« Screening Gotham--June 2-4, 2006 | Main | Kerrigan, 'Keane' Podcast Now Available for Your Listening Pleasure »
June 05, 2006
'Are You German?': The Reeler Spends a Night With the Weinsteins
Do you want to know why I love Harvey Weinstein? Perfect example: Last night, he and his brother Bob essentially represented the headline act at The Times's Sunday with the Magazine speaker series at the CUNY Graduate Center. Madeleine Albright, Karl Lagerfeld, Howard Dean and a bunch of boldface others did their own routines with Times Magazine editors and writers, but only the Weinsteins had the juice and authority to close the day-long event with the last word. Or maybe it was a scheduling necessity. I do not know.
My good camera is in the shop: Harvey and Bob Weinstein leave it all on the stage during their sold-out speaking engagement Sunday night (Photos: STV)
But that is not the reason why I love Harvey. Rather, it was the girl, the one with the Teutonic accent who asked the brothers during the audience Q&A: How do you work together? How you get on? Do you see a lot of each other? How often do you talk?
Bob replied with some answer or another, after which Harvey asked the girl, "Are you German?"
"Yes," she said.
"I thought so," Weinstein said. "I could tell from the interrogation."
Two hundred groans later, Harvey had reaffirmed his virile, shameless mogul power in my heart. After all, the preceding discussion, moderated by a thoroughly uninformed Lynn Hirschberg ("Did you have the cast for Pulp Fiction when you bought the property?") and introduced with a five- or six-minute montage of almost every Miramax movie ever made (and, notably, not a single Weinstein Company picture), had inspired an unnerving ambivalence in me and at least a few of my neighbors. I mean, doesn't everybody know the brothers fell in love with foreign film during their horny adolescence, when they checked out The 400 Blows thinking it was a porn film? And must we revisit the marketing strategy behind The English Patient again?
There were some payoffs, I suppose, including Harvey explaining how the roots of The Crying Game's marketing campaign spidered down into his outrage over a gaybashing incident in San Diego. "They'd think it's a mystery; they'd think it's a film noir," he said, referring to the homophobes he wanted to shock. "They'd walk in and they get their brains rearranged. I was pissed off about the incident. So out of that came the famous 'don't tell the secret.'
"About four weeks into it," Harvey continued, "the movie's working brilliantly. Everything is going great. Audiences are loving it. Nobody is giving away the secret. Time Magazine, in their infinite wisdom--Walter Isaacson, whom I still love, was the editor of the magazine--and Richard Corliss called and said, 'We're going to give it away this week.' "
"But why?" Hirschberg said. "Why, why, why?"
"Because they said that everybody knows," Harvey answered. "I said, 'Everybody knows?' He said, 'Look, we've all seen the movies in screening rooms.' That was the stopper. Screening rooms? I said, 'Wait a minute. There are movie theaters out there.' I'd think back to the early days of taking The Secret Policeman's Other Ball all around the country. You know: Us going and visiting, seeing what the movie theater looked like in Pittsburgh, in Iowa, in Nebraska and being there. This whole Manhattan elite, 'Oh, screening rooms'? OK
"So we said to them, 'They don't. They don't know it.' 'No, they all know it.' 'They don't know it, and they don't want to know it.' So finally the only way to convince them--this was a Thursday--was that on Friday and Saturday, we commissioned a Gallup Poll. It cost us $100,000 to find out if Time Magazine's readers wanted to know the secret of The Crying Game. And 97 percent of their readers said they don't want to know."
"Really?" Hirschberg said.
"Yeah," Harvey said. "That stopped it. I called Walter and said, 'Here's proof. Your instincts are completely wrong. So he did it as an anagram."
"He did it as an anagram?" Hirschberg said.
"Yeah," Harvey said. "In the article. You've gotta be Dan Brown to figure it out."
Such anecdotes made up the majority of the chat. Another highlight occurred when an incredulous Bob recounted Harvey calling wanting to buy My Left Foot, while Harvey recalled Bob phoning from Toronto wanting to buy The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Half the crowd had walked out of Peter Greenaway's sex-and-death opus by the midway point, Bob said, and more than a few who stayed to the end told him they hated it. But for such canny capitalists, the potential was unmistakable.
"Art and a little sex, we find, go a long way," Bob said. "It comes from the 400 Blows days."
"Isn't it basically Helen Mirren doing strange things?" Hirschberg asked.
"Well, there's cannibalism in the movie," Bob said. "Some child abuse. But artistic, you know?"
Jump forward to the film's opening day in New York, when viewers streamed out of the theater told those waiting on line to skip it. The film was depraved and vile, they warned, and nobody should see it. But it only made the crowd outside more resolute to give the film a shot. "They're paying to see it for themselves," Harvey said.
"And that was your campaign?" Hirschberg asked.
"And that was our campaign," Harvey replied. "And it worked. We made $7 or $8 million on people absolutely being told, 'Do not fucking see this movie.' "
Naturally, this being a Times-sponsored event, I thought I should keep the Q&A topical by invoking another hero of mine, Caryn James. A few months back, you might remember, James saddled up her seeing-eye dog for a ramble through the Weinstein Company's decidedly safe slate of films, only a smattering of which bore any resemblance to the edgy Miramax fare of decades past. "Well, I think you've got to do a head count," Harvey told me. "You've got to have a healthy balance. I don't think anybody would say that Transamerica would be an easy sell, and yet it turned out to be quite successful. So if you want to give us 'edgy' points, we'll take them on Transamerica, or even The Matador was something we thought was pushing forward. But there's always going to be a Miss Potter, because we like those movies, and the audiences like Mrs. Henderson Presents, and we're fans of that very literate kind of movie that England does so well and that we try to do well with England. But for every one of those, there's also Chronicles of an Escape, an Argentinian movie that's about as tough a movie as anybody's going to see--certainly as tough as City of God. You watch that, and it's tough to make it through that first hour. But the second hour is pure elation. It's about as tough as anything you're going to see this year from anybody. We'll continue to mix it up, which is the best thing we can do."
Of course, the difference between Miramax-edgy and TWC-edgy is that TWC-edgy has thus far been analogous to "loose stool," Felicity Huffman's sublime work in Transamerica notwithstanding. The bulk of the Weinsteins' foreign-film investment thus far is tied up in Asian genre pictures, not heirs to the mantle of, say, Kieslowski, whose Three Colors trilogy they distributed in 1993-94. But as always, I am with Harvey; do not forget (not that he will let you) that he could not have raised $1 billion in funding if his taste was anything less than impeccable. Just do not apply that standard to Doogal or Samantha Morton. Or, you know, German chicks.
Posted by stvanairsdale at June 5, 2006 10:00 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mcnblogs.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1106