Free Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman

felon, convicted of perjury, evidence tampering, and fraud) Giancarlo Parretti bought MGM, backed by a French state bank. There were many more such mergers to come. In 1991 the Japanese corporation Matsushita bought Hollywood godfather Lew Wasserman’s MCA-Universal while the 1990 merger of entertainment and publishing giants Time Inc. and Warner Brothers created the largest media entity in the world up to that time.
    But the magical synergy did not necessarily follow. Like so many revolutions, it appeared rather less appealing in the light of day, once the carcasses of previously profitable companies littered Wall Street. And what synergies could be found or created between soda manufacturers and movie studios were not significant. The cash-rich Japanese seduced in the 1980s by Hollywood’s siren call felt, for the most part, buyer’s remorse. But there always seemed to be a supply of new recruits to the philosophy of synergy. When Coca-Cola decided to bail on Hollywood, Sony Corporation stepped in to take over Columbia-TriStar in 1989. Starting in the eighties and all the way until the millennium, Wall Street continually found new corporate marks to bring to the Hollywood party. And there always seemed to be a hangover.
    These acquisitions ushered in a period of significant change in the corporate culture of Hollywood. Gone were the moguls of old, those self-made, self-styled tyrants and visionaries who made films that suited their image of themselves, the audience, and the country as a whole. The studios were their personal fiefdoms and the movie stars who worked there, along with the rest of the staff, their children. By the mid-to late 1980s the studios were becoming more like other corporations, run by men in suits with master’s degrees in business from Harvard and other fancy universities. They tended to regard movies as products; they scrutinized the balance sheets for profit margins. What those bosses sought most of all were reliable profits and growth. To achieve that the young studio managers in turn sought reliability in their movie slate (never guaranteed in the best of circumstances), to reduce investment in risky movie production as much as possible. This meant sticking with tried-and-true plot formulas, using market research companies to “predict” profits and weekend box office, hiring movie stars with proven track records, and, as much as possible, appealing to the mass audience by avoiding controversial topics.
    For a guy like Quentin Tarantino in the early 1990s, Hollywood’s major studios were not the place to expect a warm welcome.
    Harvey Weinstein, by contrast, was much more like the moguls of old. Loud, bullying, tyrannical, a chain-smoker and a passionate advocate of the films and filmmakers he loves, he was a self-madesuccess. Significantly, Weinstein was based in New York, operating independently of the Hollywood studios. He realized that by the 1980s American moviegoers—those who loved the great American auteur films of the 1970s and the great European art films of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—were hungry for more substantial fare than Hollywood provided them. In the 1980s independent distributors such as Orion and Cinecom offered alternatives, but none did so as energetically as Miramax.
    Created in 1979 by Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, Miramax started as a savvy distributor of European art films. The company was named for the Weinsteins’ parents: Max, who’d been a diamond cutter in a booth on Forty-seventh Street in Manhattan’s diamond district; and Miriam, a housewife and sometime secretary. The brothers credited their parents with giving them a love of movies—that, and the chance event of stumbling into a screening of the François Truffaut movie
The 400 Blows.
Both brothers attended the State University of New York in Buffalo, where Harvey started promoting concerts. Soon enough both dropped out to work in concert promotion. After the company acquired a