|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I
Harvey Weinstein sometimes believes that Hollywood is out to get him. He believed this even before it was true. Weinstein, or Harvey--in the movie business, there is only one Harvey--believes that he is a target partly because Miramax, the studio that he co-founded with his brother, Bob, is based in New York. Mostly, he believes that the movie industry resents the success he's had in the past two decades, making movies--sometimes brilliant, innovative movies--that Hollywood wouldn't touch.
The view from Hollywood is a little different; people there say that they are repelled by his behavior, which can be spectacularly coarse, and even threatening. That may seem a curious reaction; after all, abusive behavior--starting with the casting couch--became something of an art form in the early years of Hollywood and never really went away. Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, Harry Cohn, William Fox, and Samuel Goldwyn were, each in his own way, bombastic, bullying personalities. And in today's Hollywood tantrums are commonplace. But even in this context Harvey Weinstein stands out. Those who have been witness to his outbursts, public and private, describe not a lovable rogue but, rather, a man with little self-control, whose tone of voice and whose body language can seem dangerous; at times, he appears about to burst with fury, his fists closed, his teeth clenched, his large head shaking as he loses the struggle to contain himself.
At the Cannes Film Festival last May, Weinstein, who is six feet tall and weighs two hundred and fifty pounds, spotted Barry Diller, the chief executive of Vivendi Universal Entertainment. In a loud voice, he said to Diller, who is a fit five feet nine, "Why'd you call me a bully?"
"You are a bully," Diller replied, and the two studio executives stood toe to toe on the terrace of the Hotel du Cap, as an audience of actors, directors, models, and fellow-executives watched. Diller thought that there was going to be a fistfight.
Weinstein had been provoked by an article in which Diller was quoted as calling him a thug. Diller had done so because in Los Angeles the previous January, on the night of the Golden Globe awards, Weinstein had threatened a Universal executive. Although Miramax had received three Golden Globes, its best-picture candidate, "In the Bedroom," had not won, and Weinstein was irate; the Golden Globes often presaged the Academy Awards, in March. What was more, he knew of an upcoming story in the Post suggesting that he had orchestrated a whispering campaign to impugn "A Beautiful Mind," a best-picture candidate from Universal and DreamWorks SKG. Stacey Snider, the chairman of Universal, told me that Miramax, and specifically Harvey Weinstein, was to blame. (It was falsely rumored that John Nash, the mathematician on whom the movie is based, was an anti-Semite.) Weinstein says that the Post story originated with Universal and DreamWorks. Although Snider denied this, Weinstein said, "I blamed her."
After the Golden Globes ceremony, the Creative Artists Agency gave a party at the restaurant Muse for six hundred people. Snider was exhilarated, because "A Beautiful Mind" had won several awards, including best drama. When Weinstein saw her in the crowd, he headed her way and cornered her in an alcove across from the bar. To the petite Snider, he was a fearsome sight--his eyes dark and glowering, his fleshy face unshaved, his belly jutting forward half a foot or so ahead of his body. He jabbed a finger at Snider's face and screamed, "You're going to go down for this!"
"He was in my space," Snider said later. She assured him that she had not accused him, and that they were friends. Weinstein, in one of two versions of the incident he later gave me, said, "I never raised my voice to Stacey." By saying she would "go down," he meant that her movie would get tarnished.
The next morning, Snider telephoned Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks. Snider said, "I felt unsure about whether or not Harvey could become reasonable," and she wanted DreamWorks--Universal's equal partner in "A Beautiful Mind"--to be aware of the threat. She also knew that in 1993, when Katzenberg was the president of Walt Disney Studios, he had engineered Disney's acquisition of Miramax. Although Weinstein and Katzenberg often fought, Weinstein considered him one of his closest friends in the business.
Katzenberg, too, believed that Weinstein was behind the campaign against "A Beautiful Mind." Over the next twenty-four hours, the two had a series of tough conversations. "I love Harvey," Katzenberg told me, and yet he recalled a warning that he had given to Weinstein: "You can't work this way. You are endangering my friendship, and you must apologize to Stacey." Today, Weinstein is contrite. "I yelled, perhaps too loudly," he said. He eventually telephoned Snider to apologize, and he later apologized to Diller, too.
"It's time to be a statesman," Snider told Weinstein when they talked; she appealed to his vanity, telling him that if he ever wanted to win the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award--named after a widely admired studio pioneer--he would have to change. Weinstein was chastened. "This year, I decided to take Stacey's advice," he told me during one of several conversations we had in his Tribeca office. "I'm going to go out of my way. It's like Ariel Sharon--you can't be a lion of the desert and then not govern properly. At a certain point, it's time for the fire-bombing to be over. You've got to know when the revolution has succeeded. Why do I have to keep fighting?"
Yet something propels him, as the director Julie Taymor discovered in March, two months after the Golden Globes party. Taymor, who created "The Lion King" for Disney on Broadway, directed "Frida" for Miramax. The film, which opened this fall to mixed reviews, is about the free-spirited Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her marriage to Diego Rivera.
Last spring, when Weinstein saw "Frida," he decided that the pace was too slow and that the film was sometimes confusing. After a test screening at an Upper West Side theatre in March, Pauline Sealey-Kitazato, Miramax's director of market research, reported that the test audience liked the film but agreed with Weinstein. Taymor dismissed the complaints. Weinstein, standing in front of the theatre's popcorn counter and holding the questionnaire results in one hand, seemed briefly out of control. "You are the most arrogant person I have ever met," he said, ripping up the test results and dropping the scraps in front of Taymor, her collaborator and partner, Elliot Goldenthal, and other members of their production team. "I'm going to sell this to HBO," he said--meaning that he wouldn't release the movie in theatres, or that he might release it in theatres but skimp on marketing and yank it from circulation. The point was clear: this was Taymor's movie in name only. Weinstein walked away.
A moment later, Weinstein reappeared; he saw Taymor's agent, Bart Walker, of I.C.M., and yelled at him, "Get the fuck out of here!" To Goldenthal, who wrote the score for "Frida," Weinstein said, "I don't like the look on your face." Then, according to several witnesses, he moved very close to Goldenthal and said, "Why don't you defend her so I can beat the shit out of you?" Goldenthal quickly escorted Taymor away. When asked about this incident, Weinstein insisted that he did not threaten Goldenthal, yet he concedes, "I am not saying I was remotely hospitable. I did not behave well. I was not physically menacing to anybody. But I was rude and impolite." One member of Taymor's team described Weinstein's conduct as actually bordering on "criminal assault." Taymor thought of quitting or taking her name off the movie, fully expecting Miramax to abandon it--until, eventually, Weinstein called to say that he really loved the movie and wanted to work with her. Taymor stayed in the picture.
After Weinstein's blowup with Stacey Snider, and his subsequent apology, he promised that he would change--that he'd be more collegial and, several people say, consider attending anger-management classes. He says that after his exchange with Julie Taymor he promised that if he had another tantrum he would give a hundred thousand dollars to Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang camp for seriously ill children. Weinstein told me that his temper is "the thing I hate most about myself."
Harvey Weinstein believes that these flareups are simply the manifestations of a passion for movies, and, at fifty, he sees himself in the tradition of such studio greats as Thalberg and David O. Selznick. He believes that the heads of the other major studios are even more intrusive than he is, and he says, "They do it to make the movie commercial. I do it to protect the artistic integrity of an idea, and to help it be commercial. There should be creative tension. That's why I like David O. Selznick, not Harry Cohn. Cohn had no fucking taste."
Cohn's crude, abusive behavior to just about everyone is legendary. Cohn's funeral, in 1958, was crowded, and Red Skelton supposedly remarked, "Well, it only proves what they always say--give the public something they want to see, and they'll come out for it." Cohn, like Weinstein, believed that conflict produced superior work, and he made some fine movies: "It Happened One Night," "All the King's Men," "Born Yesterday," and "The Caine Mutiny," among others. Yet Weinstein, unlike Cohn, reads the scripts and books that Miramax buys, and in that way is closer to Selznick, who envisioned how "Gone with the Wind" could be brought to the screen. When I mentioned Cohn, Weinstein was not pleased. He looked down at his pack of Carltons. The top was ripped off so that he could more quickly grab a cigarette; he smokes several packs daily. He took a swig from a Diet Coke; one of his four aides always has a can ready before he sits down anywhere. Finally, he looked up and said, "Harry Cohn--that's the worst thing you could say to me. I don't think any filmmaker I've worked with, maybe with the exception of Jim Ivory"--the director James Ivory, of the Merchant-Ivory partnership--"would say that. I'm making 'Trainspotting,' 'Pulp Fiction.' I'm making calls on some of the most controversial material ever done in the movies. That's not the province of a businessman like Harry Cohn." Weinstein looked genuinely hurt.
A former employee who has thought about this comparison asks, "How can someone so crass make such good movies?" One Hollywood figure, who asked to remain unnamed, has a quick answer: "Beauty and the Beast." The producer and talent manager Bernie Brillstein said, "Passion means that you're willing to take a chance on something that's not formulaic, that you believe in the picture, not the grosses. In the long run, we'll remember the movies"--not the bullying. On the other hand, Brillstein has no business dealings with Weinstein.
In part because of the bullying, Weinstein appears to have unleashed the sort of hostility and distaste that undid the once powerful talent agent Michael Ovitz. A recurring opinion is that Weinstein's behavior has got worse as his power has grown, and that as his power has grown he has abused it--much the way studio founders like Cohn did. One Hollywood executive said that Weinstein "is on the same trajectory" as Ovitz, and added that, like Ovitz, he "has lost the ability to see things clearly," that his ego has intruded. Several senior agents at the three largest Hollywood agencies--William Morris, C.A.A., and I.C.M.--told me that they were trying to steer business away from Miramax. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, which charts the ebb and flow of power in Hollywood, observed, "In so many conversations in Hollywood, at some point Harvey's name comes up, and not always in a good way."
Weinstein, however, compares himself to Spartacus battling the Roman Empire of Hollywood--as if, apart from his occasional ill-tempered outbursts, nothing had changed. "Let me translate brutality in the movie industry: honesty," he told me. "They say it's brutal. Yeah, it's brutal to tell the truth in an industry where everyone lies."
II
On most days, Weinstein arrives at Miramax's office, on Greenwich Street, in Tribeca, before 10 A.M. He's driven in a black Mercedes, which has four phones and visors that flip down to become small movie screens; associates refer to the car as the Batmobile. His four assistants occupy his outer office, and one of them usually travels with him and keeps him in cell-phone contact with the world. Weinstein's office, which his wife recently remodelled, has exposed-brick walls, and everything in it seems too small for the large man who occupies it. The biggest object is a framed poster for "Nevada Smith," featuring Steve McQueen. There is no computer, because Weinstein barely knows how to use one; an adjoining room has exercise equipment, but he rarely uses it.
One day in...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
