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 it’s Sundance season once again, let’s go back 30 years, when Harvey and them went to the festival and picked up two award-winning films from two promising young filmmakers.
The 1994 Sundance Film Festival had several first-time filmmakers showing up with fascinating big-screen debuts. Veteran bad-guy actor Tom Noonan won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award with his dramedy What Happened Was…, where Noonan and Karen Sillas play two lonely souls engaging in a revealing, intense first date. A young David O. Russell nabbed the Dramatic Audience Award for his incest-filled black comedy Spanking the Monkey, while Hoop Dreams, Steve James’ soon-to-be-critically-acclaimed chronicle of two Black teens aspiring to be basketball players, got the Documentary Audience Award.
This was also the year when the Dramatic Filmmakers Trophy was shared by Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Boaz Yakin’s Fresh, two films that were bought by Miramax and released in theaters later that year.
We should all know the story of Clerks by now. Proud New Jerseyite Smith maxed out credit cards and sold off a large part of his comic-book collection in order to make his version of Richard Linklater’s Slacker. Using his experiences working at the now-famous Quick Stop corner store in Red Bank, Smith crafted a low-budget, black-and-white comedy about two pals (Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson) and the very eventful day they have working at their respective, dead-end jobs.
Clerks had an interesting journey before it hit Sundance. The film premiered a few months before at the Independent Feature Film Market (IFFM), where it had a disastrous screening. In his book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across Independent Filmmaking, “czar of representation” John Pierson said the “barely nonexistent” audience included “a crazy woman ranting about neo-Nazis in New Jersey.” Nevertheless, Village Voice film columnist Amy Taubin heard about the film and wrote a piece about it. Smith, who had a framed copy of an interview Taubin wrote about Linklater, couldn’t believe that Taubin wanted to talk to him. As he says in the upcoming Village Voice oral history The Freaks Came Out to Write, “I will remember that piece on my deathbed.”
By the time Clerks got to Sundance, Smith excised the original, dark ending, where O’Halloran’s convenience-store jockey gets killed by a robber. It became an instant hit with the Park City crowd, eventually getting the attention of Harvey Weinstein, who told Smith he wanted Clerks and wanted to open it big. The $27,575 film would go on to gross $4.4 million and launch Smith’s career as a foul-mouthed auteur. The MPAA initially wanted to give it an NC-17 rating for all its frank sex talk, like when O’Halloran’s character lost it when he found out his loyal girlfriend used to be a, shall we say, serial fellater. But once Miramax brought in lawyer Alan Dershowitz to appeal, it eventually got its R rating.
While Clerks became a much-adored indie classic, Fresh became another acclaimed-but-forgotten, low-budget film from the ‘90s. Produced by longtime Quentin Tarantino collaborator Lawrence Bender, the inner-city drama is about a New York preteen (Sean Nelson in his film debut), nicknamed Fresh, who balances drug dealing with surviving in the ‘hood. Thanks to the lessons he learned from his wayward, chess-playing father (Samuel L. Jackson), Fresh hatches a plan to double-cross some drug lords and get him and his drug-addicted sister (N’Bushe Wright) out of the ghetto.
The $3.5 million film was dropped into theaters the first weekend of September. Yet another film Weinstein tried to market as a hip-hop ‘hood movie, it grossed $8.1 million and ended up on several year-end critics’ lists. It is a well-acted drama, another portrait of an inner-city youngster who’s too busy dealing with adult shit to properly live life as a kid. However, I don’t think Yakin, an Israeli-American New Yorker who got his start scripting the Roger Corman-produced adaptation of the Marvel comic The Punisher and the Clint Eastwood-Charlie Sheen cop flick The Rookie, could get away with making another ‘hood movie these days. As the recently-released American Fiction has shown, the only ‘hood stories people wanna hear have to come from Black people – even if they’ve never lived in the ‘hood.
After Clerks, Smith went over to Gramercy for his next picture, the even raunchier 1995 comedy Mallrats, which was a critical and commercial flop. This made Smith go back to Miramax for his next film, the 1997 straight guy-meets-gay girl rom-com Chasing Amy (mostly inspired by Smith and producer Scott Mosier’s experiences hanging out with the lesbian filmmakers of the 1994 Sapphic drama Go Fish at Sundance), which was a hit with audiences and critics and led Smith to a lengthy run exclusively doing films for Harvey Weinstein. He began self-financing his own films in the 2010s, getting from under Weinstein’s thumb years before you-know-what happened.
As for Yakin, he followed up Fresh with another Miramax film, A Price Above Rubies, in 1998. Yakin got some backlash for casting Renee Zellweger in the lead role as a young Jewish woman experiencing a sexual awakening that causes ripples in her Hasidic community. When he shot the film in Brooklyn’s Borough Park the year before, the ultra-Orthodox locals didn’t approve of what they saw, with some causing enough of a ruckus to briefly halt filming. But Yakin wasn’t looking for their permission. ”If you’re shooting a movie in Little Italy, does that mean you have to talk to the local mafiosi and the baker?” he asked Entertainment Weekly.
Yakin went on to write and direct a lot of studio pictures. He’s helmed such films as Remember the Titans and Uptown Girls, and has been called on to punch up the scripts for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Now You See Me.
Yes, Harvey Weinstein basically put both Smith and Yakin on the map when their films played the snowy screens of Sundance. But, like so many filmmakers he discovered and later discarded, they successfully distanced themselves from dude way before shit got crazy.
Clerks is available to stream on Paramount+, Amazon Prime Video, and Hoopla. Fresh is available to stream on Paramount+, Hoopla, and Pluto TV.
