Rebels on the Backlot (9 page)

Tarantino brought his new girlfriend with him, Stacey Sher, a d-girl—development executive—at Jersey Films, which at the time was headquartered at TriStar Pictures, run by Mike Medavoy. She was his first serious girlfriend since separating from Grace Lovelace. It was still the early time of AIDS, when people thought twice about who they slept with. Sher, a dark-haired, energetic woman, once defiantly told a friend: “I’ll only date a guy who looks like an IV user.” (Sher denies ever making the comment.) Tarantino definitely fit that bill: pale, ill-nourished, hyperactive. And he was new to the elegant norms of Cannes; he was late to his own premiere because he had neglected to put on a bowtie and was turned away at the door of the festival palace.

He and Sher’s romance lasted more than a year and then ended (like all of Tarantino’s romantic relationships), but she maintained an unswerving loyalty to her friend that nearly got her fired. After
Reservoir Dogs
came out and Tarantino was making a
deal with TriStar to write
Pulp Fiction
, Medavoy got an anonymous fax that read, “I care about this company. At Sundance, I overheard a woman say [to Tarantino], ‘Hold out for $2 million,’” for the
Pulp Fiction
deal. The woman was Stacey Sher and she worked at TriStar.

Medavoy called Sher’s bosses, Danny DeVito and Michael Shamberg, to get her fired. (She wasn’t.) Sher blamed that fax and a few other damaging messages faxed around town about Tarantino on Don Murphy, the producer who’d feuded with Tarantino over
Natural Born Killers.
Murphy denied faxing anyone about Stacey Sher.

Quentin had his first real blast of media exposure at Cannes. He’d had a small taste at the Sundance Film Festival, where people had heard a buzz about a new talent emerging from the Filmmaker’s Lab. But at the time Sundance was much more artsy, high-toned, and, bluntly put, politically correct. Audiences weren’t prepared for
Reservoir Dogs’
blast of rock and roll, and the unapologetic violence of Tarantino’s vision. It was a shock. The movie was greeted with a combination of awe and anger, and won no awards. Tarantino always resented his being snubbed by the Sundance jury.

But in Cannes, for the first time, he found a ready audience for his ideas about cinema and life. Though
Reservoir Dogs
was a small movie, journalists were shocked and galvanized by its violence, and intrigued by the man who dreamed it up. Screenings left audiences divided, and at some theaters audience members nearly came to blows. Not everyone loved the film; influential critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film two thumbs down, calling it “a stylish but empty crime film.” But most critics raved. Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
praised the movie’s “dazzling cinematic pyrotechnics.” It was a small taste of the feeding frenzy to come. Bumble Ward, the British import who became Tarantino’s personal publicist, first met him here at the festival when she was a publicist for Miramax. She was taken by him—“lovely, kind, opinionated, hugest ego on the planet,” she recalls—but was even more impressed by how bowled over the journalists were. It was the beginning of the making of a media star. “There were books out
about Quentin before
Pulp Fiction,”
Ward noted. “It was
Reservoir Dogs
that shook things up.”

Cannes was the beginning of Miramax’s creation of a pop culture icon, one who secured Miramax’s future. Miramax, as Weinstein would always put it, would be the house that Quentin built. But it took a little time.
Reservoir Dogs
did not stir much of an audience its first time out, taking in just $3 million at the box office. It found its devotees later on, in video (though Miramax did not partake of the video profits).

Curiously, not everyone in Weinstein’s orbit appreciated Tarantino’s vibe. Many found the film just plain vile, including Harvey Weinstein’s wife, Eve. She and her sister, Maude, walked out in the middle of the ear-slicing scene during Miramax’s first screening of the film in Tribeca. Tarantino was sitting next to Weinstein in the theater and whispered, “Who was that?” Weinstein answered glumly, “My wife.” The director laughed. Eventually Weinstein’s sister-in-law made her way back into the theater, and after the screening Tarantino disarmed her by approaching Eve Weinstein to say, “I totally understand how you feel.” Immediately he turned to Weinstein and warned him, “I’m not gonna cut it.”

For the mogul, it was a moment of personal bonding with Tarantino: the director didn’t take offense at Eve Weinstein’s revulsion but wasn’t going to let it change his vision. It contributed to the mogul’s unswerving loyalty to him.

And finally, Tarantino made a little money. He and Bender each took home $40,000 for
Reservoir Dogs.

A
FTER
R
ESERVOIR
D
OGS
J
AYMES SENT
T
ARANTINO HER
secretary, Vicky Lucai, to help him set up office. Lucai never came back. Jaymes called to demand why she hadn’t given notice of her intention to quit. “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked. There was a long silence, then came the reply. “Really Cathryn. If it’s between you and Quentin, what choice is there?”

N
ew Line, it’s fair to say, felt ambivalent about the young writer-director David O. Russell. For one thing, he had a disconcerting tendency to stare into people while they spoke to him, as if he were imagining what they’d look like through a lens. For another, he was infuriatingly unpredictable. Russell appeared to be perfectly normal; then he would have an oddly asocial moment, like the time he snatched a handkerchief from the breast pocket of an elderly European gentleman, blew his nose with it, and replaced it, as New Line chairman Bob Shaye looked on.

Russell’s antisocial tendencies seemed to worsen with age, like a kind of physical Tourette’s syndrome; he poked people with a finger while talking to them at close range. Some people thought Russell had what one former friend called a “relational disorder,” and indeed, he has many former friends. Russell would build relationships and then jettison them over a variety of perceived slights. When his film
Flirting with Disaster
was having its premiere, friends
who attended sent him a bottle of vintage Champagne the next day to celebrate, with five hand-drawn stars on the label. Russell took this as a slight, concluding that his friends had drawn stars on the bottle because they could find nothing nice to say about the film.

He was more than a sensitive artist; he sometimes seemed pathological.

I
N THE EARLY 1990S
R
USSELL WAS A STRUGGLING FILMMAKER
and the boyfriend (later husband) of Janet Grillo, the director of development at New Line. Grillo had been with the company since the early 1980s and was one of its youngest and savviest comers. At the time, New Line was a lean and mean independent film company, built from the ground up by its driven, mercurial founder, Bob Shaye, a Columbia University–trained lawyer and, once upon a time, a failed actor. Acting was a short-lived dream; thirty-five years later he could still recite a devastating college review of his acting in
Merchant of Yonkers.
“Bob Shaye slid in and out of character like a schizophrenic calligraphist.” (À la Alfred Hitchcock, Shaye later took cameos in all the films of his
Nightmare on Elm Street
series.)

The son of a wholesale grocer, Shaye drifted into the distribution end of the movie business because he understood that aspect of it; selling movies, he figured, was at least comparable to selling groceries. Investing $1,500 from his savings, Shaye started New Line in 1968 from his small Manhattan apartment on Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue as a minor distributor of “independent”—underground, actually—art and foreign films aimed at college audiences. At first he got the films for free and scraped together the cash for a brochure promoting the events. He found arcane, cult movies—like Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary about the Rolling Stones,
Sympathy for the Devil
, and the 1930s antimarijuana film,
Reefer Madness
—and sent out catalogues to college campuses along with rosters of speakers for the lecture circuit.

Shaye himself was a bit of a hippie. His hair was long, and his
clothes were somewhat mussed, nothing like the suited Hollywood studio moguls on the other coast. Mostly, though, his eye was trained on the bottom line. By the 1980s Shaye turned away from art and cult movies toward exploitation and niche films, mostly B movies that traditional Hollywood studios didn’t want to make. His specialty was making projects with low, tight budgets for targeted audiences. His early films were with the schlock-shock director John Waters.

Curiously, this was a strategy that worked, mainly due to hard work and horse sense. Bob Shaye’s mantra became “Not a loser in the bunch,” meaning that every New Line film had to be profitable on its own terms. It was a phrase he had printed on glass paperweights that he handed out to all his executives. Unlike films made by Hollywood’s major studios, which increasingly bet huge stakes on blockbuster movies that could either bring in huge profits or result in huge losses, New Line wanted every movie it made to have a budget tied to expected box office return. This meant making smaller films with smaller budgets on the order of $3 million to $4 million and rarely more than $10 million, as compared to the $25 million to $30 million spent by the major studios on an average production by the late 1980s. “Our philosophy is to spend no more on production and marketing than the core audience we’re targeting will provide,” he told the press.

By the 1990s this approach really began to pay off, though the studio didn’t have much to brag about in terms of quality movies—far from it. In 1990 a small, goofy film that New Line acquired for $3 million,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
, took in $130 million for the studio. New Line also had a massive hit with the low-budget horror film
Nightmare on Elm Street
, which mushroomed into a series of six films that made hundreds of millions of dollars. New Line became known as the studio that Freddy Krueger built, and by 2003 Shaye still kept two large Freddy Krueger dolls on his Oscar-free office mantel.

Karen Hermelin, a former marketing executive, described the green-lighting process: “We established a market, assessed it, then creatively we went backward. For example, [we’d define] a movie
for black teen girls: How much can we make? We can make $20 million. So: No more than a $5 million budget. Nobody was doing that in the early nineties.”

But Bob Shaye was certainly not all business. A child of the sixties and seventies, he clung to the vices of his generation and had a reputation as a party animal and skirt chaser. Shaye frequently played matchmaker among his employees and had them over to his house for parties. For some, this amounted to a kind of enforced gaiety; Shaye expected his employees to come drinking with him into the wee hours of the morning when out of town on company business. “New Line as a culture was a pretty debauched place,” remembered one executive who joined the company in 1990. “The corporate retreat was drug-infested, sex-infested. Everyone slept with everybody. It was this weird kind of place.” At one retreat in Manhattan, the executive, who had joined New Line from another major studio, recalled about a dozen people lingering late at night. A more veteran executive brought down twelve tabs of acid. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not in Kansas anymore,’” said the executive.

As avuncular as he could be in some settings, Shaye also had a sharp tongue and a tendency to erupt in a tirade of withering criticism, particularly after a few drinks. Shaye’s volatile personality contributed to the departure of some executives who found his temper tantrums wearing. “He’d hug you, then he’d start a fight—almost a fistfight,” said another longtime executive who left in the mid-1990s.

And whatever Shaye’s shortcomings, it was his number-two, Michael Lynne, who caused more trouble. Ruth Vitale, a creative executive who worked at the company for six years in the 1990s and ran Fine Line Features, the art-house division, claims that Lynne sexually harassed her for a year and a half until she was pushed out. After a company dinner during a trip to London, Lynne accompanied Vitale back to her hotel and asked to meet with her in her room. Vitale was horrified when he sat on the bed, and patted it for her to sit down. They ended up on the loveseat instead, and Vitale claims that Lynne stuck his tongue down her
throat. She threw him out, but the married executive’s pursuit of Vitale became an open secret in the office. When it became clear to Lynne that Vitale would not respond to his advances Vitale felt her career at New Line was essentially over. She left the company in the late 1990s, never bringing charges because, she’s told friends, it would mean the end of her career in Hollywood. Both Vitale and Lynne declined to comment on the allegations, but a New Line executive said they were not true. “It’s all unsubstantiated,” said Russell Schwartz, New Line’s head of marketing, in 2004. “Nothing happened that’s worth commenting on.” But in fact Vitale wasn’t the only woman who left because of the sexual climate. A 1998 article in
Premiere
magazine detailed how other successful women executives left the company because of a harassing atmosphere from the top. New Line executives strenuously denied the way the studio was depicted in the article.

I
N SOME WAYS
, S
HAYE AND HIS COMPANY WERE THE PERFECT
foil to Harvey Weinstein and that other Manhattan-based, independent studio start-up, Miramax. With his outsized personality and gargantuan appetite, Weinstein was a circus impresario finding diamond-in-the-rough art films to Shaye, the disciplined bean-counter making a mint off exploitation films. Both New Line and Miramax were built from scratch, but while New Line chased profit, Miramax chased quality and the media spotlight, finding foreign gems and little-noticed auteur efforts that the Weinsteins brilliantly promoted to the entertainment press. But New Line made money, while Miramax struggled to stave off insolvency. New Line’s profitability used to drive Harvey Weinstein crazy, while Shaye couldn’t deny his private envy at the prestige won by his local competitor. (It would take until 2004 for New Line to win its very first Best Picture Oscar, for
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
)