Dimension’s slate included another movie for which Bob had high hopes, O, directed by Tim Blake Nelson, who had previously made a small picture called Eye of God. Nelson is a short, intense, articulate hyphenate (actor-writer-director) best known for playing unshaven, nose-picking white trash roles in films as disparate as Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. He grew up in Oklahoma, went to Brown University and then Juilliard to study acting.
O was essentially Othello set in a prep school. It was a violent film with several intense scenes, including the rape of a white girl by a black student, and a shootout in the school at the end. The cast included Mekhi Phifer, Julia Stiles, Josh Hartnett, and Martin Sheen. Eric Gitter, a lawyer turned producer, along with four co-producers, raised $3.5 million from an assortment of investors. Just before they were slated to go into production, Bob made a run at the film for Dimension. His pitch was, “We’re the kings of marketing films like this, we’ve done every film Quentin Tarantino’s ever made, we’ve done Priest, we’ve done The Crying Game.” The Miramax mythology, the origins legend—the nod to Mom and Dad enshrined in the company name, the stories about Miriam and her rugulah, the life-altering impact of The 400 Blows, the appropriation of Tarantino, the controversies over The Crying Game, Kids, and so on—was key to maintaining the fiction that the Weinsteins were the little guys. The less independent Miramax was, the more important it was to insist that it was still in the indie film business. This was the fig leaf that made it possible to continue trading on the reputation of a company that no longer existed. Gitter and Nelson bought it. It didn’t hurt that Bob made a very generous preemptive bid of $7.5 million, and pledged to release it on one thousand screens. Says Nelson, “They clearly saw the commercial potential of the movie.”
On April 20, 1999, while O was in post-production, twelve students and one teacher were shot to death at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, mimicking the ending of O. Sure enough, the Senate Commerce Committee scheduled hearings on the marketing of violence to children, and Senator Joe Lieberman testified on May 4. Instead of sensing trouble, Nelson just felt Columbine made O more topical. Bob seemed to like what he was seeing and the director imagined that the brothers would charge fearlessly ahead, the way they had with all those other films Bob had mentioned. Bob said he loved the dailies, wanted to rush the picture into release on October 17, and if not then, Thanksgiving.
Nelson gave Bob a cut on June 4. Soon after, he got a “really sweet” call from him, in which he said, “I love the film. I can’t wait to show it to my brother. I just wanted to call to let you know that.” Bob had reason to be in a good mood. He was about to release Scary Movie on July 7, a picture that would burn through the box office like no Dimension movie before it, even Scream. At the end of its run, it would gross an astonishing $157 million domestic. At the same time, however, Lieberman was pressing his crusade against violence in movies. “I was getting these calls from Eric Gitter,” Nelson recalls. “He and Miramax were starting to fight about everything. Eric was saying, ‘They’re terrified of this movie. And they wish they’d never bought it.’ ”
Nelson delivered the film on March 17, 2000. As far as he could tell, Miramax seemed happy. Except for one thing: they would not release the picture. “The movie just sat there,” he recalls. “It was going to open several different times over the year, and then they would cancel it.”
Meanwhile, Harvey continued to raise his profile on the national political scene. He emerged as a major fund-raiser and cheerleader for the Gore-Lieberman ticket. All told, he and Eve between them gave various candidates $750,000 and raised an additional $14 million. Harvey was invariably respectful, not to say obsequious in the presence of the First Couple. It was always, “Mr. President,” never “Bill.” He wouldn’t eat in front of them. And he never smoked in front of Hillary, because he knew she didn’t like it. But afterward, he would gorge on Cokes, hamburgers, and French fries, and chain-smoke on the plane back to New York.
Harvey threw a fund-raiser/birthday party for Hillary Clinton’s fifty-third at the Roseland Ballroom on October 25. With a multitude of celebrity egos, a million things can go wrong at events like that, and a few weeks earlier, at a Gore fund-raising concert at Radio City Music Hall, there had been at least one incident. The green room was packed with stars—Matt Damon, Salma Hayek, Bon Jovi, Paul Simon, etc.—all wanting to sit down, but there weren’t enough chairs. A young assistant in publicity had been delegated the task of guarding a precious half-circle of space comprised of a couch, two love seats, and a small table, apparently so that Harvey and his guest, Julia Roberts, could have a tête-à-tête. First the assistant had to turn away the wife of VH1’s John Sykes, who was eight months’ pregnant. Not happy, she snapped, “My husband is throwing this event.”
“Ma’am, I’m so sorry, I can’t let you sit here. This couch is reserved for Harvey Weinstein.” She stormed off. Then Jimmy Buffet, Harrison Ford, and his wife, E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathiessen descended on the couches, all wanting to sit down. “I’m sorry, this area is taken, Harvey Weinstein is sitting here.”
“Come on, let us sit down.” There were closed-circuit TVs around the room, and it was clear that at that very moment, Harvey was on stage. They said, “Hey, look, there he is, he’s not sitting here right now, we’ll move as soon as he comes in.” No sooner had they seated themselves than Harvey entered the greenroom with Roberts and made a beeline for the table as the assistant frantically pushed Ford et al. away, pleading, “Get up, get up, get up.” They did so, balancing their plates on their glasses. Roberts took off, abandoning Harvey for Damon, while the Miramax co-chairman, smiling, barked at the squatters in a tense voice, “Hey, that’s my seat.” The assistant, mortified, fessed up, said, “Harvey, it’s my fault, I’m the one watching this area.” Furious, but trying to put a good face on it in front of his celebrity friends, he pointed at the cowering girl in front of Ford, Mathiessen, and Buffet, laughed, and replied, “Yeah, it’s your fault, you’re fired!” She thought, Ohmigod, Harvey just fired me. He found her two bosses and berated them in a low voice, whereupon they came over and started yelling at her, “You’re so stupid, we can’t even trust you with this. This is the easiest thing in the world, watching a table. Go stand over in the corner.” Hillary Clinton was in the vicinity but was swept away by Sykes so that she wouldn’t be exposed to the spectacle of one of her most prominent fund-raisers beheading an underling. (The assistant was rehired the next day.)
Later that evening, the master of ceremonies, John Leguizamo, departing from his script and shocking the Gores, the Liebermans, and Hillary Clinton, all seated in the first row, with a series of off-color remarks. (Example: The reason Gore had chosen Lieberman as his running mate was because “All the women in New York know that a Jew can lick Bush.”)
At Hillary’s birthday party, Harvey, wound tight, reverted to music promoter mode, which meant he was killing everybody in his sight line. The master of ceremonies was Nathan Lane, working pro bono. Shortly before Lane was due to go on, Harvey decided to review his script to make sure there was nothing in it that would embarrass Hillary. He took exception to a silly joke about Mayor Giuliani’s comb-over, and exploded, yelling something like, “This is my fucking show, we don’t need you.” He threw Lane up against a wall. Actor James Naughton, who produced the party, separated them, said, “Wait a minute, we don’t want to do this, this is silly, calm down, we’re starting in two minutes.” He persuaded Lane to go on.
Meanwhile, Nelson and Gitter had concluded that Harvey feared releasing a violent film like O in the midst of Lieberman’s jihad because it might expose the candidates as well as himself to the charge of hypocrisy. In November 2000, journalist Rebecca Traister, quoting an unnamed source, reported in the New York Observer that Gitter had been told “that no decision would be made on when O was [to be] released until after the election.” But Dimension publicist Elizabeth Clark affirmed that Bob Weinstein “stands
behind the film,” adding that “the company has released difficult films before,” and promised that the film would “be released next year.”
Traister, then twenty-four, was a cub reporter working for “The Transom,” a gossip column in the Observer. On the evening of Monday, November 6, the day before the presidential election, she found herself at the Tribeca Grand Hotel at a party for Karen Duffy, Revlon model/MTV vj/friend of Harvey, thrown by the Miramax co-chairman to celebrate her new book, Model Patient: My Life as an Incurable Wise-Ass. The Miramax publicists had been stonewalling Traister, and she was there in search of a quote for her story.
Duffy’s book told the saga of her struggle with sarcoidosis, a rare inflammatory condition thought to be the result of an immune system malfunction. She credited Harvey with saving her life by getting her into the hands of the right doctors. Traister, accompanied by her colleague and then boyfriend, Andrew Goldman, found themselves swept along in Harvey’s slipstream, only a few paces behind him, among the crowd of stylishly dressed well-wishers on their way in. Traister caught up to him, and clutching her tape recorder, she asked him about O. He brushed her off, saying, “I have nothing to do with that. That’s Bob, my brother’s [division]. I haven’t seen the movie and I don’t know anything about it.” He wasn’t very responsive and she didn’t believe him, but it was a quote, and she was done for the night.
Harvey, however, was not accustomed to being bearded by reporters and asked questions he’d prefer not to answer. His army of publicists was supposed to protect him from just such surprises, not that it was often necessary, given how skilled he was at carrot-and-sticking the press. When the Miramax marketing department bought ads, TV spots, and so on it had a justifiable expectation of getting what it paid for. But Harvey demanded his publicists get the same results for free, and more, exercise as much control over what was written about himself, his brother, and his company as he exercised over paid advertising. The publicists not only planted pieces, they routinely tried, and sometimes succeeded, in killing stories, spinning those they couldn’t kill, and selecting writers. Of course, studio publicists have always planted favorable items and exercised damage control, but it is almost unprecedented for the chief executive to be as personally involved and invested as Harvey was—and is. Reviewers who panned a Miramax film could expect to get an irate call or letter from the Miramax co-chairman himself accusing them of “betraying” him, sometimes followed up by the customary bouquet. Nothing was too small to escape his notice.
Back in May 1995, after Harvey had acquired, seen, and hated Dead Man—in that order—at Cannes, he vigorously tried to persuade director Jim Jarmusch to recut it. Failing, he held the film for a year, until May 1996, and then released it without much enthusiasm. Recalls lead Village Voice reviewer Jim Hoberman, “Dead Man was Jarmusch’s best movie since Stranger Than Paradise. But he stood up to them, and they were vindictive about it. [Publicist] Cynthia Swartz called me and told me what a terrible film it was. They were badmouthing their own movie!” In January of the new year Jarmusch, a presenter at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, publicly rebuked Miramax, to the merriment of the assembled guests, saying that Dead Man had been seen at more private screenings than public ones, alluding to Miramax’s failure to support the film. This incident provoked John Clark, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, to do a story. Among the people Clark interviewed was Hoberman, who recalls, “One of the things that I said to him, fairly innocuous, was that I thought that Miramax had gotten more conservative since they were bought by Disney.” Then Hoberman traveled from his home in New York City to Santa Monica on a business trip. He continues, “I came back to my hotel room, and there was this series of increasingly hysterical messages on the machine from Cynthia Swartz calling on her cell phone from Sundance. In the last one, where she was very upset, she said something like, ‘Everybody has retracted what they said but you. I really hope that you do, and so does Harvey, because if you don’t retract it, he’s going to be forced to take some sort of action that he doesn’t want to take.’ ”
In early 2002, Patrick Goldstein raised Harvey’s ire by devoting one of his columns in the Los Angeles Times to chastising Miramax for its behavior in that year’s Oscar campaign. As Goldstein recalls, Harvey phoned him and said something like, “You’re a piece of shit, your column is a piece of shit, no one cares what you write, they throw the newspaper away and wrap fish in it.”
Then there were the treats. Harvey had provoked a minor scandal when he gave New York magazine editor Kurt Andersen a lift on the Miramax jet to Martha’s Vineyard in 1994. (Andersen offered to pay his own way, at the commercial rate.) The Miramax co-chairman claims this was the only time that sort of thing happened, although it occurred at least once more, when he ferried the new Premiere editor-in-chief, Jim Meigs, from the Sundance Film Festival back to New York in January 1997. Says Miegs, “Later, I regretted it. It was unseemly.”
It is well known that Miramax has some of New York’s gossip columnists in its pocket. Says former Miramax publicist Dennis Higgins, “Harvey is obsessed with the columns. He would rather see something break in a column than put out a press release and have it appear in the trades.” The most notorious example is Roger Friedman, who often uses his Internet gossip column, 411, to tout (and very occasionally knock) Miramax films. Says Higgins, “There’s no one in the pocket like Roger. It’s almost, ‘Whaddya want him to write?’ We [even] got him to say The Shipping News is great.” Harvey financed Friedman’s documentary, Only the Strong Survive, on soul singers, and is unapologetic. “Roger Friedman is making me $1.5 million,” he says. “He can come up to my office all day long. A. J. Benza, thrown out of the Daily News, was broke. I gave him fifty grand to write a book. Mitchell Fink, from the Daily News, is gonna write a book for us. I do not say to Mitchell Fink, take good care of me. He’s roasted me so many fuckin’ times, it can’t be a conflict of interest.”
Richard Johnson, the editor of the New York Post’s widely read “Page Six,” was hired by Miramax as a consultant when Harvey decided to remake a French film called Jet Set, about the club scene. Says Johnson, “The idea was, maybe I would work with a writer. They lost their enthusiasm. No money ever changed hands.” Had the project not stalled, would it have been a conflict of interest? “Sure!” Johnson responds. “It’s hard to write negative things about people who are paying you. But can’t I recuse myself? How much do I write about Miramax?” Paula Froelich, his colleague at “Page Six,” has a deal with Miramax Books for “a book on using the rules of fame to get ahead,” she explains. Some suspected that Harvey used the magazines he had money in to distribute largesse to those members of New York’s Grub Street who were Miramax-friendly. Says a former Talk editor, “They were always thrusting pieces on us that these gossip columnists had written that were not assigned by the editors, but by somebody else. Maybe by Tina. But Tina considered herself a literary lion, and they were beneath her, so someone must have made her do it, like Harvey. It was clear.”
But even though Harvey well understood that he could win more friends with honey, Traister apparently didn’t understand the rules of the game Miramax had laid down, and when she buttonholed him, he just couldn’t help himself. As she was preparing to leave, she felt a heavy hand on her shoulder. He pulled her around, growled, “You’re not gonna use that stuff I gave you, are you?”
“Harvey, I wouldn’t worry about it. You really didn’t say anything that could be used against you in any way.”
“You can’t use any of it, not a word.” He was keeping his voice level, but it sounded to her as though he was expending considerable effort to do so.
“I identified myself, you didn’t tell me it was off the record, and you were talking into my tape recorder.”
“Give me the tape recorder!”
“No, I’m not going to do that.”
Poking his finger vigorously into her shoulder, and turning to include Goldman, who had made his way over when he saw the commot
ion, Harvey bellowed, “You guys don’t give me a break, I can’t believe you fuckin’ did this to me, you come to this woman’s cancer party I’m throwing out of the goodness of my heart, and you guys show up under false pretenses—you’re fucking scum, reporters don’t do this, you don’t come to one event and ask about another story. You have to go through my office.”
“Harvey, I called your office this week, I’ve put in requests to talk to you and that wasn’t working.”
According to a witness, still poking and pushing her, spittle flying from his mouth, he leaned into her face and screamed something like, “This bitch came in here, she lied, she said she was going to cover the party, she’s not covering the party. She came to sabotage me.”
Traister was petrified. She thought, If he can break up his own party by screaming and pushing us, well shit, now anything can happen.
Goldman, in his late twenties, and maybe a hundred pounds shy of Harvey, chose this moment to intervene, saying, “Harvey, hold on a second, I was invited to this party, I’m covering this party—”
“That’s a lie, you brought this woman.” Sweating heavily, his face red and engorged, Harvey swung around to him, and drilling a hole in his chest with his forefinger, screamed, “This is going to be you and me, I want this mano-a-mano, I’m taking you outside and I’m gonna fuckin’ kick your ass.”
Goldman was so scared he looked like he was going to soil himself. But he had the presence of mind to pull out his tape recorder. Speaking haltingly through dry lips, he said, “Let’s forget about what happened with Rebecca, and let’s talk about Karen Duffy.” As Miramax publicists swarmed around Traister, profusely apologizing—“Oh, I’m so sorry, he’s very stressed out, it’s the night before the election, he’s really worked up, call tomorrow, we’ll get you a quote”—Weinstein subsided as suddenly as he’d erupted, as if a switch had been thrown, and the two men proceeded to have a perfectly tranquil conversation about the author. But thinking he had an opening with the newly quiescent Weinstein, Goldman made a mistake. He said, “Harvey, I really think it was unfortunate what you did to this girl. She was just doing her job, the paper has been really respectful of you in the past, I just don’t see why there was any need for you to do this in front of all these people.” He had inadvertently flipped the switch back again, and Weinstein began to tremble with rage. As the guests watched agog, martini glasses aquiver, Harvey shouted obscenities, screamed, “Kick these people out, they’re here under false pretenses, they’re liars, they’re liars, we’re never talking to them again.”
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