Word: miramaxers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years ago, Miramax made the brilliantly subversive decision to release Scream on Dec. 12. While analysts proclaimed the move "ignorant," good ol' Harvey Weinstein knew exactly what he was doing. Good cheer at Christmas masks the craving for blood, guts and sex-anything, anything to get us away from the umpteenth group singing of "Silent Night." Scream rocked the box office and Scream 2 opened in the same slot the next year to $39 million. Should have been a trend-o-rama, right? Nope. We're back to "Good for You" fare. Just look at this year's slate...
...stores, on the Web and at conventions like last month's Anime Weekend Atlanta. But the form needed a blockbuster and a benediction from the critics. Enter Pokemon (nuff said) and Princess Mononoke, a daunting ecological epic by anime god Hayao Miyazaki, now being released by art-house arbiter Miramax Films. All the latter movie did, in 1997, was become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history (later topped only by Titanic...
...animaster's great coup may have been to impose his will--that the film not be cut--on Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax. Weinstein is notorious for his itch to trim foreign films to suit the faster American pulse; he reads a sonnet and dreams of a couplet. Says Weinstein: "It's a genius movie. Could it be streamlined? Yeah, and it could be more accessible as a result of cutting. But Miyazaki is like Kurosawa or Sergio Leone--one of the greats of international cinema. The very idea of cutting is anathema to a director of this importance...
...lightning has not struck the building. So I guess it's O.K. with the Lord." Smith, 29, had endured a rough six months, ever since the Catholic League, a lay group with 350,000 members and an intimidating letterhead, had pressured the Walt Disney Co. and its subsidiary Miramax Films to drop Dogma, Smith's rambunctious comedy about God, faith and a monster made of poop. Smith was able to make his movie freely, but if the protesters had had their way, he couldn't show it. To twist the famous bumper-sticker phrase, their karma ran over his Dogma...
...life can now return to bustling normality. He will continue with his comic-book writing, scripts for Miramax and Warner Bros. (a Superman draft didn't work out) and a prime-time cartoon version of Clerks for, of course, Disney. "It's just rife with irony, isn't it?" he says. "Let's see if we can deliver the PG my mother was always lookin' for." But his biggest project is to enjoy time with his new wife Jennifer Schwalbach, a former writer for USA Today, and their newborn daughter Harley Quinn. "I want to take the next year...