Craig D. Lindsey
Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. Since we dealt with the great “Spring of Sin” of 1995 last month, let’s go back five years earlier to Weinstein’s original “Spring of Sin.”
It’s the spring of 1990, and pop culture is filthy as fuck.
As we began the last decade of the 21st century, modern-day entertainment was getting racier and raunchier. Comic loudmouths Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay were butting heads and selling out arenas with their risqué humor. Groundbreaking rap groups N.W.A. and The 2 Live Crew were dropping extreme, graphic rhymes that made them menaces in the eyes and ears of cops, federal agents, and the justice system. The notoriously crude Fox sitcom Married… with Children pushed housewives’ buttons during prime time, while Howard Stern racked up listeners (and FCC fines) as morning radio’s lesbian-loving enfant terrible.
Movies were also part of this new wave of naughtiness — and, of course, this was mostly Miramax’s fault. After going toe-to-toe with the Motion Picture Association of America (now the MPA) the year before over the tawdry true story Scandal, the MPA went into a censoring tizzy, branding other adult-themed flicks with the dreaded X rating.
Miramax was ready to start some drama again with two new foreign acquisitions — Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pedro Almodovar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Spanish title: ¡Átame!) — that were also fantastical, provocative tales of desire and menace.
Miramax paid half a million dollars to release Cook in the States in the first week of April. Greenaway’s first film released in the U.S since The Draughtman’s Contract in 1982, Cook has the filmmaker practically doing an operatic, black-comic take on the Seven Deadly Sins, with Michael Gambon as a gluttonous gangster who holds court at a French chef’s restaurant with his goons (which include Tim Roth and Ciarán Hinds), while his fed-up wife (Helen Mirren) has an ongoing affair with a diner (Alan Howard) all over the restaurant.
The MPA gave Miramax a choice: get to cutting the hot and heavy sex scenes between the usually butt-bald-nekkid Mirren and Howard (I’m sure many a young cinephile became a lifetime fan of the future dame after seeing all of Mirren in this) to avoid an X rating, or release it unrated. They chose the latter, and the gamble paid off: Cook grossed $7.7 million domestically. Both arty and amoral, it became a hot ticket for cinema connoisseurs and pervs in raincoats.
Although Cook went out there unrated, Harvey and them were ready to take on the MPA over Tie, in which Spanish bad boy Almodovar followed up his breakthrough 1988 comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown with an even more twisted love story.
Almodovar regular Antonio Banderas stars as Ricky, a fresh-out psychiatric patient who kidnaps a former porn star/drug addict (Victoria Abril) in the hopes that she’ll fall in love with him. While Almodovar is clearly putting a subversive spin on the romantic comedy (Abril’s equally-fucked-up beauty eventually gets her Stockholm Syndrome on and catches feelings for the guy), the sadomasochistic subject matter (not to mention the tacit endorsement of stalking) made the MPA predictably hit him with an X.
But Miramax was ready to file a lawsuit, noting that the MPA were harsh on films with sexual situations while giving violent bloodbaths a pass. (It’s worth noting that, during this time, dark-hearted films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive were released unrated after the MPA went all D-Generation X on them.)
Although Miramax lost and released Tie unrated — eventually grossing $4 million in North America — the court battle set off a sea change within the ratings board. By the end of the year, X was replaced with the even more dreaded NC-17. (The first NC-17-rated film was recently included in Crooked Marquee’s yearly Bad Romances series.)
There was one Miramax-released import that should’ve mustered up some controversy, but didn’t because it mostly slipped under the radar. Released in-between Chef and Tie, Mama, There’s a Man in Your Bed (French title: Romuald et Juliette) is a French rom-com from Coline Serreau, whose Three Men and a Cradle was eventually remade in the U.S. as Three Men and a Baby.
A Griffin Dunne-looking Daniel Auteuil is the Romuald of this story, the wealthy head of a yogurt company who gets in hot water after his underlings frame him for insider trading and shady business practices. The only person he can turn to is Juliette (Firmine Richard), a Black cleaning lady who informs him of the diabolical dealings going on behind his back. (As a woman whose skin and job makes her invisible to the people she cleans after, Juliette has seen and heard a lot.) He lays low from authorities and the media at her cluttered apartment, which she shares with her five, usually loud kids.
With Mama, Serreau crafted a cinematic Trojan horse, addressing issues of race and class inside a fancy, farcical romp. Serreau ramps up the screwball shenanigans in the first half, with Romuald and Juliette teaming up to find out who framed him. But the second half is where Serreau gets serious and shows how, even when things get back to normal, life still isn’t fair and balanced. Serreau still gets swoony in the end, making Romuald go on a money-burning mission to win Juliette’s stubborn love.
As you’ve probably figured out by now, people weren’t woke enough back then to take in a comedy where a white captain of industry and a Black working mother fall in love — even if they are both French. There was talk that the film would get remade in the States, with Richard Dreyfuss and Sheryl Lee Ralph in the starring roles, but that didn’t happen. Interracial romance was still too taboo for the mainstream; even Spike Lee’s race-mixing minefield Jungle Fever (which was released a year after Mama’s stateside rollout) stirred up a media frenzy when it hit theaters.
During that spring of 1990, Weinstein and his Miramax peoples proudly flaunted their rep as art-house hellraisers, snatching up crazysexycool imports that made American audiences feel like they were getting dirty, daring work that was foreign (in every sense of the word) to our shores. Although they ended the decade fully morphing into an Oscar bait shop, it should be noted that Miramax dove into the ‘90s not giving a fuck.
“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” is available to stream or buy. Internet Archive has a VHS rip of “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.” As for “Mama, There’s a Man in Your Bed,” you’re gonna have to head over to Russian YouTube.
