RISKY BUSINESS: PLAYING ROUGH
Anne Thompson on the dealmaking and backstage drama at Sundance 2004.
Robert Redford at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
PHOTO: FRED HAYES/WIREIMAGE.COM
There was shoving and name-calling in the hallways in Park City, Utah, this year, but this time Harvey Weinstein wasn’t in town. A new generation of buyers lined up before each new premiere screening like vultures hovering over their quarry. Call them Harvey’s children. They chased down filmmakers, ready to land deals at any cost. Harvey would have been proud.
Distributors were falling over each other to grab literate dramas with name stars (The Motorcycle Diaries, We Don’t Live Here Anymore), shock docs (the surfer flick Riding Giants, the fast-food exposé Super Size Me) and new digital cinema (Open Water, CSA: The Confederate States of America). “It’s a seller’s market,“ says IFC Films’ Jonathan Sehring, who scooped up CSA. “A lot more movies are selling. Now every studio has a classics division.“ The big box office tallies of last year’s Sundance buys boosted distributors’ expectations, and festival director Geoff Gilmore front-loaded the festival with the distribution-friendly pics.
“The deals closed slower last year,“ he explains. “There was trepidation about what did work in the marketplace. Then people saw how well American Splendor, Capturing the Friedmans, Thirteen, The Station Agent and The Cooler did. These were not standard commercial films. They were hard to describe. But there was an indie audience waiting to find them. Now the acquisitions field is more crowded, and they are willing to take a chance on audiences.“
Another major new player with a slate to fill was Warner Bros. Independent president Mark Gill. In the first few days of frenzied bidding at Sundance, he lost out on several pictures, including the prize of the festival, Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries. The coming-of-age road saga (executive-produced by Robert Redford) starring Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal as the 23-year-old Che Guevara, was aced by Focus Features, who paid the highest fee ever ($4 million) for a foreign-language pickup. “Getting into Sundance is like winning the fucking lottery for an independent filmmaker,“ says Endeavor agent John Lesher, who reps Salles. “Every studio wanted it. It was their first chance to see the movie, which was a labor of love for all involved. We wanted people to love the film, feel passionate. We were happy to go with Focus.“
Gill, who learned his job at Harvey Weinstein’s knee, had been through many a tough late-night Miramax negotiation. And he was determined to win the Tuesday-night bidding war for John Curran’s sexy swinging-couples movie We Don’t Live Here Anymore, starring the stellar Laura Dern, Peter Krause, Mark Ruffalo and Naomi Watts.
It all happened at a noisy party for Wire Image and CAA. Gill was upstairs negotiating with frazzled William Morris Independent agent Cassian Elwes, who kept running into the bathroom with his cell phone, trying to keep rival bidders at bay. When he went downstairs to confront one angry suitor, he got into a shoving match in the hallway with Newmarket topper Will Tyrer, who screamed at him for favoring Warner Bros. “Fuck you!“ Elwes yelled back. Gill was delighted with his $2 million purchase. “It sends the message,“ he says, “that we want to be in the smart-movies-for-grown-ups business.“
Newmarket’s Tyrer and his film president, Bob Berney, moved on and grabbed their movie the next day, Nicole Kassell’s precisely calibrated The Woodsman, starring Kevin Bacon as an unlikely hero: a pederast. The company’s been on a roll, with the Oscar-winning Monster and the highest-grossing indie and foreign-language movie of all time, The Passion of the Christ. It remains to be seen if they can keep that pace: Berney plans a fall release for The Woodsman, with an Oscar campaign. When you’re on a roll, it’s just like blackjack,“ he says. There’s a lot to be said for momentum.
Clearly, the topic du jour at Sundance, Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, didn’t make things any easier for its putative villains, Sundance festival founder Robert Redford and Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein. Biskind learned his lessons well at Vanity Fair and Premiere. If you want drama and controversy, hang your Big Ideas on Big Celebrities. He knew where he’d get the most ink: from dissing aging Golden Boy Redford (who has always attracted more flak than he deserved) and the Weinsteins (who had it coming). This exposé of their graceless thuggery is the Pandora’s box that their publicists worked overtime for years to suppress. Someday it had to explode.
“It’s the big story of celebrity more than small films,“ says Weinstein, who admits that he behaved badly with Frida director Julie Taymor and others, but says other accounts were “exaggerated in a tabloid way that aren’t true. People want to write a story about a big movie like The Aviator, which we won in a bidding war with DreamWorks. No one will talk about Zatôichi, or the six-hour Italian movie The Best of Youth. We have our bad sides and good sides. Yeah, I can’t control my temper. But Bob Redford had to write a check in the millions to sustain that festival. No one talks about that.“
When Biskind came calling for an interview, says Redford during a break from interviews for his starring role in The Clearing, “it was déjà vu all over again.“ He had been burnt a decade ago when Biskind did a “hatchet job“ on him in Premiere and then handed copies out on street corners at Sundance. Redford refused to talk to the writer this time. “Clearly, there’s an issue there,“ he says. “There’s only one reward for me: a mission-accomplished feeling. Whatever I was trying to do 20-some-odd years ago is being realized. We created a safe place to toughen filmmakers to face the merchant mentality; more actors want to be in independent films; we’ve kept more human stories and diversity alive; gender politics are being erased. It makes me sad that someone is so determined to find something wrong that they miss what’s there. Whatever negative stuff comes out, nothing’s going to stop me or Sundance.“
While Biskind focuses on Redford and the Weinsteins, he doesn’t seem to understand the context of the world they helped to change for the better. “Look at the most exciting directors working today,“ Fox Searchlight president Peter Rice says, “and a large percentage of them came out of either the Sundance labs or the festival: Bryan Singer, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Edward Burns, Todd Field, David Siegel and Scott McGehee, Alexander Payne, Robert Rodriguez. They scrabbled together a few hundred thousand and showed their first features here; they wouldn’t have done it without Sundance. It gives a showcase to the unusual.“
“Biskind gets half the point,“ says Gill. “It’s messy making sausage. But he did not stress that it’s awfully good sausage. Between these two guys, they have revolutionized the movie business.“
During Sundance, Biskind’s book gave Miramax a public relations headache. Bad Harvey — the screaming “scissorhands“ renegotiator who bullied Saul Zaentz, Todd Field, and Bernardo Bertolucci and drove away Ben Affleck and Matt Damon — had overwhelmed Good Harvey — the benign patron of indie filmmaking beloved by Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Anthony Minghella. Weinstein found it tough going as he negotiated by phone for talented young actor-writer-director Zach Braff’s debut romantic comedy Garden State. When Weinstein realized that he might lose the bid to arch-competitor Fox Searchlight, rather than keep jacking up the price he called Searchlight president Peter Rice (who had partnered with Miramax on the Baz Luhrmann opera La Bohème) and offered to split rights on Garden State around the world. Rice agreed, and they both turned up together on a conference call to close the $5 million deal. At Sundance, Braff sat down with Rice and his team to discuss distribution and marketing. “We still don’t have worked out who’s releasing what,“ insists Weinstein, but “we took cutting the film off the table.“
“The filmmakers wanted to have Peter Rice control the cut and release,“ asserts one rival distributor. “Harvey wouldn’t have gotten anything otherwise.“
Ironically, says writer John Pierson, who has just published a revised edition of his indie classic Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, “you could not pick a better time to make a deal with Miramax. You don’t have to worry about whether you can trust Harvey. He’s sitting on a chair with every light in the world on his face.“
“They’re formidable competitors,“ says Gill. “They’re always strong, sometimes a little rough, but they will always be in the game.“
There’s no question that both Redford and the Weinsteins, imperfect though they may be, were instrumental in changing the course of movies in Hollywood. But so did a lot of other people, including Down and Dirty’s hapless hero: ex-October Films and United Artists chief Bingham Ray, the cinephile among the philistines, the man who loved the likes of Mike Leigh, Lars von Trier and David Lynch. He’s the one who got really hurt by the Biskind book.
Within days of its publication, Ray was out on his ear at UA because he talked so candidly to Biskind about the screener ban, which had already gotten him in trouble with his boss, MGM chairman Alex Yemenidjian. Although Ray knew that his contract would not be renewed in May, he sent out e-mails with his contact numbers at Sundance, ready to lead the UA acquisitions team into battle. Ray never went — and can’t talk about the terms of his abrupt departure. According to insiders at UA, the MGM specialty label will now add more mainstream commercial flicks like Jeepers Creepers and the upcoming The Woods to its eclectic slate. Just what we all need.
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