Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (5 page)

And while you love it all, this unexpected gift of a thriving chocolate milk concern, every once in a while, in the midst of it all, you think, “How’d I get
here
? All I wanted was some chocolate milk.”

T
his is important to put right on front street: Nearly everything I’ve achieved in life since 1994 I owe to Harvey Weinstein—the larger-than-life (
not
a fat joke) half of the legendary Miramax siblings who mainstreamed indie film. And to show my gratitude, I made his ideals my own and fought his holy war against the studio infidels and heathens, sometimes even at his behest.

Now here’s the tough shit: Miramax was owned by Disney at the time—the most studio-est of the studios. So in essence, I was an indie filmmaker owned by a mouse in short pants.

Miramax was the premier destination for indie filmmakers in the early ’90s. Harvey and Bob Weinstein, concert promoters in Buffalo, dipped their toes into the movie biz and discovered art-house gold, distributing such envelope-pushing modern classics as
The Piano
and
The Crying
Game.
Their winning ways with non-popcorn fare caught the attention of the Walt Disney Company, and in 1993 the family-movie mavens purchased Miramax, lock, film stock, and barrel, keeping Harvey and Bob as coheads of the indie film distribution company they named after their parents, Miriam and Max. It wasn’t charity on Disney’s behalf: With a corporate wolf’s war chest under his indie sheep’s clothing, Harvey took underground film to mainstream multiplexes while producing a string of Oscar winners and pop-culture landmarks. Disney buying Miramax and the subsequent run of cinematic gems (and dreck) that would follow was the biggest boon to art patronage since the Medici family.

Harvey picked up
Clerks
at the ’94 Sundance Film Festival, after its fourth screening and Q & A. The flick had built up amazing buzz over the course of its first three public exhibitions, and at its last fest run at the Egyptian Theater, Miramax acquisitions king and New Jersey native Mark Tusk would persuade Harvey to give our amateur film a room in their mansion. I’d go on to make the bulk of my flicks at Miramax, from ’94 to 2007, benefiting from the gobs of Disney mouse money the Weinsteins had.

Under the stewardship of the big screen–loving siblings (who, according to their legend, got into the art-house game after mistaking
The 400 Blows
for an adult movie), smart and off-kilter flicks had a better shot at theatrical distribution—the dream of all nascent filmmakers. And Harvey could make your dream come true … if you were a true believer.

And the Miramax and Weinstein ethos was
easy
to believe in—because it
defined
independence. The brothers were modern-day folk heroes back then, mere years before they’d
become figures of legend and myth, when their names would become bigger than the flicks they’d make. The pair had elbowed their way into the movie biz, bringing to the mainstream what was traditionally considered art-house medicine. They were scrappy and they had excellent taste, but it was their “Fuck you, we’ll do it ourselves” attitude I always loved best—the fact that they’d achieved all they had as outsiders in what was normally an impenetrable field.

But worry not, gentle reader: I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. That’s because, not content to merely imbibe the Miramax elixir, I
bathed
in it instead. I was in my early twenties, so I was espousing the tired old “Movies are for the masses; I only watch
films
” philosophy—the irritating, judgmental stage through which every budding cineast must pass. It was a point of view that synced up seamlessly with the Weinstein Miramax vibe—which was
Indie as Fuck
. In the ’90s, Harvey sold the movie biz as an Us vs. Them religion—art vs. commerce. The best way to get young men to fight on your behalf? Give ’em a bogeyman and a cause. Our crusade? It was the Miramaxkateers vs. the Studios Suits! Never mind that our paychecks have a little drawing of Mickey Mouse on them,
THIS IS INDIE WAR!

At Miramax, we were raised to believe that outside our fence was a world of waste: corporate conglomerates pumping out barely scripted sequels and remakes, starring the same old expensive faces the majors overspent casting yet again, backed by marketing campaigns that were nearly double the cost of the movie itself.

“They bought it” was a phrase Harvey’d often use when trying to explain a competing studio’s better opening weekend
at the box office.
Anybody
could throw money at costly TV spots to get the potential audience’s attention; at Miramax we were encouraged to spend our wit and grit instead. We were making
film history
; the studios were making
product.
There was no art in their art; it was all dollars and senselessness.

Miramax was positioned as the antidote to all that, the cure for the common movie. And for a brief, shining time, it actually
was
the best game in town:
Pulp Fiction
,
Shakespeare in Love
,
Good Will Hunting.
All legendary, award-winning flicks, all of which had been put into turnaround by other studios. Harvey knew how to spin straw into gold from studio discards. The message was simple: The studio gold is shit and the studio shit is gold. The studio was where they spent thirty million dollars to make the same movies Miramax could make for ten. The studios were where they passed on a movie in which the Jesus Christ of Art-House Cinema, Quentin Motherfuckin’ Tarantino, was involved—as Columbia Tristar had done with
Pulp Fiction
. In the Church of Miramax, Harvey was God, Quentin was the Son, and we were all full of the indie Spirit. Our films were just dirty little prayers.

But as with any religion, the moment it’s organized, a beautiful idea becomes structured and institutionalized. Slowly, the gut instincts that’d paved the way for
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
and
Reservoir Dogs
were replaced with box office tracking and focus-group testing of everything from trailers to posters. The Miramax ethos went from “Beat ’em at their own game” to “
Two
can play at that game.” Gone was the emphasis on creatively selling a flick or sending the
filmmaker on a grassroots campaign to generate interest months before a theatrical opening; eventually, it was all junkets and reshoots for bloated flicks that didn’t remotely reflect Miramax’s roots at all.

Michael Eisner was the first person to notice it. We all met in New York City at the Disney offices to pitch the
Clerks
cartoon to Eisner and then-ABC-big-dog Bob Iger; Harvey was enjoying a number one opening for
She’s All That
—a romancer that starred Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook and looked and felt nothing like any previous Miramax release. As we waited for the elevator, Harvey boasted about being able to open one of
their
movies at number one, just as good as
them
.

For a rabid parishioner in the Church of Miramax, it was confusing to hear the Creator crow about topping from the bottom and stooping to conquer.
She’s All That
was maybe a Dimension movie on its best day, which would’ve made sense: Dimension was the genre label, set up to release more mainstream flicks. The Miramax logo at the head of that flick felt somehow
wrong
. The emperor suddenly seemed naked, celebrating a Pyrrhic victory. I wanted to tell our good king that one more win like that over the studios and he might be coming back to Epirus alone.

But it was 1999 and I had no business objecting to how Harvey ran his company—particularly when none of my flicks had ever graced the top spot on any box office chart. I had a sinking feeling we were at the beginning of the end of something special and unique, but it was not my place to turd in Harvey’s punch bowl …

Michael Eisner, on the other hand, unbuckled, dropped
trou, and crapped a long log of floating truth in the midst of the party.

Mere moments after Harvey’s victory lap downstairs, we were upstairs at the ABC network offices in New York, readying to pitch the
Clerks
cartoon to Eisner and Iger, when my producer and friend Scott Mosier and I bore witness to how the heavens roar when titans clash. As we settled in, Harvey asked Eisner if he’d seen the
She’s All That
grosses. Eisner congratulated him on the top spot, quickly adding, “But you’ve gotta be careful with your
brand
.”

Eisner was the first businessman I had ever heard employ what would become the most overused marketing buzzword of the twenty-first century:
brand.

As Mosier and I looked on spellbound, Michael Eisner was saying the shit I was thinking, observing that the Freddy Prinze Jr. pic would’ve been a more appropriate Dimension release. His theory that a Miramax film
meant
something to its audience—that the opening logo was a stamp of quality—was something even
I
knew. How could this suitiest of suits see this when our Fearless Leader couldn’t?

“Touchstone Pictures used to mean something,” Eisner said, referring to the Disney label that’d released the Tom Hanks hit
Splash
eons prior. “Then we put out a few bad movies under the Touchstone label and we lost the audience’s trust.”

Harvey looked like he got sucker-punched. He’d been feeling fine about his box office Benjamins ’til Eisner pulled Medusa’s head out, freezing our per-screen Perseus in his tracks. That’s when Eisner released the kraken …

“If you’re not careful with your brand, you lose the audience.”

The advice wasn’t directed at me and I’m not sure Eisner even noticed or cared if I and my non-captain-of-industry cohort Mosier were in the room; still, I absorbed the cautionary tale like it
had
been intended for me. Never fuck with the brand. Check.

By 2005, after more than a decade of delivering Oscar gold to the parent company while still frequently battling with Disney over expensive, non-indie films such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and
Cold Mountain
, as well as such controversial films as Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11
and, yes, Kevin Smith’s
Dogma
, the Weinstein brothers were done at Disney. They left behind what’d become Miramouse to start the Weinstein Company. It was like being Catholic during Henry VIII’s Reformation: No matter what you used to believe, you followed your king as he made himself the supreme head of a new church. I followed along, as did Quentin Tarantino, the guy who put Miramax on the map. But without the deep Disney pockets, even
that
kind of credibility didn’t necessarily get shit green-lit during the early rocky days of the Weinstein Company.

I remember when Quentin brought in a horror movie called
Hostel
that he’d shepherded but didn’t direct. The cost was horror-movie small, with a budget of five million or less, yet the Weinstein brothers passed.
Twice
, actually—in script stage and after the finished flick was screened for them. And even though the budget was low, and even though their mightiest all-star was producing and presenting—the guy whose silver-tongued mobsters and glowing, mystery briefcase had provided Harvey and Bob with a license to print money—the House That Quentin Built passed on a
minuscule-budgeted Tarantino project. Camelot was gone: Welcome to Came
little
.

Lionsgate seemed to understand the benefit of having a flick attached to a cinematic legend, so it picked up
Hostel
. It was a smart move, as Lionsgate did well with the leavings of the Weinstein brothers—just as the Weinstein brothers had done well with the leavings of other studios for so many years. When you’re hungry, you’ll pick through your neighbor’s garbage, but when you’re full you’d never
dream
of doing something so gross as touching someone else’s discards. That’s because when you’re overfed and always full, with a seemingly unending supply of food, you tend to be a lot more wasteful. There’s always more where this shit came from.

When
Hostel
opened well with a campaign that was straight-up early Miramax, it was clear the tables were turning: The studios (even up-and-comers like Lionsgate) had studied Bob and Harvey’s marketing magic for years and simply started heading in that direction
themselves
. Imitation can be the highest form of flattery, but it can also be the death of your business if you do something specific that nobody else does. Once everyone starts doing it too, that’s not good for business. If folks find out the secret ingredient is children’s cough syrup, anyone can make a Flaming Moe. And the studios started mixing up Flaming Moes so tasty, the audience never noticed it
wasn’t
Harvey and Bob behind the bar anymore. In 1999, I remember seeing a trailer for the DreamWorks release
American Beauty
and saying to Scott, “Wow—they’re selling it like it’s a Miramax flick.”