Word: miramaxers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...strong indie showing seemed a victory for a favorite hero of old Hollywood films: the nervy little guy. That can be misleading, since most of the "independent" companies are owned by media conglomerates: Miramax by the Walt Disney Co., Gramercy (which released Fargo) by Polygram, Fine Line (Shine) by Time Warner. October Films (Secrets & Lies) is partly financed by mighty Allen & Co., but despite rumors that it is open to a takeover bid, Bingham Ray vows to maintain autonomy. "We're at the peak of our game right now as a privately held, true independent," he says...
Harvey Weinstein has his own definition of independence. "It has always meant independent of the seven major studios," says Harvey, "and that's how we operate. Disney is our big daddy or rich uncle. Basically, they're our bank. You can say Disney or you can say Chase Manhattan." Miramax has the freedom to run its business so long as it works within budget guidelines and doesn't buy movies rated NC-17. "A hundred-percent freedom," says Disney CEO Michael Eisner. "They're completely autonomous. And they should be. They keep their costs down and their ideas up. They...
...Weinsteins also enjoy hondeling and hectoring. In 1993 Miramax heard that TIME was about to run a story revealing that Jaye Davidson, the "female" lead in The Crying Game, was a man (hardly a scoop, since Davidson had won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor). Furious, Harvey called a top editor 18 times in one day in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the nonsecret a secret...
...Miramax has always had a genius for picking films. Sometimes it picks them out of the gutter. The Miramax tactic: find a pretty orphan, take it home, dress it up and show it off. When TriStar said no to Pulp Fiction, the Weinsteins eagerly said yes and snagged their biggest hit ever. Last year 20th Century Fox backed out of The English Patient just before the film was to begin shooting. Instead Fox pinned its Oscar hopes on another sweeping morality play, The Crucible--only to see it swept away, at the box office and in the Oscar race...
...movie executive would prefer fathering films to merely adopting them. But while you can make a lot of money producing pictures, you can also lose a lot. Miramax did indeed tank with some of its early in-house productions, like The Lemon Sisters with Diane Keaton and The Long Walk Home with Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. It has been more successful with genre films birthed by Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films. Dimension plans sequels to Scream, From Dusk Till Dawn and Total Recall, originally made by another studio. Miramax, which traditionally had more pickups than homegrown product, is making...