Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  But in Cannes, for the first time, he found a ready audience for his ideas about cinema and life. Though Reservoir Dogs was a small movie, journalists were shocked and galvanized by its violence, and intrigued by the man who dreamed it up. Screenings left audiences divided, and at some theaters audience members nearly came to blows. Not everyone loved the film; influential critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film two thumbs down, calling it “a stylish but empty crime film.” But most critics raved. Vincent Canby of the New York Times praised the movie’s “dazzling cinematic pyrotechnics.” It was a small taste of the feeding frenzy to come. Bumble Ward, the British import who became Tarantino’s personal publicist, first met him here at the festival when she was a publicist for Miramax. She was taken by him—“lovely, kind, opinionated, hugest ego on the planet,” she recalls—but was even more impressed by how bowled over the journalists were. It was the beginning of the making of a media star. “There were books out about Quentin before Pulp Fiction,” Ward noted. “It was Reservoir Dogs that shook things up.”

  Cannes was the beginning of Miramax’s creation of a pop culture icon, one who secured Miramax’s future. Miramax, as Weinstein would always put it, would be the house that Quentin built. But it took a little time. Reservoir Dogs did not stir much of an audience its first time out, taking in just $3 million at the box office. It found its devotees later on, in video (though Miramax did not partake of the video profits).

  Curiously, not everyone in Weinstein’s orbit appreciated Tarantino’s vibe. Many found the film just plain vile, including Harvey Weinstein’s wife, Eve. She and her sister, Maude, walked out in the middle of the ear-slicing scene during Miramax’s first screening of the film in Tribeca. Tarantino was sitting next to Weinstein in the theater and whispered, “Who was that?” Weinstein answered glumly, “My wife.” The director laughed. Eventually Weinstein’s sister-in-law made her way back into the theater, and after the screening Tarantino disarmed her by approaching Eve Weinstein to say, “I totally understand how you feel.” Immediately he turned to Weinstein and warned him, “I’m not gonna cut it.”

  For the mogul, it was a moment of personal bonding with Tarantino: the director didn’t take offense at Eve Weinstein’s revulsion but wasn’t going to let it change his vision. It contributed to the mogul’s unswerving loyalty to him.

  And finally, Tarantino made a little money. He and Bender each took home $40,000 for Reservoir Dogs.

  AFTER RESERVOIR DOGS JAYMES SENT TARANTINO HER secretary, Vicky Lucai, to help him set up office. Lucai never came back. Jaymes called to demand why she hadn’t given notice of her intention to quit. “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked. There was a long silence, then came the reply. “Really Cathryn. If it’s between you and Quentin, what choice is there?”

  Chapter 2

  Spanking and Flirting;

  Chewing on Pulp Fiction

  1992–1995

  New Line, it’s fair to say, felt ambivalent about the young writer-director David O. Russell. For one thing, he had a disconcerting tendency to stare into people while they spoke to him, as if he were imagining what they’d look like through a lens. For another, he was infuriatingly unpredictable. Russell appeared to be perfectly normal; then he would have an oddly asocial moment, like the time he snatched a handkerchief from the breast pocket of an elderly European gentleman, blew his nose with it, and replaced it, as New Line chairman Bob Shaye looked on.

  Russell’s antisocial tendencies seemed to worsen with age, like a kind of physical Tourette’s syndrome; he poked people with a finger while talking to them at close range. Some people thought Russell had what one former friend called a “relational disorder,” and indeed, he has many former friends. Russell would build relationships and then jettison them over a variety of perceived slights. When his film Flirting with Disaster was having its premiere, friends who attended sent him a bottle of vintage Champagne the next day to celebrate, with five hand-drawn stars on the label. Russell took this as a slight, concluding that his friends had drawn stars on the bottle because they could find nothing nice to say about the film.

  He was more than a sensitive artist; he sometimes seemed pathological.

  IN THE EARLY 1990S RUSSELL WAS A STRUGGLING FILMMAKER and the boyfriend (later husband) of Janet Grillo, the director of development at New Line. Grillo had been with the company since the early 1980s and was one of its youngest and savviest comers. At the time, New Line was a lean and mean independent film company, built from the ground up by its driven, mercurial founder, Bob Shaye, a Columbia University–trained lawyer and, once upon a time, a failed actor. Acting was a short-lived dream; thirty-five years later he could still recite a devastating college review of his acting in Merchant of Yonkers. “Bob Shaye slid in and out of character like a schizophrenic calligraphist.” (À la Alfred Hitchcock, Shaye later took cameos in all the films of his Nightmare on Elm Street series.)

  The son of a wholesale grocer, Shaye drifted into the distribution end of the movie business because he understood that aspect of it; selling movies, he figured, was at least comparable to selling groceries. Investing $1,500 from his savings, Shaye started New Line in 1968 from his small Manhattan apartment on Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue as a minor distributor of “independent”—underground, actually—art and foreign films aimed at college audiences. At first he got the films for free and scraped together the cash for a brochure promoting the events. He found arcane, cult movies—like Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil, and the 1930s antimarijuana film, Reefer Madness—and sent out catalogues to college campuses along with rosters of speakers for the lecture circuit.

  Shaye himself was a bit of a hippie. His hair was long, and his clothes were somewhat mussed, nothing like the suited Hollywood studio moguls on the other coast. Mostly, though, his eye was trained on the bottom line. By the 1980s Shaye turned away from art and cult movies toward exploitation and niche films, mostly B movies that traditional Hollywood studios didn’t want to make. His specialty was making projects with low, tight budgets for targeted audiences. His early films were with the schlock-shock director John Waters.

  Curiously, this was a strategy that worked, mainly due to hard work and horse sense. Bob Shaye’s mantra became “Not a loser in the bunch,” meaning that every New Line film had to be profitable on its own terms. It was a phrase he had printed on glass paperweights that he handed out to all his executives. Unlike films made by Hollywood’s major studios, which increasingly bet huge stakes on blockbuster movies that could either bring in huge profits or result in huge losses, New Line wanted every movie it made to have a budget tied to expected box office return. This meant making smaller films with smaller budgets on the order of $3 million to $4 million and rarely more than $10 million, as compared to the $25 million to $30 million spent by the major studios on an average production by the late 1980s. “Our philosophy is to spend no more on production and marketing than the core audience we’re targeting will provide,” he told the press.

  By the 1990s this approach really began to pay off, though the studio didn’t have much to brag about in terms of quality movies—far from it. In 1990 a small, goofy film that New Line acquired for $3 million, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, took in $130 million for the studio. New Line also had a massive hit with the low-budget horror film Nightmare on Elm Street, which mushroomed into a series of six films that made hundreds of millions of dollars. New Line became known as the studio that Freddy Krueger built, and by 2003 Shaye still kept two large Freddy Krueger dolls on his Oscar-free office mantel.

  Karen Hermelin, a former marketing executive, described the green-lighting process: “We established a market, assessed it, then creatively we went backward. For example, [we’d define] a movie for black teen girls: How much can we make? We can make $20 million. So: No more than a $5 million budget. Nobody was doing that in the early nineties.”

  But Bob Shaye was certainly not all business. A child of
the sixties and seventies, he clung to the vices of his generation and had a reputation as a party animal and skirt chaser. Shaye frequently played matchmaker among his employees and had them over to his house for parties. For some, this amounted to a kind of enforced gaiety; Shaye expected his employees to come drinking with him into the wee hours of the morning when out of town on company business. “New Line as a culture was a pretty debauched place,” remembered one executive who joined the company in 1990. “The corporate retreat was drug-infested, sex-infested. Everyone slept with everybody. It was this weird kind of place.” At one retreat in Manhattan, the executive, who had joined New Line from another major studio, recalled about a dozen people lingering late at night. A more veteran executive brought down twelve tabs of acid. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not in Kansas anymore,’” said the executive.

  As avuncular as he could be in some settings, Shaye also had a sharp tongue and a tendency to erupt in a tirade of withering criticism, particularly after a few drinks. Shaye’s volatile personality contributed to the departure of some executives who found his temper tantrums wearing. “He’d hug you, then he’d start a fight—almost a fistfight,” said another longtime executive who left in the mid-1990s.

  And whatever Shaye’s shortcomings, it was his number-two, Michael Lynne, who caused more trouble. Ruth Vitale, a creative executive who worked at the company for six years in the 1990s and ran Fine Line Features, the art-house division, claims that Lynne sexually harassed her for a year and a half until she was pushed out. After a company dinner during a trip to London, Lynne accompanied Vitale back to her hotel and asked to meet with her in her room. Vitale was horrified when he sat on the bed, and patted it for her to sit down. They ended up on the loveseat instead, and Vitale claims that Lynne stuck his tongue down her throat. She threw him out, but the married executive’s pursuit of Vitale became an open secret in the office. When it became clear to Lynne that Vitale would not respond to his advances Vitale felt her career at New Line was essentially over. She left the company in the late 1990s, never bringing charges because, she’s told friends, it would mean the end of her career in Hollywood. Both Vitale and Lynne declined to comment on the allegations, but a New Line executive said they were not true. “It’s all unsubstantiated,” said Russell Schwartz, New Line’s head of marketing, in 2004. “Nothing happened that’s worth commenting on.” But in fact Vitale wasn’t the only woman who left because of the sexual climate. A 1998 article in Premiere magazine detailed how other successful women executives left the company because of a harassing atmosphere from the top. New Line executives strenuously denied the way the studio was depicted in the article.

  IN SOME WAYS, SHAYE AND HIS COMPANY WERE THE PERFECT foil to Harvey Weinstein and that other Manhattan-based, independent studio start-up, Miramax. With his outsized personality and gargantuan appetite, Weinstein was a circus impresario finding diamond-in-the-rough art films to Shaye, the disciplined bean-counter making a mint off exploitation films. Both New Line and Miramax were built from scratch, but while New Line chased profit, Miramax chased quality and the media spotlight, finding foreign gems and little-noticed auteur efforts that the Weinsteins brilliantly promoted to the entertainment press. But New Line made money, while Miramax struggled to stave off insolvency. New Line’s profitability used to drive Harvey Weinstein crazy, while Shaye couldn’t deny his private envy at the prestige won by his local competitor. (It would take until 2004 for New Line to win its very first Best Picture Oscar, for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.)

  While Miramax lived for the New York Times, Shaye had little use for the cultural elite. He was interested in the Wall Street Journal and the bankers who read it. As New Line grew, another philosophy came to burnish Shaye’s reputation: “prudent aggression,” a phrase he had painted by artist Ed Ruscha and hung in a frame in his Los Angeles office. Shaye used this mantra to seduce successive investment banking firms to float him ever-larger sums of cash—$75 million in 1990 alone. New Line’s profitability was lauded in successive articles in business magazines, and Shaye seemed to forget that he once cared about making good movies. He opened an art-house division in 1990, Fine Line, as a gesture to the movies he once loved. But it was the pronouncement of the New York Times of which he was most proud, from the pen of William Grimes in 1991: “A film company’s success story: Low cost, narrow focus, profits.” The article was bronzed and hung on his wall, as was a subsequent paean by the Times’s Bernard Weinraub in June 1994: “Dues paid, a Hollywood upstart joins the mogul set.”

  The Weinraub article ran less than a year after Shaye sold his company to Ted Turner’s Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., for $667 million in cash and stock, about $100 million of which went into Bob Shaye’s own pocket.

  IN 1990 DAVID OWEN RUSSELL WAS STRUGGLING TO FIND A toehold in the nascent Manhattan independent film world. He waited tables for a catering company and tutored high school kids on their SATs (along with James Schamus, a screenwriter and later film executive at Universal). Among his many other jobs, Russell waited tables at Alan Alda’s daughter’s wedding; he later cast Alda in Flirting with Disaster. He also bartended for Rupert Murdoch.

  Russell finally got a break when he began dating New Line executive Janet Grillo. Grillo believed in him, and she had shepherded a number of urban hits for the young studio, including House Party and Pump Up the Volume. It was Grillo who in 1990 brought to the studio Russell’s new spec script, Spanking the Monkey, a bizarre comedy about a young man’s incestuous relationship with his mother. Originally called Swelter, Russell had scribbled it in a fever during a seven-day jury duty stint in Manhattan.

  The script read like a drama. Russell had intended it to be a comedy.

  Either way, it was very strange. Spanking the Monkey was a revenge fantasy based on Russell’s unhealthy (though apparently not literally incestuous) relationship with his own mother. As a teen in the summer of 1980, Russell was stuck at the family home in Larchmont, New York, a wealthy, white suburb north of Manhattan, caring for his mother after she had broken a leg in an auto accident. His father, a sales executive for Simon and Schuster, was away on business, as he often was. The premise is the same in the movie (in the film the father is a philanderer); it’s about a teenaged son stuck caring for his attractive, bedridden mother in suburbia. Their relationship slides from emotional manipulation into sexual manipulation.

  Maria Muzio Russell, the filmmaker’s mother, doesn’t appear to be such a monster, but according to Russell, she was even worse than the person he depicted. Other family members describe her as an upper-middle-class alcoholic housewife with great dreams for her gifted but introverted son. According to Russell and others, she was a master of the art of passive aggression and sometimes aggressive-aggressive behavior: she berated Russell constantly, then ignored him, becoming physically abusive but also reveling in her precociously intelligent boy. Grillo, who married Russell in 1992, recalled the haranguing phone calls she’d get from Maria Russell when they were a young married couple in Manhattan. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve spoken to you?” she’d hiss down the phone lines. After a while Grillo wouldn’t answer the phone after 4:00 P.M., because it was probably Maria Russell, in a drunken rage. But she was also, according to Grillo, “charismatic, smart, warm, funny, generous, sophisticated, informed about the world. That was always there.” And she physically resembled Grillo in many ways.

  Matt Muzio, Russell’s younger cousin who looks a lot like David, agrees that Maria Russell was openly abusive. “David’s mother was abused as a child, psychologically and physically, and she didn’t have the strength to say ‘It ends here.’ David’s mom wasn’t an achiever. She sat home and drank. And she pushed David.” Muzio recalled one day when the Russell’s family cat was killed, and Russell’s mother took him aside and simply told him, “The cat died.” Then she went into the other room to be with some friends who were visiting, and left David alone in his room. “His coping with that kind of
thing was to run away, into a fantasy world, into his own imagination,” said Muzio. But the pain of that rejection endured, and Russell wrote precisely how he felt about the incident in his philosophic 2004 movie, I Heart Huckabees. The movie’s hero, a young man named Albert Markovski (played by Jason Schwartzman), is searching for meaning in life, and ends up in his parents’ apartment, telling the cat story to actress Isabelle Huppert, who tries to convince him that the world is all chaos and random suffering. “You were embarrassed about feeling sad for the cat,” Huppert tells him. Then she turns to the mother, played by Schwartzman’s own mother, Talia Shire, and says, “Your home is a lie.” She tells Schwartzman-Markovski (in other words, Russell), “You were orphaned by indifference. …You were trained to betray yourself.”

  Russell’s father, Bernard Markovski (yes, the name of the main character in “Huckabees”), traveled often, so was physically distant as well as emotionally absent. One painful line in Spanking the Monkey came from Russell’s real life, when his mother told him that his father had never wanted to have him. In the movie—and, according to Russell, in real life—she said this to draw her son closer to her, to explain why he should be grateful for her affection. He registered it as a moment of manipulation.

  And when as a young adult Russell told his parents he wanted to be a filmmaker, he recalls his mother’s making this cutting remark: “Well, why don’t you just jump in a shark tank and swim with sharks? You’ll have a better chance of surviving.”