Harvey ignored Chicago as an Oscar contender, just as he did In the Bedroom the year before, until the film on which he had placed his bets, Gangs, foundered. In both instances, his gut, his instinct, misled him, but like a studio executive, he played the percentages, taking his cues from the marketplace, and moved his money when and where the numbers told him to. Chicago was hardly an indie film, but it was relatively inexpensive and entertaining, yet again the kind of movie Hollywood used to make. To hear Harvey tell it, “I had more input in the editing of Chicago than I did on Gangs of New York.” Unlike Scorsese, Chicago director Rob Marshall “embraced collaboration. I could sit in the editing room with Rob and say, ‘This should move faster, this can blow by.’ ”
Yet Chicago was the occasion for customary Miramax carnage. According to one source, Harvey “tormented” Marshall. One day, Marshall even collapsed on the set. Richard Gere called Harvey and said something like, “Back off and don’t be so tough on Rob, don’t do it in front of other people, it’s demoralizing, it’s embarrassing, have some class.” Harvey told Gere to mind his own business. (Marshall could not be reached for comment.)
As awards season approached, Far from Heaven looked like a strong contender. The reviews were universally glowing, and at year’s end, it had appeared on approximately twice as many critics’ top ten lists as any other picture. It cleaned up at the New York Film Critics Awards, winning five, including Best Film. Recalls Haynes, “Harvey made his way over to our table, looking so contrite, and sheepish almost, he wouldn’t even make eye contact with me. Finally, he said, softly, ‘Todd, I . . .am . . .so . . .sorry.’ Then he started to talk about the fact that he was seeking counseling or something, ‘because I just can’t allow this kind of thing to happen again.’ ” Moore, who had won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, and the legendary Elmer Bernstein, who wrote the music, seemed like shoo-ins for Oscars, while Best Picture and Director also appeared to be within reach. But both Haynes and Vachon felt that Focus threw its weight behind The Pianist, and as a result, Far from Heaven was virtually ignored. Recalls Haynes, “People would say, ‘Focus isn’t pushing it enough, don’t you wish you were with Miramax?’ I could only say no, because the most important thing for me, hands down, is to finish the film the way I want. And someone interfering in the production process, that’s worse than a lackluster marketing campaign. On the other hand, I wanted to say, ‘Dammit, guys, think bigger. You seem to be the last ones catching on to the fact that actually this could be a serious Oscar film.’ ” Adds Vachon, Far from Heaven just wasn’t Focus’s movie. It was a leftover, an orphan. Soderbergh was right.” Counters Schamus, “As with the success of our marketing of Far from Heaven, so did everyone at this company kill themselves for those Academy awards. None of us had any possible motivation why we wouldn’t. We tried. We lost. We’ll try again.” Regardless, the episode put a chill on an old friendship.
Despite brutal competition, Chicago did well with the awarding class—the screenwriters, producers, and directors, as well as the Catholic, New York, L.A., and national critics, and in particular the Foreign Press Association, laying track for the Oscars. At the January 26 Golden Globes ceremony, one awardee after another, including Scorsese, Zellweger, and most conspicuously Gere, did their best to dispel the gloom that surrounded Harvey, especially after a tough piece in The New Yorker by Ken Auletta. As Bob was overheard complaining that no one was giving him the time of day, Gere called Harvey “a kindly, lovable, gentle man who we all love, a little rough around the edges but with a heart of gold,” and even ridiculed Auletta by name. (Gere’s valentine was enough to make you wonder about the Dalai Lama. Says Rudin, “I think it cost him the nomination. Toadyish.”) Allowing for the fact that everyone who praised Harvey that night either was, is, or may in the future be on his payroll, those familiar with his MO know that he shamelessly heaps encomia on himself via proxies when the occasion calls for it, and suspected that he was doing so again, playing Edgar Bergen to Gere’s Charlie McCarthy. Says one former Miramax staffer, “They’re coached to do that. It’s like, ‘Catherine Zeta-Jones, you gotta talk about Renée Zellweger and how great she is whenever you talk to the press. Renée, you get up there and talk about Catherine. Richard, you get up there and you talk about Harvey.’ It’s like a big circle jerk.”
The next week, Miramax got so many Oscar nominations (forty) that the L.A. Times dubbed the ceremony “the Harveys.” Three out of the five Best Picture nominations—Gangs, Chicago, The Hours—were Miramax films in one way or another, while the Weinsteins had an executive producer credit on a fourth, Lord of the Rings. (The fifth film was The Pianist.) Two Miramax directors, Scorsese and Marshall, were up against Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her), Stephen Daldry (The Hours), and Roman Polanski (The Pianist).
Harvey campaigned hard for Scorsese, had him putting in appearances and gratefully accepting tacky awards at every rubber chicken dinner between Los Feliz and Santa Monica. As one of his competitors put it, “I marvel at Harvey Weinstein’s ability to turn one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema into a guy who would wash your car for your vote.” With his knack for overdoing it, Weinstein created a scandal and no small backlash by inducing Sound of Music director Robert Wise, then age 88, and possibly none too compos mentis, to put his signature on a text written by a Miramax consultant praising Scorsese. (It would have been more logical for him to endorse Marshall for his musical, and indeed, Marshall seemed to have thought so. Already chafing at Weinstein’s campaign for Scorsese, Marshall perceived this as a slap in the face, had words with Harvey over it, and was a no-show at the party Harvey threw in honor of the Chicago sweep of the Screen Actors Guild Awards.) The Wise endorsement caused such an uproar that had the story come out even a week earlier, The Pianist, which was coming on strong, might well have won the Best Picture Oscar. When The Pianist won Best Picture at the BAFTA Awards in London, Miramax panicked. Publicist Swartz began badmouthing Polanski, calling him a “rapist” and “child molester.” The internet site Smoking Gun suddenly produced the nearly thirty-year-old deposition of Polanski’s victim, a flame that was fanned by Miramax soldiers, like Roger Friedman on his site, and “Page Six” of the New York Post. This suggested to some that the disclosure revealed the hand of Miramax although this was never proven. Says Schamus, “Harvey made two mistakes: he failed to drag us into the gutter, and he very publicly treated the Best Director Oscar as something he could give to Marty Scorsese because he just decided to.”
When Polanski won the Oscar, it seemed for a moment that the Miramax express might be derailed, but Chicago won, giving Miramax its first Best Picture since Shakespeare in 1998, putting Harvey back on top. But with the Pianist upsets, it seemed to some people that Harvey came away a loser. After months of asserting that Scorsese was a lock, he did an about-face, claiming that he never expected the director to win after he lost the Directors Guild award to Marshall and that the critics did not like the film. Despite Gangs’ flaws, it was a sad moment when Scorsese lost. His face, flashed on the TV screen for no more than a nanosecond at the moment Polanski’s name was announced, was a tragedic mask of surprise, dismay, and pain. It was as if Harvey had been entrusted with a Ming vase and had dropped it.
Postscript: The Sweet Hereafter
If Miramax picked up its chips and took them to the bank, its legacy, nevertheless, remains. Not only did the Weinsteins transform distribution, they brokered a marriage of indie and mainstream that resulted in a novel kind of picture that did more than just cross over; it exchanged DNA with commercial movies. An amalgam of difference and sameness, personal and commercial, voice and genre, these films played like Hollywood movies while retaining the indie spirit, however vague and hard to define that may be. Indie filmmakers began to work in a more commercial idiom, and stars were increasingly willing to aid and abet them, not necessarily because they needed career liposuction, like John Travolta and Bruce Willis in the days of Pulp, but because Miramax had made indies, as Ethan H
awke puts it, “sexy.” The 2002 crop of films like Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid; About Schmidt, with Jack Nicholson; Solaris, with George Clooney; Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, with Clooney and Julia Roberts; The Good Girl, with Jennifer Anniston; Punch-Drunk Love, with Adam Sandler; Adaptation, with Nicolas Cage, twice; The Hours, with Nicole Kidman; and One Hour Photo, with Robin Williams, speak for themselves. Ditto the 2003 films like the triad from Focus: Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray; Sylvia, with Gwyneth Paltrow; and 21 Grams, with Sean Penn. They are all children of Miramax, even if their directors don’t want to sit on daddy’s lap.
Even Miramax’s most vocal critics won’t go so far as to say the indie world would have been a better place had the Weinsteins gone into, say, loan sharking, repossessing cars, or solid waste management. Says Spike Lee, “Miramax has been great. They do what they gotta do, above the table and below the table, to get those nominations.” Rudin adds, “I don’t think Miramax has had a bad influence. A lot of movies reached larger numbers of people than they otherwise would have because they were very aggressive marketing them.” The director-driven star vehicles no longer seem to be a contradiction in terms, and it is a compelling vision, one that ignited the indie explosion of the 1990s, but it is still a fragile one, as the fate of Far from Heaven suggests.
Moreover, Harvey is not Michael Ovitz. The Weinsteins have built a viable infrastructure, however erratically managed, and created a valuable library of films. And of course Harvey has Bob to depend on. As 2002 proves, many of his assets have remained intact. He is still bold, aggressive, able to move quickly and decisively where the majors can’t or won’t. He still has an eye for finding gold in studio slag heaps. As Marcy Granata noted, stars are his meal ticket, and so long as meaty roles in studio movies become fewer and farther between, he will always have a shot at luring them into his stable as long as he is able to buy up the best material in town, dangle it in front of them, and promise them Oscars. Filmmakers are warier—he’s more brutal with them—but if the stars come, the directors won’t be far behind. Still, much depends on whether Harvey can stop me-tooing the studios and listen to his contrarian instincts. If he goes on the Atkins Diet, resists swallowing huge mouthfuls of high-carb pictures like Gangs, and instead sticks with finger food like Chicago, he’ll be fine, at least from a commercial point of view.
The question is, Can he? Projects like Cold Mountain, Aviator, and his ostensible newfound interest in studio-type tentpoles like The Green Hornet, suggest that he may not. The movie marketplace is in constant flux; it’s a shadow play of shifting shapes, nearly impossible to make out. Today’s trend is tomorrow’s garbage and the next day’s nostalgia. To make matters murkier still, Miramax in particular is very much a moving target. Predicting which way the company will jump is never easy. Dominated by the will of two men, it can turn on a dime, reverse course, bob and weave. Still, no matter how much the Weinsteins twist and shout, you don’t need to be a weatherman to chart their direction. It’s like global warming, which is to say, despite local fluctuations in climate, an early frost here, a late winter blizzard there, we know it’s coming. Now that Miramax has stepped up to the “next level” to compete with the majors, it will live or die by the economics that governs the studio system, and therefore may lose its edge.
But even were Miramax somehow immune from the logic of the marketplace, Harvey’s biggest worry will always be himself. He long ago fell victim to his own notices, most often fashioned, ironically, by himself. Trapped in a forest of mirrors, all the talk of “I’m rich because I’m right” too easily slides into “I’m right because I’m rich.” His festering sense of inferiority, his hunger to become an insider, his fierce competitiveness, his passion for celebrities and deep need to bask in their reflected glow—all propel Miramax toward the studio sun, making him a poor guardian of the indie flame—although guarding the indie flame was never what he was about. Rather, it was more like feeding the indie flame, fanning it into a conflagration. The danger is, of course, that the blaze may consume him. Regardless, indie filmmakers and distributors have entered the post-Miramax era. What does this mean for them?
STRICTLY SPEAKING, by the new millennium, as Steven Soderbergh says, “The independent film movement, as we knew it, just doesn’t exist anymore, and maybe it can’t exist anymore. It’s over.” And Miramax killed it. With success. Success that was purchased at an enormous cost. Of course, that’s an exaggeration, but even though “co-optation” and “commercialization” may be dismissed as no more than slogans from the 1960s, and an Affleck may say, “Get over it!,” that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Today they are even more potent than ever. In the past, it could take years for a film-maker to get from a Sundance film to a big studio movie—for Soderbergh, a decade elapsed between sex, lies and Erin Brockovich—but today, directors like Bryan Singer go from The Usual Suspects to X-Men and X-Men 2, or the Wachowski brothers from Bound to The Matrix in a couple of years. Darren Aronofsky signed on for Batman 5 after he did his second film, Requiem for a Dream, and now Christopher Nolan is directing it, just one movie away from his breakthrough, Memento. Doug Liman went from Go to The Bourne Identity, while Charles Herman-Wurmfeld went from Kissing Jessica Stein to Legally Blonde 2. The escalating profitability of indie films, or at least the illusion of it, along with the video boom and the skyrocketing 1990s stock market created the motive (profit) and the means (cash) that corporatized what once was a movement fueled by artists.
Two thousand two and 2003 had all the earmarks of bumper years, and they were, but it’s important not to lose sight of what is not and cannot be produced in the one-step-forward, two-steps-back indie world. In today’s market, Anthony Minghella most likely couldn’t set up The English Patient, especially not at Miramax. He says, “Sydney Pollack and I are trying to make a movie, The Assumption of the Virgin, which is a mirror project to The English Patient, and it’s been very, very hard to raise even $5 million in the U.S. for domestic distribution, never mind the $15 million we went to Fox for with The English Patient.” Spike Lee always has trouble getting financed, as his difficulties on Rent suggest, and it’s getting worse. His recent film, 25th Hour, produced on a modest $15 million budget, was done for a Touchstone worried that it didn’t have any Oscar-class pictures. The Disney division refused to make the film unless he attracted an actor like Edward Norton, who worked for a fraction of his asking price. Said Norton, “The whole thing that’s happening to Spike is BS. He’s suffering from the Woody Allen syndrome. People say, ‘Oh, it’s just another Spike Lee movie.’ ” Ditto John Sayles: “It’s getting harder to get our movies financed. . . . Anything over $1 million or $2 million sends distribution companies into their litany of the five or six hot actors who can allegedly ‘open’ a picture.”
To the degree that indie films have deteriorated, they mimic the devolution of studio films, with a time lag of maybe half a decade. First there was the rise of films dependent on stars. Then, as Ethan Hawke points out, “Even on the indie level, the middle-range film is disappearing. The movies that I would have been the lead of, even fifteen years ago, aren’t getting made anymore. I probably got the best reviews of my life, bar none, for Tape. Nobody saw the movie. Andrew Niccol, who wrote and directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show, did a script that’s phenomenal, and he can’t get the money for it with me and Ewan McGregor attached. For under $20 million! I called up this producer and said, ‘Why don’t you want to do this movie, man?’ He said, ‘The script is great, if you like Beckett.’ I said, ‘Well, I do like Beckett. So, that’s not a plus?’ ‘No, that’s not a plus. I don’t want to make a movie that plays at the Film Forum in twenty-five years.’ It’s funny, ’cause I do.”
You don’t have to worship at the Jarmusch shrine or get your nourishment from the granola Sundance to wonder what’s happened to the indie movement. The not-ready and never-will-be-ready-for-prime-time films, the ones that Rick Linklater, Hal Hartley, Allison Anders, and Gus Va
n Sant (occasionally) like to make, and actors such as Hawke like to perform in, have almost disappeared. “You can’t get a film made for $10 million,” Hawke continues. “Linklater has this incredible screenplay of a Philip K. Dick story, ‘Scanner Darkly,’ and I want to be in it. After Training Day, I can get you $30 million if you want to do a cop movie, but we can’t get anyone to give us $10 million for that. Getting great reviews and being a respected indie film director doesn’t get you shit to do your movie.” Now, of course, after School of Rock, Linklater has enough clout to make a follow-up to Before Sunrise, with Hawke (and Julie Delpie), but it’s taken him two-and-one-half decades to get there.
Some, like Affleck and Matt Damon, approached their first film as a calculated career move, but if you aspire or presume to be “auteur” with something to say and a distinct way of saying it, if you cultivate a personal “voice,” the road to the Independent Spirit Awards, or just a theatrical playdate, is neither straight nor smooth. History rewards the winners—Soderbergh, Tarantino, the Andersons, Payne, Russell, and so on—and they will insist, as does Vachon, that good filmmakers always rise to the top, dismissing those that don’t as losers or whiners or hacks. But the new rules of the indie game are weighted heavily toward box office success, with promising or even brilliant but uncommercial films failing to get picked up for distribution, witness the fate that befell L.I.E. and The Believer.
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