For the Miramax co-chairman, the consequences of peeing in the Hollywood pond are more serious than not getting the right table at Morton’s or the best suite at the Peninsula Hotel. The agents, of course, are his natural enemies, mongooses to his cobra. “He moved into the studio game, and on that level, agencies are not looking to help him by suggesting that their clients work for nothing for him,” continues Elwes. “Anytime you see a $50 million budget, actors should not be working for scale anymore. Agents feel that if there are going to be difficulties ahead, their clients might as well be paid for their misery.” Counters Harvey, “Agents are the people who malign me the most. They wear suits, and they are suits. There’s no ripped T-shirt and cool sensibility underneath. They might as well be on Wall Street.”
Harvey has been able to muscle his way into partnerships with other studios in the past, but his behavior has made it harder and harder for him to continue to do so. Take DreamWorks. Co-president Walter Parkes had asked Lasse Hallström to direct Catch Me If You Can. According to sources close to Hallström and DreamWorks, at the time he had no contractual obligation to Miramax, but Harvey demanded half the picture. Hallström was desperate to do the film, especially after he got Leonardo Di Caprio, whom he had directed years before in Who Killed Gilbert Grape? to commit. In an effort to create a quid pro quo, Miramax sent over script after script, including Rent. But nothing clicked. Harvey offered Hallström another movie, An Unfinished Life, and in case he didn’t get the point, he “just beat the shit out of him, told him he’d never work at Miramax again,” says a top DreamWorks executive. “It was pure bullying.” (A source close to Hallström says he walked away voluntarily because post-production on The Shipping News made it impossible for him to make the Catch Me If You Can release date.) Hallström would find himself buying a ticket to see Catch Me If You Can in a theater. Subsequently, Miramax and Dream-Works partnered on Tulip Fever, and Miramax bought a few territories on another, House of Sand and Fog. As one highly placed DreamWorks source puts it, “Jeffrey is psychotically loyal to Harvey.”
After the talks collapsed, DreamWorks executives were amused to see Miramax put Rent in turnaround, suggesting how little regard it had for the material in the first place. Rent had been optioned jointly by Miramax and Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Films. Spike Lee was approached to direct it. “I thought because it was coming through the auspices of Bob De Niro and Marty Scorsese, that people were gonna look out [for me], but they didn’t,” says Lee, angrily. “We got fucked.” Lee worked on the script throughout the summer of 2001. At one point, he needed to talk to Harvey. “I could not get him on the phone,” he says. “I have a summer house in Martha’s Vineyard, and I had to track him down there myself. He was fucked, because he picked up the phone and he could not hang up. I said, ‘Harvey?’ He said, ‘Who is this?’ ‘Spike! Look, you have to meet me.’ ” Lee went over to his house, which overlooks the sound in Vineyard Haven. They sat on his porch and spent an hour going over the script, the budget, and the casting, while Harvey drank Diet Coke. According to Lee, when the meeting was over, Harvey smiled, shook his hand and said, “We’re making this film, Spike!” Yet, it never happened. Lee had cast the picture, was ready to begin pre-production. “We were trying to hold our cast together, but they didn’t give us any money,” he continues. “Finally I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m not doin’ this anymore, I quit.’ They tried to make it out a budgetary thing, but it was bogus. My thing is, if you don’t want to make the motherfucker, just tell me. He had us hanging for a whole summer. And then at the end, for all the work we did on the film, we got a measly $50,000, which had to be divided up many different ways.” Would he ever get involved with Harvey again? “No way in hell. I would rather sell tube socks, three for $5. There’s a sayin’, ‘God don’t like ugly!’ The fucked-up shit he’s done over his career, that’s just gonna come ’round and bite ’im. He’s a lyin’ cocksucker! A fat bastard. A fat rat bastard!”
Paramount has probably done more co-productions with Miramax than any other studio, but that too has been a rocky relationship. Not only did Harvey blame the studio for The Talented Mr. Ripley’s mediocre performance, he also tangled with Rudin, then a fixture on the Paramount lot. Rudin has a reputation for volatility that rivals Harvey’s own, and in him, the Miramax co-chairman met his match. According to the producer, Harvey used Iris, which they were co-financing, as a counter in their tug-of-war over A Confederacy of Dunces, which Harvey was trying to get away from Rudin on Soderbergh’s behalf. Says Rudin, Harvey threatened, “If you don’t sell me Dunces, I’m going to put Iris on the shelf.”
Rudin responded, “Do what you want. I’ve made the movie, I’ve delivered it, I don’t care what you do. You don’t want to release this movie, I’ll give you Judi Dench’s number, you call her up and tell her you’re gonna shelve it! ’Cause I’m not gonna be the guy delivering that message. Hope you have a nice phone call.” Rudin continues, “After a year of torture, threats, blackmail, and after holding Iris hostage, he finally agreed to pay me. It was probably the single most painful and unpleasant thing I have ever been through in the movie business. Solely at the hands of Harvey.”
Prior to the falling out over Dunces, Rudin and Weinstein had entered into a deal to co-produce The Hours, adapted from Michael Cunningham’s novel about Virginia Woolf, starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf, and co-starring Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. “It was charming Harvey coming after me every day, beseeching me to honor him with the project,” recalls Rudin. “Of course, the minute he gets it, you’re [toast]. He wanted Nicole playing Virginia Woolf to look like herself, and was determined not to let her wear a prosthetic nose. Nicole Kidman looking like Nicole Kidman playing Virginia Woolf would be laughable. But he was relentless in trying to get me to can this idea to the point where he sent somebody to London to see her. I posted a security guard on the set so this person couldn’t get at her.” (Harvey responds, “That’s complete bullshit. I said, ‘Don’t reveal the nose on the poster. Save it as a surprise, à la The Crying Game. And then they go and put it in the fucking poster.”) Rudin adds, “Every time you finish there, you swear you’ll never go back, and then sooner or later you want to make a specific kind of movie, and the road leads to him. But I don’t think I could do it again. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel like there’s no movie that’s worth being put through what you get put through there.”
On or about August 9, 2002, a large, square box wrapped in red gift paper arrived at Harvey’s office. It sat on the floor in the middle of his rug while his four assistants eyed it suspiciously. When they opened it, they discovered it contained twenty-seven cartons of Marlboro Lights and a note that said, “Thanks for all the help on The Hours, Best, Scott.” Harvey apparently composed a letter to Rudin saying, “Dear Scott, I’m working on a cure for cancer, you better hope your family doesn’t need it!” (Harvey denies this.) Marlboro Lights are not his brand—he’s been smoking Carlton—but he smoked them anyway.
Then there was the case of Cold Mountain, based on the dark-horse best-seller of the same name by Charles Frazier, directed by Anthony Minghella, and set up at MGM. MGM’s McGurk decided that rather than doing it as a big studio movie, “spending $100 million, it would be smarter to do it as a co-venture with Miramax, which could bring it in for much less. We’ll take international, let them take domestic and manage the Minghella relationship.”
Indeed, Cold Mountain, which takes place during the Civil War, is essentially a story about a man walking through the woods, and there was a time when Miramax would have made it for $10 million or less. Initially, Harvey talked a $40, $50 million movie, but it quickly became an $80 million movie, with each company kicking in $40 million. Harvey blamed Minghella. Says Gill, “Filmmakers like Minghella, who used to be treated very well, were getting kicked in the mouth too. It’s the difference between, ‘We love working with you,’ and ‘We’re gonna kill you.’ ” His script contained some expensive battle scenes. Trying to save money, Harvey wa
nted to use Civil War reenactors, but Minghella, according to him, insisted on actors. “Anthony said, ‘No. It’s got to be my way,’ ” he says. “His detail rivals Scorsese’s. I didn’t want Cold Mountain to be another Gangs.” But the director got his way.
Again, there was a time when Harvey would have cast the lead with a cheap up-and-comer like Hugh Jackman, pre-X-Men. But now he wanted Tom Cruise, the most expensive star in Hollywood, and he wanted him to cut his price, which was then something like $20 to $25 million against 20 percent of first-dollar gross. Cruise’s people told him, “He’s getting a divorce, he needs the money,” and refused.
Cruise’s price brought the price tag rocketing upward to way over $100 million, the figure that McGurk hoped to avoid. After a good deal of backing and forthing, Harvey offered the actor a third of the movie to cut his fee out altogether, but Cruise again refused, and then the talks died. “When Harvey finally did decide to come up as high as he could go, Tom lost interest,” says Sydney Pollack, who, with Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, produced the film. “Cruise said, ‘There’s been too much negotiating here, I don’t trust this, and I don’t want to do this.’ ” The actor reportedly felt that Harvey had treated him shabbily. Minghella and Miramax subsequently put together a cast (Kidman, Jude Law, Renée Zellweger, Donald Sutherland et al.) whose entire cost was substantially less than Cruise’s cut would have been, and there were no big-gross players. But the film’s price going in was about $90 million.
Harvey fought the budget down by shooting the bulk of the production in Romania, and lopped another $10 million off the cost with a sale-leaseback arrangement, reducing the budget going in to somewhere between $90 and $100 million. But the Romanian weather frowned on the production. It rained when it should have been sunny. MGM executives were having second thoughts. They wondered if a Civil War drama would do well internationally. They saw Four Feathers, also a period piece, crash and burn, while the budget of Gangs was apparently spiraling out of control. MGM bailed.
With MGM out, Weinstein had to shop the picture around town, hat in hand, looking for a partner. He was like George W. Bush trying to rustle up a coalition of the unwilling to invade Iraq. Despite its best-seller pedigree, A-list director, stellar cast, and stunning rushes, every studio turned him down. Harvey, or rather, Disney, was stuck with the whole package, and Michael Eisner was reportedly not happy.
Still, it’s a business, and money is money, so some studios hold their noses with one hand and Harvey’s with the other, trying to structure deals so that their exposure to Miramax is limited. Miramax got a piece of Fox’s Master and Commander, but as Russell Crowe, the picture’s star puts it, “It’s best to keep them in a subservient position, and make sure there’s no blood in the water.” Universal, where there was a considerable amount of ill will in the wake of A Beautiful Mind, is co-producing Cinderella Man with Miramax, also starring Crowe. It was an old deal, pre-dating Mind. “We’ve never had a bad experience on the actual partnership,” says Snider. “For the most part, when he’s not been yelling at me, Harvey has been respectful.” But Universal has constructed the deal in such a way as to keep Miramax at arm’s length. “If you’re not careful, and not just careful but paranoid, you can end up in having to grant a concession to a demand that never in a gazillion years should have been made in the first place,” says a source there. “Harvey will do things that no partner would do to another partner, like competing against you by setting a release date on one of your dates, and extracting a favor in exchange for moving off it. You have to build a wall around your business so your movie is protected.” In the case of Cinderella Man, Universal is overseeing the production and controls domestic distribution, while Miramax is taking international. Still, observes Mark Gill, “There’s no such thing as keeping Harvey at a distance.”
Grazer and Ron Howard, who are producing and directing, respectively, for Universal, were still smarting from the Mind fracas and entered the relationship with trepidation. “We were seduced by the idea of doing the movie, but we were equally scared of Miramax,” says Grazer. “But as much as I hated them, I have enormous respect for what they’ve accomplished. I felt like if they’re capable of being that effective for themselves, they can be that effective for us. Sort of what Spiro Agnew said to James Brown when Brown was invited to the White House. He said, ‘If you can stop a riot, you can start one.’ You should either do a movie with somebody or you should not do the movie and walk away. My choice was, I’m going to trust Harvey—until something else happens.”
In a relatively brief span of time—the summer of 2001 to the spring of 2002—Harvey managed to antagonize Mangold, Konrad, Hallström, Field, Snider, Katzenberg, Taymor, Haynes, Scorsese, Penotti, Stevens, Cruise, Rudin, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer as well as scores of agents and former Miramax staff.
Even Disney, struggling in an adverse economic environment, turned on Miramax, threatening to eat its own. With falling revenues and plummeting stock prices, Eisner didn’t want anyone roiling the waters, and that’s what the Weinsteins—whose deal is up in 2005—do best. He was skittish and in the mood to resolve his problems with them as amicably as possible. On the other hand, there is no denying the bad blood between Miramax and Disney. With friends like Katzenberg, McGurk, and Roth long gone, replaced by Dick Cook, with whom they have a history, the climate there has turned frigid. Among other things, Disney was unhappy with the size of the movies Miramax is making, and wanted the brothers to go back to a modified version of their original business plan, $20, $30, even $40 million pictures, not the $70, $80, $90 million pictures they’ve been making lately. Miramax’s 2003 slate would include several budget busters like Cold Mountain; Kill Bill, which exceeded its schedule by at least three months and may have reached nearly $70 million; and Duplex, which escalated from about $35 million into the neighborhood of $60 million—for a mirthless comedy that takes place mostly in one apartment—after Miramax dumped its bargain-rate director, Greg Mottola, and replaced him with the very expensive Danny DeVito.
The Weinsteins have been operating with an annual $700 million budget cap, which includes production and P&A expenses. According to Harvey, the company exceeded it when MGM left it holding the bag on Cold Mountain, and Disney has been trying to redefine how those expenses are calculated in an effort to squeeze Miramax and downscale the size of the brothers’ bonus package. According to Weinstein, Disney was also trying to lower the budget cap to $500 million, in part by changing the formulas by which foreign sales can offset costs. From the Weinsteins’ point of view, Disney was nickel-and-diming them, which had made them livid. “They’re in financial trouble, and they’re trying to renegotiate the deal,” Harvey says. It has always killed the Weinsteins to share the profits with anyone—agents, producers, investors, filmmakers, or employees—and this must be even more true of sharing them with Disney. As Elwes puts it, “I’m sure at the back of their minds is that nagging thought that had they managed to remain independent and had the success that they’ve had over the last eight years, they’d be billionaires as opposed to multimillionaires.”
Eisner ordered an audit of Miramax books in 2002—such audits are annoying, but fairly common—and the Weinsteins retaliated by hiring two high-powered attorneys, Bert Field and David Boies, to find legal grounds for a counteraudit of the Disney books pertaining to their video and international TV distribution of Miramax product. “They of course audit us every minute,” Harvey says. “They get to see my books all the time, so there’s no hiding what we do. On the flip side, Bob and I’s [sic] pay is determined by accounting from Disney. I don’t get to see everything unless I ask for an audit. There’s been some discrepancies in what we think we’re owed. We’ve asked to see certain things, and they haven’t been as forthcoming as we’d hoped.”
The Weinsteins, who have always thought they could do a better job running Disney than Eisner and his team, are openly critical of Eisner’s judgment, starting with his refusal to let Miramax produce Lord of the R
ings. “Let’s not forget who was the guy who believed in it first,” i.e., himself, Harvey says, “and to his detriment couldn’t get his own company to back his vision. With the way they exploit theme parks, that one decision cost the company maybe a billion dollars. Right now, instead of the stock being at $13, it would be like Viacom’s,” which was then trading at nearly three times that level. According to Miramax sources, Eisner has made other decisions that incensed the brothers, including turning down the TV show The Weakest Link, which became a hit for NBC, and vetoing a scheme to turn One Times Square into an entertainment mecca for tourists. Sources also derided Eisner for overpaying for the ABC Family Channel and for the ongoing brain drain at the studio, such as Jerry Bruckheimer’s defection to Warner’s Television with his hit CSI franchise in tow. The brothers have been talking to investment bankers about putting together a group of investors who would buy Miramax—which has been valued by Harvey at approximately $600 million—from Disney. But Eisner not only turned it down, he declined even to bring it to the board. In an attempt, perhaps, to inflame Eisner and provoke him into letting Miramax go, Harvey reportedly showed up at his office the Friday before the March 2003 Oscar ceremonies with Bert Field in tow. Eisner hates Field, who represented Katzenberg in his successful suit against Disney, winning about $275 million, and this gesture was roughly equivalent to bringing Yasir Arafat to the Knesset. Furious, Eisner is supposed to have said something like, “That’s crossing the line, and you can’t go back from it.”
Even Smith, Affleck, and Damon have gotten caught up in the tangled relationship between Miramax and Disney. As Smith puts it, “Both Matty and Ben have expressed alternatively or together, ‘I don’t know if I can do this anymore, I don’t know if I can stay there anymore.’ Affleck’s like, ‘Get out of Miramax, fuckin’ leave it, we can make so much money elsewhere.’ ” Affleck and Damon made a deal for their company, LivePlanet, with Disney, not Miramax, because Harvey would not meet their price. And outside of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Jersey Girl, both of which Affleck made with Smith, none of the ten features he’s made since Bounce in 1999 has been at Miramax save for Daddy and Them, which he did as a favor to Billy Bob Thornton, and Third Wheel, which he did as a favor for a protégé, writer Jay Locopo. “With Jersey Girl, it was Harvey’s chance to get Ben back in,” says Smith. “Ben knew that too, and it was like pulling teeth with him to do it at Miramax. There was a period when Ben was just like, ‘You know, you and I could take this out anywhere. And get paid like crazy.’
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