Producer Harvey Weinstein, who cofounded Miramax studio and is now co-chairmen of independent production house The Weinstein Company, regaled an audience with anecdotes from his lengthy career Saturday, paying particular homage to Weinstein's long-time collaborator Quentin Tarantino.
"I always say the house that Ruth built was Yankee Stadium, and the house that Quentin built was Miramax and the Weinstein Company," Weinstein said onstage at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts Theatre at a packed discussion during the Tribeca Film Festival.
Weinstein opened the talk by plugging Tarantino's forthcoming bloody Western flick The Hateful Eight. "It's good, really good," exclaimed Weinstein, who says he has seen about 40 minutes of the film, which is slated for a fall 2015 release. "It's special and fun and sharp and new and edgy."
Weinstein also defended the director's decision to continue making movies using film stock. "There’s a difference," Weinstein advocated. "Digital is faster and cheaper, but it’s not film. [Christopher] Nolan and Quentin are at the vanguard of this.”
Dressed in gray pants, a black jacket and white shirt, Weinstein looked casual and composed onstage. As befits an executive who has heralded contemporary classics like Pulp Fiction and Chicago and won more Oscars than he can count, Weinstein was engaging but bullish on his own films, claiming his new flick, the critically-panned Woman In Gold is "doing really well" despite earning just $17 million since its April 1st release.
Weinstein re-told stories from his time in Hollywood and offered nuggets for aspiring filmmakers. His best advice for producers: "Try to read once in a while."
Weinstein recounted acquiring then-unknown Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Good Will Hunting, which had been bouncing around studios with plans for Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio to star in it. Weinstein says various executives read the script and claimed to love it, but during his first meeting with Damon and Affleck he asked about a scene where two previously assumed-heterosexual professors perform oral sex on each other, creating a narrative discontinuity.
"They said, 'That's the red herring! You're the first guy in a studio to have read the script, everyone else read coverage,'" Weinstein recalled. "They gave it to me on the spot. They said, 'We're making it with you because you read it yourself.'"
A Queens native, Weinstein, along with brother Bob, founded production company Miramax in 1979, using their parents' names Miriam and Max for inspiration. They sold the company to Disney in 1998 for $80 million, but continued running it. The brothers founded The Weinstein Company in 2005 once they left Miramax.
One of Weinstein's biggest regrets remains Lord of the Rings. The Weinstein brothers sold the rights to New Line Cinema (now part of Warner Bros.) in 1998 for some $11 million plus 5% of the movies' first dollar gross, which was split with 2.5% going to the brothers while Miramax got another 2.5%. During the talk, Weinstein explained this 5% of gross as his executive producer fee.
Thanks to that fee, the pair still managed to profit off the movies, though not as much as they would have had they produced the Peter Jackson-directed trilogy. The Lord of the Rings films grossed a combined $2.9 billion. Considering theater owners keep approximately half the take, the Weinsteins earned some $70 million off the Lord of the Rings films for Miramax and themselves.
They also earned around $20 million for the first Hobbit movie, which grossed $1 billion and for which they had maneuvered the same deal. The Weinsteins, who later tried to claim $75 million in profits from the two subsequent Hobbit sequels, were denied anymore cash from the series after a November 2014 ruling rejected their claim.
More recently, the Weinstein Company has had hit after hit on the small screen. "We're having considerate economic success," Weinstein said of the group's television division, which produces the Project Runway franchise on Lifetime, Myrtle Manor on TLC and Mob Wives on VH1. On Netflix, its Marco Polo series was recently renewed, which its forthcoming MTV Scream series is in post-production.
Its television division is reportedly in talks with ITV to sell for a rumored $950 million deal, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
"No deal has closed," Weinstein said. "There's interest from many different places."
There was no opportunity for audience members to pose questions at the end of the hour-long discussion.
Weinstein was also not asked about his recently dropped criminal charge in connection with an Italian model's claim that he touched her breasts during a business meeting in his office in TriBeCa last month.
He did have plenty to say about Wikileaks' decision to publish the leaked emails and documents from the December hack of Sony. "Sony got hacked. They paid the price: There are executives who are no longer there, it wrecked the place, emotionally it hurt people," said Weinstein, who claimed Wikileaks' Julian Assange is not seeing the "human cost" of republishing the leaked material.
“The emails are private property," Weinstein continued, praising journalists including discussion moderator Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline who did not publish the emails. "He’s a rare journalist that stood by ethics and integrity,” Weinstein said to audience applause.
"I hope that Apple and Google and some of the people there who are politically conscientious find new ways to protect us," Weinstein concluded.
