Weinstein was capable of spending generously on a good script—especially with a stellar cast attractive to foreign buyers—that was too expensive for anyone else, but then he would turn around and say, “I spent all this money on a film no one else wanted to do, and now we can’t make our money back.” In this case, having spent liberally on post-production, he suddenly woke up to the fact that the budget was pushing $23 million. “It’s very difficult with Miramax when you’re in that post-production nightmare,” says Webster. “When I was there, we had a thing called the ‘gold report,’ printed on gold paper. It was a budget, and gave the financial status of every movie. It went on Harvey’s desk each week, and my guess is he never looked at it. Not once. Harvey doesn’t care about budgets—until he needs to care, and by then it’s too late.”
The Yards would probably have gone straight to video had not Cannes president Gilles Jacob loved it and invited it to the festival in May 2000. But the critics who saw it there panned it, so Gray was back to square one. Says former Miramax marketing head Dennis Rice, “Look at the story! You got disagreeable people, an antihero who’s a loser who gets out of jail only to get into trouble again, and he’s on the run because he’s betrayed by his loser friend. Why would anybody who lived in Spokane, Washington, give a shit about the New York City subway yards?” Miramax held a screening in New York in early October. There was nobody there but Gray and Wahlberg. Gray was heartened to see a seat roped off with Harvey’s name on it, but he also noticed that it was empty and remained so throughout the screening. But what Gray called “the so-called premiere” at the Writers Guild in L.A. “was really humiliating.” According to him, “The place was half empty, and no one from Miramax showed up. I saw someone the next day who said, ‘Jeez, that was maybe the worst studio premiere ever.’ ” The poached salmon, fillets of beef, and plump shrimp that Miramax lavished on luckier filmmakers had become bad finger food and Martinelli sparkling cider.
The Yards finally went out on October 20, 2000, in about 150 theaters, unsupported by TV advertising or anything else. Says Webster, “Miramax kept the film in post-production for nearly two years, and then abandoned it at the altar. Completely. They dumped the movie so utterly, it was like a public dis.” The reviews were mixed, although Elvis Mitchell included it in the same year-end top-ten list that was headed by Hamlet. After six weeks, it disappeared, grossing under $1 million.
Observed Nick Wechsler, one of the film’s producers, who subsequently produced Quills and Requiem for a Dream, “Both of those films have difficult and disturbing themes, yet both Fox Searchlight and Artisan have spent the money to support them. Most distributors would have given it a bigger push, but Harvey has moved past the point where he has the energy or need to be the kind of P. T. Barnum figure who can create a market for a movie even where there isn’t one.”
Companies push pictures that don’t turn a theatrical profit all the time. Sales of videos and DVDs represent such important revenue streams that theatrical releases are often little more than loss leaders, trailers for the ancillary markets. Some companies regard theatrical marketing as an investment in talent relationships. But not in this case. Continues Webster, “Harvey took a very ruthless, cold look and said, James Gray is an artistically interesting but noncommercial filmmaker, Joaquin Phoenix is probably not going to be a movie star, Charlize Theron, I’ve already put her in half a dozen movies, I’m fine there. James Caan, good actor, but older, so what’s the point? Mark Wahlberg was the key. If he had gotten Mark’s next two movies, he would have supported the film. Harvey tried, but they didn’t hit it off.” Wahlberg didn’t like the way Harvey had treated Gray. Concludes Webster, “As it was, he cut and ran. If Miramax don’t want your movie, they will drop it like a stone. I stand by that movie, ’cause it’s a good movie.”
But Gray went public, broke the taboo against taking his case to the press. “I warned James against it,” says Webster. “For a young filmmaker like that, who’s got a career ahead of him, it was an incredibly naive thing to do. You can never beat those guys in the press, they just understand the media too well. The corridors of power are too dark and murky, and you get lost in them.” A source close to Gray believes Miramax punished Gray by pressing its claim to two future films. Gray got an offer to write and direct from Warner Brothers, but Miramax threw legal obstacles in his way. He had to hire an attorney to get the company to back off. Gray worried he was going to be forced into bankruptcy defending himself against Miramax. He said, “Believe it or not, I’m not bitter. I got to make the movie I wanted to make. . . . It just would’ve made a big difference to me and to the actors if Harvey had acted as if he was proud of the movie and judged the film on its merits, not just on its salability.” Would he make another film at Miramax? “I will because I have to.”
Meanwhile, Mike Ovitz had started a new management company, Artists Management Group, after his very public ouster from Disney. One of his clients was Martin Scorsese, whom he had represented since the mid-1980s at his former agency, CAA. Two of his top executives, Rick Yorn and Cathy Schulman, who had long since left Sundance, flew to New York to meet with the director. They asked him, “If you could do anything, what would it be?” His answer was, “I would make Gangs of New York, a project that I’ve had for eleven or twelve years.” He described it as an epic saga, a revenge story set in New York City during its Jurassic Age before and during the Civil War, when nativist gangs roamed its streets, taking on all comers, especially Irish immigrants. One of the reasons the project had never been made was because it rested on the back of a twenty-year-old character, and there never seemed to be an actor able to play that young who the studios thought was strong enough to carry such a leviathan of a picture. Yorn represented Leonardo DiCaprio, and he pricked up his ears. On the plane back to L.A., they read Jay Cocks’s lengthy, convoluted script. “It not only dealt with the story of these gangs, but also the conscription riots, Lincoln’s presidency, the city burning down—twice, immigrant policies, Tammany Hall politics, on and on,” recalls Schulman. “It was, Ohmigod, how’re we gonna deal with this? It was way too long. And way too dark. We did a couple of more drafts with Cocks, but we felt we weren’t getting anywhere.”
Still, AMG started selling the notion of a Scorsese Gangs of New York starring DiCaprio, whom everyone still wanted for everything. The early budgets were coming in around $84 million. The picture had been set up at Disney, where Scorsese had a deal, but Kundun had not made a dime there, nor had Bringing Out the Dead for Paramount nor Casino for Universal. Studios were cutting back on mega-budget pictures, and Joe Roth was having second thoughts. He put it in turnaround. Every studio turned it down. Then Initial Entertainment Group’s Graham King, who was trying to put his company on the map and was unaware of Gangs’s checkered past, wrote a check for $65 million for foreign rights. With King’s money committed, Roth reconsidered, and turned Gangs over to Miramax. Harvey was thrilled. Gangs seemed like the perfect film to kick off the new century. It was an enormously expensive period piece directed by the legendary Scorsese, a genuine auteur who, with the possible exceptions of Woody Allen and Robert Altman among directors still working regularly, best embodied the revolutionary New Hollywood of the 1970s. With DiCaprio headlining, it wasn’t even all that risky, and Harvey was confident he could weed out the violent and controversial material Scorsese was famous for. If Harvey could add Scorsese, with his reputation for artistry and integrity, to his stable, it was a surefire way of stilling those ugly stories that swirled around Miramax once and for all. For Harvey, it would be a triumph of branding. With Quentin Tarantino apparently lost in his labyrinthine World War II script, Inglorious Bastards, Scorsese could take up the slack. He was a trophy director, Oscar bait, and brought with him the kind of legitimacy that not even the Shakespeare Oscar could confer. In fact, smelling Best Picture, Harvey took producer credit.
Bob Weinstein reportedly opposed his brother’s involvement, thought the project was a sinkhole and didn’t lik
e the script, but Harvey was determined. He claimed his exposure was capped at $15 million, with Scorsese and DiCaprio liable for budgetary overruns, but nobody in Hollywood believed him. (One former Miramax executive in a position to know is sure Miramax was in for $32 million, a figure also reported by Laura Holson in the New York Times.) Scorsese’s price was $6 million, the same rate he got for Casino, $3 million of which was deferred in case he went overbudget. As was his custom, Harvey wanted everyone to reduce their rates. Di-Caprio took a small cut, $15 million instead of $18 million, with $4 million of that assigned to cover overages, while Cameron Diaz, who had a lesser role, worked for something under $2 million. Daniel Day-Lewis, who is not a fan of Weinstein’s, was a reluctant participant. He said, “What he doesn’t understand is that I did Gangs in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.”
The Miramax co-chairman lost little time before he started drawing on the Scorsese account. He peppered his conversation with the director’s name. It was Marty this and Marty that: Scorsese had voted for Shakespeare, not Private Ryan; Scorsese had invited him to his sixtieth birthday party, etc., etc. When Harvey disclosed to a rapt audience at the Learning Annex in New York City on April 30, 2003, that he intended to direct Mila 18, he said, “I’m going to have Marty next to me. I’m not going to take any chances.” But those who knew both the strong-willed Scorsese and the short-fused Weinstein smiled. “Marty is only interested in making the right picture, and he’s strong enough to fight for what he believes in,” said Saul Zaentz. “Harvey’s interest is . . . about making money.” As one observer put it to journalist Kim Masters, “Harvey finally got the director he deserves, and it’s a fair fight.” In fact, the yoking of Scorsese and Weinstein set up an epic clash between the auteur-driven aesthetic of the 1970s and the studio mentality of the 1990s that threatened to eclipse the drama on-screen. Harvey had always imagined himself an Irving Thalberg, a David O. Selznick, and it was the old studio system he admired. “While I grant the ’70s was a golden era of moviemaking,” he says, “1939 kicks the entire ’70s’ ass in one year. It fucking blows all those movies from the ’70s completely fucking away. From Citizen Kane to How Green Was My Valley.” (Citizen Kane was actually released in 1941.) A Thalberg needs his von Stroheim, a Selznick needs his Gone With the Wind. Harvey’s von Stroheim would be Scorsese, and his Gone With the Wind would be Gangs of New York.
Principal photography commenced late summer, early fall of 2000. Harvey, concerned that his meticulous and temperamental director might fall behind, became obsessed with the picture, spending a mind-boggling sixteen weeks on the set. Indeed Scorsese worked at a snail’s pace, shooting less than a page a day and running the budget way over the projected $93 million. Harmonious sets have produced bad movies, and tempestuous sets good movies—witness Chinatown—but in this case it seemed as if the duel of wills between director and producer brought out the worst in each. “I’m sick of my image of killing and maiming!” complained Harvey. “It’s complete horseshit!” Still, Gangs did nothing to mitigate this perception. The two men had a blowout over the way the director had made up Day-Lewis, especially his hair and the prosthetics on his face. “He was playing a really bad guy, and he had to look pretty ugly,” Schulman explains. “Marty was going for the integrity of the character, and Harvey wanted to have a marketing campaign that featured a good-looking Daniel and a good-looking Leo. He didn’t think Daniel looked sexy.”
Miramax hired producer David Parfitt, who had successfully shepherded Shakespeare in Love, as a consultant to ride herd on Scorsese, but it was impossible. Says Parfitt, “Marty’s in control, he’s surrounded by his people, he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. You can’t go to Martin Scorsese and say, ‘Hello, I’m David Parfitt, you should shoot it that way.’ He’s a great filmmaker and you know what you take on.”
Although there was tension between the director and the producer throughout the production, Weinstein generally showed Scorsese a good deal of respect. Nevertheless, according to a colleague close to the director, “Marty feels that this was not his best work. He was unhappy with the film.” Essentially, Scorsese blames Harvey, at least in part, for its failure. Scorsese, the source continues, “complained that Harvey, with his suggestions and his huge ego, was an enormous encumbrance upon his creativity. At each stage Marty felt he was being hampered from moving to the next stage, creatively. He felt Harvey stopped him from being able to see the total picture. Harvey was always saying, ‘You need to do this, you need to do that, you should get rid of this scene, that scene’—Marty hasn’t had a producer speak to him like that since he was a kid.” Others say it was the director who rattled the saber. After one angry meeting in his hotel room, he threw a coffee table at a Miramax representative, which crashed into the door as it was closing. (Scorsese actually had mirrors affixed to the video monitors to alert him to Weinstein’s approach.) “Marty’s as mean and difficult as Harvey,” said one executive. “He has an extraordinary temper, and he won’t bend at all for anything.” And a crew member added, “Marty more than once said, ‘I’ll walk away and let someone else finish it.’ ”
The shooting dragged on for so long that the next movie on Diaz’s schedule, The Sweetest Thing, hove into view. Recalls Harvey, “That was the big fight that I had with Marty, where I had to release Cameron. Marty said, ‘You can’t do that.’
“ ‘Marty, you can’t have an actress who worked [practically] for free, stayed four and a half months straight, six months overall, and then about to come into a $15 million payday, and not release her.’
“ ‘I’m gonna talk to Columbia myself.’
“ ‘Do whatever the fuck you want.’ He called Columbia, and they said, ‘Fuck you.’ He got mad at me, overturned what he thought was my desk, but he threw down [producer] David Parfitt’s desk by mistake.”
Gangs wrapped after seven months on April 13, 2001, eight weeks over. As is his wont, Weinstein became more aggressive during post-production, and it was then that there were several big blowouts—over issues of taste, length, and score. Scorsese produced a rough cut that came in at three hours, forty minutes. Weinstein threatened that he wouldn’t release the picture unless the length was radically reduced. The Scorsese camp was furious because Miramax was trumpeting the long, early cut as the “director’s cut,” when it knew perfectly well it was merely a rough cut that Scorsese always intended to shorten. Miramax just wanted to spin its case that the director was out of control.
Harvey, betraying some bitterness—although he still says he loves the movie—claims he wanted to end it two-thirds of the way through: “When we finished the pagoda sequence, where DiCaprio reveals himself, I turned to Marty and said, ‘We’re done. Here! Dramatically, the movie is over. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a race to end it. We should get through it in fifteen minutes.’ ” He thought he was going to be able to muscle Scorsese into dropping the entire draft riot sequence, provoking one of the most bitter confrontations between the director and the producer. Speaking of Scorsese’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, Weinstein reportedly told Scorsese, “She’s too old to do the job anymore. Dump her.” According to Harvey, Scorsese refused to cut the sequence, saying, “This is how I conceived it.” He continues, “That’s an example of my power on that movie. Why should he listen? He’s ‘Martin Scorsese’!”
Ironically, as desperate as Harvey had been to get into business with Scorsese, once he succeeded, he tried to tone down Scorsese’s voice, the signature touches that would make Gangs a “Martin Scorsese film.” As he had done in the past, he tried to make the picture more audience friendly. If there is one thing Scorsese’s films are not, it is audience friendly, and this one was no different. It contained three big battles between the gangs. Harvey wanted to eliminate the first one—which happened to be the best—because it was long, harrowing, and violent, in order to get to the story faster. The dialogue is filled with nineteenth-century slang, as when DiCaprio’s character says of Diaz, “She’s a prim-lookin’ stargazer
,” meaning she’s sexy. Harvey tried to insert translations for that and like locutions into the voice-over, but Scorsese objected. Then there was the jar of ears, souvenirs of battle displayed in a bar. “I tried to get that out of the goddamned movie three years ago,” he complained. “I said, ‘I hate that in the script.’ Who wants to see a goddamned jar of ears? It’s disgusting!” Likewise, there’s a brief scene in which a dog chews up some rats. Weinstein wanted to say, “Marty, I promise you, you’ll get your $3 million back if you take out the ears and the rats,” but he saved his breath. Instead, he said, sourly, “He doesn’t give a shit.”
As the picture became mired in post-production, the money flowed like water from a broken main. But it wasn’t only the money. As Cassian Elwes puts it, “Harvey put all the resources of that company, the entire Miramax machine, on that movie for two, three years. The hidden costs of that, in terms of the time taken away from making other pictures, are gigantic!”
Thirteen
All That Jazz Is Gone
2000–2001
• How Steven Soderbergh became a one-man Sundance, while Harvey Weinstein threw a headlock on a reporter, paused Billy Bob Thornton’s directing career, and vaporized Todd Haynes.
“Miramax has been a blessing and a curse for the film industry. You have to give them credit because they made indie movies sexy. They showed you could make money off them. The curse is that they commercialized them.”
—ETHAN HAWKE
Still not entirely recovered from his five-week stint in the hospital, with Talk magazine floundering and the presidential election just around the corner, Harvey kept up an exhausting pace. Despite the Oscar nominations for The Cider House Rules, there was little to cheer about. Not only had Harvey’s reentry traumatized his staff, but there was the humiliation of having to acknowledge that Bob’s Dimension division, which had released Scream 3 on February 4, 2000, to the tune of an $89 million domestic gross, was propping up the company.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 60
