KEVIN Smith, writer director of low-budget smash Clerks, says: "I would do anything for Miramax." In common with a host of now stellar film making talents he owes his career to the selling savvy of New Yorker brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein and the company they have presided over since 1979.
And nothing demonstrates the Weinsteins' progress better than this week's Academy Awards, in which their films won 12 Oscars, including nine for The English Patient (which represents a £27 million investment for Miramax), as well as one each for Emma, Sling Blade and Kolya.
In the late 1970s, the brothers were running a dilapidated movie theatre in Buffalo, New York, showing films between the college rock acts they promoted; 20 years on, their drive to the top has seen the Queens tough guys forge the reputations - in America, where it counts - of names as diverse as Neil Jordan, Quentin Tarantino, Daniel Day Lewis, Zhang Yimou, Jane Campion and Krysztzof Kieslowski.
In their two decade surge, the Weinsteins have taken on all comers - snapping up movies that the west coast big boys wouldn't touch and beating rival small scale outfits to the flag time after time. Combining a sharp eye for unrecognised talent and wolfish money management, the Weinstein's bear like personalities have chalked up an astounding strike rate. And this despite seemingly incompatible elements of taste (in one year, 1994, they released Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Three Colours White, Three Colours Red, Heavenly Creatures and Bullets Over Broadway).
Harvey regularly tells the story of how he locked the Chinese producers of Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou into a room at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival until they had agreed to sell him the North American rights.
In fact, word of mouth is as crucial to the Miramax myth as the bottom line. The brothers play up their street smart Jewish roots, regularly wrong footing the stuffed shirts who, until their advent, dominated non mainstream film making. Now in their early 40s, they were born in Flushing, Queens the sons of Miriam and Max - hence the company name.
Bob, the younger half, makes the trips to the bank ("It was always like pulling teeth," he says), while Harvey specialises in supplying the tired and emotional antics that make good copy. Recently, for example, he ended up brawling in the snow at the Sundance Festival after rivals Fine Line edged Miramax out in a fierce contest for Australian film Shine. Widely aired also is the early days story of their trip to see Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (they thought it was a porn film, of course), which clued them up to America's neglect of foreign cinema.
Right from the start of their film operation - spending $80,000 on five hours of unedited footage and stitching together the $6 million grossing The Secret Policeman's Other Ball - the brothers have shown themselves masters of the art of turning the recondite into the marketable, and the controversial into column inches.
"Lust. Murder. Dessert." was the poster line slapped on The Cook, The Thief His Wife And Her Lover; they got Claudia Ohana to pose for, Playboy to publicise the Gabriel Garcia Marquez scripted Erendirn; Errol Morris's miscarriage of justice plea The Thin Blue Line had its documentary origins carefully disguised with a brooding crime story style trailer. Most importantly, they simply outbid every other offer for films they believed in.
In his book about US independent cinema, Spike, Mike, Slackers And Dykes, sales rep John Pierson explains in detail how the fledgling Miramax's bullying tactics worked - a la Cannon's hucksterish Israelis, Golan and Globus, deal kings of the 1970s - to secure Lizzie Borden's then radical film Working Girls, about life in Manhattan brothels.
Working Girls, released in 1987, was their first bona fide homegrown hit albeit only on the tiny urban circuits that had already taken Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Wayne Wang's Dim Sum, and Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It. But the Weinsteins' aspirations were always breakout oriented: "There is nothing to say," is Harvey's oft repeated opinion, "that so called art house movies cannot be mass market, and play in local neighbourhood theatres."
Miramax proved this repeatedly, making hits out of four consecutive Oscar winners for films in a foreign language, starting with 1988's Pelle The Conqueror (whose Scandinavian credentials they attempted to prove with a trailer featuring the film's lone shot of a topless woman).
Crucial to the march to glory was the swift status hike they achieved at Europe's premier film event, the Cannes Festival. While Hollywood big timers used the festival as a summer break, soaking up the sun and showcasing their own contenders for blockbuster, Harvey and Bob furiously picked over Europe's finest cinematic clearinghouse: next in the chain was Cinema Paradiso, which set records for a subtitled film in the US.
They scored, however, a massive success of their own by piloting Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies And Videotape to the Palme d'Or in 1989, after plaguing festival director Gilles Jacob to select the then unknown film maker's debut for the main competition. After that strategic feat of arms, which defied conventional practice on how to introduce a low budget movie to the world, Cannes was virtually their private fief, where they exerted an influence as overpowering as at the Sundance Film Festival, America's showcase for bits homegrown filmmakers.
The Miramax signature is a hands on, total commitment dedication to each movie they sign up. Says Harvey: "You have to do what's right for each individual film, and that's where the independents are infinitely better than the majors."
ANOTHER landmark was My Left Foot, the Christy Brown biopic that ran counter to all the accepted norms of hit making. Not only did Miramax secure their first English language. Oscars (via Daniel Day Lewis and Brenda Fricker), they virtually created the home video market for fringe movies by shifting more than 50,000 copies of the tape version.
The street fighting, maximum energy Weinstein approach, however, has made plenty of enemies. The "Harvey Scissorhands" nickname is one point of attack: by messing with their film makers' work (The Thing Blue Line was an early re cut victim, as were Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine and Cinema Paradiso), Miramax has earned brickbats that liken them to the cavalier west coasters they are supposed to despise. In their defence, though, Kevin Smith maintains that being asked to cut 10 minutes from Clerks waste of the smartest things we ever did".
Clearly, there's a fine line between respecting a director's vision and ensuring that what's valuable in a movie isn't obscured by can't see the wood for the trees irrationality. Former boy wonder Jim Jarmusch, for example, took a pot shot at the Weinsteins during a recent awards ceremony, after the poor performance of his existential western Dead Man, implying that Miramax had abandoned its traditional low budget base as the operation grew. Others might contend that the film's poor box office outside America might suggest that, simply, it wasn't much of a movie in the first place.
More serious, however, are pressures that have undoubtedly arisen since Disney bought Miramax in 1993, retaining the Weinsteins as salaried executives of a genuine mini major studio. On the good side, it's put an end to the Weinstein's reputation for roguery ("killers in thier business" according to Disneyhead Michael Eisner), the never - ending cash-flow crises, and the revolving door sensibility toward Miramax staffers.
On the other hand, the Disney family values profile required the immediate off loading of foul mouthed comic Martin Lawrence's You So Crazy to rivals, Goldwyn when it failed to get a rating, and the subsequent unveiling of the blood spattered Pulp Fiction prompted a public outcry about Disney's public morality policies. The issue came to a head with Larry Clark's teen sex and drugs fable Kids, which was given a dreaded NC-17 rating (next stop, illegal porn) by America's film censors, the MPAA. Rather than sell or shelve, the Weinsteins simply created a new, separate company to release it unrated.
What hasn't changed, though, is the fact that legal and censorship - battles have regularly acted as a central plank in the Miramax marketing policy. As far back as The Thin Blue Line the Weinsteins have recognised the value of notoriety. The British import Scandal had an early first amendment tussle with the MPAA over its certification, Robert Altman's Pret A Porter also suffered, over publicity material that depicted a near naked Helena Christensen. Unlike Scandal, however, the publicity failed to make much of a dent in the returns.
Miramax is currently enjoying an era of financial stability that, bankrolled by Disney, simply throws into relief the economic tightrope the Weinsteins were walking for years. Even with successes like The Crying Game and The Piano behind them, the rolling credit that Miramax secured could never engineer escape from the debts left by duds like The House Of Spirits.
A deal with Disney has also allowed the Weinsteins to plough money into film production itself - they have always been careful that Miramax didn't go down the same plughole as Britain's Palace Pictures, which foundered over the huge costs of funding their own films. It's often suggested that the Weinsteins have long nurtured dreams of film making, but their one directorial effort, Playing For Keeps is a long forgotten embarrassment.
The future holds few fears for them; they're already showing that they've lost none of their ahead of the crowd instinct by riding the current horror movie wave through the Bob headed division titled Dimension, sponsors of chillers such as The Crow, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Wes Craven's upcoming Scream. More significantly, perhaps, they chose not to go after recent Sundance winner Welcome To The Dollhouse, preferring to fund the equally alluring, though slightly more up scale, charms of Flirting With, Disaster.
Like Virgin, Microsoft or SKG Dreamworks, Miramax, remains a signature company, entirely dependent on the forceful personalities of the Weinsteins for its identity. In the words of superagent Robert Newman, a former employee: "No matter how high you get at Miramax, it's like being [the late] Colonel Tom Parker: everyone wants to know when Elvis is coming. And Elvis is Harvey and Bob."
