was unbelted, and the collision was severe enough to throw him against the windshield and then down to the floor on the passenger side, with his legs twisted up in the wreckage. His left upper arm was badly fractured, and it was bleeding freely. Blood was flowing from his ears and massive lacerations on his forehead. Both the front and side airbags had deployed, some punctured by the sharp end of his exposed humerus, and all four were smeared with blood. His Audi looked like Princess Di’s car. Ray had to be cut out and helicoptered to Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, where he lay in a coma for three days. When he awoke, his nurse said, “I was the one who met the helicopter when you got in here. You looked like shit. We didn’t think you were going to make it.” Ray glanced down at his leg, which was hurting, and saw bone. The doctors had dug trenches on either side of his tibia to relieve the pressure from swelling under the fascia that connect it to the muscles and tendons. The trenches were so wide they couldn’t be stitched up and had to be closed with skin grafts. The doctors had expected him to die, and one day he woke up to find a chaplain sitting by his bed with a clipboard, who said, “Hello, Ray!” Everyone called him “Ray Bingham.” Flipping through his papers, the chaplain rattled on with forced cheeriness: “How’ya feelin’ today? You feel like a chat?” Ray does not have much use for religion, and all he could muster was, “More morphine!” He observes, “I didn’t come out of it with a spiritual thing, not me. If there was a moral to it, it was that I literally hit a wall. I was just asleep at the wheel.”
Ray lay on his back with his right leg and left arm elevated for three weeks and then some. He was issued two tickets, one for driving at an unreasonable speed and one for driving without a seatbelt. One day a nurse saw him watching movies on a portable Panasonic DVD player that Schmidt’s son had lent him. She asked, “Are you in the movie business?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you do?”
“I used to run a company called October Films.” He noticed her eyes glaze over, and he added, “You ever hear of Miramax?”
“Of course I’ve heard of Miramax.”
“It was kinda like Miramax, but not so successful.”
Twelve
The King of New York
1999–2000
• How Harvey Weinstein romanced Tina Brown, got sick unto death, made Uma Thurman cry and Martin Scorsese crazy—while Steven Soderbergh broke
the Traffic gridlock.
“I told Marty, to make Gangs of New York, ‘You really sold your soul to the devil on this one. The devil himself. Satan! Lucifer!’ ”
—SPIKE LEE
By 1999, it seemed that Harvey had become bored. Acquisitions had lost its luster, and Happy, Texas, the previous year’s Sundance prize with its embarrassing $10 million price tag, earned a meager $2 million when it was released on October 1. Its failure cut the thread that ran from sex, lies through Cinema Paradiso, The Crying Game, The Piano, Sling Blade, Trainspotting, and Life Is Beautiful. The company snapped its acquisitions purse shut until 2002, when Miramax paid a mind-boggling $20 million-plus for Hero, which Harvey thought would become the new Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Indeed, Harvey allowed his crack acquisitions division, which had been the mainstay of the company for so many years, to deliquesce into a puddle of mediocrity. Amy Israel and Jason Blum both left in 2000 to start their own production company, an exit undoubtedly accelerated by the cigarette-flicking incident over Run Lola Run at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998. As Geoff Gilmore puts it, speaking of their successors, “They’re not in contact with me anymore. These guys always used to call me up and say, ‘What’s going on, what’s good?’ The new staff is much less sophisticated about what makes films interesting and what makes them breakout possibilities. I don’t even know their names. Harvey’s competitors, his peers, are trouncing him.”
For a while, Harvey didn’t seem to care. At Cannes in 1999 he sat on his hands. The moral of Shakespeare in Love seemed obvious: why get your life threatened over a tiny film like Priest with virtually no upside, when you can make pots of money and get showered with praise, including an Oscar, for producing costume dramas, and meanwhile passing on pictures like Kids, Boogie Nights, Election, Happiness, American Beauty, and later, Traffic. It was a no-brainer. As Lechner explains, “When Harvey became largely a producer, he began working more than ever off his own taste. And his taste is for feel-good movies, movies about food, movies about World War II, movies about underdogs who triumph. And as Miramax got more successful, won more Oscars, he felt freer to be himself.” Success allowed Harvey to be Harvey, and Harvey is a man who feels a good deal more affinity for Claude Lelouch than he does for David Lynch.
For indie companies, “Production is a trap,” points out attorney Linda Lichter. “Once you start spending money on production, you have less money for acquisition. And acquisitions financed outside the system are generally made with more freedom, are genuinely independent. Doing a picture at Miramax—or any of the other minimajors—became no different than doing a picture for Disney. They are subject to the same kinds of financial, risk-averse pressures that the studio is. You have executives who think they’re producers, who nitpick the script, take the voice out of it, and remake it the way they want. And all of a sudden, it’s denatured, it no longer has that verve and the charm that we all look for.”
In other words, at the same time the indie world was being Miramaxed, Miramax itself was being Disneyized. Harvey took indie films and rubbed down their sharp edges, sweetened their voices, just as he had Americanized foreign films in the old days. Miramax became, as it were, a Trojan horse through which studio values came to permeate much of the indie scene. As John Schmidt puts it, “The game of making $30 or $40 million putative art films, with $25 or $30 million marketing campaigns, has infected everyone. Everyone’s spending more, and everyone’s making less.” It was not a conspiracy; no one set out, exactly, to subvert the indie world. Like Disney, the Miramax folk were just trying to maximize return on investment, in short, make money. Everything else followed. Somehow, it all just “happened.” Eventually it became clear that it wasn’t Quentin Tarantino who was the voice of Miramax, it was John Madden and Lasse Hallström.
Despite the spats—the raised voices, thrown dishes, and slammed doors—Miramax and Disney had more in common with each other than either cared to admit. Disney was very much cast in the mold of Barry Diller’s activist Paramount of the late 1970s and early 1980s, thanks to former Dilleristas Eisner and Katzenberg. Paramount kept a tight rein on costs, gave writers voluminous notes, thought nothing of rapping the knuckles of directors and stepping in itself, rewriting, reshooting, and re-cutting. So did Disney, and more important, so did Miramax. Miramax was making money, winning Oscars, and beefing up its library. As Disney executive Rob Moore, who had taken over the Weinsteins when McGurk left, puts it, “Miramax was delivering, and Disney was delivering.” Which is why the friction between them may have created a lot of smoke but not much fire. Both sides had strong incentives to make the arrangement work. Disney understood that without the Weinsteins, Miramax was just an empty shell. For their part, the brothers knew that Disney owned the ground they stood on, which is to say, the name and the library, and that financing them from scratch would be an expensive proposition for any other studio. Besides, the way their deal was structured, they would be leaving too much money on the table to just walk away. After Kids and Priest, McGurk went to Eisner and said, “Hey, do you want me to go and sell Miramax, because I would love to get a multiple of 10 to 20 on what we paid for it. For the sport of it.” Eisner responded, “As long as I’m around, we’re never selling that company.” Says McGurk, “He thought that they had built one of the best brands in the business, so all that talk of leaving was baloney, on both sides. Look what Disney did with their business. They couldn’t get arrested from a profit standpoint before Disney bought them, and now they’re making $150 million a year.”
Miramax’s first phase, its Bronze Age, lasted seven years, from 1979, when the company was founded, to 1986, when Playing for Keeps was released and the handful of original employees, burned-out and bitter, exited en masse. The second or Silver Age lasted six or six and a half years, from 1987 to the middle of 1993, when Disney bought the company and another sizable group of staff left. The third phase, the Golden Age, lasted five years, from the Disney sale in mid-1993 to the Shakespeare Best Picture Oscar. During this period, Miramax blew the competition away, and at the same time enjoyed enormous critical goodwill and commercial success picking up films in turnaround, while Dimension broke records with The Crow and the Scream cycle. Harvey succeeded in building his own stable of stars—Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Gwyneth Paltrow—and produced one superstar director, Quentin Tarantino.
But in the wake of Shakespeare, as Miramax veered to its right, out of the fast lane into the center lane, another group of key staffers defected. It wasn’t only the acquisitions team; in the second half of the 1990s, Linde, Webster, Lechner, Bowles, Gigliotti, and Foley joined them. The third stage of the rocket fell away. The glory days were over, at least for a while.
But Harvey never charted a course he couldn’t, or wouldn’t change. No sooner had he turned his back on acquisitions than he was consumed with envy as he watched his competitors move into the vacuum. Recalls Kevin Smith, “We were in Harvey’s office the Monday after Blair Witch had made a load of money, and Time magazine, with the film on the cover, was in his in-box. I pointed to it and said, ‘What happened?’ He was like, ‘I have no idea.’ He was really pissed off that it wasn’t his. And pissed off that somebody could do a Miramax and not be Miramax.” The old rivalries may have produced pangs of jealousy, but increasingly it seemed that his real competition was closer to home—namely, his brother, Bob, who was practically releasing a blockbuster a year. As Cassian Elwes puts it, “The success of Dimension changed Miramax into a company that was looking to make $100 million profits as opposed to $20 million profits. They went up to the next level.” As Dimension soared, Harvey borrowed Bob’s stars, like Neve Campbell, for movies like 54. Smith continues, “We were telling Harvey that we didn’t want to make Jay and Silent Bob at Miramax, we wanted to make it at Dimension, because we didn’t feel it was a Miramax movie. I said, ‘Look, man, this movie is a genre movie, I know you’re making genre movies over here now with She’s All That, but I don’t want to be the guy who contr
ibutes to the downfall of what Miramax means.’ What Eisner said rang very true to me. Harvey was fine about it, said, ‘You pick my brother to make the commercial movie with, I gotta make the arty shit.’ But later on I heard that it bugged him that we went across the hall.”
Harvey had his Oscar and had showed Hollywood that he could acquire, produce, and market with the best. In the process he and his brother had created a wildly profitable mini-major. Like Oliver Twist, albeit in somewhat less straitened circumstances and with considerably less politesse, Harvey cried, “Please, sir, I want some more!” But it wasn’t so much success or money that he sought, it was power, influence, and respect. Harvey’s tireless publicity troops splattered items about him across the canvas of the movie business, publishing, and shortly politics; he became a veritable Jackson Pollock of self-promotion. Says producer Scott Rudin, “You’ve got somebody who whenever he farts, he feels the need to issue a press release about it.” Practically leasing space in the gossip columns of Manhattan’s tabloids, he fancied himself the face of the city. To his enemies, he was just a hypocrite. “He tried to position himself as Mr. New York, the unofficial mayor,” says Spike Lee. “So when he talks about what he does for New York—‘Hey, motherfucker, how ’bout you shoot some of your films in New York instead of taking all those runaway productions up to Toronto?’ Nobody talks about that shit.”
Harvey’s big problem in this regard was that the city already had a mayor, the law ’n’ order former prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, so in his own mind, he became the “sheriff” of New York. (There’s a poster for Nevada Smith behind his desk, Steve McQueen with his gun.) Still gnawed by whatever it is that gnaws you when you’ve been born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, dropped out of college, and been shunned by the kings and queens of Hollywood who couldn’t see the prince for the frog, he hungered to conquer new territories, lands that would give him entrée into what must have seemed to him to be the intellectually soigné worlds of magazine and book publishing. And he wanted Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and then editor of The New Yorker, as his hood ornament.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 56
