Free Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman Page A

rundown, two-thousand-seat theater, it was Bob Weinstein who came up with the idea of showing movies there.
    From there they started Miramax, with Miriam Weinstein as the company’s first receptionist. The company struggled mightily to survive in the 1980s, buying the rights to foreign-language films, releasing some low-grade erotica. In 1988 a British venture capital firm seeking to get into the movie business bought a small stake in the company for $2.5 million, guaranteeing a line of credit. That allowed the Weinsteins to coproduce some films and acquire others. Over time the company won a reputation for having the uncanny ability to choose films of artistic quality and cultural significance, and the even more uncanny ability to sell those films to the media, critics and discerning audiences, using clever marketing and dogged persistence. But Harvey Weinstein was a walking contradiction, a gifted self-promoter capable of vastly self-destructive behavior. He eventually grew to become a legend in contemporary Hollywood, a mogul who could as easily bury a film he’d producedas promote it all the way to Best Picture at the Oscars. He was a champion of visionary directors, but he also earned the nickname “Harvey Scissorhands” because of his willingness to trim a director’s cut at will. He rode his employees hard, and he raged over the smallest infractions. It wasn’t uncommon to see overworked, underpaid drones at Miramax burst into tears, and Weinstein actually boasted he was once voted by a leading magazine as one of the worst bosses in the country. He threw things. He got his way. But he also dominated the Academy Awards from the early 1990s onward. In the latter part of the decade—after Miramax was acquired by the Walt Disney Company—Weinstein lost his taste for challenging and controversial fare, turning to costume dramas and lightweight genre films. By 2004, his future, and that of Miramax, was uncertain because of feuding with his corporate parent, Disney. But in the early years he was an advocate of the quirky, the risky, and the new.
    E ARLY ON ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT FILMS M IRAMAX acquired turned out also to be the first veritable sign of commercial life in the independent film world.
Sex, lies, and videotape
is a cerebral comedy about sex, marriage, love, and intimacy, a multicharacter work written and directed in a loose, documentary style by a newcomer, Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh had just turned twenty-six years old when the film came out, a precocious talent who had turned up at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival and became an immediate media sensation. The movie’s distinctive tone presaged the rebel sensibility of the new generation of filmmakers. It was unpolished, sexy, and funny, with an unmistakable sense of vérité, of reality. The movie starred James Spader as Graham, the odd, repressed observer of several people in various stages of romantic and sexual crisis; Andie MacDowell played Ann, a quiet type married to John (Peter Gallagher), who is having an affair with her sister, Cynthia (a feisty Laura San Giacomo, in a role she has never equaled). Graham’s peculiarity is that his greatest sexual satisfaction comes from interviewing women about their fantasies and needs.The movie was fresh and new, like nothing ever seen before in Hollywood, certainly, and it became the sensation of the 1989 Sundance Film Festival (then called U.S. Film Festival), where it nonetheless failed to win a single prize. Even so, the movie was sought after by most of the independent distributors at the festival. Bob Weinstein pushed Harvey to buy the film, and they did, for a million dollars—not the first time Miramax would outbid its competitors by a lot.
    A coproducer on
sex, lies
, Nancy Tenenbaum, recalled the negotiations, which took place at an office on the Columbia-TriStar lot. (Columbia-TriStar had helped finance the film.) “One by one each distributor came in to earnestly tell us why they deserved to