Miramax Films - Part One

The 80s Movie Podcast

On this episode, we’re going to start a miniseries that I’ve been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.

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TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It’s the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens/ Thank you for listening today.

On this episode, we’re going to start a miniseries that I’ve been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.

But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it’s important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax.

But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don’t know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino’s debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him.

During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people.

Harvey himself.

Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don’t know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn’t really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn’t doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have.

And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm.

I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened.

And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax’s release of Muriel’s Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table.

Twenty feet from stardom, indeed.

I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity.

As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don’t believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss’s disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I’m saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they’ve answered for everything they did.

Okay, enough with the proselytizing.

I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I’m going to get that out of the way right now.

Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979.

Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins.

Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond’s first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar’s run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre.

But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide.

As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini.

Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone’s The Hand and Edward Bianchi’s The Fan, to Lewis Teague’s Alligator and J. Lee Thompson’s Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante’s The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film’s final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings.

Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax’s next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out.

Or, at least, that’s what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK.

Which I can’t necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film’s director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that’s all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen.

Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film.

Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman’s Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who.

The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company.

One slight problem, though.

The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn’t following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie.

It also didn’t help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm.

But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend’s performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide.

The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan’s I Shall Be Released at the show’s closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows.

While Temple’s version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax.

But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn’t be until July 16th when they’d start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could.

When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres.

So, you’d think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor.

Right?

You’d think.

Now, I already said The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball was their only release in 1982.

So, naturally, you’d think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January.

Right?

You’d think.

In fact, Miramax’s next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film.

Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn’t have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let’s Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima’s powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they’d keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers’ entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert.

So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we’re still four years away from them becoming the distributor they’d become. But we’re going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short.

Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 1987.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.