“Okay, what does he want to talk about? What should I bring?”
“Don’t know, bring it all!” The executive on the other end of the line, perhaps in the middle of a meeting with a filmmaker, cutting a trailer, checking out ad art, whatever, dropped everything, gathered up his or her papers, marshaled the troops—say, the entire marketing or publicity department or both—and marched them into the conference room where they might wait forty-five minutes while Harvey took calls, maybe one from President Clinton, making sure that everyone knew it. Or, after the meeting had finally started, Harvey would stand up and say, “I gotta go to lunch, guys, stay here, order yourselves something, I’ll be back.” Or it would be, “I gotta go downstairs and watch a little bit of a film.” Sometimes there were four or five of these open-ended, marathon meetings a week. After which, staffers had to put in their ten-hour day.
Harvey had always been famous for his preternatural grasp of detail, but as the company metastasized, and he was preoccupied with Talk or politics, overextended and not paying attention or simply because he didn’t want to admit he was wrong, he became increasingly prey to selective memory. Staffers learned to put everything in writing, create a paper trail because he either forgot what they said or pretended to. As had always been true, his bad ideas vastly outnumbered his good ones, but whereas in the past he could be talked out of the bad ones, now it became harder and harder to get him to change his mind or admit he was wrong. He was prone to outbursts like, “I am Ariel Sharon! You are the Palestinians with sticks and stones,” or “I am the tank commander and you are the infantry and you’re about to get run over,” or “I am the king and the king decides.” He would insist that anything that popped into his head be implemented. He had a picture called Malèna, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, that he was convinced would be a hit. He would not hear anything to the contrary, and against all advice, he squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars before he gave up.
But tank commanders need to be able to give orders, whereas the Weinsteins were often mired in indecision, especially if they were rattled or scared they were about to release a loser. Bob was notorious for not being able to decide on creative material—particularly if Harvey was undermining or ridiculing him—until it was almost too late. People learned not to throw anything away because what he hated one week, he loved the next.
When the holiday season came around in the fall of 1999, Miramax came up short. Weinstein thought Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, which he co-financed with Paramount, was going to be his Oscar film. When Ripley faltered, the only thing Miramax could salvage from the debris of 1999 was Lasse Hallstrom’s tepid adaptation of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, which Meryl Poster shepherded through the company, and which paled before the audacity of, say, former Miramax director David O. Russell’s Gulf War picture, Three Kings. Even though right-to-lifers bridled at the film’s pro-abortion message, it was so tepid as to be nearly invisible. The reviews of Hallstrom’s picture were respectful, if unenthusiastic. Among the dissenters was indie flame keeper Amy Taubin, writing in the Village Voice, who called it “paternalistic, puffed-up, and dull.”
While Harvey had been dallying with Freddie Prinze, Jr., his rivals had not been idle. Fox Searchlight released Boys Don’t Cry, Kim Peirce’s stunning cross-dressing tragedy, while USA put out a holdover from Gramercy, Being John Malkovich, the delightfully antic film from relative newcomers screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. And New Line financed the overblown but not uninteresting, frog-raining Magnolia, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Even the studios had released a flurry of offbeat films by indies or first- or second-timers that became Oscar contenders, like American Beauty, which had ended up at DreamWorks. Warner Brothers put out The Matrix, shoved through the studio meat grinder by maverick executive Lorenzo di Bonaventura, despite its doubtful antecedents (the relatively unknown Wachowski brothers). Di Bonaventura also godfathered Russell’s Three Kings, while Paramount released Election, by another Miramax alumnus, Alexander Payne, earlier that year. According to one source, once the picture was anointed by the critics, Harvey called Payne in for a meeting. Even though Miramax had passed on Election, “they beat the shit out of him, said, ‘You owe us! We made your first movie. You gotta do a movie with us.’ ” Payne was stunned. Later, he reportedly said, “ ‘You know what? I was so naive that I thought maybe they were gonna say they realized they dumped Citizen Ruth, they were sorry about the way they treated me, and if there was any way they could get back into business with me—and I kinda wanted to hear it. But it was the exact opposite tack.’ ”
In other words, this was the year that the seeds sown by the Pulp Fiction hurricane finally bloomed. The studios were beating the indies at their own game. The new generation of executives who came of age in the mid-1990s—di Bonaventura at Warner’s, Amy Pascal at Sony, Stacey Snider at Universal, and Mike de Luca at New Line and then DreamWorks—were, to some extent, moving away from the we-know-best, anti-filmmaker arrogance of the generation that preceded them, the Eisners, Lansings, Semels, and Daleys, and trying their hands at Indiewood films, either directly or through their indie divisions. As Ted Hope puts it, “The current crop of people who control the purse strings at the studios got into the business partially out of the love of the films that they saw in the ’70s, and regret that they don’t have the same sort of cultural feathers in their caps.”
Although the results have been mixed, this class of executives isn’t stupid; they realize they have little choice. Like their predecessors in the 1970s, they know that even teenagers get bored—especially teenagers—and no matter how much money they’re making, the studios continually need to restock the talent pool and vary the product, shuffle the actor deck so audiences can see the occasional fresh face, Steve Buscemi in Armageddon or Ethan Hawke in Training Day. The studios were not only making deals with indie directors, but giving them a relatively free hand.
It seemed for the moment, anyway, as if this strange fruit, far from representing the co-opting of indies by the studios, represented the reverse. “I think something has changed,” Russell said at the time, hopefully. “I think the Sundance culture has definitely had an impact on the audiences—they’ve become more sophisticated—and also the studios. Ten years ago Three Kings—a war/action movie—would have been Heartbreak Ridge with Clint Eastwood, or Election—a high school movie—would have been Zapped. There are executives who yearn to work with independent-minded filmmakers and make films that are different from the run-of-the-mill ‘product.’ Studios want to find that Good Will Hunting audience.” Even producer’s rep John Pierson, who had seen it all, added his voice to the chorus. “David O. Russell is like my hero right now because here’s a guy who made a no-budget film, Spanking the Monkey, and then a mid-level Miramax screwball comedy, Flirting with Disaster, still very personal and really hilarious, and then Three Kings, probably the most political film of the year—inside the studio system, like a termite. Putting George Clooney in the film and getting Warner’s to pay for it, that’s great.” But, he cautioned, “Let’s not get carried away.” Indeed, although the studios did continue to patronize a few indie directors—Wes Anderson and Spike Lee at Disney, Russell at Warner’s, etc.—their hearts lay with Spiderman, X-Men, and The Hulk. It was the middle-range movies—the $40 to $60 million pictures—that they were turning away from, creating a new niche for Miramax.
Harvey, self-exiled from the feast, arrived at St. Bart’s on Christmas Day for his annual holiday there. Two days later, on Monday, the 27th, he spoke to his office, said he wasn’t feeling well, didn’t want to be bothered by phone calls. He was running a 104-degree fever that he couldn’t knock down. He saw a local doctor, then spoke to his physician in New York, who said, “Let’s not take any chances, you’d better get back here.” His assistants scrambled to find a plane, and he flew back. Bob met him at Newark airport, and whisked him to New York Hospital in a shroud of secrecy.
MIRAMAX WAS A
LMOST INVISIBLE at the January 2000 Sundance Film Festival. Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight picked up the most press, but flopped at the box office. On the other hand, Paramount Classics’s David Dinerstein and Ruth Vitale scooped up Kenny Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, as well as Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, and both did respectable business. Artisan, which had captured lightning in a bottle with The Blair Witch Project the year before, acquired Miguel Arteta’s second feature, the weird and beguiling Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s opinion of the festival was upbeat. “To say Sundance doesn’t matter is crazy,” he said. “People like myself wouldn’t even have a career if not for the chances that Sundance has been willing to take.”
Boys Don’t Cry had been workshopped at a Sundance lab, and after it opened to rave reviews, Robert Redford was reportedly stung when IFC Productions, which co-financed the film, and Fox Searchlight, which distributed it, got all the credit, while the institute’s role was ignored. Increasingly, IFC had become an irritant and a goad. Reflects an executive, “He was massively competitive with the IFC and if the IFC went into film distribution, which they did, and if the IFC went into production, which they did, why couldn’t Sundance?” It seemed as if the labs helped film-makers develop their projects, the festival showcased them, the channel aired them, and the theaters would shortly exhibit them, but the production piece of the puzzle was missing. Sundance neither got kudos for the films it nurtured nor, more important, a chunk of the profits. As the source points out, “It’s almost like Sundance has been so much a part of creating the independent phenomenon that Bob wanted to capitalize on it, not just for his own financial gain, but as ego fulfillment. He wanted his cinema chain, he wanted his channel, he wanted his new production company, he wanted to be in distribution, he wanted what other people had, he wanted what he wanted for whatever reasons he thought he wanted them. He has this intense appetite, an appetite that has increased in the last few years, maybe because his movies haven’t been successful, maybe because he’s aging, who knows. Sundance is such a large part of his identity that if it does well, then it will somehow fill this empty hole inside him. It’s psychological.”
Redford had used the festival as a platform to publicize new initiatives in the past, and this year was no different. He announced the formation of Sundance Productions, to be headed up by Jeff Kleeman, a veteran production executive whom Redford lured away from MGM. The new company, a division of Redford’s for-profit Sundance Group, which also owned the resort, the catalogue, and Sundance Farms, which made scented candles and soaps, would enjoy the same autonomy as the festival and the channel. Redford was on the verge of making an extremely sweet deal with Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures that would finance the new production entity; give him a controlling interest in the channel by buying out his two partners, Universal (which had inherited PolyGram’s stake) and Showtime; take General Cinema out of the cinema center mix, leaving Sundance in sole control of that as well; and finance a Sundance Internet venture. Of this smorgasbord, it seemed that Allen was most excited by the channel.
There appeared to be so much money in the offing, that so far as Sundance Productions was concerned, Redford claimed to have financing for development and marketing. He even talked about buying a distribution company that, along with its theaters and cable channel, would make Sundance a real powerhouse on the indie scene, a one-stop shop that might even be able to go up against the big boys, and at the very least humble upstart IFC. The fact that this vertically integrated indie behemoth totally contradicted the vision of the early Sundance, which was structured precisely to insulate novice filmmakers from the demands of the market, seems to have bothered only the dwindling number of purists in the Sundance ranks. As Sydney Pollack puts it, “Now you’re in the theater business? Now you got a TV station? Come on, the government broke up MCA for this reason!”
Sundance Productions envisioned a slate of twelve movies over four years. Some would be small, $1 to $2 million, and some might go as high as $20 or $25 million, but they would average out at $15 million. In the fall of 1999, Kleeman hired seven people away from good jobs to work for the new outfit, found space in L.A.’s Westside, and hired an architect to design the offices. He started meeting with American and European production and distribution companies, such as Good Machine, with which Sundance Productions hoped to establish alliances. Although they respected Sundance, executives expressed considerable skepticism toward Redford, whose reputation for toying and teasing was legendary. He was fast losing his luster as a star, and if he had made a lot of movies around town, he had also failed to make a lot of movies around town.
But by the spring of 2000, the new company had targeted several projects and appeared to be up and running. Only one thing was lacking: cash. Where was Paul Allen’s money? The answer was, “It’s coming, it’s coming, just hold off a week or two. Hire a publicist, prepare the announcements.” Sundance Productions hired a publicist and sent out a press release. A week or two passed, and still there was no money. The refrain was the same, “Just be patient, just wait, it’s coming.” Weeks turned into months, and by early summer, rumors were flying, mostly to the effect that the deal was ready to be signed, but Redford would not put his signature on the piece of paper. Why? According to the story that subsequently made the rounds, he was all set to close, but cautious as always, he consulted Ruth Bernstein, the “branding” person he had hired to help slap the Sundance name on appropriate enterprises. Over a meal, he asked her, “Do you think I should make this deal?” Placing a napkin on the table, she drew a picture of a big blimp, and said, “From my point of view, the deal is like a blimp. This blimp is going to land in your backyard, and you have no idea who’s going to emerge from that blimp and come live in your house.” As soon as she said that, Redford realized she was right. He needed to get to know these Vulcan Ventures people better. But that would have to wait a couple of months because he was in post on Bagger Vance.
Then, in June 2000, Vivendi, the French waterworks that was reinventing itself as an entertainment powerhouse, bought Universal. In a televised press conference, Vivendi head Jean-Marie Messier, ticking off the goodies he had just acquired, mentioned not only Universal, but the Sundance Channel that had piqued Allen’s interest. In other words, the window of opportunity that would have allowed Sundance to buy Universal’s stake in the channel with Allen’s money had slammed shut. Running on Redford time, the actor had been accustomed to keeping people waiting. Finished with Bagger Vance, he apparently tried to resuscitate his relationship with Allen, only to find himself on the wrong end of the hourglass. Allen’s people failed to return his calls, and gradually it became clear that the deal was dead. (Allen declined to comment.) “Bob’s ambivalent,” says Sydney Pollack. “How do you sell a big financial interest to someone and not have them take the control away from you?” This is true, but little consolation to the people who were recruited to run Sundance Productions, which died with the deal, along with the dream of taking control of the channel from the partners, and the cinema centers from General Cinema.
That winter, Redford fired his COO, Gary Beer, who had been at his side since Sterling Van Wagenen had left in the mid-1980s. It was Beer who negotiated the deal for the channel and for the theaters. Reportedly, Beer was notified by FedEx, just after he closed the channel deal. Speculates a former Sundance executive, “Bob falls out of love with people, even people who have been with him for many, many years, like Gary. They’re not shiny new toys anymore. What he wanted from Gary was for Gary to be a rainmaker for him, and there was a limit to what Gary could do.” Beer had “Sundanced” more than his share of people in his time, and now he had been Sundanced himself. It was said that when he left, Redford refused to shake his hand.
Meanwhile, the Sundance Channel had been struggling to keep up with IFC. It was the perennial Avis to IFC’s Hertz, and it rankled Redford. Nora Ryan, the president, and Dalton Delan, the executive VP of programming, departed, and in January 1998, in an attempt to turn the ch
annel around, he had hired Liz Manne, someone, at last, who knew her way around the indie film world. Under Manne, the programming improved, and subscriptions rose. Redford, however, was still picking fault. Like Harvey, no matter how rosy the prospect, he was dissatisfied. He wanted more, he wanted better. He would blue-sky, and the channel personnel invariably found themselves in the position of wet blankets, telling him why they couldn’t launch this kind of original programming or acquire that Sundance award-winning film because they didn’t have the budget. Of course, Redford didn’t like to hear no. As one source puts it, “You can paint a painting, but you have to have a frame. By explaining over and over what the frame was, you get put in the position of being the boogeyman. And that’s a bad position.”
LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, Bob Weinstein thought Harvey was a heart attack waiting to happen. He even reportedly had meetings with VP of accounting Irwin Reiter where they tried to “what if” themselves into the scenario. Now it seemed that their worst fears might be coming true. The exact nature of Harvey’s illness was a closely held secret, perhaps, as some speculated, because he was in the middle of renegotiating his deal—yet again—with Disney, but also because Eve reportedly preferred it that way. Eisner didn’t find out that Harvey was in the hospital until he read it in the papers, and even then Bob wouldn’t tell him which hospital Harvey was in. (He registered under a false name.) The first thing that occurred to everyone was that it was indeed a heart attack, although staffers were quick to joke, “Heart attack—what heart?” Rumors flew, ranging from lung cancer to flesh-eating bacteria, AIDS, drugs, you name it, but those few who knew weren’t saying. Director James Gray referred to it as his “mysterious Kremlin leader illness.”
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