GOING INTO THE FALL OF 2001, Miramax seemed to be looking at an uptick in its fortunes. The only problem, in fact, seemed to be an embarrassment of riches. The Weinsteins still employed a modified version of their throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy, carpetbombing theaters with Oscar wannabes backloaded into the holiday season, most of them bunched into the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Amelie, a delicate meringue whipped up by the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen), starring a saucer-eyed, Audrey Hepburn look-alike named Audrey Tautou, and boasting of digitally enhanced clouds in the shape of rabbits, seemed poised to become that year’s Chocolat, at the very least sure to clinch Best Foreign Film. Iris, the Iris Murdoch biopic Harvey produced with Scott Rudin, starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench, was a natural for a Best Actress nomination. Piñero, which showcased Benjamin Bratt’s critically praised performance, was another acting nomination waiting to happen. Almost forgotten in the crush was that year’s Sundance acquisition, In the Bedroom, which might conceivably earn a nod for Sissy Spacek. And if luck really smiled on the Weinsteins, she could face off against Nicole Kidman, who might be nominated for The Others. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla, of course, was the eagerly awaited Gangs of New York. Gangs had Oscar written all over it, especially since Martin Scorsese, who should have won for Raging Bull, if not for Goodfellas, had never been honored. And if for some reason Gangs stumbled, Miramax had another Oscar contender in The Shipping News, which had been entrusted to the sure hands of house director Lasse Hallström. Miramax couldn’t lose.
Gangs had originally been scheduled for December 21, 2001. But with its limb-chopping violence and brutal anti-government riots, it was not deemed post–9/11-friendly. Moreover, the meticulous Scorsese was still editing and reediting, and it wasn’t ready. Rather than try to force the issue, as Paramount had the ill-fated Godfather: Part III in 1990, Weinstein wisely postponed it, first to July 12, 2002, and then December 25, 2002.
But what looked in late summer like a Weinstein Chanukah, by the fall resembled The Nightmare Before Christmas. With the pole removed, the tent was about to collapse, bringing down Miramax’s fall schedule with it, especially since The Shipping News was underperforming in the top two boxes. Harvey panicked.
Amelie, released on November 2 to generally favorable reviews, was doing brisk business, and In the Bedroom, which opened on November 23 to even better reviews, was also showing signs of life. But these pictures were too small to plug the Gangs hole. Casting about for a more suitable replacement, Harvey’s eye fell on Jim Mangold and Cathy Konrad’s Kate & Leopold, scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day, 2002. Consistently scoring in the high 80s, Kate & Leopold was looking like a Meg Ryan, Sleepless in Seattle–sized hit. When the film was screened at Tribeca for the Weinsteins, “Harvey cried,” recalls Konrad. “He said he hadn’t seen a movie like this since—he invoked the great masters, Sturges and Capra, and told Jim he was a fucking genius. Bob, who is more reined in emotionally, took Jim outside and said, ‘If this movie doesn’t make $100 million, we’re morons.’ ” After the movie received kudos at ShowEast from hard-bitten exhibitors, the Weinsteins towed it from its safe harbor right into the midst of holiday traffic, assigning it Friday, December 21. But Kate & Leopold never would meet the Weinsteins’ expectations, its fate a function of Miramax’s weaknesses as the company accelerated around the curve between the old century and the new, no longer the little engine that could, but the Acela Express, way too large, powerful, and swift for the old wooden tracks to which it clung.
When Mangold and Konrad complained about the marketing materials, which seemed to be aimed exclusively at women, they couldn’t find Harvey. Says Konrad, “We screamed and we yelled and we demanded to know where Harvey was. We were banging the gong, going, ‘Where’s the guy who used to live and die by marketing, the man you always expect to turn onion soup into gold bullion. Where the hell is Harvey?’ Harvey was deep into Gangs.”
Be careful what you wish for. After Kate & Leopold was moved up, Harvey parachuted back into Mangold’s and Konrad’s lives. “Then,” says Konrad, “our hell began. I get a lot of calls from filmmakers asking my advice about how to deal with Miramax. I always say, ‘You’re gonna get it up the ass at some point, it’s just that when you do, it will be the biggest surprise of your life, and you’ll go, Why didn’t I see that coming?’ ” Now it was their turn. The couple had already had their press junket, and the movie had been reviewed in the long-lead-time magazines. According to Weinstein, one thousand prints had already been struck.
The film had premiered in New York on Mangold’s birthday, Sunday, December 16, and the next day, four days before the scheduled release, the two filmmakers went to Harvey’s office for what they thought was a marketing meeting.
Harvey led them down the short hall to the conference room, saying, “C’mere, I want to introduce you to some people.” There were something like fifteen people squeezed into the room. Konrad recalls, “I started shaking, because I knew that something really, really horrible was about to happen. I’m always prepared for the worst, because that’s what this business has taught me, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened in this meeting.”
Harvey had an unresolved issue with the film that the filmmakers had ignored. Some of the reviewers had noted that the time hopping and the convoluted ancestry of the characters raised an incest question between two of the characters. Worse, the numbers had apparently tumbled into the 70s at the two previews, still not bad, but not good enough to withstand the holiday heat. Harry Potter was still going strong, Ocean’s 11 had hung in, and so too, to everyone’s surprise, had Vanilla Sky. Harvey said, “We’re up shit’s creek. We underestimated the competition.” Turning to one of his executive gofers, he said, “Get me the numbers on Lord of the Rings. This is tracking huge. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Konrad thought, Duhh! We’re coming out in four days, you’re just getting the tracking numbers now? We fuckin’ busted our humps for two years? And you haven’t done your job? “I admit, I didn’t know,” Harvey continued. “The early screenings on Lord of the Rings—people were saying there were problems, but now—I’ve moved your release date back, you’re coming out on Christmas Day. And you gotta cut four minutes!” Konrad was stunned. She thought, This is after two premieres! We’re done, we’re locked. Finished. The cutting rooms are gone. There’s no Avid. Our editor is helping Adrian Lyne cut Unfaithful. We’re about to release the movie! Prints have been struck. She looked up, and at the end of the table she recognized, as she puts it, “the Scissorhands with their cassette,” referring to post-production veteran Scott Martin. She knew what that meant. Kate & Leopold was about to go under the eleventh-hour knife.
Recalls Mangold, “They showed me a shadow cut of the movie in which they had made devastating, awful hacks, losing one scene without which the movie made no sense. They literally butchered it.” Ironically, the major cut was a self-referential, signature sequence in which the director registers his contempt for testing. Mangold felt cornered. “It’s very hard, even for a star, to say, ‘Never,’ in the face of someone who’s as influential as Harvey is, and who controls that much material,” he explains. “I found myself having to make Sophie’s choice. The only way out of the position he put me in was to give him four minutes that were my four minutes as opposed to four minutes that were his.”
By now, news of the last-minute cuts had leaked to the press. In the trades, Mangold was quoted saying they were his idea. He was in another bind. “I felt I was being made to look like an absolute idiot,” he says. “But I also felt that if I had gone public, and said these were forced down my throat, I was fucking my own movie three days before my release. It would become a huge story, and the movie would be destroyed. You can’t do that. I was in tears.” If Kate & Leopold indeed required cutting, it should have been done way earlier. Snipping four minutes at that late a date served no purpose other than to add Mangold and Konrad to the increasingly unse
lect club of ex-Miramax filmmakers. Even some hardened Miramax hands were shocked. Exclaims Kevin Smith, “You sit there going, Kate & Leopold—how does this happen?”
Kate & Leopold opened on December 25 against Ali and several other films. It got slaughtered. Ali grossed $14.7 million over the first weekend, while Kate & Leopold did $9.7 million.
What’s the moral of this story? If the director and the producer are to be believed, their movie was the victim of Harvey’s inattention, an overburdened marketing department, and the mismanagement of the company. Hobbled by a culture of chaos based on a cult of personality, Miramax was no longer the brash adolescent whose growth spurt, financed by Disney, enabled it to wipe the floor with the competition. Miramax had become a mature company with five hundred employees, spilling out across Tribeca into three buildings, far too large to be run as a mom-and-pop store—particularly if Mom and Pop were otherwise occupied. None of the senior executives, the so-called vice presidents, was empowered to make decisions, nor wanted to. At Miramax, the premium was on loyalty, not initiative.
But Kate & Leopold was a sign of a more serious problem: the failure of Harvey’s attempts to ratchet himself up to the next level, to go up against the studios. “Kate & Leopold is the kind of movie that a major should have made,” says Rudin. “Miramax is now in the business of making ersatz studio movies, and it’s never been good at that. They spend half of what the majors spend on marketing. If you’re gonna release a movie in 2,500 runs, you gotta spend competitively in 2,500 runs. You can’t release it like it’s in eight hundred runs.” Adds a former Miramax executive, “The problem is that Harvey thinks that if he’s spending more money for movie stars, that that’s good enough, and he forgets that he still has to market the movie. He’ll cheap out on those wide releases. He’ll try to save the incremental $5 or $6 million that could be the difference between hitting critical mass or not. It’s true Harvey used to have the reputation of a big spender in the independent world, but in the studio business, the level of spending is just a different stratosphere. He’s not comfortable doing that. He’s scared of Bob saying, ‘Harve, you wanna gross or you wanna make money? You’ll kill your upside.’ ”
Konrad is bitter: “So your movie comes out, it’s floundering, it’s the holidays, and Harvey doesn’t even call. He loves you for a minute, and then he just steps on your face and you’re a piece of shit again. What I don’t like about Miramax is that they profess a loyalty to filmmakers, they talk the family talk, but family doesn’t treat family like that. Family is not about only when things are good. Family is about when things are hard. Talent is not allowed to bark. You only get to beg. I’ve never spoken to them again. I can’t speak to them, because it doesn’t do you any good in this town to remind people of where they failed. Everybody just looks at you and says, ‘Just get over yourself. It’s a business.’ ”
Fourteen
Gods and Monsters
2001–2002
• How James Schamus and David Linde took over Focus, saving Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes from the clutches of USA, while Miramax scored with Chicago, but humiliated Martin Scorsese.
“Harvey is deeply in love with the arts. He’s one of those people who thinks that through helping artists fulfill their dreams, he becomes part of the art, which in a way is true. Heaven, Gangs, Cold Mountain—wouldn’t exist without him. He dreams of the filmmaker’s dream, but it will always stay the filmmaker’s dream and not his own. And that is Harvey’s tragedy.”
—TOM TYKWER
The 2001 Oscar campaign showed how agilely Miramax could shift its marketing assets from one square to another. Kate & Leopold and The Shipping News were perceived as failures, roadkill on the shoulder of the Miramax highway. But Todd Field’s In the Bedroom was starting to look like that year’s Hummer—or, more like it, Volvo. “He didn’t really give a shit about us,” recalls GreeneStreet partner Fisher Stevens. Then, “once he realized Shipping News was not gonna work, he put all his eggs in our basket.” When Miramax bought it, it was ostensibly buying a finished film. But, as often as not, in the Weinsteins’ hands, a finished film becomes a work-in-progress. “Going with Miramax, we were signing a deal with a company whose corporate culture is to cut films to shreds and not let anyone stand in their way,” says Ted Hope, who produced Bedroom for Good Machine. “I dreaded it. I sat Todd Field down and said, ‘You realize what this means? They are going to want you to recut your film. They’re going to fight you tooth and nail for what they think is the right movie.’ ”
Indeed, Harvey wanted to cut thirty minutes. Despite what the Miramax co-chairman had been told, Field refused. Harvey mounted an elaborate campaign to pressure the director, using Martin Scorsese to bludgeon him. Scorsese watched Bedroom with his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, and according to Harvey, told him, “ ‘What are you, out of your fucking mind? Cut twenty minutes out of the fucking movie.’ They both said the last third just goes on forever.” Still Field resisted. Then Harvey just disappeared, as he had on Jim Mangold and Cathy Konrad. Over the course of several months of inconclusive haggling with Miramax executives, “You could see Todd wasting away,” says Hope, “going crazy that he couldn’t lock this picture.”
Finally, Field and Hope were granted a meeting with the Man. He sat them down in a room with two decks and two monitors, his cut and Field’s cut. He encouraged them to explain what they liked or didn’t like about each version, but insisted, “At the end of this conversation, what I say goes.” When it was all over, to their astonishment, he let them off with no more than five minutes of trims. “We won,” says Hope. “But we spent nine months to get a meeting that we could’ve had six weeks in. Todd got a bleeding ulcer. I think a lot of people wouldn’t make that trade.”
What Field and Hope didn’t know was that the picture was the object of a tug-of-war between dueling factions within Miramax. One side lobbied to cut the film. The other side, sensitive to the bad press stirred up by James Gray the year before, ridiculing Miramax for brutalizing The Yards, favored leaving it alone. “Everyone had seen the James Gray thing go so badly,” says a source inside the company. “James got his movie, but the process had been bloody, and it wasn’t worth the public embarrassment it caused the company.” The argument against cutting Bedroom ran, “You’re Harvey Scissorhands, you’ve ruined one movie, you’re gonna ruin another movie? Your big problem right now is that you’re sliding down the mountain with the critics, the guys who used to adore you, and now they think you’re really fucking up. You’ve got to get some integrity back. Don’t mess with something they’ve already seen at Sundance and liked.” It was a small movie for which Harvey had zero expectations, so he agreed and let Field off easy.
Miramax loved the numbers Bedroom was racking up, but it hated those box office bumps the contract required it to pay GreeneStreet. Harvey’s people began to pressure Penotti and Stevens to renegotiate what it now realized was a bad deal. Miramax wouldn’t take no for an answer. The calls from Miramax were so relentless and pressing that the two men felt they were being stalked. Penotti received one call at seven on a Sunday morning. But GreeneStreet held fast and wouldn’t let Miramax renegotiate the deal.
There was more bad blood over Piñero, also produced by GreeneStreet. “That was another horribly painful experience,” says Stevens. “They wanted Leon Ichaso, the director, who’s made tons of movies, to do this, to do that, and Leon finally said, ‘Fuck it, I’m done!’ They threatened to bury it, and basically they did. As soon as Ben Bratt failed to get a Golden Globe nomination, that was it. They do things behind your back, like saying, ‘We’re thinking of pulling Piñero from festivals,’ when they’d already pulled it from festivals.” Stevens has mixed feelings about working with Miramax again. “I would do another film with them in a second,” he says. “But I would go in completely not trusting them. They beat us down so much that it’s made us real skeptical and bitter. Harvey’s right a lot of the time. But it’s the way they go about it that makes it really
unpleasant. The worst thing was trying to get money back from us. From our little company that’s struggling to survive. It was squeezing blood. John and I personally made zero. We didn’t even take a fee, nothing. Ted Hope? Todd Field? Crap!”
Flat broke, Field was anxious to do a deal somewhere. Out of Sundance, he accepted an assignment to write a script for a small company called Catch 23. “I let Miramax know that I would like to give them the first opportunity to match the offer and enter into some kind of similar arrangement,” he says. “I never heard back from them.” Months later, after Bedroom became a hit, Harvey desperately wanted to sign Field. After all, if he couldn’t reel in the director of a tiny film he was turning into a $30 million plus hit, with whom could he do a deal? He was anxious to announce it on the eve of the Oscar nominations on February 12. But it never happened. Says Stevens, who was close to Field, “The relationship was tenuous. It would not be Todd’s first choice to work with them again, for sure.” (Field refused to comment, other than to say, “I decided against it. I wasn’t ready to make that kind of commitment to anyone at that point in time.”) Ultimately, he ended up at DreamWorks.
The Oscar jockeying that year was unusually ugly. Universal had watched while DreamWorks clawed its way to two Best Picture awards in a row by cloning the Weinsteins’ Oscar strategy. In late December, around the time of the Golden Globe nominations, Ron Howard’s movie, the front-runner for Best Picture, became the target of a smear campaign unprecedented in the history of the Academy Awards for its viciousness. The trouble began when a Miramax consultant directed the attention of an L.A. Times stringer to a Matt Drudge item pointing out that the movie had omitted material from Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash relating to his alleged homosexuality. Friends of Miramax beat the drum through the weeks leading up to the Oscar nominations, when A Beautiful Mind, Fox’s Moulin Rouge, New Line’s Lord of the Rings, USA’s Gosford Park, and In the Bedroom were nominated for Best Picture. (For Miramax, it was the eleventh Best Picture nomination in ten years.) Then, on March 5, just after the Oscar ballots went out, Drudge struck again, writing, “Some Academy members are discovering shocking Jew-bashing passages found in the book on which the movie is based.” When he heard this, Brian Grazer, whose company, Imagine, produced the picture, thought, We’re dealing with a man who’s been schizophrenic for forty years, and now you want to load him up in a wheel chair and push him onto the 405 Freeway? It’s so antithetical to the point of the movie, which is to help destigmatize mental disability, not to compound this man’s problems. You can’t defend yourself against that kind of charge. I’m lost, I’m never gonna win this thing. It’s so fucked up.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 65
