Initially, a cat’s-away-the-mice-will-play giddiness pervaded Miramax. But as it became evident that Harvey was seriously ill and would be out for some time, the worker bees, motivated by a mixture of compassion, loyalty, and, as always, fear, labored mightily to keep the ship afloat. Bob was at the helm, and everyone pulled together in an effort to operate as Harvey would have wanted them to. Then, on February 2, senior executives learned that he was coming home from the hospital, and would shortly be back in the office.
When Harvey returned to work just before the Oscar nominations were announced, he looked drained and weak, uncertain on his feet, with a tracheotomy scar at the base of his throat that he tried to conceal with a turtleneck shirt. He had lost forty pounds and given up smoking. Reduced to sipping miso and chicken soup, he returned in a foul humor. He was bitterly disappointed that Ripley hadn’t done better, blamed Paramount for bungling the marketing when he wasn’t around to supervise it. He seemed determined to prove that he was the same old Harvey, if anything, tougher than ever. “The films weren’t working the way they should be working,” recalls one of Harvey’s assistants at that time. “He didn’t sit back and say, This is just cyclical, it will come back around, just keep plugging away. His reaction was, I’m not doing enough, my people are not doing enough. When he came back, it was with the same type of viciousness, fixated on making sure everybody was three times as productive. Nothing was ever good enough.”
For staffers who expected to be patted on the head for carrying on in his absence, or were expecting a Harvey who had seen the white light and returned mellow and chastened, it was a rude shock. He second-guessed their every decision and ridiculed their judgment as if to show that Miramax could not function in his absence. Such are the vagaries of the human heart that in the face of this blizzard of abuse, some staffers felt sorry for him. People made excuses: he was a guy who loves to dance but had spent that year’s Oscar prom in the hospital; going cold turkey on cigarettes made him edgy. As one former executive put it, “People talked themselves into saying, ‘You know what, their bark is worse than their bite, they always apologize.’ Or, ‘Harvey doesn’t know any better. Don’t take it personally, he treats everyone that way.’ But then somebody else went, ‘Bullshit. He does know better. Does he talk to Eve that way? Does he talk to his daughters that way? Does he talk to Gwyneth Paltrow that way? No! He absolutely does know better, and he doesn’t give a shit.’ ”
Weinstein called a meeting at Elegant Film, Eve’s production company, to review the Oscar campaign for The Cider House Rules, an uphill struggle what with the film’s tepid reception. The marketing division, which had prided itself on two Best Picture Oscars in the last four years, had the most at stake. Says one member of the team, “It was like, All right, we’re gonna show him what we’re made of. We left no stone unturned so that Harvey would be totally proud of us and that we could get as many Academy nominations as we possibly could. We worked like dogs.” They downplayed the controversial elements in the film—abortion, drug addiction, and so on—and used warm and cuddly images to sell the picture. But instead of being pleased, Harvey was sarcastic. He would turn to someone and say, “Let me do the thinking. I’ve done pretty well, haven’t I? Haven’t I? You think this company’s done well with me here?” Recalls the source, “Harvey completely shit all over the Academy campaign for Cider House Rules. He told us that we would never get any nominations because we had fucked it up. The next day, we got seven.”
The Cider House Rules was up against The Green Mile, The Insider, and The Sixth Sense, but the front runner was American Beauty. Once again, it was Miramax against DreamWorks, and once again, the fur flew. This time, DreamWorks had learned a few things, beefed up its ranks to Miramax levels. Having concluded that the company that spends the most money wins, DreamWorks proceeded to do so.
Meanwhile, under the heading of unfinished business, The Hairy Bird, which Harvey had renamed Strike, for reasons best known to himself, was still hanging around with no place to roost. It had come to be regarded as that dread demographic pariah, a “tweener,” too much of an art film for the commercial audience, and too much of a teen comedy for the art audience. To fulfill its contractual obligation to Alliance, however, Miramax was forced to open it in the U.S. So they did, in Seattle, in 1998. The sixteen hundred theaters he had promised Sarah Kernochan had become one. The film opened, closed, and returned to its nest on the shelf.
Months passed. In the wake of She’s All That, Harvey realized that he owned what could well be Rachael Leigh Cook’s next picture. In the spring of 1999, he asked Kernochan and Nora Ephron, who was the executive producer, to write a voice-over. The two women spent a month writing the new material, sent it to Miramax, but never got a reply.
Kernochan wrote Harvey yet another letter, imploring him to open her film in New York and L.A. The message came back, “Harvey’s willing to go along with it, but who’s going to pay for it?” Kernochan emptied her savings account, spent $100,000 opening the film herself—for a week in New York, which was all she could afford. Eighty thousand dollars of that went to the New York Times, for ads. Now called All I Wanna Do, it finally opened on March 24, 2000.
The Miramax experience devastated Kernochan’s career. “When I stopped taking screenwriting assignments in 1997 to direct my own movie, I saw that as a step up,” she says ruefully. “I was feeling very good about myself.” Reentering the script market three years later, she found that she had been forgotten. “It was like I had to start all over again,” she continues. “I was having to audition for teen zombie movies. I couldn’t even get the shit assignments. Just as a screenwriter. As a director, forget it!” When Miramax bought The Hairy Bird for $3.5 million, she was paid $100,000 for the script, and $100,000 for directing. Subtracting the $100,000 she spent to open the movie in New York, and amortizing the remainder over the three years that passed between the start of production and release (excluding the years of pre-production), she came away with the equivalent of a salary of $33,333 a year! Would she ever do a film with Miramax again? “Never. I’d rather eat glass!”
Three days later, on March 27, 2000, DreamWorks found its groove. Cider House got two Oscars, Best Supporting Actor for Michael Caine and the other for John Irving’s screenplay, but American Beauty beat it for Best Picture and won five Oscars in all.
What with Harvey’s illness, and the various distractions that competed with Miramax for his attention, the beginning of the new millennium seemed very much like the end of the old millennium. There was still no English Patient, no Good Will Hunting, no Shakespeare in Love in the pipeline. Vatel, a lush and lavish period piece directed by Roland Joffé, was an inexpensive pickup from the previous year’s Cannes that Miramax hoped would get some craft nominations. When it tested badly, Weinstein dumped it. Vatel opened so quietly and was gone so quickly that the film’s star, Uma Thurman, didn’t even know it had been released. It was insulting to Thurman, but then Harvey seemed to take her for granted.
Thurman was also the star of Merchant and Ivory’s The Golden Bowl. The two men had given Weinstein a wide berth since the Mr. & Mrs. Bridge fiasco almost a decade earlier. Says Merchant, “Years passed and years passed, we felt he’d mellowed a bit, and he wrote me a wonderful letter, a sincere letter, I think, about A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, how much he liked it. So I thought, Maybe he’s coming around a bit, and would leave us alone. So we went to him with The Golden Bowl. Never at any time did he say anything about the cast, or tell us to change the script, or do anything. There was never any kind of attempt to influence us in any way.”
As was often the case, the honeymoon lasted until Harvey actually saw the picture. Says Ivory, “He said the usual kinds of things—‘Great film-making guys, worthy of being up there in the Merchant-Ivory [pantheon],’ all this stuff, but then we started hearing about problems that they had with it, his ladies wanted to give us some tips on how we should shorten it. Basically, he didn’t like Uma. He thought she was ove
r-the-top, overdramatic, and he told her so at a party for her husband, Ethan Hawke’s, Hamlet, directed by Michael Almereyda, in New York.”
Harvey had financed Hamlet, and didn’t like it either, and the “party,” held at the beginning of May, was a courtesy screening for friends of the film at the Tribeca screening room. The Golden Bowl had provided Thurman with a meaty role that had Oscar potential, erasing the embarrassment of Vatel. She was proud of the work she had done on the picture. Harvey swept in late in the evening, after he’d already had several contentious encounters elsewhere. His agenda was to enlist her in his fight with Merchant and Ivory over the length, as well as his attempt to keep the film out of Cannes, against the wishes of the filmmakers, who had submitted it. He wanted Thurman to say to them, “Don’t put the film in Cannes, protect my performance, take some time, work on it some more.” Usually actors (not unlike humans in general), like to hear they’ve done a good job before the bullets start to fly, but Harvey dispensed with the preliminaries. Continues Ivory, who was not there but heard the story from Thurman, “It was an awful thing. He publicly told her that he hadn’t liked her performance, and it could be improved if only I would listen to him, but if I didn’t do that he couldn’t predict what the critics might say.”
By the time he was finished, Thurman was in tears. She was shocked by his behavior. After all, she was part of the Miramax family, Tarantino’s favorite leading lady, already slated to star in his next film, Kill Bill. Says Hawke, “I’ve heard that so much, ‘She’s a part of the Miramax family!’ Yeah, until your movie doesn’t work, and then you’re not part of the family at all. You’re not even a distant cousin. It’s really fraudulent. Uma’s not part of the Miramax family, she has her own family, the Thurman family.” Thurman refused to throw her weight behind Harvey’s attempt to cut the film. She explains, “Harvey is notorious now for wanting to put his stamp on the films that he puts out. He was enlisting me for my own self-interest. He was saying in his own scary fashion that the movie could be an Oscar film, but that the way Merchant and Ivory were going to do it was going to fuck it up, but if he had his way, it would turn out great for me. It didn’t matter to me who was right and who was wrong, I wasn’t going to try to manipulate Jim—regardless of whether it was in my interest. I have too much respect for him. James Ivory is an auteur, an artist, and win, lose, or draw, you don’t turn your back on a filmmaker.”
But Merchant and Ivory were not mollified. “They chose the mall in Clifton Commons, New Jersey, to test The Golden Bowl,” continues Merchant. “We said, ‘Why New Jersey, why Clifton Commons? What is there about Clifton Commons that is good for Golden Bowl?’ They said, ‘There’s a Barnes & Noble right by the movie theater, and we recruited our audience out of the bookstore!’ The audiences for intelligent films, films of quality, are in the cities. If it goes to the malls, like we did with Room with a View, it goes only afterward, not before. If you open it everywhere, wide, there will be no audience for it, because they have not heard the word of mouth and the reviews they have not read. That’s a very important thing, otherwise we are going to lose the battle.” Merchant understood the metamorphosis that had turned Miramax upside down.
With the filmmaker’s permission, Harvey made his own parallel or shadow cut. According to president of marketing Mark Gill, “Miramax took twenty-one minutes out of the movie and it was a lot better. It wasn’t ‘You must do this,’ it was, ‘Consider this. Call us to discuss.’ They never called. They sent a one-sentence letter saying none of the cuts are approved. It was a big ‘Fuck you!’ ” Indeed, Merchant and Ivory rejected the Miramax cut, saying, “Thank you, but we don’t want it.” Recalls Merchant, “Then they just went nuts. We have a close relationship with the exhibitors, so they called us, and said, ‘What’s going on? Your film has been pulled from the two cinemas where it was booked.’ We said, ‘We have no idea.’ Then we got a call from his [Harvey’s] minions, and they said that they will send the film to video and HBO.”
Regardless of whether the film was too long or not, the question again is, Why did it happen? It is easy to tell from the length of the script approximately how long a film will be. But Harvey apparently ignored the script, ignored the production, and treated the film, as was his habit, like all acquisitions, confident that when the time came, he could muscle the filmmakers and fix it in the editing. But Merchant and Ivory were not Mark Christopher or Sarah Kernochan. They had made their share of clinkers, but had had long and distinguished careers. They would not give in, and ultimately bought the film back from Miramax for $5 million. Says Ivory, Weinstein “doesn’t know what he has in his films. He’s like a savage in the jungle walking along, and he sees some bright, shiny thing down on the ground, and he stops to pick it up, he looks at it, he doesn’t know what it is, but he knows it’s valuable, so he puts it in his pocket and goes on his way.”
Would the two men ever work with Miramax again? “I don’t think so,” says Merchant. “We have almost bankrupted ourselves trying to raise that kind of money. Because we are not in that kind of league to write a check for $5 million. But we are Merchant-Ivory, and we have the backing of our own work, our library, we could survive. But someone else would have just collapsed. It was a nightmare thing.” And Ivory? “Never!” he says. “It doesn’t mean anything to Harvey that you’ve made films for forty years and that people know who you are. He has to be like the bully in the schoolyard, bend your arm around behind you until you scream.” Adds Hawke, “I told Jim and Ismail, ‘You shouldn’t have taken his money.’ How many people have got to be crying in the corner from going to this guy’s birthday party before you stop going to his birthday party. Jim and Ismail being angry about that is like being angry at the scorpion. I know he’s one of the few people with the cash to do these kinds of movies, but it’s a dangerous dance, because if Harvey falls in love with The Golden Bowl, The Golden Bowl makes $40 million, and is nominated for seven Oscars. If Harvey doesn’t, he buries it. And he’s got the money and the power to not worry about it.”
As for Hamlet, which New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell listed as number one on his year-end top ten list, Harvey dumped it. As he has shown repeatedly, it’s not the hacks he exploits, but the real filmmakers, the ones who are ready to make sacrifices for their art. As Hawke puts it, “Filmmakers shortchange themselves by making the movie cheaply. We made Hamlet for under $2 million, really inexpensive for shooting a movie in New York, and the reason we did that was we wanted complete creative freedom. I didn’t get paid, Bill Murray didn’t get paid, nobody got paid. We just did it because we loved it. If we’d made the movie for $10 million, they would have had to advertise it. And then the movie would have had a chance.”
But spending more money afforded no protection either, as James Gray discovered on The Yards. Gray found himself damned either way. Like Little Odessa, the director’s first film, The Yards was produced by former Miramax production head Paul Webster, after he left Miramax to head up Film Four in London. On the basis of his script, Gray had recruited an exceptional cast that included one hot actor, Mark Wahlberg, coming off Boogie Nights, and two up-and-comers: Charlize Theron and Joaquin Phoenix, who stood out in a cast of standouts in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For—as well as a flock of 1970s veterans, including Ellen Burstyn, James Caan, and Faye Dunaway. On the basis of this cast, Miramax reeled in $15 million in foreign presales, which covered all but a fraction of the film’s $17.7 million budget. Gray shot the film in late summer of 1998.
Like Little Odessa, The Yards has the feel of a 1970s film. It is deliberate, dark, and uncompromising, as it follows the inexorable disintegration of the handful of lives pulled under by the whirlpool of corruption whose physical vortex is a New York City subway yard. Gaunt, lost, and stripped of his swagger under Gray’s direction, Wahlberg turns in the best performance of his career, abetted by similarly fine work from Phoenix and Theron. But it wasn’t Shakespeare or Cider House. There was no genius-in-the-making or plucky orphan to root for;
it didn’t have a tidy, upbeat ending, at least until Harvey got hold of it. (After he returned from the hospital, Miramax script readers were told that the company would henceforth make only films with happy endings.) Gray told Patrick Goldstein, writing in the L.A. Times, that Harvey made “every major decision from beginning to end. It’s all top down, starting with him.” In order to get him to go with casting singer Steve Lawrence in a small role, “Gray had to guarantee the studio his salary against the days it would cost to reshoot the Lawrence scenes if they didn’t work out.” According to a source close to the production, Weinstein, as he had done with Jim Mangold, actually wrote a scene that he dictated to Gray over the phone. Worried that audiences would think there was an incestuous relationship between the characters played by Wahlberg and Theron, rendering them unsympathetic (they’re cousins and the relationship is left ambiguous), Harvey wrote dialogue that makes it clear that they haven’t had sex. With no Robert De Niro to back him up, Gray shot it, but managed to avoid using it.
Then The Yards plunged into post-production hell—for two years. Gray delivered his director’s cut in September 1998. It scored badly. In May 1999, he and Harvey had lunch. “Harvey, spitting crab meat at me, kept yelling, ‘I’m the master of the invisible cut!’ ” Gray recalled, but gave him money to do three days of reshoots. In exchange, Miramax demanded another film from him. The reshoots, of course, included a new, upbeat ending on which Weinstein insisted, where Wahlberg’s character improbably brings the bad guys down in a hearing room packed with bureaucrats and politicians. The Miramax ending felt tacked on, something out of another film, another era, Marlon Brando finking on Lee J. Cobb a half century earlier in On the Waterfront. When Gray asked for another day of reshoots, for which he paid with his own money, Miramax again extracted a future commitment, leaving the director owing two pictures to the Disney division.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 59
