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 Sundance Film Festival season is upon us, let’s once again recall a time when he forked over a lot of money for a comedy he eventually and unceremoniously dumped into theaters.
It’s kind of wild to think that a filmmaker would have such a traumatic experience working with Harvey Weinstein that it would turn him off making any more movies from a certain genre. But that seems to be what happened with Brad Anderson.
I’ll explain: In 1998, Anderson was at Sundance, showing off his second feature Next Stop Wonderland. It was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize and became enough of an audience favorite to prompt a bidding war among distributors. Of course, Miramax won the battle, ponying up a whopping $6 million for the North American rights. Ol’ Harvey was quite proud of the acquisition, telling the press he and his company were going into “the Brad Anderson business.”
It’s easy to see why Weinstein wanted this Wonderland. It’s a kooky, audience-friendly tale of star-crossed romance that was all the rage back in the day. After getting dumped by her pretentious activist boyfriend (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who, of course, crushes it in his brief role), registered Boston nurse Erin (Hope Davis) gets thrust back in the dating scene by her mother (Anderson’s aunt Holland Taylor), who places a dating ad for her in the paper. While she plows through a series of meetups with phony-ass dudes, she continually misses the opportunity to meet the guy she should be dating — aspiring marine biologist Alan (Alan Gelfant). Throughout the movie, they constantly cross paths, only to have their moment to lock eyes and fall in love thwarted by one thing or another.
Despite its indie-ness (it was made for $1 million), Wonderland is just as far-fetched and middlebrow as your average studio rom-com. New York Times critic Stephen Holden nailed it when he wrote that even though “it creates and sustains an intelligent, seriocomic mood better than any recent film about the urban single life,” the film “isn’t really much more than a beautifully acted, finely edited sitcom.” Anderson also crams in a bunch of subplots, like the trio of douchey pals (which includes Archer/Bob’s Burgers voice star H. Jon Benjamin) who wagers who’s gonna be the one who goes all the way with Erin, and the loan shark (the late Victor Argo) who tries to get Alan to do some shady stuff in order to clear out his debt.
We do get a savvy, sexy performance from a young, alluring Davis, who was already getting a rep as an art-house doyenne thanks to performances in The Daytrippers and The Myth of Fingerprints. Although she’s now known as a veteran character actress — basically the go-to gal whenever a TV drama needs someone to play an uptight, middle-aged, white lady — her turn in Wonderland makes you think she could’ve had a lovely career as a romantic lead. It also has a snazzy bossa nova soundtrack (which I actually bought years ago at a used bookstore in North Carolina), scored by Claudio Ragazzi and featuring selections from Walter Wanderley, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Astrud & Bebel Gilberto, that makes the movie seem more exotic than it is.
Of course, since Weinstein splurged all this dough, you know he’s gonna want some changes. After test screenings didn’t dig the way one character —a suave but pushy, Brazilian suitor (Jose Zuniga) of Erin’s — bowed out of the film, he had Anderson add a scene that gave the character a more likable resolution. (You can tell the scene is a reshoot since Zuniga’s hair is considerably shorter.)
Anderson soon realized how much of “the Brad Anderson business” consisted of him shutting up and doing what he was told. “Miramax will steamroller over you, if they can,” he said in 2001. “I’d never been through that before. My assumption was that you sell the movie and that’s the movie they buy. But they look at it as a product. A product needs to be reworked or altered in order to fit the consumer’s needs. And you’re just the obstacle in their way to try to remake that product into whatever they think is going to make it more lucrative.”
From the way Miramax dropped it into theaters at the tail end of August 1998, with virtually zero publicity, Harvey and them didn’t have much hope for Hope and the movie she stars in. With the exception of the acclaimed Native American drama Smoke Signals (another Sundance favorite), it was a bad summer for Miramax, and with most of their releases (including previous Hellhole subjects Hav Plenty — another rom-com with a reshot ending — and 54) failing at the box office, Weinstein cut his losses and let Wonderland sink.
Anderson’s relationship with Miramax — and rom-coms — soon soured. He was set to make an American version of the 1996 French rom-com When the Cat’s Away, but it collapsed. In 2000, he returned to Sundance with another rom-com, the time-travel whatzit Happy Accidents, starring Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio. Paramount Classics made an offer for it, only to renege a month later. IFC, which financed it, eventually distributed it via its IFC Films arm a year later.
That same year, he released the low-budget horror thriller Session 9, with David Caruso, Peter Mullan, and Josh Lucas as members of a clean-up crew uncovering some spooky goings-on at an abandoned mental asylum. It opened up to rave reviews and picked up a cult rep in the U.S. and overseas. From then on, Anderson focused on serious, scary projects. He would direct such films as The Machinist, The Call, and the upcoming horror flick Blood, scheduled for release at the end of the month. He’s also directed episodes of The Wire, The Shield, and Fringe.
I guess after you’ve dealt with the menace that is Harvey Weinstein, the last thing you wanna do is turn out cutesy, quirky love stories. You wanna make films that put audiences through the same hellish wringer he went through dealing with that muhfucka.
Next Stop Wonderland is available to rent or buy (it’s also streaming on Starz).
