“Harvey, I don’t think you want to do this,” gasped Goldman.
“I’m sick of shit like that in my life. If you guys fuckin’ play like that, then I’m gonna deal with you as a guy and I’m gonna kick your ass. Okay? Somebody has cancer. That’s bad taste. Then you’ll deal with me. And you know what? It’s good that I’m the fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece of shit fucking town. Somebody cares.” He shoved Goldman, and pausing to point at Traister, shouted, “Keep your bitch colleague under control.” At some point Harvey must have noticed that the record indicator on Goldman’s tape recorder was blinking red. He bellowed, “You fuckin’ getting all this? You fuckin’ getting all this?” and made a grab for it. In the scuffle Goldman fell backward, and struck a woman, an actress, with the tape recorder. Pointing at the Observer reporter, Harvey shouted, “Look at what this fucking guy did, look at what this piece of shit did. He hit this woman at this party, I’m gonna take him outside and I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him!” He put Goldman in a headlock and dragged him out the glass doors onto the street as the guests poured out behind them and paparazzi snapped pictures. Finally, the Miramax publicists, who were all over Weinstein like Lilliputians on Gulliver, grabbing at his arms and saying things like, “Let him go, let him go, Harvey, you’re acting crazy,” succeeded in separating the two men. Weinstein instructed the hotel security to seize the tape recorder. But they had no idea who Harvey was, and as he frantically yelled, “This is my party, this is my party,” Goldman made his escape.
In addition to the paparazzi, there were several gossip columnists covering the event; Goldman and Traister fully expected to see the story splashed all over the tabloids the next day. After all, the head of a major division of the Walt Disney Company had attacked a journalist at a party in a posh downtown hotel in front of scores of witnesses. But there was virtually nothing. Those items that did appear blamed the victims and seemed to have been spun by Miramax, like the one on “Page Six” of the Post that went, “A couple of pushy reporters for the New York Observer pushed Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein to the breaking point, causing an ugly scene at what should have been a joyous celebration for former MTV veejay Karen Duffy.” In Inside.com, one of the few outlets to accurately report the confrontation, a Miramax publicist denied Harvey had had Goldman in a headlock, admitting only that he was “helping” him leave. Miramax publicists continued to insist that they had agreed to give Traister the quote she wanted, and that her behavior was inappropriate. Traister told friends she believed that she was subsequently followed by a detective, and that Miramax called around to her former employers to find out if she had ever done anything reprehensible.
Later that night, Harvey got on a plane with Affleck, Robert De Niro, and Glenn Close to fly to Miami to join Jon Bon Jovi, Stevie Wonder, and other celebrities onstage with Gore for an election eve rally. The stars rarely see Harvey out of control, and of course he never mentioned the dustup at the Tribeca Grand. “Does Harvey intimidate journalists?” muses Affleck. “I didn’t know anything about it. If he intimidates gossip columnists—good, they fuckin’ deserve it. They print erroneous shit every fucking day. Some guy trying to do some body slam story on O, where Iago’s monologue that’s four pages long gets boiled down to Josh Hartnett saying, ‘Watch your girl, bro,’ and he got yelled at and thrown out of the party—it’s not like we’re talking about the world peace. Where his behavior is like Queens coming across the river, and he’s still the concert promoter, I think it’s kind of charming. Maybe not so charming if you’re the one in the head-lock, but Harvey is a tough bastard, his people skills are not all that good. And he doesn’t have a lot of restraint, he’s all id. But Harvey is not Suge Knight. People are different to different people, and I’ve seen only the human side of him. He supported me and Matt, and he’s been a pretty good friend to me.”
On election night, November 7, Harvey took over Elaine’s and told everybody that the Clintons would be dropping by. But the night got so crazy, with the dead heat in Florida, that Hillary called over from the Sheraton, where the couple was staying, to say, “We just can’t come.” Weinstein was infuriated, and told her, “I’m bringing a group up to your hotel.” Capricia Marshall, who had been the White House social secretary, chimed in, said, “You cannot bring any press, and please limit it.” Harvey walked around Elaine’s, saying, “You can come, you can’t, you can come, you can’t.” Affleck, Tina Brown, Uma Thurman, and Ethan Hawke were among the chosen few, as well as Roger Friedman and a few other reporters, despite the ban on the press.
There was no question that the time and effort Harvey was putting into the political campaign, as well as Gangs of New York, was hurting his production slate. Jim Mangold and Cathy Konrad were prepping Kate & Leopold. Says Konrad, “Generally you walk into movies at Miramax going, ‘I hope Harvey doesn’t come around.’ Yet, this time we were begging for Harvey to come around, and he never did, until it was too late.” He seemed bored by the nuts and bolts of production. “He asked us if we knew what was going on with him,” Mangold recalls. “He said, ‘Ya know, I don’t just make movies anymore. I’m changing the world!’ ” Konrad thought, What do you do with that? I know we sound stupid—we care about the world too—but we have to start shooting in two weeks and no one gives a shit!
BY THE FALL OF 2000, Scott Greenstein’s perch had become precarious. None of USA’s films had made much money, and with high overhead, the company was devouring cash. On the eve of the release of Traffic, Variety published a piece saying that it was only a matter of time before Barry Diller fired him. People were counting the days until the ax fell.
But Greenstein showed surprising staying power. And when Russell Schwartz had brought in the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, or Donna Gigliotti snagged Neil LaBute’s Possession and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, he was happy. Before you knew it, USA had developed a respectable slate of pictures, none of which had yet been released.
Soderbergh thought he had a shot at the Oscar, and wanted Traffic out before the end of the year, which meant bucking the holiday gridlock. It was up to Jack Foley to get the theaters. For a new, small company like USA, “The competition is so destructive, so sociopathically murderous, that going up against the big guys at Christmas is bordering on volunteering for electroshock treatment,” he says. “Everything about this picture was a square peg. It was a drug film, cerebral, noncommercial, and America was looking for entertainment, Meet the Parents. So coming from Miramax, where you live outside the box—take your rules and shove ’em up your ass—I took the Avco in Westwood, which was available because it had fallen on hard times, and we won. We won huge.”
Traffic was released on December 27, 2000, and started breaking records. While marred by the improbable Michael Douglas subplot (with some exceptions, only in movies do high-level government officials resign on the grounds of principle), it was a throwback to the great faux documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, like Peter Watkins’s The War Game, and filled with all manner of formal experimentation. “I spent a lot of time analyzing Battle of Algiers and Z—both of which have that great feeling of things that are caught, instead of staged, which is what we were after,” Soderbergh explained.
Traffic improbably grossed $124 million, only a million and a half less than Soderbergh’s big Universal hit, Erin Brockovich, and it stayed the blade that had been tickling the nape of Greenstein’s neck. Soderbergh’s two consecutive blockbusters, meanwhile, finally gave him some muscle. After an interval of a decade, he cashed in the sex, lies promissory note, partnered in a new production company called Section Eight with his Out of Sight star, George Clooney. He started calling filmmakers—Kim Peirce, James Gray, Lodge Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven), Harmony Korine (Julian Donkey-Boy), Alison Maclean (Jesus’ Son), John Maybury (Love Is the Devil), Chris Nolan (Memento), Alejandro Iñárritu (Amores Perros), Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También). He asked them, “What are you doing? Can I help?” Soderbergh explains, “I don’t know what else
you’re supposed to do with whatever juice you’ve got at the moment other than get interesting movies made. We’re trying to move as quickly as we can before that juice runs out.”
Soderbergh’s idea was to offer indies he admired a financial incentive to do more commercial projects. His assumption was that the studios, with their increasingly single-minded focus on blockbusters, had abandoned the center, the kinds of films they used to make. “I feel there’s dissatisfaction at both extremes,” he says. “People who go to see art house movies are frustrated with what they’re seeing, and people going to the big star-driven vehicles are also disappointed with what they’re seeing.” He proposed another model: “There’s a middle ground to be had as there was in the ’70s. Movies that were being financed by studios with stars in them were being made by really interesting directors. I’ve always thought that I’d rather see a movie in four thousand theaters by Todd Haynes than some hack.” As his Section Eight partner, Clooney, put it, “Part of what we’re trying to do is say, ‘Why can’t we do the aesthetic that came from [the ’70s]?’ We just try to push an indie sensibility within the Hollywood mainstream.”
Soderbergh asked filmmakers on the other end of the line, “Do you want to stay in the art house ghetto your whole life, or are you interested in working in an established genre with movie stars? Because there’s a way to do what you do and not be bothered by the studio, but also make something that people might go to see.” He explains, “One of the reasons Memento popped is that it was an art house movie but it was also a murder mystery that had a couple of actors that aren’t huge stars but are known, and I feel audiences went, ‘Oh my God, someone who wants to tell a story and wants to entertain me a little bit. It isn’t like eating vegetables.’ Most of the directors have said, ‘God, yeah, I’m really tired of making movies that nobody sees.’ ”
Soderbergh felt confident in their answers; after all, he had been there himself. He was using his own career trajectory as a model. He had hit the bull’s-eye before anyone knew a target existed, after which, donning the indie hair shirt, he stumbled off the path into the wilderness, where he lost himself for nearly a decade until he hitched a ride on the Hollywood freeway, turning away from the esoteric (read, personal) projects that characterized his early years. He explains, “It makes sense when you consider that the independent movement has been swallowed up by the studios, that I’d inevitably be some sort of hybrid. Maybe I was acting preemptively when I decided I’m going to move toward the middle, because I don’t know that I had a career [outside the mainstream] anymore. Something must have felt like, That’s not happening.” In Soderbergh’s Good Samaritan phone calls to his less fortunate brethren, he was preaching the gospel of St. Harvey and St. Robert. Almost every indie institution had become devoted to nudging filmmakers toward the commercial center, whether it be Sundance or Miramax or the Independent Feature Project’s Spirit Awards or Damon and Affleck’s Project Greenlight or the example of the exceptional career of Tarantino.
Yet he was asking them to do something he failed at himself. Soderbergh hasn’t been a hybrid, like Tarantino, so much as he was of two minds, divided, following the more common, easier, one-for-me, one-for-them model. The hybrids are hard to pull off—when they fail, they’re dismissed as “tweeners”—and in a decade and a half, Soderbergh has only found the zone twice, in sex, lies, which increasingly seems like a happy accident, and Traffic. After Traffic, he embarked on Ocean’s 11 for Warner’s, an unapologetic Hollywood movie, with an all-star cast. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. “For me, Ocean’s made no sense,” he says. “It was the hardest thing I ever did. It’s a movie about absolutely nothing. I found it just brain-crushing. I never felt fluent, never felt comfortable. Every day I was hanging on by my fingernails.”
No sooner had he begun his studio film than he wanted to do one for himself. “About two weeks into it, I was feeling like, I want to do a little, a guerrilla movie. I just need to wash this out of my system.” Ironically, he described the movie he wanted to make as Son of Schizopolis. “Schizopolis was not designed to be understood by anybody,” he continues. “I combined the energy of that with a more coherent throughline, a narrative spine that’s more in line with sex, lies.” He wrote it during the Ocean’s production with a friend, Coleman Hough, a playwright. The film was called How to Survive a Hotel Room Fire.
In February 2000, Soderbergh had read an article in The New York Times about Godfrey Reggio and his unsuccessful, ten-year journey to find financing for the last of his Qatsi trilogy. He thought, That’s just insane, this guy’s, like, amazing. He called Reggio and offered to finance the initial phase of production with his bonuses from Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s 11.
Soderbergh gave Reggio $1.7 million against a $6 million budget. But just at the moment Naqoyqatsi shifted into high gear, he started running out of money. He thought, MGM owns the first two Qatsi films. I’ll go to them and say, If you’ll put up the remaining $4 million for Godfrey’s movie, I’ll give you How to Survive a Hotel Room Fire. And I’ll eat my share to make it more enticing. So he went to MGM. Executives there said, “Sounds great,” but then nothing happened. Months passed. Finally, Soderbergh called his manager, Pat Dollard, and asked, “What the fuck’s going on? I need to know, I’m outta money, we’re in a crunch here.” Dollard phoned MGM, came back and told Soderbergh, “They’re running numbers.” The director replied, “That’s it, call Miramax and USA and make the pitch.” Both of them responded, “Where do we send the check?” He went with Miramax because Harvey also said, “I’m taking you out of Godfrey’s movie, financially. You should never put yourself in that situation. I’ll pay the whole $6 million.” Adds Soderbergh, “Forty-eight hours later we had a three-page deal memo, so Godfrey got funded, and we went off and made Hotel Room Fire.” For Harvey, it was a twofer: he was dying to revive the relationship with Soderbergh, for the moment the hottest director going, as well as get into business with Clooney, now a huge star. The film, which became Full Frontal, was shot in eighteen days in November 2001 on a rock-bottom budget of $2 million by keeping costs down, about a third on film and two thirds in digital video. None of its all-star cast, including Julia Roberts, was allowed trailers.
Yet Full Frontal, a cat’s paw for Soderbergh and Clooney’s attempts to renovate American filmmaking by finding a middle way, seemed to offend everyone. Rather than applauding when a filmmaker like Soderbergh, unlike so many of his peers who—dare we speak the words—have “sold out,” the reviewers roasted him. They seemed to regard it as a stunt, as if a director who had a commercial hit like Ocean’s 11 couldn’t possibly be sincere in wanting to go home again. As Ethan Hawke puts it, “They’d just gotten through celebrating the shit out of him, setting him up to be the great Hollywood director, and he was finally going to come through on the promise of sex, lies and be a ‘player,’ right, and then he went back to get some indie street cred, and they smelled a rat. They’re crazy.”
Purists, the “real” indies who had little interest in making films inside the system, didn’t like it either. To them, Soderbergh must have looked like the mouse in a Pavlovian experiment. Each time he wandered off into indie territory, he got an electric shock that drove him back to the studio cheese.
Soderbergh had always rationalized his romance with commercialism by modestly insisting that he never aspired to be an auteur, and in this he offended some of the hybrids he has been trying to promote, the ones who made studio films on their own terms. “I was on a panel with him at the Hamptons Film Festival in 1997, and he said something that surprised me,” recalls David O. Russell. “He said, ‘I want to know who’s gonna be the next Sydney Pollack!’ I thought, Wow, that’s a weird thing to say. Then I realized, That’s him! He’s become the next Sydney Pollack. He sees himself as a craftsman. That’s very convenient for him, because somehow it becomes an excuse to say, ‘I can make more generic movies, like Ocean’s 11 since, let’s face it, I don’t have any pretensions, I’m not a visionary
.’ But that’s a pretty black-and-white way to look at it. Is Alexander Payne a visionary? Is Spike Jonze a visionary? I don’t know. But I know they’re not just craftsmen. I know they’re making really ballsy movies, and that’s what I’m interested in. I don’t know that I’m a great artist, but I suffer over the choices I make, and I think it’s okay to make a movie that takes more time and tries to thread the needle more.”
Soderbergh is probably right; there is a middle ground between the marginal and the commercial. It is the way taken by Russell, Payne, Jonze, and the two Andersons, who have all managed, with the help of modest budgets and big stars, to make studio-financed films with as few concessions to the market as possible. Even Hawke, albeit speaking as an actor, has started to come around. “You can’t piss upwind for that long before you’re peeing all over your pants,” he says. “To be honest, I felt really excited by Training Day because I made a movie that could play at the mall that I feel comfortable talking about, and it lets me know that I can do it, and I want to keep trying to do it. Rather than doing one for them and one for me, I want to try to find the one with them that I feel proud of. Maybe that will come.”
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