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. We once again go back to 1995 and revisit three films that made up what I like to call Miramax’s “Spring of Sin.”
It’s March of 1995 — and Miramax has a naughty lineup of imports ready to hit U.S. arthouses.
All three films the company released that month were festival acquisitions. The last two — Muriel’s Wedding and Priest — were picked up after debuting at the 1994 Toronto Film Festival. The first movie out the gate, Exotica, debuted a few months before at Cannes.
Exotica was a breakout film for Canadian writer/director Atom Egoyan, who had previously helmed such made-in-Canada indie dramas as Next of Kin and Family Viewing. This ensemble piece (budgeted at CAD 2 million) mostly takes place at a sumptuous strip club. When she’s not doing her signature routine of interpretive-dancing to Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” schoolgirl outfit-wearing main attraction Christina (Mia Kirshner) provides intense lapdances for Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a frequent visitor who’s carrying a lot of personal pain. This strange bond is already affecting Christina’s complicated relationship with her ex (Elias Koteas), who is not only the club’s pontificating DJ, but is also the guy who impregnated her boss/lover (Egoyan’s wife Arsinée Khanjian, who was pregnant during filming).
Moody and labyrinthine, Exotica is a titillating, time-bouncing neuro-noir that’s less about sex, desire, perversions, etc. and more about just coping through life. Most of the characters (which also include Don McKellar as a gay, rare bird-smuggling pet-store owner, Victor Garber as Francis’s handicapped brother and a teenage Sarah Polley as Francis’s concerned niece) are either holding on to secrets or trauma that slowly but surely reveal themselves throughout the movie.
Since Exotica was released when erotic thrillers were at their pervy peak, that’s how Weinstein marketed the film in the U.S. and Canada. Egoyan went along with it, under the condition that Kirshner wouldn’t appear in posters in her schoolgirl gear, an essential part of the story he didn’t want exploited by Harvey and them. (Luckily, for Miramax, he didn’t say anything about omitting it from the VHS box cover art.) The plan worked; initially released stateside on six screens, the rollout expanded to 433 screens after it made $14,379 per screen. The film also did gangbusters in its native homeland, playing for 25 weeks in Toronto. It ended up grossing CAD 15 million ($10 million) worldwide.
Muriel’s Wedding showed up a week after Exotica’s release. The Australian dramedy from writer-director P.J. Hogan, with Toni Collette giving a career-launching star turn as a lonely, ABBA-obsessed Aussie girl who longs to be married, became a smash around these parts, raking in $57.5 million against a $9 million budget. It also spawned a 2016 musical version back in Australia.
Wedding is yet another perfect example of Weinstein’s gift for chicanerous but effective marketing. The movie’s poster and trailer presented Wedding as an adorable rom-com, glossing over how it’s really a sad, cruel, grotesque burlesque. It’s a film where fellow Aussie darling Rachel Griffiths shows up as Muriel’s new, free-spirited bestie — only to get spinal cord-damaging cancer in the middle of it.
And the other characters are self-centered and contemptible, and that includes Collette’s Muriel, who’s basically a lying, delusional sociopath who steals money from her verbally abusive father (Bill Fisher) so she can start a new life in Sydney. Collette begins her ascent as one of the most fascinating actresses of our time with her material-elevating performance, playing her protagonist as a wounded soul looking for the love she can’t get from family, friends or even herself.
While Exotica and Wedding brought in some sweet box-office returns, Priest stormed up a lot of controversy for Miramax and Disney, its parent company. This British melodrama, which Miramax bought for $1.75 million, features Linus Roache as Father Greg, a strait-laced man of the cloth who relocates to a Liverpool parish and clashes with resident, liberal Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson), who lives in sin with his housekeeper (Cathy Tyson).
As much as Greg remains loyal to our lord and savior, he is also involved in a secret relationship — with a man (a pre-Trainspotting Robert Carlyle). His sexuality isn’t the only thing dude is struggling with. He starts wondering if he should break the seal of the confessional when a teenage girl (Christine Tremarco) tells him her incest-supporting dad (Robert Pugh) molests her on the regular.
Scripted by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Antonia Bird, both British-TV vets, Priest feels like a busy, prosaic BBC telefilm that made it to the big screen, mainly because it’s not afraid to show two guys doing it. Roache and Carlyle engage in some hot-and-heavy man-on-man action that undoubtedly made people in 1995 ready to get their protest on.
Of course, Catholic organizations in the U.S. and the U.K. condemned Priest. Originally scheduled for a Good Friday release (Weinstein always found creative ways to be a powerful troll), the film was pushed back a week after those groups ordered people to boycott everything Disney-related and flood their phone lines with complaints. Bomb and death threats soon followed. Even Harvey admitted that shit got outta hand in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures: “There’s nothing as frightening as getting these letters that said, ‘Dear Jew, Go fuck yourself, I’m gonna kill you’… You think publicity always fuels the box office — not that kind of publicity.”
Despite all the drama, Priest grossed $4.2 million worldwide, making it yet another successful acquisition for Miramax. You could say that month encapsulated what made them an influential, revolutionary film company — discovering ambitious, international flicks and giving them exposure in the U.S. of A! It also seems like the starting point of when the Weinsteins stopped giving a fuck about the art house and started their Oscar-craving descent into mainstream mediocrity.
After this year, they were never this naughty (but in a cool way) ever again.
Exotica is available to stream on The Criterion Channel. Muriel’s Wedding is available to stream on Hoopla and Paramount+. Priest is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
