But the most serious objection is the obvious one: it’s not the tiny indie films—idiosyncratic in voice and local in detail—that are likely to be pirated; they most often don’t travel well. Rather, it is the big-studio action movies, like the two Warner’s released in the late fall, The Last Samurai, a Tom Cruise vehicle, produced by Shakespeare in Love’s Ed Zwick; and The Matrix Revolutions, as well as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, from a Warner’s division, New Line.
The merits of the studio case aside, one fact became glaringly obvious: despite the explosion of indie power in the 1990s, the undeniable viability of their business model, and their increased visibility in the public eye—from the studios’ point of view, their indie divisions were so inconsequential that they could just ignore them. “I only wish the studios noticed the specialized business enough to conspire against it,” observes Ted Hope. “The whole way it came about just shows how little respect there is for us. We’re just a blip on their flowcharts and their income and outcome P&Ls—they couldn’t care less.” Piracy was paramount, and if the screener ban did inflict some collateral casualties, did knock some indies out of the Oscar race, the studios were all too willing to sacrifice them on that altar of piracy protection, especially, as Ray, Vachon, and others supposed, if it cleared the way for themselves. Moreover, events seemed to prove that the illusion of independence these divisions carefully cultivated turned out to be just that, an illusion. When push came to shove, they were unable to act independently of their studio parents.
Still, a funny thing happened on the way to implementing the new policy. It raised a hue and cry among indies and their friends. Said producer Jeremy Thomas, “The people who have made this rule are in the Dark Ages. The specialty labels live by awards. It’s the little bit extra that they get from a nomination that makes their business pay.” An Oscar in a major category can mean $10 to $15 million in additional revenue for an indie distributor. “When I first heard about it, I thought it was a joke,” added Artisan CEO Amir Malin. “It’s a great injustice and a knee-jerk reaction to piracy.” Robert Altman, who had been an outsider throughout most of his career, got it right away and was furious. He said, “This is a real Karl Rove move. It’s just plain wrong.” Far from being powerless, they mobilized talent, critics, and industry groups that stood to be damaged by the shock wave of the hasty and ill-conceived studio diktat. Valenti and the majors were taken by surprise. The counterattack was organized, needless to say, by Ray, with a little help from his friends. Soon after the new policy was announced at the end of September 2003, he got on the phone. “We talked to the IFP in New York and L.A., and they motivated a whole group of people, and it really snowballed,” he says. “We had people write letters, Altman, Scorsese, Coppola. We called friends, and they called their friends. It was an honest-to-goodness, classic guerrilla grass-roots campaign.”
Ray organized a sit-down at the Four Seasons hotel in New York of the six families, as Kevin Smith likes to call them, UA, Sony Classics, Focus Features, Paramount Classics, Fine Line, and Miramax, who buried their differences and got together in the same room for the first time. (Actually, Tom Bernard could not quite bring himself to break bread with Harvey, and made himself available by phone. Paramount Classics’s Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein were on the phone as well.)
Initially, Harvey toed the studio line. He was quoted in Variety saying, “I will go along with this ban if it is for the reason of combating piracy.” At the Four Seasons meeting, Harvey took a back seat, explaining that he was already on the Academy’s watch list, and that were he to play a prominent role, the media would spin the story as a feud between him and Michael Eisner. “This should not become Harvey versus Disney,” he said. “It’s bigger than just me.” But rumor had it that Harvey had dragged his feet in the beginning, thinking that Miramax was too big to be adversely affected by the ban, and only came around after his staff rebelled. Says Hope, who had produced two pictures released that fall that would be affected, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams. “I found it weird that someone like Harvey would not take a [stand] when clearly it’s an issue that the creative community is 100 percent behind. He’s one of the biggest fighters and vociferous voices, but he hasn’t stepped out on a limb. The way I read that is his business today is blockbusters like Cold Mountain, not specialized niche pictures. He could have rallied a lot of support. Truly, it’s the passing of an era.” Ray disagrees: “I think Harvey has done a really fine job.”
Bernard thought the idea of Academy members pirating indie movies was ludicrous and suggested that they produce a cartoon picturing them with walkers and pirate hats, DVDs in hand, boarding a ship flying the skull and crossbones. Harvey said he knew the president of eBay and that if he asked him to stop selling films, he would. With Harvey on the sidelines, the group selected Ray as their spokesperson. But no sooner had they done so than the phone rang. Harvey picked it up. Looking at Ray and unable to pronounce the name of his boss, MGM Pictures CEO Alex Yemenidjian, Harvey stuttered, “It’s Alex Yemen-yemen-yemenegian—” Yemenidjian was not easily ruffled. He had a reputation for rarely losing his cool, rarely breaking a sweat. He reminded Ray of his old boss, Sam Goldwyn. “You would actually have to murder Sam’s wife in front of his eyes to get a reaction,” he recalls. He got a reaction out of Yemenidjian, who was furious, and Chris McGurk, who was also on the line and who had taken heat from Yemenidjian on Ray’s behalf. Ray explained to friends, including Bernard, that Valenti had apparently called Yemenidjian at six o’clock in the morning and said, “Hey, your man’s on the front page of the trades, what the fuck is that?” Yemenidjian was embarrassed, as in, You can’t control your own people. According to Bernard, Yemenidjian insisted it was a piracy issue. Ray said it wasn’t. It got heated and ugly, and—still according to Bernard—Yemenidjian, without saying the words, gave Ray a choice between shutting up and getting out. There was a long pause. Yemenidjian asked, “Are you still there?” Ray replied, “I’m thinking.” As he told Bernard later, “It’s the Jack Benny line. ‘Your money or your life?’ Beat. ‘I’m THINKING!’ ” Ray went home that night, and said to his wife, “So, Nancy, how much money do we have in the bank?”
“Oh, no, more drama?”
“Yeah, there’s always drama.” He says now, “When Alex told me to back off, I backed off. I felt bad, like a total fucking sellout. But I got a kid to send to college.”
Paramount’s VP Rob Friedman reportedly called Paramount Classics’s Vitale and Dinerstein while they were on the phone to the group at the Four Seasons and silenced them as well. The industry was looking for favors from Congress—better copyright protection, trade concessions, etc.—and no studio could afford to look “soft on piracy.” Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer reportedly never saw the logic of the screener ban and went along reluctantly, perhaps helped by a threat that he and his company would be targeted by an ad campaign saying he was pro-piracy. After all, Sony made the device used to copy tapes and DVDs.
The group selected James Schamus—probably the only one who’d graduated from college—to collect the suggestions and turn them into a 1,000-word “Dear Jack” letter they sent to Valenti. Then Schamus, Harvey, and Michael Barker got on the phone with Valenti. Schamus told him, “The consumer has a completely cynical attitude towards the companies that make the product, viewing them as gigantic greedy corporations who want to control everything. And stamp out anything of interest that’s unique or individual. You just did that, for the movie business, man. Under the rubric of fighting piracy, in one week, you have created precisely the market conditions that have destroyed the record industry.”
Initially, Valenti’s attitude had been, I’m retiring soon, I’ll take the heat. Indeed, he had said repeatedly, “If there is a villain in the piece, it’s me.” But Schamus hammered home, “This is your legacy, Jack, this is what you’re going to be remembered for, this is a defining moment, you
shouldn’t go out this way.” Valenti is not a stupid man, and he was swayed by both arguments. A few days later, a provisional compromise was reached: tapes (not DVDs) would go out as usual to Academy members, but not to the guilds and journalists, as they had in the past, and the issue would be reexamined in the future.
The indie divisions let out a collective sigh of relief but, at the same time, were suspicious. In the absence of any systematic attempts to deal with the piracy issue, it struck many as a stopgap measure to shut them up so that, as Bernard puts it, “Jack can go off into the sunset in peace.”
On October 31, Harvey weighed in with a robust denunciation of the new screener policy in a guest column in Variety. “This ban [is] a grave threat to the progress of bringing independent and foreign films to wide audiences,” he wrote. “Losing potential awards recognition for these types of films directly threaten[s] their ability to reach the filmgoing public. We [can] not sit still and watch this happen.”
The family feud left hard feelings. It suddenly became crystal clear that despite the incestuous mixing of vital bodily fluids that occurred during the 1990s reign of Miramax and Sundance, there was still a chasm between the studios and the indies divisions, not to mention the “real,” unaffiliated indies. There was still an Us and a Them—which is probably a good thing. The indie divisions, albeit owned lock, stock, and barrel by the studios, were capable of delivering a reality check of their own. The people who run them are different in kind from the bean counters who guard the studio gates. After Ray’s dustup with Yemenidjian, McGurk called him and said, “I gotta tell ya, Bingham, with you, it’s never boring. It’s exhausting. Ya know, you would be a problem and have a problem, no matter where you went, no matter who you were working for. Or with. It’s just your nature.”
“You just arrived at that, did you?” Continues Ray, “No matter where I go—the only thing consistent in this is me. I bring out the best and the worst in some of these people. This was all about money, and I still believe that there are decisions that you make that aren’t motivated by financial gain. The independent world isn’t like the Hollywood world. The motives are different, the goals are different, people aren’t necessarily trying to get rich and powerful, they’re trying to push art first while thinking everything else will take care of itself. That’s the naive part of it, it doesn’t happen that way. You can’t even talk about that with a straight face or people will laugh you off the planet. But there’s a big big part of me that really does believe that. And will always believe that.”
Cast of Characters
Not everyone mentioned in this book is included. Only those people who appear repeatedly or in widely separated sections are listed, with partial credits, relevant to the period the book covers.
Ben Affleck: actor, Good Will Hunting, Chasing Amy, Shakespeare in Love, Dogma; co-writer, Good Will Hunting.
Allison Anders: filmmaker, Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida Loca, Four Rooms.
Paul Thomas Anderson: filmmaker, Boogie Nights, Magnolia.
Wes Anderson: filmmaker, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore.
Gregg Araki: filmmaker, The Living End, Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation.
Darren Aronofsky: filmmaker, Pi, Requiem for a Dream.
Bille August: filmmaker, Twist and Shout, Pelle the Conqueror.
Roger Avary: co-story, Pulp Fiction; director/writer, Killing Zoe.
Michael Barker: co-president, Sony Classics; formerly of UA Classics and Orion Classics.
Gary Beer: at various times, president, Sundance Group; executive VP, Sundance Institute, etc.
Lawrence Bender: producer, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting.
Albert Berger: producer, King of the Hill, Election, Cold Mountain.
Tom Bernard: co-president, Sony Classics; formerly of UA Classics and Orion Classics.
Bernardo Bertolucci: filmmaker, Before the Revolution, The Conformist, 1900, Little Buddha.
Frank Biondi: chairman and CEO, Universal Studios.
Jason Blum: senior VP of acquisitions and co-productions, Miramax.
Lizzie Borden: filmmaker, Born in Flames, Working Girls, Love Crimes.
Eamonn Bowles: senior VP, acquisitions and marketing, Miramax.
Danny Boyle: filmmaker, A Shallow Grave, Trainspotting.
Alison Brantley: director of acquisitions, Miramax.
Betsy Brantley: actress, Havana, Schizopolis. Married to Steven Soderbergh.
Alan Brewer: childhood friend of Harvey Weinstein; musical director, The Burning, Playing for Keeps.
Edgar Bronfman, Jr.: CEO of Seagrams, Universal’s parent.
Tina Brown: chairman and editor-in-chief, Talk magazine.
Stuart Burkin: post-production, Miramax Films.
Jane Campion: filmmaker, Sweetie, The Piano, Portrait of a Lady.
Vincent Canby: lead reviewer, the New York Times.
Simon Channing-Williams: producer of Mike Leigh’s films.
Eve Chilton: married to Harvey Weinstein.
Larry Clark: director, Kids.
Joel and Ethan Coen: filmmakers, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing; producers, Bad Santa.
Matthew Cohen: senior VP, marketing and creative advertising, Miramax.
Dick Cook: chairman, Walt Disney Studios.
Matt Damon: actor, Good Will Hunting, Dogma, All the Pretty Horses; co-writer, Good Will Hunting.
Daniel Day-Lewis: actor, My Left Foot, Gangs of New York.
Dalton Delan: VP of programming and creative director, Sundance Channel.
Guillermo del Toro: director, Cronos, Mimic.
Mike De Luca: president of production, New Line.
Ira Deutchman: founding partner and president of marketing and distribution, Cinecom; head of Fine Line Features.
Tom DiCillo: filmmaker, Johnny Suede, Living in Oblivion.
David Dinerstein: senior VP of marketing, Miramax.
Pat Dollard: agent; Steven Soderbergh, client.
William A. Donohue: director of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
Jim Doyle: Buffalo friend of Harvey Weinstein, Miramax employee in the 1980s.
Denise Earle: filmmaker.
Steve Earnhart: post-production, Miramax; director, Mule Skinner Blues.
Cassian Elwes: agent, William Morris.
Larry Estes: senior VP of feature films acquisitions for Columbia/TriStar Home Video; financed sex, lies, and videotape; Gas Food Lodging; One False Move.
Nikki Finke: film journalist.
Jack Foley: president of distribution, USA Films; formerly, senior VP of theatrical distribution, October Films; president of distribution, Miramax.
Jean-Francois Fonlupt: chairman, CiBy 2000.
Alberto Garcia: competition director, Sundance Film Festival.
Donna Gigliotti: president of production, USA Films; formerly, executive VP, Miramax Films.
Mark Gill: variously senior VP of marketing and president of the L.A. office, Miramax Films.
Geoff Gilmore: director, Sundance Film Festival.
Eric Gitter: producer, O.
Richard Gladstein: senior VP of production, Miramax Films; formerly, VP of production and acquisitions, Live Entertainment.
Ed Glass: partner, Glass/Schoor Films.
Susan Glatzer: VP, October Films.
Ernst Goldschmidt: chairman, Pandora Films.
Sam Goldwyn: chairman, the Samuel Goldwyn Company.
Carlos Goodman: entertainment attorney.
Cary Granat: president, Dimension Films.
Marcy Granata: president, publicity and corporate relations, Miramax Films.
James Gray: filmmaker, Little Odessa, The Yards.
Scott Greenstein: chairman, USA Films; formerly, co-president, October Films; senior VP, Miramax.
Janet Grillo: senior VP, New Line, married to David O. Russell.
Ulu Grosbard: director, Straight Time, True Confessions.
Nicole Guillemet: VP and general manager, Sundance Instit
ute.
Dolly Hall: producer, 54, High Art.
Lasse Hallström: director, Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, The Shipping News.
Todd Harris: agent, William Morris, for Robert Duvall.
Amy Hart: marketing coordinator, Miramax.
Hal Hartley: filmmaker, The Unbelievable Truth, Trust.
Michael Hausman: producer, Alambrista!, Heartland, Desert Bloom.
Todd Haynes: filmmaker, Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven.
Rick Hess: agent, William Morris.
Dennis Higgins: senior VP of publicity, Miramax.
J. Hoberman: lead film reviewer, Village Voice.
Peter Hoffman: consultant to Miramax; formerly CEO, Carolco Pictures.
Nicole Holofcener: filmmaker, Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing.
Ted Hope: partner, Good Machine; executive producer, Trust, Safe, Walking and Talking, The Brothers McMullen; producer, Happiness, In the Bedroom.
Trea Hoving: executive VP of acquisitions, Miramax Films.
Amy Israel: senior VP of acquisitions, Miramax Films.
James Ivory: director, A Room with a View, Howards End, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, The Golden Bowl.
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