Word: weinstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time of triumph, Harvey Weinstein grandly spreads the glory around. "This is a great moment for independent films," he says. "It shows that risk has its rewards." The risks are mostly of finance, not of film form. The big winners among little movies didn't dabble in delirious innovation (the hallucinogenic Trainspotting got only a screenplay nod). The primary appeal of their stories is not to the young mass audience, which prefers spectacular fantasy and broad comedy, but to older viewers, more sophisticated and more sentimental, liberal in their politics and conservative in their desire for humanist affirmation--folks very...
...rewarded, from Marty to Annie Hall to Ordinary People to Driving Miss Daisy. The allure for the high-stakes gamblers who run the studios is the $100 million special-effects film, like the Twister-Flood-Dante's Peak epics--"movies that seem programmed off the Weather Channel," as Bob Weinstein drolly says...
...Harvey Weinstein has his own definition of independence. "It has always meant independent of the seven major studios," says Harvey, "and that's how we operate. Disney is our big daddy or rich uncle. Basically, they're our bank. You can say Disney or you can say Chase Manhattan." Miramax has the freedom to run its business so long as it works within budget guidelines and doesn't buy movies rated NC-17. "A hundred-percent freedom," says Disney CEO Michael Eisner. "They're completely autonomous. And they should be. They keep their costs down and their ideas up. They...
...movie-mad kids from Queens, New York. Their parents, Bob recalls, "used the local theater as a baby-sitter. They'd drop us off at a triple feature and pick us up six hours later." (The boys must be grateful for the benign neglect of Miriam and Max Weinstein; the company is named after them.) After a stint as rock-concert promoters in Buffalo, New York, Harvey and Bob got into film distribution, making their rep with the 1989 hits sex, lies, and videotape and My Left Foot. Often they saw themselves as custom tailors, trimming foreign films to make...
...producing pictures, you can also lose a lot. Miramax did indeed tank with some of its early in-house productions, like The Lemon Sisters with Diane Keaton and The Long Walk Home with Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. It has been more successful with genre films birthed by Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films. Dimension plans sequels to Scream, From Dusk Till Dawn and Total Recall, originally made by another studio. Miramax, which traditionally had more pickups than homegrown product, is making more of its own films. The company is plunging into musicals, with movies of Chicago (possibly starring Madonna...