IT IS a call that can breathe a chill into the stoutest heart: “I have Harvey Weinstein on the line for you.” For many film-makers over the past two decades, this presages one of two things: good news or bad news. It is a mark of Weinstein’s reputation that either scenario is equally terrifying. But all that could change when his contract with Disney expires — if word on the street is correct, he is about to be unceremoniously dumped.
As the co-founders of Miramax, the independent film company (named after their parents), Harvey and Bob Weinstein did not so much infiltrate Hollywood as launch a full-frontal assault with all guns blazing. Through a series of aggressive acquisitions, primitive-but-brutally-effective marketing tactics and a sometimes cavalier disdain for “fair” play, they snarled, clawed, cajoled, bludgeoned, slashed and burnt their way into Hollywood’s exclusive party. They were the unwanted guests — the gatecrashers who descend on the buffet and grab the goodies with both hands, stuffing canapés into their mouths and their pockets for later. While the Hollywood suits tut-tutted and muttered behind their manicured hands, they were powerless to stop them. Until, perhaps, now.
The Weinsteins not only disobeyed the rules, they also made up their own, again and again. When Miramax teetered on the brink of collapse after 13 years of erratically profitable trading, along came Walt Disney, which delivered them from potential bankruptcy by buying the company for $70 million (£36 million) in 1993, and contracting the brothers Weinstein to run their own ship. The relationship with the Disney executives Jeffrey Katzenberg, the late Frank Wells, Joe Roth and Michael Eisner has been well documented, most notably in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures. Suffice to say that it was a tempestuous marriage, during which the Weinsteins carved their bloody niche in cinema history. Now, with their contract with Disney due to expire, Harvey may be about to ride — like El Cid — out of history and into legend.
The news on the street is that Eisner wants to retain Bob and his Dimension Films — the genre arm of Miramax that remains hugely profitable — and ditch Harvey, whom he considers an expensive liability.
Harvey’s great strength in the early days of Miramax, and throughout the honeymoon period with Disney, was his ability to turn a $10 million movie into box-office gold. More recently, probably around the time of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Disney executives watched in horror as Harvey’s ambitions led to pictures costing $100 million, for which the profit margin — if there was one at all — was markedly narrower.
Unrepentant, Harvey has continued to get behind big pictures, with Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain and The Aviator, Scorsese’s extravagant movie about Howard Hughes.
Given the current negotiations, which I have been warned not to address, The Aviator looks like Harvey’s final fling with Miramax. “I’m not sure it’s a swansong,” he says when I suggest that this may be the case. “Bob and I are having negotiations, and it might not turn out the way people think. We may not even leave. It (The Aviator) is Marty (Scorsese) and my’s (sic) second marriage. Compared with the stormy first marriage — and there were clouds along the way — this was more like a vacation at St Bart’s.”
Harvey attributes the new-found harmony to Leonardo DiCaprio, who dominates the film as Howard Hughes. “This is not Marty’s dream project and not Harvey’s dream project. It’s Leo’s dream project. He motivated everybody, including us. It often felt as if we were serving his ambition. He set the tone.”
The fact remains that Harvey is playing for high stakes once more, after a series of heavy losses. Even in the world of fantasy accounting inhabited by studio executives and film moguls, neither Gangs of New York nor Cold Mountain performed to any degree of satisfaction.
Harvey, however, is unfazed. Unlike his Hollywood counterparts, who regard the opening weekend figures as the whole story, he is looking at the long term. “One of the things that I’m criticised for is that I like to make big movies,” Harvey agrees.
“I’m not interested in making $100 million movies such as Spiderman or X-Men, which I love, but they aren’t me. Growing up I watched Lawrence of Arabia, I watched Spartacus. Those epics were always filled with intelligence, thanks to brilliant writers such as Robert Bolt and Dalton Trumbo. These are the heroes of my youth so, if I do epics, I’m gonna do those epics with the equivalent of a David Lean, which I think Anthony Minghella has evolved into in Cold Mountain.”
While Weinstein’s aspirations may be honourable, they do not appear to make financial sense in the current climate. The real returns are being generated by the comic-book extravaganzas, not the “intelligent” epic. And it is Miramax’s losses on the big movies that have provided Eisner with the leverage potentially to oust Harvey.
“Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Cold Mountain and Cinderella Man to come,” says Harvey, reciting the titles like a litany. “I look at these four huge movies and see them as the centrepiece to my own personal career. Yeah, I spent $400 million, but these are classics. Yeah, while it is relatively simple, economically, to take the lower-budget movies and turn them into corporate gold , I think it is the responsibility of a corporation also to grow with your directors.
