Is the Weinstein Brothers Ship Sinking?I sure hope that Bob and Harvey Weinstein get their shit together. They have made some great movies in the past. But not putting any money behind them to promote the movies is Horse shit. You spend all this money to make the movie and then don't put anything into promoting it. Real Smart. Get it together and bring back the old magic that made this team on of the best out there.
IN the wee hours of Friday morning, Quentin Tarantino stood in a West Village bar that had opened for him and his entourage — cast members of his new movie, “Inglourious Basterds,” and his longtime producers, Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Swinging a blue cocktail in one hand, he held forth about the time that Harvey told him he’d like to invest in a restaurant.
The goal, Harvey explained to Mr. Tarantino at the time, wasn’t to schmooze, or to get the best table. New York City had just banned cigarettes from restaurants and Harvey, then an avid smoker, didn’t approve.
“He said, ‘I want to light up in my own restaurant and blow smoke in the fire marshal’s face,’ ” Mr. Tarantino recalled.
Vintage Harvey chutzpah. The story killed, and when the laughing died down, Bob smiled, waited a beat and added another punch line.
“A million dollars,” he sighed, “for a cigarette.”
Ah, the flush years. They must seem kind of distant now. Because four years after Disney bought the Weinsteins out of Miramax, the company that first ushered indie films into the multiplex, the brothers are under serious stress.
A full accounting of their agita begins, naturally, with a batch of underperforming movies. Since opening its doors in 2005, the Weinstein Company has released about 70 films, and more than one quarter of them failed to break the $1 million box-office mark in the United States. Thirteen of these took in less than $100,000.
To complicate matters, the company’s beloved reality television show, “Project Runway,” was until recently sidelined by litigation. Harvey decided last year to move the show from Bravo to Lifetime, prompting NBC, which owns Bravo, to sue, contending that it had the right to match Lifetime’s bid and keep the program. In April, the Weinstein Company settled for an undisclosed sum, and those backstabbing fashionistas will return to the air, at long last, on Thursday night.
Yes, the brothers have had triumphs as well. Bob, who handles the lowbrow genre stuff, scored with the supernatural thriller “1408” and “Scary Movie 4.” (These brought in $72 million and $91 million, respectively.) Harvey showed a bit of the maestro’s touch with “Hoodwinked,” and with “The Reader,” which has taken in $101 million around the world, despite some tepid reviews, and won Kate Winslet an Oscar.
But the Weinsteins’ flop-to-jackpot ratio has been high enough to prompt the brothers to hire Miller Buckfire & Company, financial advisers who help troubled clients restructure. Last week, the firm finished its review and is urging Team Weinstein to release and promote only 10 movies a year, unload unpromising titles from its film library and avoid empire-building.
To shore up their finances, the brothers received a bridge loan a few months ago estimated at $75 million from Ziff Brothers Investments, according to two people familiar with the loan who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about it.
“We are a private company and aren’t going to comment on unsubstantiated claims from unnamed sources,” Harvey says of the bridge loan. He points over and over to what he describes as a robust pipeline of film, theater and television projects, not to mention a library of 250 films. Sit tight, he advises, and don’t bet against us.
But some backers of the Weinstein Company say they’re getting anxious. They were corralled in 2005 by Goldman Sachs, which helped raise $1 billion for the company. At the time, filmmaking had acquired a certain cachet in private equity circles, and here was a chance to bankroll what were arguably two of the greatest movie producers in modern cinematic history.
Starting in the late ’80s, the Weinsteins produced “Pulp Fiction,” “Shakespeare in Love,” “The English Patient,” “My Left Foot,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Piano” and hundreds of other movies, garnering 249 Academy Award nominations and three Oscars for best picture. In one 11-year stretch, they racked up 13 best-picture nominations.
SO what happened? In part, the Weinstein Company is coping with the same problems facing every other studio, most notably the grim slowdown of the DVD market. But plenty of the Weinsteins’ wounds are also self-inflicted. Instead of using their lush, Goldman-fueled pile of start-up money to focus on filmmaking, the brothers ventured into such new realms as fashion (buying part of Halston, the once-storied label), online social networking (through A Small World, known informally as MySpace for Millionaires) and a piece of Ovation, the cable network.
These were all Harvey’s ideas — his attempt, he says, at a Barry Diller-style conglomerate. The problem wasn’t just that the companies failed to generate vast profits. It’s that they took Harvey’s eye off the film ball, which is why he kept whiffing.
“What happened was, I got more fascinated by these other businesses and I figured, ‘Making movies, I can do that in my sleep,’ ” he says in an interview in his office in downtown Manhattan. “I kind of delegated the process of production and acquisitions. Yes, I had a say in it, but was I 100 percent concentrating? Absolutely not. I thought I could build the company and delegate authority, and that’s where it went wrong.”
Bob, meanwhile, has disavowed his goal of becoming the next king of African-American urban comedies, an unlikely ambition for a Jewish guy from Queens. But a few years ago, he took note of Tyler Perry’s success, and it looked like easy money. Bob produced “Long Shots,” with Ice Cube, and “Soul Men” with Bernie Mac and Samuel L. Jackson.
“Did like $15 million gross,” Bob says of “Soul Men,” “and it was a relatively expensive, $20 million movie. And for an African-American movie, there’s no foreign business. So those were two bad missteps, definitely.”
For months, the brothers have ignored media requests for comments, leaving lots of “Are the Weinsteins goners?” articles and blog posts with boilerplate denials offered up by their representatives. The two broke their silence to deliver this very simple message: We’re back to what we know. Bob is planning three new “Scream” films, the most profitable franchise in the Weinsteins’ history. Harvey has sworn off interest in the nonmovie parts of his business, sounding a bit like a married man lamenting a fling.
“I’m going to just do this and nothing else,” he says.
At minimum, the brothers are focused on the director who gave them “Pulp Fiction,” Mr. Tarantino. “I’ve got their undivided attention, I can honestly say that,” Mr. Tarantino said in a phone interview. “They want ‘Inglourious Basterds’ to be a hit even more than I want it to be a hit. Even in the grand scheme of things, it’s more important to them than me.”
Born promoters, the brothers have timed their mea culpas for maximum impact. “Inglourious Basterds” is one of several must-wins on a slate of roughly 10 Weinstein films on their way in coming months. The others are “Nine,” a film version of the Broadway musical, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Penélope Cruz. There’s also “Halloween II” and an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalypse bummer, “The Road,” starring Viggo Mortensen. For some of these films, “Inglourious” among them, the brothers had to bring in partners to split production and promotion expenses, which means they’ll split profits, too.
Will these guys be around to shepherd all these movies into theaters? The question has the sort of final-reel drama that the Weinsteins, in other circumstances, might savor. What’s certain is if there aren’t a few blockbusters in the near future, these guys are going to have to find new jobs.
Of course, rivals and reporters have issued dire predictions like that throughout the Weinsteins’ career. But there’s a difference. This time, it’s a Weinstein making the prediction.
“The ship’s riding on the slate,” Harvey says, sounding remarkably buoyant, all things considered. “If by February, when we release ‘Hoodwinked 2’ ” — he playfully thumps a hand on the table, dramatizing the sound of failure — “I’ll be driving you, or making cheap hamburgers, or selling trailers, or refrigerators, or something. If the slate works, we’re right back to plan.”
THE Weinsteins — Harvey is 57 year old, Bob is 54 — will not discuss how much money they have left in the bank, but just calling up and asking for an interview, you could get the impression they’re running low. A few years ago, you’d barely have the receiver off your ear before public relations specialists would call to vigorously frisk you about your intentions. Your request for a sit-down would initially be denied, but if you persisted, you would eventually be summoned to Harvey’s office, where he would praise your work and offer you some goodie — a book deal, for instance — if you wrote about something else.
Not now. The Weinstein Company doesn’t keep the same phalanx of P.R. pros on retainer, lost perhaps in a downsizing that included an 11 percent staff cut last year. Once you get into Harvey’s office, the most you can expect by way of enticing offers these days is a well-brewed cup of coffee.
That said, the brothers were downright generous with me when it came to screening their coming movies. In fact, they shared as much of their slate as was ready — six movies in all, as well as ads, DVDs and rough cuts of unfinished products.
The goal, they said, was to demonstrate the strength of these films. For Harvey, it also seemed as if the screenings were supposed to bolster his case if — or, perhaps in his mind, when — he had to complain about this article. We showed him everything and he still said we’re doomed, was the subtext. If there is such a thing as prevenge, this is it.
“You see this?” Harvey asks, pounding a finger against a sheet of paper. It’s a Nielsen NRG tracking poll, a gauge of public interest in coming movies. He points to figures besides “Inglourious Basterds.” Here’s the G-rated version of what he says next: “This is called ‘smash hit’!”
Behold the charming Harvey, a plumpish, easily excited man with ink-dark eyes, two days’ worth of facial stubble and a trace of a New York accent. He is self-deprecating, chatty and usually in a rush. He has about him that magnetic field of charisma that you recognize as soon as you pass through his orbit.
Happily, we won’t meet the irate Harvey, but those who have encountered him describe a combustible, thin-skinned creature who belongs in the Extreme Mammals exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. In Hollywood, he is known for outbursts that elevate profanity and rage to a kind of performance art. He says that age, his daughters from a first marriage, and his second wife, the 33-year-old British clothing designer Georgina Chapman, have mellowed him. But even after decades at the epicenter of the film business, he and his brother seem to consider themselves gatecrashers at a party where everyone wonders how they got past the bouncer. They tend to believe that many people are rooting for their demise — reporters in particular.
“We should send all journalists to Kamchatka, this place where nothing grows,” he jokes at one point, invoking a Siberian backwater. He laughs and adds, “That’s where they’re going to send me.”
We’re at a Friday-afternoon marketing meeting in the Weinstein Company’s offices in TriBeCa, on the third floor of a red-brick office building over a restaurant. Harvey sits at the head of a large table, sporting a black suit and white shirt, a uniform he wears every other day, when he isn’t in a dark blue suit with a white shirt. It’s a foolproof wardrobe strategy for a guy with little fashion sense, Harvey explains, the recommendation of his wife.
There are four employees at the table, with an additional three videoconferenced in from the Los Angeles office. Some of these people are relatively new to their jobs, because much of the senior staff has departed in the past year, including the head of acquisitions and the head of production. Former employees describe morale at the office as low. You half-expect people at this meeting to blink H-E-L-P in Morse code.
They don’t. They seem totally engaged and convincingly chipper, though one way to ensure that nothing revelatory happens at any event is to invite a reporter to eavesdrop on it. Harvey, though, seems eager to prove that the Weinstein Company is busily planning life after “Inglourious Basterds,” and perhaps he’d like to demonstrate how focused on movies he is once again.
Much of the conversation is given over to the release of “Nowhere Boy,” a biographical film about the teenage years of John Lennon.
“It’s our old-school wheelhouse a little bit,” says Francois Martin, a senior vice president.
“Like old Miramax,” Harvey says.
“Yeah, I didn’t want to say it.”
There’s brainstorming about “Shanghai,” a romantic spy drama set in China during World War II to be released in the United States in the late fall. There’s talk of Golden Globes and Oscar campaigns for Brad Pitt for “Inglourious Basterds” and Mr. Mortenson for “The Road.” Later, there is a screening of TV spots shot for “Project Runway” featuring Nicole Kidman.
The meeting ends with a talk about “Inglourious.” It’s a tricky film to market because it’s a one-of-a-kind hybrid of war, comedy, sadistic violence and fantasy. Yes, fantasy. It gives away little of the plot to note that Mr. Tarantino deviates rather wildly from the historical facts of World War II and that at some point the movie becomes a broadly comic and spectacularly violent exercise in wish fulfillment. Also, the Allies beat, scalp and chiffonade the foreheads of so many German soldiers that at moments, against your will, you feel sorry for the Nazis.
Harvey and his underlings know they need to prepare their audience, somehow, for the way “Inglourious” rewrites history. (“Somebody ought to talk and say ‘fantasy, fantasy, fantasy,’ ” Harvey tells the group.) There’s also some evidence in the tracking polls that teenage girls aren’t interested. So the company has created ads for that niche.
Harvey watches one of those ads for the first time, featuring a female star of the film. As soon as the spot is over, he weighs in.
“Almost,” he says. “The women aren’t empowered enough; you don’t see them doing anything. It starts out like something for females, but you want to see Mélanie Laurent do something.”
He’s right, or it sure seems as if he’s right. Harvey has an impresario’s gut about what will draw a crowd. When the topic of a photograph for this article came up, he had a concept in a flash: he and his brother, standing outside the office of Goldman Sachs, hats out, as if they’re asking for money.
As a sight gag it works because Goldman is unlikely to lend the Weinsteins any more money.
IN 2005, Joe Ravitch, a member of Goldman’s media group, cobbled together a group of investors for the Weinsteins’ new venture. At the time, the brothers were coming off of a contentious 12 years running Miramax as a subsidiary of Disney, a bumpy corporate relationship that yielded dozens of exceptional movies.
From the start of their improbable career, the Weinsteins have never taken orders very well, and they tend to keep their own counsel. They began in Buffalo, where Harvey went to college and was a concert promoter, and the pair segued into the movie business through a concert film of the band Genesis. He and his brother saw a niche in obscure foreign movies, like “Crossover Dreams” with Rubén Blades, which were ghettoized into small art house theaters in the mid-’70s.
They chose “Miramax” by conjoining the names of their parents, Miriam and Max, a diamond cutter who toiled in Manhattan for years. Harvey and Bob found truffles like “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” for Miramax, and they parlayed tiny movies into modest, mainstream hits. It helped that they were both genuine fans of cinema, a trait rarer than you’d think in the business. It also helped that they were willing to bluster, bully, threaten and sweet-talk with an intensity that few in Hollywood could match.
They were masterful guerrilla marketers, too. They brought a huge audience to “The Crying Game” with their keep-the-secret campaign, and they fine-tuned the art of winning Oscars, with the now-common practice of sending free copies of the movies to Academy members.
By the time they released “Pulp Fiction,” in 1994, every studio wanted to make Miramax-style films. But as part of Disney, the brothers clashed a few too many times with Michael Eisner, then Disney’s chairman. The release of Michael Moore’s anti-war film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a moneymaker that was too controversial for the company behind Mickey Mouse, was the snapping point. Disney bought out the brothers, and they left to start their own company.
With hedge funds circling Hollywood four years ago, Mr. Ravitch’s pitch to investors, and his own bosses at Goldman, was a straightforward bet on two overachieving filmmakers.
But the problems started right away. A pay-TV deal with the premium cable channel Starz — which would have paid the brothers for the exclusive rights to show their films — fell apart, eliminating what would have been a steady source of revenue. Then Harvey began his buying spree: a “significant” investment in the social networking Web site ASmallWorld in May 2006, a piece of Ovation a few months later, a chunk of Halston in March 2007.
At the time, Harvey’s idea was to outfit the celebrities in television and movie properties with dresses that Halston would sell.
All of these moves required board approval, but some investors read the news of these acquisitions and were flabbergasted. In Goldman’s 142-page initial offering, there were lots of boilerplate warnings, like “The Company expects to be highly leveraged, and the Company’s indebtedness could adversely affect its financial situation.” But nothing like: “Wild man atop flow chart will lose interest in movies and attempt cross-platform mogul status.” About as close as it gets is a promise to “opportunistically seek to form strategic relationships” and “consider ownership stakes in its partners.” It also predicts more than $160 million in profit by the end of 2009.
Backers were equally unprepared for the Weinsteins’ combative style, particularly when it came to dealing with each other.
“They fight incessantly,” said one investor, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to poison his relationship with the Weinsteins. “They’d make more money selling tickets to the board meetings.”
Harvey says the brothers do tend to mix it up, and have done so “in the board room, in the family room, at mom’s house.” That said, he describes the notion that they had big fights in the board room as “ridiculous.”
Blame, this investor says, falls to Goldman Sachs as much as the Weinsteins. The imprimatur of the bank carried a lot of weight, and there was an assumption that Mr. Ravitch and others had done their homework. But there was at least one glaring oversight in their homework: nobody asked Michael Eisner what it’s like to work with the Weinsteins, according to two people who have discussed the subject with him.
Mr. Ravitch left Goldman Sachs this year and is now creating an investment fund in connection with the Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor. He didn’t return calls. Goldman officials would not discuss the Weinstein Company but sent a statement praising the brothers: “Their strong track record was one of the key factors that attracted a great deal of capital, including from Goldman Sachs, into their independent film company.”
The first eight months of this year have been particularly dreadful for the Weinsteins. They have released only four films, in a limited number of theaters, and they have so far brought in a total of $1.3 million domestically. In their Miramax days, the brothers often earned many times that figure on a Friday night.
The problem is that in the years since the founding of the Weinstein Company, virtually everything about the movie business has become tougher. Margins at theaters have slimmed, so films are shuffled in and out faster. Nothing has replaced the revenue once offered by DVDs. And when the brothers finally signed a pay-TV deal, in July last year with Showtime, the network had decided that what drew and kept subscribers wasn’t movies, but original programming.
Traditionally, a cable network simply paid a studio for movies, providing a steady flow of revenue for the studio to finance more movies. But Showtime, according to a person with knowledge of the seven-year deal, required the Weinsteins to put up millions as a buffer against potential losses if the brothers are unable to deliver. Harvey flatly denies fronting any money to Showtime, providing one of those moments in reporting about this company when all signs point to X and he says “Absolutely not X.” He sees the arrangement as a “game changer,” one of the pillars of the Weinstein Company’s financial rebound and the perfect compliment to his regained discipline.
“In the end, I realized that I’m not a good C.E.O., I’m not a good manager,” he says. In addition to being too spread out, he was also in businesses he knew nothing about. “I had no idea what any of these companies were,” he says. “I just thought they were fascinating ideas, these were fascinating people and I think eventually these companies will all thrive. But I saw the result of everything not working.”
IF the Weinsteins have a game changer, it probably isn’t Showtime. It’s Bob Weinstein. Without him, the game for the company might already be over.
He never strayed from the movie business, and he seems incapable of anything but total focus. You got a hint at his attention to detail at a recent test screening of “Youth in Revolt,” a teenage comedy in the vein of “Juno.” The director, Miguel Arteta, said that for weeks he and Bob had lengthy back-and-forths over seemingly minor decisions, like this one: Does the last scene of the film need a voice-over?
Bob said yes. Mr. Arteta said no. Bob’s version screened on this particular night in an East Village theater in New York, and afterward, a focus group of 20 audience members were peppered with questions. Among them: How many of you liked the voice-over in the last scene?
Every hand but one went up.
Unbeknownst to the attendees, Mr. Arteta sat two rows away, and after that vote, he turned to Bob, who sat at the rear of the theater, offering him a grateful, smiling shrug that said, “You were right.”
“He’s not somebody who just hands you the money and says, ‘You better do good,’ ” Mr. Arteta says. “It makes you feel less lonely as a director. You feel like you have a partner.”
Bob is less extroverted than his brother, but in private he’s every bit as funny, expansive and sharp. Until it’s time to go on the record. At that point, his jocularity vanishes and he starts to sound like a politician at a press conference he’s attending against his will. None of the public parts of filmmaking come naturally to him, and he lacks the layers of smoothness that Harvey puts between himself and his temper. At the “Youth in Revolt” screening, the movie started with the soundtrack but no picture and Bob shot out of his chair, cursing and waving his hands until the projector stopped and the movie was rewound.
At moments during a half-hour interview, it seems as if he’s actively trying to keep his cool. Asked to name his greatest regret about the Weinstein Company, he pauses for just over 20 seconds, staring at the table, as though waiting out the impulse to explode or strangle someone with his bare hands.
“I think,” he says at last, slowly and in a modulated whisper, “we were a little too ambitious about trying to create the same model we had at Miramax. We didn’t have to start out that fast.”
The Weinsteins have a complicated relationship, one that is a little mysterious to people around them. They manage to seem inseparable and wholly separate at the same time. They work in different offices, a block apart, but speak constantly to each other on the phone. They extol each other’s accomplishments and talents, but as with many brothers, they are also competitors. When I vowed to Harvey that I would crush Bob in a Ping-Pong match — there’s a table in Bob’s office — Harvey cackled and promised to publish an ad hailing the defeat if his brother lost.
Ultimately, Bob begged off, saying that his elbow was in too much pain to play.
It’s one of the few contests that either Weinstein has ever ducked. For most of their careers, the they have regarded movie promotion as a form of warfare. They see themselves as leaders in a series of sustained, tactical strikes against a surrounding enemy. In the Miramax days, they reached their audience with clever, cost-efficient marketing and sheer force of will. Miramax employees were famous for working long hours, over weekends, through vacations.
But without Harvey on a bullhorn, the Weinstein Company was no longer an irresistible force. Which Harvey realized, at last, soon after the release of “Miss Potter,” a Renée Zellweger movie in 2006 about the life of the children’s author Beatrix Potter. It was exactly the sort of quiet, literate film that the brothers turned into gold at Miramax, and Harvey thought that it would gross $40 million, at least, and almost surely win an Oscar nomination for Ms. Zellweger.
But MGM was in charge of distribution of Weinstein Company movies at the time and Harvey was minding other stores. Before he knew it, the film had grossed only $3 million and was gone from theaters.
It seems like a preventable error to him now: “Sometimes with a movie like ‘Miss Potter,’ the theaters are saying ‘Take it off the screen!’ and you have to say: ‘No, no, no! One more week, two more weeks!’ Whatever you have to do to hold on, you have to hold on.”
The distractions of his other companies led to some memorable film fiascos, like “Fanboys.” The movie had a catchy premise: “Star Wars” fanatics drive across the country, break into the home of George Lucas and steal a copy of an coming “Star Wars” movie. But Harvey didn’t love the finished product and he didn’t fight with his usual combination of charm, guile and cajolery to persuade the director to change it. It was released the movie in a small number of theaters and with little promotion. It earned less than $700,000.
To Dana Brunetti, who produced “Fanboys,” the whole episode was a blown opportunity.
“I don’t think the Weinsteins understood that they had this stalwart audience of ‘Star Wars’ fans in their back pocket,” he says. “They just wanted the movie to be whatever had been hot the previous weekend. It was ‘Superbad’ one weekend, something else the next.”
WHICH brings us to some worst-case scenarios for the Weinsteins. What if the problem isn’t just that Harvey neglected his bailiwick? What if it’s deeper than that?
At the start of their careers, the brothers found ways to package the sort of skillfully made, modestly financed films that Hollywood ignored. Inevitably, Hollywood started paying attention, and conventional studios like Fox Searchlight now churn out movies like “Juno.” Yet the surprising part isn’t that old, bloated Hollywood adopted the methods of the Weinsteins. It’s that the Weinsteins adopted the methods of old, bloated Hollywood, rather than finding a new way to again outfox the majors. “Fanboys” aside, Harvey has been gravitating to more star-driven vehicles with larger budgets.
The genius of a movie like “Pulp Fiction” is that it grossed more than $200 million worldwide and cost just $9 million to make. (Yes, the movie had stars, but Mr. Tarantino had so much juice, they worked for a pittance.) “Inglourious,” on the other hand, cost nearly $70 million. The cheap, inventive marketing campaign is impossible for a movie of that scale. But the pricey, carpet-bomb approach to promotion has never been the Weinsteins’ forte.
WHEN the director Kevin Smith released “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” last year, he says, it was impossible to get Harvey to spend enough to promote the movie, which cost about $24 million to make. And Harvey seemed truly scattered at the time, Mr. Smith says. At the premiere, he introduced Mr. Smith to the actress Sarah Chalke, which was awkward because the woman was actually Traci Lords, a co-star of the movie.
“The old Harvey would never would have made those kinds of mistakes,” he says. “He just wasn’t as present, he wasn’t minding the farm, so to speak.”
Despite some good reviews, “Zack and Miri” earned just $34 million, which Mr. Smith found disappointing. Harvey says the problem wasn’t a lack of promotion; he says the company spent more than $30 million marketing the movie, a budget that is several times Mr. Smith’s best guess. Harvey also says the movie will ultimately earn a $10 million profit, factoring in all the ancillary revenue like DVD sales.
Mr. Smith sounds more wistful than angry. He remembers the Miramax days as a golden age, and he lauds the Weinsteins as the only producers he’s met who care about the quality and originality of their work. The weird glee that attends every murmur about the Weinsteins’ financial woes baffles him.
Which is a refrain you hear time and again from directors who’ve worked with Harvey and Bob: when these guys are engaged, nobody is a fiercer advocate for your movie. And if they were to fold, film culture would be poorer for it.
“They had impeccable taste when they were hungry,” Mr. Smith says. “The problem is that they’re not really hungry anymore. They’re starving and desperate.”
IN the wee hours of Friday morning, Quentin Tarantino stood in a West Village bar that had opened for him and his entourage — cast members of his new movie, “Inglourious Basterds,” and his longtime producers, Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Swinging a blue cocktail in one hand, he held forth about the time that Harvey told him he’d like to invest in a restaurant.
The goal, Harvey explained to Mr. Tarantino at the time, wasn’t to schmooze, or to get the best table. New York City had just banned cigarettes from restaurants and Harvey, then an avid smoker, didn’t approve.
“He said, ‘I want to light up in my own restaurant and blow smoke in the fire marshal’s face,’ ” Mr. Tarantino recalled.
Vintage Harvey chutzpah. The story killed, and when the laughing died down, Bob smiled, waited a beat and added another punch line.
“A million dollars,” he sighed, “for a cigarette.”
Ah, the flush years. They must seem kind of distant now. Because four years after Disney bought the Weinsteins out of Miramax, the company that first ushered indie films into the multiplex, the brothers are under serious stress.
A full accounting of their agita begins, naturally, with a batch of underperforming movies. Since opening its doors in 2005, the Weinstein Company has released about 70 films, and more than one quarter of them failed to break the $1 million box-office mark in the United States. Thirteen of these took in less than $100,000.
To complicate matters, the company’s beloved reality television show, “Project Runway,” was until recently sidelined by litigation. Harvey decided last year to move the show from Bravo to Lifetime, prompting NBC, which owns Bravo, to sue, contending that it had the right to match Lifetime’s bid and keep the program. In April, the Weinstein Company settled for an undisclosed sum, and those backstabbing fashionistas will return to the air, at long last, on Thursday night.
Yes, the brothers have had triumphs as well. Bob, who handles the lowbrow genre stuff, scored with the supernatural thriller “1408” and “Scary Movie 4.” (These brought in $72 million and $91 million, respectively.) Harvey showed a bit of the maestro’s touch with “Hoodwinked,” and with “The Reader,” which has taken in $101 million around the world, despite some tepid reviews, and won Kate Winslet an Oscar.
But the Weinsteins’ flop-to-jackpot ratio has been high enough to prompt the brothers to hire Miller Buckfire & Company, financial advisers who help troubled clients restructure. Last week, the firm finished its review and is urging Team Weinstein to release and promote only 10 movies a year, unload unpromising titles from its film library and avoid empire-building.
To shore up their finances, the brothers received a bridge loan a few months ago estimated at $75 million from Ziff Brothers Investments, according to two people familiar with the loan who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about it.
“We are a private company and aren’t going to comment on unsubstantiated claims from unnamed sources,” Harvey says of the bridge loan. He points over and over to what he describes as a robust pipeline of film, theater and television projects, not to mention a library of 250 films. Sit tight, he advises, and don’t bet against us.
But some backers of the Weinstein Company say they’re getting anxious. They were corralled in 2005 by Goldman Sachs, which helped raise $1 billion for the company. At the time, filmmaking had acquired a certain cachet in private equity circles, and here was a chance to bankroll what were arguably two of the greatest movie producers in modern cinematic history.
Starting in the late ’80s, the Weinsteins produced “Pulp Fiction,” “Shakespeare in Love,” “The English Patient,” “My Left Foot,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Piano” and hundreds of other movies, garnering 249 Academy Award nominations and three Oscars for best picture. In one 11-year stretch, they racked up 13 best-picture nominations.
SO what happened? In part, the Weinstein Company is coping with the same problems facing every other studio, most notably the grim slowdown of the DVD market. But plenty of the Weinsteins’ wounds are also self-inflicted. Instead of using their lush, Goldman-fueled pile of start-up money to focus on filmmaking, the brothers ventured into such new realms as fashion (buying part of Halston, the once-storied label), online social networking (through A Small World, known informally as MySpace for Millionaires) and a piece of Ovation, the cable network.
These were all Harvey’s ideas — his attempt, he says, at a Barry Diller-style conglomerate. The problem wasn’t just that the companies failed to generate vast profits. It’s that they took Harvey’s eye off the film ball, which is why he kept whiffing.
“What happened was, I got more fascinated by these other businesses and I figured, ‘Making movies, I can do that in my sleep,’ ” he says in an interview in his office in downtown Manhattan. “I kind of delegated the process of production and acquisitions. Yes, I had a say in it, but was I 100 percent concentrating? Absolutely not. I thought I could build the company and delegate authority, and that’s where it went wrong.”
Bob, meanwhile, has disavowed his goal of becoming the next king of African-American urban comedies, an unlikely ambition for a Jewish guy from Queens. But a few years ago, he took note of Tyler Perry’s success, and it looked like easy money. Bob produced “Long Shots,” with Ice Cube, and “Soul Men” with Bernie Mac and Samuel L. Jackson.
“Did like $15 million gross,” Bob says of “Soul Men,” “and it was a relatively expensive, $20 million movie. And for an African-American movie, there’s no foreign business. So those were two bad missteps, definitely.”
For months, the brothers have ignored media requests for comments, leaving lots of “Are the Weinsteins goners?” articles and blog posts with boilerplate denials offered up by their representatives. The two broke their silence to deliver this very simple message: We’re back to what we know. Bob is planning three new “Scream” films, the most profitable franchise in the Weinsteins’ history. Harvey has sworn off interest in the nonmovie parts of his business, sounding a bit like a married man lamenting a fling.
“I’m going to just do this and nothing else,” he says.
At minimum, the brothers are focused on the director who gave them “Pulp Fiction,” Mr. Tarantino. “I’ve got their undivided attention, I can honestly say that,” Mr. Tarantino said in a phone interview. “They want ‘Inglourious Basterds’ to be a hit even more than I want it to be a hit. Even in the grand scheme of things, it’s more important to them than me.”
Born promoters, the brothers have timed their mea culpas for maximum impact. “Inglourious Basterds” is one of several must-wins on a slate of roughly 10 Weinstein films on their way in coming months. The others are “Nine,” a film version of the Broadway musical, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Penélope Cruz. There’s also “Halloween II” and an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalypse bummer, “The Road,” starring Viggo Mortensen. For some of these films, “Inglourious” among them, the brothers had to bring in partners to split production and promotion expenses, which means they’ll split profits, too.
Will these guys be around to shepherd all these movies into theaters? The question has the sort of final-reel drama that the Weinsteins, in other circumstances, might savor. What’s certain is if there aren’t a few blockbusters in the near future, these guys are going to have to find new jobs.
Of course, rivals and reporters have issued dire predictions like that throughout the Weinsteins’ career. But there’s a difference. This time, it’s a Weinstein making the prediction.
“The ship’s riding on the slate,” Harvey says, sounding remarkably buoyant, all things considered. “If by February, when we release ‘Hoodwinked 2’ ” — he playfully thumps a hand on the table, dramatizing the sound of failure — “I’ll be driving you, or making cheap hamburgers, or selling trailers, or refrigerators, or something. If the slate works, we’re right back to plan.”
THE Weinsteins — Harvey is 57 year old, Bob is 54 — will not discuss how much money they have left in the bank, but just calling up and asking for an interview, you could get the impression they’re running low. A few years ago, you’d barely have the receiver off your ear before public relations specialists would call to vigorously frisk you about your intentions. Your request for a sit-down would initially be denied, but if you persisted, you would eventually be summoned to Harvey’s office, where he would praise your work and offer you some goodie — a book deal, for instance — if you wrote about something else.
Not now. The Weinstein Company doesn’t keep the same phalanx of P.R. pros on retainer, lost perhaps in a downsizing that included an 11 percent staff cut last year. Once you get into Harvey’s office, the most you can expect by way of enticing offers these days is a well-brewed cup of coffee.
That said, the brothers were downright generous with me when it came to screening their coming movies. In fact, they shared as much of their slate as was ready — six movies in all, as well as ads, DVDs and rough cuts of unfinished products.
The goal, they said, was to demonstrate the strength of these films. For Harvey, it also seemed as if the screenings were supposed to bolster his case if — or, perhaps in his mind, when — he had to complain about this article. We showed him everything and he still said we’re doomed, was the subtext. If there is such a thing as prevenge, this is it.
“You see this?” Harvey asks, pounding a finger against a sheet of paper. It’s a Nielsen NRG tracking poll, a gauge of public interest in coming movies. He points to figures besides “Inglourious Basterds.” Here’s the G-rated version of what he says next: “This is called ‘smash hit’!”
Behold the charming Harvey, a plumpish, easily excited man with ink-dark eyes, two days’ worth of facial stubble and a trace of a New York accent. He is self-deprecating, chatty and usually in a rush. He has about him that magnetic field of charisma that you recognize as soon as you pass through his orbit.
Happily, we won’t meet the irate Harvey, but those who have encountered him describe a combustible, thin-skinned creature who belongs in the Extreme Mammals exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. In Hollywood, he is known for outbursts that elevate profanity and rage to a kind of performance art. He says that age, his daughters from a first marriage, and his second wife, the 33-year-old British clothing designer Georgina Chapman, have mellowed him. But even after decades at the epicenter of the film business, he and his brother seem to consider themselves gatecrashers at a party where everyone wonders how they got past the bouncer. They tend to believe that many people are rooting for their demise — reporters in particular.
“We should send all journalists to Kamchatka, this place where nothing grows,” he jokes at one point, invoking a Siberian backwater. He laughs and adds, “That’s where they’re going to send me.”
We’re at a Friday-afternoon marketing meeting in the Weinstein Company’s offices in TriBeCa, on the third floor of a red-brick office building over a restaurant. Harvey sits at the head of a large table, sporting a black suit and white shirt, a uniform he wears every other day, when he isn’t in a dark blue suit with a white shirt. It’s a foolproof wardrobe strategy for a guy with little fashion sense, Harvey explains, the recommendation of his wife.
There are four employees at the table, with an additional three videoconferenced in from the Los Angeles office. Some of these people are relatively new to their jobs, because much of the senior staff has departed in the past year, including the head of acquisitions and the head of production. Former employees describe morale at the office as low. You half-expect people at this meeting to blink H-E-L-P in Morse code.
They don’t. They seem totally engaged and convincingly chipper, though one way to ensure that nothing revelatory happens at any event is to invite a reporter to eavesdrop on it. Harvey, though, seems eager to prove that the Weinstein Company is busily planning life after “Inglourious Basterds,” and perhaps he’d like to demonstrate how focused on movies he is once again.
Much of the conversation is given over to the release of “Nowhere Boy,” a biographical film about the teenage years of John Lennon.
“It’s our old-school wheelhouse a little bit,” says Francois Martin, a senior vice president.
“Like old Miramax,” Harvey says.
“Yeah, I didn’t want to say it.”
There’s brainstorming about “Shanghai,” a romantic spy drama set in China during World War II to be released in the United States in the late fall. There’s talk of Golden Globes and Oscar campaigns for Brad Pitt for “Inglourious Basterds” and Mr. Mortenson for “The Road.” Later, there is a screening of TV spots shot for “Project Runway” featuring Nicole Kidman.
The meeting ends with a talk about “Inglourious.” It’s a tricky film to market because it’s a one-of-a-kind hybrid of war, comedy, sadistic violence and fantasy. Yes, fantasy. It gives away little of the plot to note that Mr. Tarantino deviates rather wildly from the historical facts of World War II and that at some point the movie becomes a broadly comic and spectacularly violent exercise in wish fulfillment. Also, the Allies beat, scalp and chiffonade the foreheads of so many German soldiers that at moments, against your will, you feel sorry for the Nazis.
Harvey and his underlings know they need to prepare their audience, somehow, for the way “Inglourious” rewrites history. (“Somebody ought to talk and say ‘fantasy, fantasy, fantasy,’ ” Harvey tells the group.) There’s also some evidence in the tracking polls that teenage girls aren’t interested. So the company has created ads for that niche.
Harvey watches one of those ads for the first time, featuring a female star of the film. As soon as the spot is over, he weighs in.
“Almost,” he says. “The women aren’t empowered enough; you don’t see them doing anything. It starts out like something for females, but you want to see Mélanie Laurent do something.”
He’s right, or it sure seems as if he’s right. Harvey has an impresario’s gut about what will draw a crowd. When the topic of a photograph for this article came up, he had a concept in a flash: he and his brother, standing outside the office of Goldman Sachs, hats out, as if they’re asking for money.
As a sight gag it works because Goldman is unlikely to lend the Weinsteins any more money.
IN 2005, Joe Ravitch, a member of Goldman’s media group, cobbled together a group of investors for the Weinsteins’ new venture. At the time, the brothers were coming off of a contentious 12 years running Miramax as a subsidiary of Disney, a bumpy corporate relationship that yielded dozens of exceptional movies.
From the start of their improbable career, the Weinsteins have never taken orders very well, and they tend to keep their own counsel. They began in Buffalo, where Harvey went to college and was a concert promoter, and the pair segued into the movie business through a concert film of the band Genesis. He and his brother saw a niche in obscure foreign movies, like “Crossover Dreams” with Rubén Blades, which were ghettoized into small art house theaters in the mid-’70s.
They chose “Miramax” by conjoining the names of their parents, Miriam and Max, a diamond cutter who toiled in Manhattan for years. Harvey and Bob found truffles like “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” for Miramax, and they parlayed tiny movies into modest, mainstream hits. It helped that they were both genuine fans of cinema, a trait rarer than you’d think in the business. It also helped that they were willing to bluster, bully, threaten and sweet-talk with an intensity that few in Hollywood could match.
They were masterful guerrilla marketers, too. They brought a huge audience to “The Crying Game” with their keep-the-secret campaign, and they fine-tuned the art of winning Oscars, with the now-common practice of sending free copies of the movies to Academy members.
By the time they released “Pulp Fiction,” in 1994, every studio wanted to make Miramax-style films. But as part of Disney, the brothers clashed a few too many times with Michael Eisner, then Disney’s chairman. The release of Michael Moore’s anti-war film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a moneymaker that was too controversial for the company behind Mickey Mouse, was the snapping point. Disney bought out the brothers, and they left to start their own company.
With hedge funds circling Hollywood four years ago, Mr. Ravitch’s pitch to investors, and his own bosses at Goldman, was a straightforward bet on two overachieving filmmakers.
But the problems started right away. A pay-TV deal with the premium cable channel Starz — which would have paid the brothers for the exclusive rights to show their films — fell apart, eliminating what would have been a steady source of revenue. Then Harvey began his buying spree: a “significant” investment in the social networking Web site ASmallWorld in May 2006, a piece of Ovation a few months later, a chunk of Halston in March 2007.
At the time, Harvey’s idea was to outfit the celebrities in television and movie properties with dresses that Halston would sell.
All of these moves required board approval, but some investors read the news of these acquisitions and were flabbergasted. In Goldman’s 142-page initial offering, there were lots of boilerplate warnings, like “The Company expects to be highly leveraged, and the Company’s indebtedness could adversely affect its financial situation.” But nothing like: “Wild man atop flow chart will lose interest in movies and attempt cross-platform mogul status.” About as close as it gets is a promise to “opportunistically seek to form strategic relationships” and “consider ownership stakes in its partners.” It also predicts more than $160 million in profit by the end of 2009.
Backers were equally unprepared for the Weinsteins’ combative style, particularly when it came to dealing with each other.
“They fight incessantly,” said one investor, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to poison his relationship with the Weinsteins. “They’d make more money selling tickets to the board meetings.”
Harvey says the brothers do tend to mix it up, and have done so “in the board room, in the family room, at mom’s house.” That said, he describes the notion that they had big fights in the board room as “ridiculous.”
Blame, this investor says, falls to Goldman Sachs as much as the Weinsteins. The imprimatur of the bank carried a lot of weight, and there was an assumption that Mr. Ravitch and others had done their homework. But there was at least one glaring oversight in their homework: nobody asked Michael Eisner what it’s like to work with the Weinsteins, according to two people who have discussed the subject with him.
Mr. Ravitch left Goldman Sachs this year and is now creating an investment fund in connection with the Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor. He didn’t return calls. Goldman officials would not discuss the Weinstein Company but sent a statement praising the brothers: “Their strong track record was one of the key factors that attracted a great deal of capital, including from Goldman Sachs, into their independent film company.”
The first eight months of this year have been particularly dreadful for the Weinsteins. They have released only four films, in a limited number of theaters, and they have so far brought in a total of $1.3 million domestically. In their Miramax days, the brothers often earned many times that figure on a Friday night.
The problem is that in the years since the founding of the Weinstein Company, virtually everything about the movie business has become tougher. Margins at theaters have slimmed, so films are shuffled in and out faster. Nothing has replaced the revenue once offered by DVDs. And when the brothers finally signed a pay-TV deal, in July last year with Showtime, the network had decided that what drew and kept subscribers wasn’t movies, but original programming.
Traditionally, a cable network simply paid a studio for movies, providing a steady flow of revenue for the studio to finance more movies. But Showtime, according to a person with knowledge of the seven-year deal, required the Weinsteins to put up millions as a buffer against potential losses if the brothers are unable to deliver. Harvey flatly denies fronting any money to Showtime, providing one of those moments in reporting about this company when all signs point to X and he says “Absolutely not X.” He sees the arrangement as a “game changer,” one of the pillars of the Weinstein Company’s financial rebound and the perfect compliment to his regained discipline.
“In the end, I realized that I’m not a good C.E.O., I’m not a good manager,” he says. In addition to being too spread out, he was also in businesses he knew nothing about. “I had no idea what any of these companies were,” he says. “I just thought they were fascinating ideas, these were fascinating people and I think eventually these companies will all thrive. But I saw the result of everything not working.”
IF the Weinsteins have a game changer, it probably isn’t Showtime. It’s Bob Weinstein. Without him, the game for the company might already be over.
He never strayed from the movie business, and he seems incapable of anything but total focus. You got a hint at his attention to detail at a recent test screening of “Youth in Revolt,” a teenage comedy in the vein of “Juno.” The director, Miguel Arteta, said that for weeks he and Bob had lengthy back-and-forths over seemingly minor decisions, like this one: Does the last scene of the film need a voice-over?
Bob said yes. Mr. Arteta said no. Bob’s version screened on this particular night in an East Village theater in New York, and afterward, a focus group of 20 audience members were peppered with questions. Among them: How many of you liked the voice-over in the last scene?
Every hand but one went up.
Unbeknownst to the attendees, Mr. Arteta sat two rows away, and after that vote, he turned to Bob, who sat at the rear of the theater, offering him a grateful, smiling shrug that said, “You were right.”
“He’s not somebody who just hands you the money and says, ‘You better do good,’ ” Mr. Arteta says. “It makes you feel less lonely as a director. You feel like you have a partner.”
Bob is less extroverted than his brother, but in private he’s every bit as funny, expansive and sharp. Until it’s time to go on the record. At that point, his jocularity vanishes and he starts to sound like a politician at a press conference he’s attending against his will. None of the public parts of filmmaking come naturally to him, and he lacks the layers of smoothness that Harvey puts between himself and his temper. At the “Youth in Revolt” screening, the movie started with the soundtrack but no picture and Bob shot out of his chair, cursing and waving his hands until the projector stopped and the movie was rewound.
At moments during a half-hour interview, it seems as if he’s actively trying to keep his cool. Asked to name his greatest regret about the Weinstein Company, he pauses for just over 20 seconds, staring at the table, as though waiting out the impulse to explode or strangle someone with his bare hands.
“I think,” he says at last, slowly and in a modulated whisper, “we were a little too ambitious about trying to create the same model we had at Miramax. We didn’t have to start out that fast.”
The Weinsteins have a complicated relationship, one that is a little mysterious to people around them. They manage to seem inseparable and wholly separate at the same time. They work in different offices, a block apart, but speak constantly to each other on the phone. They extol each other’s accomplishments and talents, but as with many brothers, they are also competitors. When I vowed to Harvey that I would crush Bob in a Ping-Pong match — there’s a table in Bob’s office — Harvey cackled and promised to publish an ad hailing the defeat if his brother lost.
Ultimately, Bob begged off, saying that his elbow was in too much pain to play.
It’s one of the few contests that either Weinstein has ever ducked. For most of their careers, the they have regarded movie promotion as a form of warfare. They see themselves as leaders in a series of sustained, tactical strikes against a surrounding enemy. In the Miramax days, they reached their audience with clever, cost-efficient marketing and sheer force of will. Miramax employees were famous for working long hours, over weekends, through vacations.
But without Harvey on a bullhorn, the Weinstein Company was no longer an irresistible force. Which Harvey realized, at last, soon after the release of “Miss Potter,” a Renée Zellweger movie in 2006 about the life of the children’s author Beatrix Potter. It was exactly the sort of quiet, literate film that the brothers turned into gold at Miramax, and Harvey thought that it would gross $40 million, at least, and almost surely win an Oscar nomination for Ms. Zellweger.
But MGM was in charge of distribution of Weinstein Company movies at the time and Harvey was minding other stores. Before he knew it, the film had grossed only $3 million and was gone from theaters.
It seems like a preventable error to him now: “Sometimes with a movie like ‘Miss Potter,’ the theaters are saying ‘Take it off the screen!’ and you have to say: ‘No, no, no! One more week, two more weeks!’ Whatever you have to do to hold on, you have to hold on.”
The distractions of his other companies led to some memorable film fiascos, like “Fanboys.” The movie had a catchy premise: “Star Wars” fanatics drive across the country, break into the home of George Lucas and steal a copy of an coming “Star Wars” movie. But Harvey didn’t love the finished product and he didn’t fight with his usual combination of charm, guile and cajolery to persuade the director to change it. It was released the movie in a small number of theaters and with little promotion. It earned less than $700,000.
To Dana Brunetti, who produced “Fanboys,” the whole episode was a blown opportunity.
“I don’t think the Weinsteins understood that they had this stalwart audience of ‘Star Wars’ fans in their back pocket,” he says. “They just wanted the movie to be whatever had been hot the previous weekend. It was ‘Superbad’ one weekend, something else the next.”
WHICH brings us to some worst-case scenarios for the Weinsteins. What if the problem isn’t just that Harvey neglected his bailiwick? What if it’s deeper than that?
At the start of their careers, the brothers found ways to package the sort of skillfully made, modestly financed films that Hollywood ignored. Inevitably, Hollywood started paying attention, and conventional studios like Fox Searchlight now churn out movies like “Juno.” Yet the surprising part isn’t that old, bloated Hollywood adopted the methods of the Weinsteins. It’s that the Weinsteins adopted the methods of old, bloated Hollywood, rather than finding a new way to again outfox the majors. “Fanboys” aside, Harvey has been gravitating to more star-driven vehicles with larger budgets.
The genius of a movie like “Pulp Fiction” is that it grossed more than $200 million worldwide and cost just $9 million to make. (Yes, the movie had stars, but Mr. Tarantino had so much juice, they worked for a pittance.) “Inglourious,” on the other hand, cost nearly $70 million. The cheap, inventive marketing campaign is impossible for a movie of that scale. But the pricey, carpet-bomb approach to promotion has never been the Weinsteins’ forte.
WHEN the director Kevin Smith released “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” last year, he says, it was impossible to get Harvey to spend enough to promote the movie, which cost about $24 million to make. And Harvey seemed truly scattered at the time, Mr. Smith says. At the premiere, he introduced Mr. Smith to the actress Sarah Chalke, which was awkward because the woman was actually Traci Lords, a co-star of the movie.
“The old Harvey would never would have made those kinds of mistakes,” he says. “He just wasn’t as present, he wasn’t minding the farm, so to speak.”
Despite some good reviews, “Zack and Miri” earned just $34 million, which Mr. Smith found disappointing. Harvey says the problem wasn’t a lack of promotion; he says the company spent more than $30 million marketing the movie, a budget that is several times Mr. Smith’s best guess. Harvey also says the movie will ultimately earn a $10 million profit, factoring in all the ancillary revenue like DVD sales.
Mr. Smith sounds more wistful than angry. He remembers the Miramax days as a golden age, and he lauds the Weinsteins as the only producers he’s met who care about the quality and originality of their work. The weird glee that attends every murmur about the Weinsteins’ financial woes baffles him.
Which is a refrain you hear time and again from directors who’ve worked with Harvey and Bob: when these guys are engaged, nobody is a fiercer advocate for your movie. And if they were to fold, film culture would be poorer for it.
“They had impeccable taste when they were hungry,” Mr. Smith says. “The problem is that they’re not really hungry anymore. They’re starving and desperate.”
Source-NYT
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