By the time the production ordeal was over, Vachon had changed her mind about Miramax. “I wish I had done the movie with Miramax,” she says. “I realized that an asshole who cares about movies is better than an asshole who doesn’t.”
USA wanted to test Far from Heaven. Vachon continues, “In my experience, the studio always tells you, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not about the numbers, it’s about finding who your audience is.’ And then of course, when the numbers are bad, which they almost always are for movies like Boys Don’t Cry or Far from Heaven or One Hour Photo, they freak, and of course it is about the numbers.” (One Hour Photo, which barely registered, grossed $31.5 million on a budget of $12 million, becoming the most profitable film Vachon had ever done.)
Indeed, the scores for Haynes’s film were low. Despite the success of Traffic, Greenstein felt his position at USA was fragile. Soderbergh was his greatest asset. “Scott delivered for Steven,” says Vachon. “He got Traffic made for him, he got him the nominations, and he got him the director award. Steven and Scott made a good team. Scott could say something insane, and Steven could pull out the piece that made sense and translate it. When Scott is at his best, he can tell what the pulse points are, in a room or in a story or in a package. He kinda understands the essence of the thing he’s supposed to sell.” Still, he would get on the phone with Haynes and say, in a hysterical voice, “I’m gonna lose my job over this film,” and quote from the preview cards—“Look, 20 percent of the people thought it’s too slow”—pleading with him to edit it down. Two days before he was scheduled to begin principal photography on Solaris, Soderbergh flew to Portland, Oregon, to spend a day with Haynes going over the film. “Soderbergh had final cut on Far from Heaven,” says Haynes. Steven says, “He got tough with me, but in a very constructive way, saying that whatever I ultimately decided he would support.” Soderbergh suggested lots of cuts, some of them radical, and Haynes rejected most of them. “I needed to be able to make the film my way,” he explains. “We’re different filmmakers; we make different types of movies, which is why he supported me in the first place.” Trying to be cooperative, Haynes called USA and said, “ ‘I had a great meeting with Soderbergh, but some of the things he suggested are kind of extreme and I have a feeling I may not follow them all.’ Scott heard immediately that I was not going to do every single thing Soderbergh said, and he called Christine and got really tough with her on the phone, said, ‘If Todd doesn’t do every single thing Steven says, we’re not gonna support this movie.’ ” He was only doing what he thought he had learned from Harvey. Indeed, says USA Entertainment CEO Michael Jackson, “That may well have been a good call. Let’s face it, Velvet Goldmine hardly set the world afire. He may have wanted to put his foot down. I’m sure he was trying to get something that would work for an audience as opposed to being a home movie. And, actually, the film worked.”
At 4:30 in the afternoon of Thursday, May 4, Vachon was at a party at Robert Altman’s company, Sandcastle, where she ran into Julianne Moore, who took one look at her face and asked, “What’s going on with the movie?”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, what’s the matter, what’s wrong? What are they doing to you? Are they going to fuck this up?”
Vachon thought, I have to leave, I don’t want to pretend to Julianne that everything’s okay. She got a cab, and on her way downtown, her cell phone rang. It was Good Machine’s James Schamus and Ted Hope, saying, “You won’t believe this, but Scott just got fired, we’ve taken over USA.” Vachon was thrilled. She called Haynes in Portland, and told him the news. He too was thrilled. “It felt amazing because James was someone I’ve known for years and think is so smart and feel I could talk to about anything,” says Haynes. Adds Vachon, “The only person who wasn’t thrilled was Soderbergh, because he’s always been very loyal to Scott, and was like, ‘I don’t think this is good for the movie.’ ”
As the Heaven drama had unfolded in the foreground, the big picture was changing in the background. In the early days of 2002, Vivendi had bought Barry Diller’s film and television assets, giving him what would eventually be a controlling role at Universal. USA Films was folded into Universal Focus under Stacey Snider. It looked like Greenstein was slated to head up the new division. Indeed, a piece in Variety said exactly that. Everyone, Snider included, thought Greenstein had leaked it. This was not, in fact, the truth, although it didn’t much matter. Perception is all. Good Machine’s David Linde spoke for many when he said, “This is suicide.”
But despite the story, it seemed unlikely that Greenstein would head Focus Features, as the new company came to be called. At USA, Diller made all the day-to-day decisions, from poster design to allocation of a film’s weekly marketing budget. This made Greenstein a bad fit with the company Snider envisioned. For her, it made no sense to have an independent division if it wasn’t independent, and in this spirit Focus was to have its own marketing and distribution divisions, separate from the parent studio. Before coming to Universal, she had been an executive at Sony and had admired Sony Classics’s Michael Barker and Tom Bernard from a distance. Their attitude to the parent studio was, “You can come in and kiss our ass when the Academy Awards come around, but otherwise, ‘Fuck you.’ ” Says Snider, “I loved that.” She admired Good Machine, Christine Vachon, producer and indie attorney John Sloss, and the pre-Disney Miramax, “when it was Miriam and Max’s company,” as she puts it. “They’re mavericks that have personality.” She told Diller, “Scott’s a great executive, but if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it differently, which is not to hire an executive, but to hire filmmakers.” Moreover, Diller had asked Jackson to look around for a replacement for Greenstein, which Snider undoubtedly knew. Diller doesn’t recall this and says, “My position was, ‘I’m not going to tell [the Universal executives] what to do, but I knew they never intended to give Scott the job. He didn’t do anything wrong, and he didn’t deserve to be used in that way.”
Universal and Good Machine already had a relationship. Schamus had been hired by Universal to produce and co-write The Hulk, with Ang Lee, who was also directing. Snider stunned everyone by proposing to buy Good Machine and install Schamus and Linde as the co-heads of the new division, Focus Features. Schamus told Haynes, “Cut it whatever way you want to.” He adds, “Three days later they screened the film for me and by the end of the film, I was in tears.”
Increasingly it seemed that the small indie companies were being shuffled and reshuffled by the high rollers in the ongoing poker game of international capital for whom they had little intrinsic value and were no more than the jokers in the deck. Universal bought October, sold it to Diller, who transformed it into USA Films, which in turn was gobbled up by Vivendi and returned to Universal, where it was merged with Good Machine to become Focus Features.
Still, for the moment, the good guys had won. Hope left to form his own production company. He says, “It’s nice to feel that for once you have a fully integrated film company that is essentially run by filmmakers, knowing that you might have the opportunity of speaking to someone about why the movie should get made out of passion, and not strictly about numbers. So much of the process on the studio side is about risk aversion, cover your ass to protect your job. Here it’s let your ass hang out for all to see.”
WEINSTEIN HAD PULLED OFF a miracle with In the Bedroom, driving it to a $35.9 million gross. But he spent a lot of money doing it, and Bob was rumored to have complained that he had spent so much he couldn’t make a profit on it. “Is it rational to spend $20, $25 million to maybe make [a profit of] $5 or $6 million?” wonders GreeneStreet’s John Penotti. “I don’t know.” If he spent too much marketing traditional indie films like In the Bedroom, he spent too little on their studio wannabes like Kate & Leopold. At one time, Harvey had achieved a delicate balance between studio and indie-style marketing, combining the best of both worlds, but over the last few years, it seemed like he combined the worst.
As 2001 became 2
002, the numbers remained dismal. The Shipping News lost $10 million; Piñero was barely released; The Four Feathers, a co-production with Paramount, was a disaster, costing about $80 million and grossing a mere $18 million worldwide. Miramax stood to lose about $13 million. On the Line, with two kids from ’N Sync, cost $10 million and did only $4.4 million.
As usual, Dimension had picked up the slack with Spy Kids, released in March 2001, which cost $35 million and grossed $113 million, as well as The Others, released in August, making 2001 Miramax’s best year ever, according to Harvey, with $170 million in profits. But the next fiscal year, which ended October 31, 2002, was one of the worst, and Bob’s magic touch seemed to have deserted him. Texas Rangers, with James Van Der Beek for example, cost $38 million, and grossed a mere $623,000. Impostor, with Gary Sinise, which cost $40 million, made $6.11 million; Below, aka Proteus, co-written by Darren Aronofsky, was a $40 million horror movie that grossed $589,000; and Equilibrium, with Christian Bale, cost $16 million and grossed $1.2 million. In the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell called Equilibrium “a movie that could be stupider only if it were longer.” Too cheap to use stars (Van Der Beek, Sinise, and Bale couldn’t open a can of tunafish, much less a movie), Bob was suddenly unable to come up with pictures that packed the high concept punch of the Screams. And sans stars, some of these flops weren’t even cushioned by decent foreign and ancillary sales. Miramax shoved a few of its pictures into the future to burnish the books. Waking Up in Reno, a stinker that kept getting elbowed from quarter to quarter because it was sure to drag down everything around it, was pushed to October 2002 and died there, grossing a minuscule $269,109. Then there was the $27 million (probably more) Harvey lost in the noisy collapse of Talk magazine in January 2002. And finally, Miramax got slapped with half the production and marketing costs for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, which one source put as high as $80 million.17 According to a fall 2002 New York Times article, over the course of the past five years, Miramax ranked no higher than seventh among the studios in box office revenue.
In the spring, the Weinsteins had ceased stocking the offices with sodas and bottled water, bagels and coffee cake. Car service was cut back. On March 15, they fired seventy-five employees in the first mass layoffs in the company’s history. The damage was compounded by hemorrhaging of key executives, which began in October 2000, when longtime Dimension head Cary Granat left, followed by president of publicity Marcy Granata, who had been there seven years. VP of finance Bahman Naraghi followed suit, as did the head of physical production, Kevin Hyman, and the top echelon of the marketing department, including Matthew Cohen and David Brooks, all of whom apparently melted under the pressure to generate box office for films that weren’t grossing. West Coast publicity head Janet Hill also left. Then, in the middle of October 2002, Mark Gill, who joined Miramax in late 1994 and had become president of the West Coast office, resigned and was escorted out of the building at Bob’s behest by a lawyer from business affairs. “They’re like Mafia dons,” says Gill. “They dote on their family and murder everybody else.”
Miramax realized that these highly publicized firings and resignations sent the wrong message—the company was in trouble—so when they were followed by another round of cuts, it was done so quietly that the press barely noticed. The upheavals of 2002 rivaled the turnovers of 1986 and 1993–94. In all, the workforce was downsized by approximately 25 percent.
But Harvey insisted that the “Where’s Harvey?” problem was moot. Once Talk folded and the electoral campaigns ended, he would again be able to give the company his undivided attention, and indeed, the 2002 fall slate seemed to be the beneficiary. But no sooner did he swear off media acquisitions than he quietly made an offer to buy the New York Observer from Arthur Carter—and failed. And he still, as he boasted to Mangold and Konrad, harbored ambitions to change the world. Come the next presidential election will he be able to resist mixing in Democratic Party politics? Probably not.
Harvey didn’t seem to care about alienating filmmakers like Taymor, Haynes, or any of the others he’s left for dead along the way, but the list is a veritable Who’s Who of young American directors—most of whom have returned the compliment. Despite its attempts to tangle up talent in options on future projects, Miramax has lost out on repeat business. As Donna Gigliotti puts it, filmmakers “vote with their feet. How many people go back to Miramax for a second movie?” Although the watchword in the film business is “never say never,” the vast majority of the 1990s generation don’t work there, like Alexander Payne, Todd Haynes, James Gray, David O. Russell, Larry Clark, Jim Mangold, Baz Luhrmann, P. J. Hogan, Julie Taymor, and Todd Field, all of whom once did so.
Outside of the Miramax family, the “made guys,” as Rick Linklater calls them, and the directors Miramax held and holds options on, the company became the port of last call for almost the entire group of filmmakers who emerged in the 1990s, like Ang Lee, Neil LaBute, Wes and Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solondz, Nicole Holofcener, Allison Anders, Lisa Cholodenko, Hal Hartley, Kim Peirce, Darren Aronofsky, and Miguel Arteta. Nor are the British directors whom Miramax once distributed—Jim Sheridan, Neil Jordan, Michael Caton-Jones, Danny Boyle—flocking to the company, not to mention Mike Leigh, who avoided it from the start. Nor are the great international filmmakers, like Bernardo Bertolucci and Pedro Almodóvar, eager to throw in their lot with the brothers. This is all the more remarkable because Miramax is one of the few games in town. As Russell puts it, “Given who Harvey was, he could have cornered the market, he could have had every gifted young filmmaker lined up to work with him, saying, ‘God, this is the place to be.’ He could have made a factory there, with us. His gluttony for power and fame has hurt him. If he can’t shove you in his mouth and eat you right now, if you’re not a Matt Damon soufflé, he chucks you aside. He alienates everybody.” Adds Mangold, “Harvey does both good and bad. He does give people breaks that they wouldn’t have had, and that does take courage that others don’t have. But the problem is that the same personality type that has the hubris to face the wind and say, ‘I looked in his eyes and I believe in this guy,’ is also the person who will look in that same kid’s eyes and say, ‘I saw your movie, and I don’t believe in it.’ ” Harvey jumped through hoops to snag Soderbergh and Clooney, but Soderbergh’s next feature is for Warner’s (Ocean’s 12). Soderbergh is producing eight films, and only one of those is at Miramax, Confederacy of Dunces, which Harvey bought for him. Clooney’s Intolerable Cruelty was for Imagine, with Joel Coen directing.
Says Vachon, “Harvey sends me four scripts a week. Romantic comedies.” Ironically, she has become Harvey’s Harvey. “He thinks, We can do this for $20 million, I bet Christine could do it for $12. The movies are set up, all I have to do is say yes and collect money, but I can’t put Killer Film’s name on that crap. I respect his ability, but if I’m gonna put myself through that, it has to be with something I care about. But I know I’ll be making a movie with Miramax in the next year or two. Either they’ll give me the right romantic comedy, or I’ll come up with something they like.”
But despite his oft-repeated claim that “there’s a new Harvey in town,” the “new” Harvey turned out to be pretty much the same as the old Harvey. He seemed stressed and resumed smoking. Some even claimed to have heard him mumbling to himself in the elevator. In May 2002, Harvey had an ugly run-in with Diller at Cannes. Still smarting from Diller’s comments in Variety, Harvey demanded, “Why’d you call me a bully?” Diller, who thought they were going to get into a fistfight, replied, “You are a bully.” The last thing Harvey needed was a tussle with Diller, yet another drop in the ocean of bad karma that was washing away the Miramax beachhead. Bullying staff and pushing around hapless indie directors is one thing; threatening studio heads is quite another. By mid-2002, there was a growing consensus in Hollywood that he was too big for his britches. Says Scott Rudin, “I think the behavior has gotten completely out of hand. People have had their fill and don’t want
to deal with him anymore. They’re tired of being bullied and threatened, and tired of the vendettas and the punishing and the ugliness. People go to great pains here to make this look like a business, not a candy store. His shenanigans are not good for the public perception of the industry, not good for people whose businesses are publicly traded. There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made in Hollywood, and nobody wants to have their livelihood fucked with, and that’s what he does.”
It seemed like Harvey had run out of lives, that he was poised on a tipping point. Says one top studio executive, “He’s done one horrible thing too many. When the cat shit gets bigger than the cat, get rid of the cat.” Or, as Cassian Elwes puts it, “In Hollywood, everyone’s favorite page in the trades is the obituaries. There’s a natural tendency to want to see people fail as opposed to succeed, there’s an enormous amount of jealousy that floats around. And Harvey’s pissed off a lot of people.” Harvey had become so weakened that it didn’t seem like it would take much to topple him into the no-man’s-land inhabited by the likes of Mike Ovitz.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 67
