With the recent news of Disney’s acquisition of a lot of Fox assets, obvious questions arose about the future of indie subsidiaries that produce more mature and artistic content like Fox Searchlight and R-rated properties like Deadpool. Folks have echoed Miramax as evidence of Disney holding a place for that type of content. I did some digging and I found there was a lot clashing of ideas between filmmakers and Disney. Disney objected on many occasions to the creative directions and the production of films that touch on hot button issues. The tumultuous relationship ultimately ended in the demise of Miramax as Disney decided to kill it despite the awards successes of the label. Iger was also in a high level position at this time and was pivotal in making that decision.
From an Entertainment Weekly cover story in March of 2005:
There's a lot of risk and reward in the history of the company,'' says Harvey Weinstein. And never were the risks steeper, or rewards greater, than in 1993, when Disney bought Miramax for the now-astonishingly-bargain-basement price of about $80 million. The potential for a corporate culture clash was evident. Disney had stockholders to please and an assiduously family-friendly image to cultivate; Miramax courted controversy with an appetite that expanded with every headline, protest, and NC-17 rating. Nonetheless, the deal made sense. With an ever more noteworthy track record of turning underdogs from My Left Foot to sex, lies, and videotape to The Crying Game to The Piano into gold, Miramax gave Disney a handful of assets it had been lacking: adult prestige, bicoastal media cool, and a renewable supply of Academy Award nominations. As for what Disney gave Miramax, that was simple: money — and lots of it — in the form of a hefty bonus structure for the Weinsteins above their seven-figure base salaries, and a budget that eventually rose to $700 million annually.
For the first few years of the partnership, the sailing was relatively smooth. Disney could tolerate the occasional Walt-is-turning-over-in-his-cryogenic-tube jokes that would accompany, say, the release of Miramax's inflammatory gay-Catholic drama Priest(1995) in exchange for the revenues, raves, and seats at the Shrine Auditorium that came with movies like Pulp Fiction. In early 1997, the partnership may have reached its pinnacle: Wes Craven's Scream gave Bob Weinstein's Dimension division its first blockbuster franchise (''It was Dimension's defining moment,'' says Bob Weinstein, ''the movie that put us on the map''), and The English Patient gave Harvey the one trinket he'd always wanted — a Best Picture Oscar. ''We gambled the company on that movie,'' recalls Harvey Weinstein, who had never before spent so much on a film (even Pulp Fiction cost only $9 million). ''It was a pivotal moment—Joe Roth [then Disney's movie chief] and Disney gave us the ability to spend $27 or $28 million and make a bigger movie. At the time it was pretty shocking in the so-called 'indie headquarters.'''
The following year brought Miramax its biggest box office hit yet, Good Will Hunting, a movie that epitomized Miramax's ability to sell the backstory — in that instance, the friendship between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck — as aggressively as the movie itself. A year after that, Miramax took home its second Best Picture trophy, when Shakespeare in Lovestunned Saving Private Ryan and cemented Harvey Weinstein's reputation as the most brutally effective campaigner in Oscar history. Among the runners-up that year was Life Is Beautiful, which the company turned into the most successful foreign-language film in U.S. history until that time. Meanwhile, Dimension was becoming a serious earner for Disney, launching successful franchises in comedy (Scary Movie) and family adventure (Spy Kids, created by Robert Rodriguez, whom Bob Weinstein calls ''the godfather of Dimension'') alongside the Screamtrilogy.
But the successes masked a series of recurring frustrations that often pitted the Weinsteins' brio and ambition against Eisner's caution and determination to control the reins. Working under a deal that required them to gain Disney's approval for any individual film budget above a cap that eventually rose to $35 million, the Weinsteins chafed; when they took their pitch for The Lord of the Rings to Eisner, the boss said no. (In fairness, Peter Jackson was never happy with the Weinsteins' proposal to make J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy into two films rather than three; nonetheless, seeing the project go to New Line and gross billions had to sting.) Disney and the Weinsteins also clashed over issues of content: Kevin Smith's raw, button-pushing Dogma went to Lions Gate after Disney discouraged its release through Miramax. And they butted heads over expansion: Eisner nixed Harvey Weinstein's proposal to purchase half of IFC and Bravo and launch a Miramax cable channel for $300 million, only to see the two channels sell later for four times that, and also passed on Weinstein's proposal to buy the Artisan film library, which instead went to Lions Gate. ''The idea that the disagreements with Michael were personal has been exaggerated,'' says Weinstein. ''They were more about my entrepreneurial spirit.''
Ironically, it was at the moment of Miramax’s greatest public successes - the Oscar triumph in 2003 of the company's highest-grossing film ever, Chicago — that the relationship between the Weinsteins and Disney began to sour in a more serious way. The brothers had endured their first extended period of bad publicity, over everything from a ballooning staff that necessitated layoffs to the failure of Talkmagazine to the escalating budgets of increasingly large-scale movies like Gangs of New York and Cold Mountain (not to mention costly schlock like Duplex and duds like The Shipping News). According to the James B. Stewart book DisneyWar, in the spring of 2003, Disney's board of directors asked for a review of Miramax's financial performance (although the company's profitability over the last five years has been a point of extended dispute between Disney and Miramax, both sides agree that Miramax lost money in fiscal 2001). The Weinsteins responded by hiring Eisner nemesis Bert Fields to represent them, and reportedly spent part of the next year looking for ways to either buy back their company or secure independent financing.
As late as the end of 2003, Eisner, who declined to comment on specifics of the Weinsteins' departure, was saying he expected them to stay at Disney. But last spring, the two sides reached the point of no return. A source close to the Weinsteins says that the brothers' refusal to offer a public statement of support to Eisner during his extended showdown with Disney's board and angry stockholders last year was ''a 'no going back' moment.'' It coincided with the noisiest fractures in the relationship yet: Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to underscore the muzzling effect the parent company had on Miramax, and Eisner's choice to make public his contention that Miramax had been profitable for only two of the last five years — a statement with which the Weinsteins bitterly disagree — seemed a calculated attempt to provide solid financial underpinnings for the impending divorce decision. In August, the Weinsteins received notice that their contract, which ends in September 2005, would not be extended. After exploring various options, including one in which Bob Weinstein would have stayed at Disney, the Weinsteins and Disney began hammering out the particulars of a departure deal last November.
Those particulars contain some rather bitter pills for both sides. The Weinsteins have to surrender not only the company they named after their parents, Miriam and Max, but also the name itself. Disney will also keep Miramax Books (though its well-regarded chief, Jonathan Burnham, has announced his departure), and, most importantly, an 800-plus film library that contributes considerably to an estimated overall value of $2 billion. What Disney and Eisner lose, though less quantifiable, is no less substantial; if, as expected, animation giant Pixar leaves the Disney fold, Eisner's reputation as someone unable to play well with other powerful men will be chiseled in granite, and as for Oscar prestige, unless the studio has a surprising campaign up its sleeve for The Pacifier, the glory days may be over. (This year's race, in which Miramax received 20 nominations, Pixar 4, and Disney 2, was not atypical.) In addition, it's unlikely that Disney will be making many movies with Bob-and-Harvey loyalists like Robert Rodriguez, who told EW in January that if the Weinsteins left Disney, he'd ''probably see where they were going and figure out how I'd work with them again,'' or Quentin Tarantino, who last fall publicly compared the Weinsteins' potential disentanglement from Disney to the liberation of France during World War II.
The word small is no accident; in the Disney telling, Miramax went off mission sometime in the Gangs of New York era and must now be refashioned along the lines of Fox Searchlight, which caps almost all of its budgets at $15 million and has been flourishing recently. So look for a reputation for fiscal restraint on the résumé of whoever gets the unenviable job of replacing Harvey Weinstein — and expect a lot of skepticism in the industry. ''I don't understand what the [Miramax] name is without the talented people who worked many years to create that brand,'' says Proof producer Jeff Sharp of Hart Sharp Entertainment. ''I don't want to speculate, but unless you have a visionary or someone with the charisma and sheer love of cinema like Harvey, you just get the corporate side of it.''
Judging by the number of filmmakers expressing relief that the Weinsteins will remain involved with their movies, Disney has some serious image-rehab work ahead in the creative community. Matadorwriter-director Richard Shepard says flatly: ''I made Harvey call me to tell me this project wasn't going to get abandoned in any sort of ugly divorce, and he promised me that. I would not want to see it released by someone other than [Harvey]. . .I think we all know that the reason the Miramax engine was so good was because of Harvey, you know?'' And Greg McLean, writer-director of Wolf Creek, says the Weinsteins ''were just so enthusiastic and straight about what movies were good, what movies were shit. . .I had a ball [with them].'' Expressing confidence that Wolf Creekwill be released through the Weinsteins' new venture, he adds, laughing, ''I mean, unless Disney wants to bring out an NC-17 horror movie. I wouldn't if I was them — my shareholders would shoot themselves!''
Submitted December 16, 2017 at 04:38AM by buzz3light http://ift.tt/2Bf6Z0a
