At the Globes, held on January 19, Sissy Spacek won Best Actress for a Dramatic Role for her turn as the grieving mother in Bedroom, and Miramax won two additional Globes, but considering the number of nominations it got, fifteen, the company was virtually shut out. Worse, A Beautiful Mind won Best Dramatic Film, and worse still, Amelie was beaten for Best Foreign Film by the lowly No Man’s Land—Bosnian Danis Tanovic’s absurdist black comedy about the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia, distributed by UA Classics, now run by Bingham Ray. Ray had been hired by Chris McGurk after he left Universal to become COO of UA’s parent company, MGM. Waiting for the elevator to go up to the UA party tent on the roof, Ray, who could barely contain his glee, said, in a loud voice, “We kicked the fat fuck’s ass.” With a bow in the direction of family values, Variety reporter Bill Higgins quoted him saying, “We kicked Miramax’s ass.” Even that was too much for Harvey, who cut the article out of the paper, circled Ray’s words in red, and sent it to McGurk. McGurk buttonholed Ray, demanded, “Did you say, ‘We kicked Miramax’s ass?’ ”
Shaking his head vigorously, Ray solemnly replied, “No.”
“Good. So you were misquoted?”
“No, what I said was worse!”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘We kicked the fat fuck’s ass!’ ”
McGurk put his head in his hands.
In a dark humor, Harvey made his way to the CAA after party at the restaurant Muse. Earlier that evening, he had apologized to Universal Pictures chairman Stacey Snider for the consultant’s indiscretion—“He’s somebody on my payroll, I’ll fire him if you want,” etc.—and now he found that his mea culpa was on everyone’s lips. Moreover, he had just been informed that his bête noir, journalist Nikki Finke, was about to come out with a story in the New York Post accusing Miramax of masterminding the negative campaign against Beautiful Mind. Harvey blamed DreamWorks executive Terry Press, whom he still regarded as the author of all Miramax bad notices, for both indignities.
Fortunately for her, Press wasn’t at the CAA party, but Snider, who weighs in at 5’ 2,” 105 pounds, no more than a throw pillow next to Harvey, was. Poking his finger in her face like an irritable woodpecker, he accosted her in the packed room, saying, “You’re going to go down for this! Get your house in order. And clean up your act. Or otherwise we will.” He denounced Press, and warned Snider that if she didn’t watch herself, she would be caught in the crossfire. She thought, If you feel that it’s Dream-Works, go tell DreamWorks. “He was yelling,” Snider recalls. “He was very angry. He wouldn’t come down from it. Usually, you can say, Let’s relax, let’s talk about this, we can figure this out. He just kept going.” (Weinstein has said, “I never raised my voice to Stacey.”)
Says one executive, “It was the second public display of rage that night. After the Globes he stood in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton Hotel and yelled at his staff. For losing Amelie. When you’re young and scrappy, this Mean Streets behavior is accepted. When you’re fifty, and you’re a fat cat, you can do all the benefits you want for the city of New York, but how you carry yourself matters.” Adds Snider now, “There were two things at play. Miramax had had a best picture nomination for nine or ten years in a row. That was something that the company was focused on preserving, and that goal is legitimate. But if you have a company whose culture is in service of one personality, if it’s the Harvey Weinstein Company, and there’s no means of checking that personality, that means you can have poking fingers and maligning films.” Shortly thereafter, Barry Diller gave Harvey a very public spanking. According to Variety, Diller “lashed out” at Weinstein for “threats and intimidation.”
On the phone the following day, DreamWorks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg accused Weinstein of stepping over the line. Katzenberg said something like, “You can’t work this way. You are endangering my friendship, and you must apologize to Stacey,” adding, “And I’m sick of you always pointing the finger at Terry. You think if it’s raining outside, it’s Terry’s fault.”
“Jeffrey, I am paranoid about that woman.”
“She says she hasn’t spoken to Nikki Finke in six months.”
“She’s lying.”
“You are speaking about somebody who’s family to me. So you better think before you call her a liar.”
People around Katzenberg believed that the close friendship between him and Harvey was a one-way street. People around Harvey felt the reverse. As a former Miramax executive put it, “The relationship is 80 percent Harvey.” Harvey himself says, “I have great fondness for Jeffrey, and I will never forget that he brought me to Disney, where I think I’ve done unbelievably well for him, because he has an ongoing piece of my efforts. [But] hundreds of people have come to me and said, ‘You’re getting screwed.’ I’ve had many reports that he has been disingenuous. However, when I confront Jeffrey and say, ‘Have you been disingenuous?’ he says he hasn’t.”
Outside of the incident with the consultant, the evidence for Miramax being the source of the campaign against Mind was circumstantial. Even Miramax publicists who are in a position to know aren’t sure. Says one, “When A Beautiful Mind opened, there was a reference in A. O. Scott’s [New York Times] review to things being left out. Harvey’s reaction was, ‘Can you believe what’s not in this movie?’ The inference was, People should know about this. We were told, ‘This should be pushed. Everyone get on this case.’ One Miramax publicist is very close to Drudge, and he brought up the anti-Semitism within the first week or so, and then it showed up in Drudge later. The connection is just too close. But with Harvey there was a kind of denial. Even when there were a bunch of us in a room, or in the car, there was never a point where he’d let down his hair and say, ‘That backfired.’ It was always, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong.’ Clearly, though, we were not innocent.” As former Miramax executive Tony Safford says, in another connection, Miramax “works very hard on pictures, and they work very hard against pictures. Every slur, everything imaginable, they’ll throw against a picture.” But publicity VP Matthew Hiltzik denies Miramax indulges in negative campaigning: “Harvey never roots for someone else’s movie to fail.” And Mark Gill: “Our hands were pretty much clean. He is terrified of people coming after him.” And Weinstein adds, “It’s Scapegoat 101: let’s blame Miramax.”
On March 4, Harvey took time out from the Oscar campaign to flame director Julie Taymor in a lobby full of startled moviegoers at New York’s Lincoln Square Theater, on 68th and Broadway, after a successful screening of her film Frida. A biopic of the legendary, uni-browed Mexican artist and companion of famed left-wing muralist Diego Rivera, the project had a long and difficult history, starting with Madonna and ending with Salma Hayek. Harvey grudgingly agreed to produce the film, which featured Hayek, Alfred Molina, Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, and others, but he extracted his pound of flesh. Every time it looked like he was about to green-light the film, he would go back to Hayek and ask her for another optional picture or cut her price or get her to do a cameo in something else of his. After working on the project for eight years, Hayek’s salary was the SAG minimum $70,000.
The first cut of Frida came in somewhere between two and two and a half hours. Harvey wanted it shorter. He said things like, “I was put on earth to deal with artists, to take their work and make it better.” But Taymor didn’t think he was put on earth to make hers better. He tested the film. Taymor and the Miramax bunch milled around the lobby of the big multiplex waiting for the audience to finish filling out cards. They went back inside for the focus group session, came out again. Someone from the NRG gave Harvey a summary of the scores. He looked at them, said, “These scores are very good.” They were in the mid-80s, miraculous for a story about Kahlo, Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. He said to Taymor, “What did you think about what the focus group said?”
“They were confused about Trotsky, Communism in Mexico—we could answer those things, but none of us want to make the film longer.”
“We
ll, we could solve that by looping lines.”
“They enjoyed the movie, the film succeeded, I don’t feel we have to answer every question that an audience might conceivably have about the Mexican Revolution. This movie is about Frida Kahlo.” What Taymor didn’t know is that you’re in trouble if your film tests badly, but you can be in worse trouble if it tests well, because Harvey will think he can get it to test better. Which seems to be what happened in this case. For reasons best known to himself, at that point Harvey just exploded. He tore up the scores, turned to Taymor and screamed, “You are the most arrogant person I have ever met. This is what my brother told me, and he’s right.” (Bob had just met Taymor for the first time.) With a parting shot—“Go market the fucking film yourself, I’m selling it to HBO”—he made as if to go. Then he turned on his heel. Looking at Bart Walker, Taymor’s agent, he roared, “Get the fuck outta here.” He pointed at Elliott Goldenthal, Taymor’s companion, an Oscar-nominated composer who wrote the music for the film, basically for nothing, and continued at the same volume, “I don’t like the look on your face. Why don’t you defend your wife, so I can beat the shit out of you.” He then turned to the Miramax executives, who were watching in horror, the producer, and the editor, and screamed, “You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired,” as if he were pinging targets with an air gun at a carnival concession. “It was all about power,” says Gill. ‘I want it my way.’ Showing who’s boss. ‘Make her fucking listen to me.’ ” Regarding the incident, Taymor said later, “I wouldn’t call it a screaming fight if only one person was yelling.” She continued, “I would have quit had it not been for Salma. I wanted to make this happen for her.”
For many years, Harvey had been in the habit of showing films in various states of readiness to a posse of friendly journalists and film reviewers. As he had in so many other areas, Harvey had taken a dubious practice that had always existed on an informal, ad hoc basis—Pauline Kael used to read scripts and visit editing rooms dispensing advice—and mass-produced it. It was smart business, because it killed a whole flock of birds with the same stone: it gave Harvey an advance peek at how a film might fare with reviewers, suggested changes he could make that might incline the critics to smile on it, gave him ammunition in his fights with recalcitrant directors, and last but not least, enmeshed writers, reviewers, and editors flattered by Harvey’s attention to their opinions in a web of complicity that could not but affect their judgment, no matter how much they denied it. In this case he showed Taymor comments by Rex Reed, Lynn Hirschberg, Graham Fuller, John Brody, Tina Brown, and several others.16 Says Mangold, who strongly opposes this practice, “There is a kind of strange incestuous relationship between film critics, market testing, and studios, where the critic becomes complicit in an act of recutting, and puts the filmmaker in the grave. Now it’s not just what the shopping mall said, we also know that Peter Travers liked the movie, but was bugged a little by this or that. It’s a kind of Alice in Wonderland world you’re living in.” Harvey screened Frida for his posse, and used their comments to pressure Taymor.
Eventually, their differences were resolved, but the entire episode left a bad taste. What with the public tongue-lashing he directed at his staff at the Globes, the scolding he gave Stacey Snider, and now the outburst with Taymor, Harvey seemed more out of control than ever.
After Harvey exploded at Taymor, he vowed to seek help. “The morning after Julie’s thing was when I talked to Meryl Poster, I said, ‘We gotta deal with my anger management. All my movies got screwed up because of [my] personality. I have too bad a temper, this has to stop, now. God, what an asshole I’ve been.’ ”
On Saturday, March 24, Miramax’s pre-Oscar party was held under a tent in the Sky Bar of the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset. In an effort to show that there were no hard feelings, Weinstein and Katzenberg entertained about seven hundred guests with a skit that poked fun at their “feud.” It was an amusing idea, but what made spectators gasp was the X-rated material. As Universal and DreamWorks executives watched uneasily from ringside, exchanging glances as if to say, “What are we doing here?” the two studio chairmen, dressed like gladiators, confronted each other in “Snider’s office,” where she, played by Christina Applegate, was trying to broker a detente between them. A sampling, courtesy of the infamous Nikki Finke:
KATZENBERG (to Snider): Hello, darling. You look so beautiful today.
WEINSTEIN: I timed that, Jeffrey. Exactly two seconds till your first suck-up.
KATZENBERG: If you gained exactly one more pound, you could have come as Rome.
SNIDER: I brought you here today because I have had enough. I can’t take any more of the “he said, she said” bull.
WEINSTEIN: Who are you calling “she”?
SNIDER: First it was Saving Private Ryan against Shakespeare in Love. Now all this backbiting about A Beautiful Mind.
WEINSTEIN: I swear on the life of my driver, I never said any of this. But Nash was gay, wasn’t he?
KATZENBERG: Hey, looking at you in that outfit, you ought to know.
WEINSTEIN: Shove it up your skirt, Sparky.
KATZENBERG: I think you seem to have forgotten. I bought your company.
WEINSTEIN: Yeah, in 1993, with Michael Eisner’s money.
KATZENBERG: Lucky for you, back then he still had some.
WEINSTEIN: Not that you ever saw any of it.
KATZENBERG: (to Snider) Does it turn you on when he talks dirty like that?
It went on—and on—in the same vein. If it was meant to soothe ruffled feathers within the two companies, it didn’t work. As one DreamWorks executive says, “It was a setup. To have the Universal and DreamWorks people down in front, like props in a play. It was like, this entire thing existed to show people that we came to them, onto their turf. It was this fake all-is-forgiven thing. To put us down.”
The following night, on March 24, the Oscars were held for the first time at the new Kodak Center on Hollywood Boulevard. In the Bedroom lost Best Picture to A Beautiful Mind; Sissy Spacek, who was nominated for Best Actress, lost to Halle Berry, for her performance in Monster’s Ball. According to one source at the company, Harvey blamed Spacek for not doing enough to promote herself. Although Amelie had broken La Cage aux Folles’s record to become the highest U.S.-grossing French movie ever ($33 million), it again lost Best Foreign Film to No Man’s Land. Harvey had to settle for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Iris’s Jim Broadbent. As if this weren’t bad enough, the brothers became the butt of award show patter. Nathan Lane, doubtless evening the score after Harvey’s display of ill temper at Hillary Clinton’s birthday party five months earlier, presented the new Best Animated Feature Oscar. Referring to one of the nominated features, he quipped, “Up to now I thought Monsters, Inc. was a documentary on the Weinsteins.”
Miramax had not mounted a serious Best Picture candidate since Shakespeare in Love in 1998, a three-year drought. It was not just the humiliation of losing that rankled: promising Oscars was one way Weinstein managed to snag actors on the cheap. If he couldn’t deliver, they wouldn’t cut their rates, and if they didn’t cut their rates, the days when a Pulp Fiction or a Good Will Hunting rained gold would be over, which is to say, Harvey’s spécialité de la maison, the mid-range blockbuster, would become a thing of the past. The company was stumbling, and things would get worse before they would get better.
TODD HAYNES and Christine Vachon had put their eggs in the USA basket. Far from Heaven, executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh, was supposed to go for $12 million and change, brutally low for an ambitious film that was attempting to reproduce a glossy Sirkean melodrama, with its elaborate sets, meticulous costumes, and lush cinematography. But it was beset with problems that nearly sank it, including the pregnancy of star Julianne Moore, who insisted that it had to be shot in New York City, where she lived, which was promptly hit with 9/11, cutting weeks off pre-production and destroying about a quarter of the locations, all clustered in downtown Manhattan. When Vac
hon complained that she couldn’t make that budget, Scott Greenstein made all the right noises, “We’ll figure it out,” but later it became an issue. It was the usual story; indies have to make films like this on their own backs, and when USA pressured Haynes and Vachon to throw in chunks of their fees, they did. The production was hellish throughout. The bond company ousted Vachon and took over because the film had gone over budget by $300,000. The bond company representative summoned Vachon to a meeting and, like a principal speaking to a naughty student, told her, “We are extremely disappointed in you.”
“Okay . . .”
“We trusted you and you lied to us.”
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“You know what I’m gonna have to do?”
“What are you gonna have to do?”
“I’m gonna have to cut the schedule.”
“Well, we can’t.”
“You mean, you won’t.” If the bond company could show malfeasance, or that she was refusing to cooperate, it could remove her entirely and, worse, seize what little remained of her fees. It was unable to do so, but this was the first time in the course of a career that had spanned nearly two decades and thirty-eight films that a bond company had moved on her. Vachon was furious. “Am I ten? I’m forty fucking years old! I honestly felt the attitude, coming from USA and the bond company was, ‘You just got in over your head, girlie!’ and that if this had been Ted Hope, they would have been, ‘Poor Ted, he didn’t have good people working for him, therefore we will work with him to figure a way out of this.’ With me it was just punitive, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? We’re gonna take away the E-ZPass from your car and we need you to give us the $22.80 in charges that we don’t think were directly related to driving to the set.’ There was such an atmosphere of dread. I could not believe that USA allowed this to happen to the movie. Scott did not return my calls, he didn’t return Todd’s calls.”
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 66
