Harvey banking on Oscar success

Harvey Weinstein with Gwyneth Paltrow

10 April 2012

As a child in the Sixties, Harvey Weinstein used to watch the Oscars late into the night on TV. The Weinsteins lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Flushing, New York, a tumbledown commuter area from which Harvey's father would trudge into Manhattan every day to cut diamonds in a sweatshop.

Oscar Night transfixed Weinstein and his younger brother, Bob. They were two Jewish kids dreaming of making it in the movies. It was the era of Lawrence of Arabia and stars such as Gregory Peck taking Best Actor for To Kill a Mockingbird. As the awards came and went, Harvey's mother, Miriam, would shout: "At 10.30pm you guys are going to sleep - I don't care what happens."

On Sunday night, Weinstein will take pride of place at this year's ceremony - but he will have something very different to worry about, and he will care very much about what happens.

For one of the most colourful characters in Hollywood, this year's ceremony is crucial. The stable of films backed by his company Miramax has notched up an incredible 40 Oscar nominations. Whether it is Catherine Zeta-Jones and Chicago, Daniel Day-Lewis and Gangs of New York or Nicole Kidman and The Hours ... every major movie in this year's list of nominees has Weinstein's fingerprints all over it.

Most Hollywood movie bosses would sit back and relax. But not Weinstein. He knows that only by walking away with a clutch of major awards will he silence - at least for now - the Hollywood sharks hungrily circling his multi-million pound empire.

The past year has been the most difficult of Weinstein's meteoric career. The man described as "a cross between Don Corleone and Nero" has been plagued by an avalanche of bad press and, even worse, vengeful whispers from his peers.

Whatever happens on Sunday, Weinstein, 51, is certainly secure in his position as the most talked-about figure in Hollywood. Recently there have been stories of tantrums on film sets; blazing rows in public with other studio executives; out-of-control budgets; disputes with former business partners; a clutch of lukewarm reviews for some of his major movies; and, in an industry where perception is everything, the overriding impression that he had finally lost his touch.

ONE man who will not be watching the Oscars, and who knows Weinstein well, is Michael Radford, director of White Mischief and Il Postino. Speaking in London, Radford, who will shortly start shooting The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino, said yesterday: "The fact is that the Oscars are like a Rotten Borough, and Weinstein understands that. He's ruthless, and interested only in power and money. He is an absolute bully. But he is clever."

In a sense, Weinstein is the victim of his own success: a huge, burly, domineering man (but also one capableof intense charm), Weinstein, who is more than six foot and weighs 18 stone, has blazed a noisy trail through Hollywood.

In short, his formula is simple: to finance or distribute movies which appeal to a middle-class, thirtysomething audience which has largely forsaken the cinema to the teenagers. With his brother Bob as his partner, Weinstein and Miramax delivered films such as My Left Foot, The Piano, The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Emma and Pulp Fiction. They weren't "art", but neither were they trash, and they helped make Weinstein a fortune. But then the backlash against his brash, intimidating behaviour began.

First, his enemies smelt blood during the making of Martin Scorsese's rambling, $100 million drama, Gangs of New York, which Miramax partfinanced. Almost from the start, things appeared to go wrong: there were reports that Weinstein and Scorsese were at each other's throats.

On release, the movie received mixed reviews. Legendary Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman excoriated the film in the trade bible Variety. To date, it has achieved respectable audiences, taking nearly $10 million on its opening weekend.

But still the sniping continues. Weinstein is in dispute with Saul Zaentz, producer of The English Patient, who claimed that not only was he owed money by Weinstein, but that the movie mogul had not allowed him to see accounting records. Weinstein was vehement in his defence: "Sue us!" he told Entertainment Weekly in the States. "This is no Enron situation and we're inviting Saul to sue us so he keeps quiet."

Bravado is part of Weinstein's brash, over-the-top style. Everyone in Hollywood has a story about Harvey. At one party, he jabbed a finger in the face of a female executive who had upset him, and screamed: "You are going down for this!" In another incident at the Cannes film festival, actors and directors watched in dismay as Weinstein seemed on the point of punching senior movie boss Barry Diller.

He has been nominated as one of America's Worst Bosses. An employee was allegedly sacked on the spot for failing to perform in a company football match (he got his job back later), and a self-help group was reportedly set up by exemployees of Miramax.

Even Oscar-winning actors have had run-ins with Weinstein. Michael Caine was furious with Miramax after Weinstein decided that The Quiet American, in which Caine stars, was "unpatriotic" for a post-11 September audience. "He felt it was too anti-American, or something like that. So I shouted at him and told him he was wrong," said Caine.

What these incidents illustrate is Weinstein's bizarre dual-personality. On the one hand, he has championed intelligent, relatively sophisticated films such as The English Patient and has backed them with his own money; on the other, he is the snarling, aggressive movie mogul so beloved of gossip columnists.

From the time he started Miramax with his brother in 1979, Weinstein has revelled in his image as an outsider. In a snub to Hollywood, he runs his empire from a suite of offices in the trendy Tribeca district of Manhattan (the restaurant downstairs is owned by Weinstein and actor Robert De Niro). He has homes in New York and Martha's Vineyard with his wife Eve and their three young children.

The roots of his character lie in his upbringing. His father Max, an army supply sergeant who fought in the Second World War and stayed in the Middle East to support the burgeoning-Jewish underground, was a formidable character. Harvey adored him (the name Miramax is a combination of his parents' names).

Back in New York, the family was an intensely close, rumbustious clan. Harvey was born in 1952, his brother two years later. Max, who died in 1976, taught his sons that, by sticking together, they could achieve anything.

After dropping out of college, Harvey began promoting rock concerts. In the late Seventies he saw an opportunity to bring comedy to a middlebrow audience in the States and promoted live shows such as Monty Python's The Secret Policeman's Ball.

He was joined by his brother. Their mother was Miramax's first and only secretary when her sons launched the company in 1979. From this tightlyknit, family-run business, Harvey struck gold in the Eighties when he bought the rights to Stephen Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape for $1 million. The movie went on to take $25 million at the box office.

The Weinstein bandwagon was on a roll. He ruthlessly promoted his movies, spending almost as much on promotion and advertising as on production. In 1993, the two brothers sold the company for $60 million to Disney in an unprecedented deal which allowed them to run the company as a private fiefdom. Brother Bob now oversees the hugely profitable Dimension subsidiary, maker of teenage horror flicks such as Scream.

Weinstein's supporters claim that he has put his troubles behind him. Apart from the problems within his film division, last year he was forced to close the celebrity magazine Talk, which he launched with British editor Tina Brown. Losses were in the region of $25 million.

If the tide has - once again - turned in his favour, then Sunday night will be the ultimate test. Certainly, his obsession with the Oscars goes so far as to creating an entire department within his company to lobby for nominations.

"It's like a presidential election war room," said one director. "They plot the campaign as closely as that." No surprise, then, that Weinstein is good friends with the Clintons and supported Hillary's campaign for the US Senate.

There is a story he likes to tell about his childhood. When he was 14, his father called the two young boys in to see him. Talking intently, he related in passionate detail the story of the Kennedy clan: how Joe Kennedy, the family patriarch, had supported his sons John and Bobby, how the Kennedy brothers were untouchable if they stuck together.

The story made a profound impression on Weinstein. He never forgot it. And on Sunday, with his opponents arrayed in the seats around him, Weinstein will be banking on his own election landslide.

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