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. Let’s take it back to thirty years ago, when a certain pulpy flick set off a wave of crazy/sexy/cool crime stories.
It’s October 1995, and a year has passed since Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction broke box-office records, snagged a lot of awards, and made the ex-video store employee an in-demand, A-list filmmaker.
Pulp also made crime stories profitable at the movies, and that fall saw an onslaught of them. David Fincher’s gloomy police procedural Seven made over $300 million worldwide, while Robert De Niro and Al Pacino finally faced off in Michael Mann’s beloved heist flick Heat. Novels from hardboiled legends Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty), Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress), and Richard Price (Clockers) received big-screen adaptations. And twisty, twisted noirs The Usual Suspects and To Die For were being heavily buzzed as “the next Pulp Fiction.”
As the months and years progressed, up-and-coming filmmakers began dropping movies that were undeniably Tarantino-esque. From 2 Days in the Valley to Truth or Consequences, N.M., they were usually scuzzy, black-comic shoot-’em-ups full of witty, too-cool criminals engaging in felonious activity that could go from eccentric to violent in a heartbeat. “They rattle with too much dialogue, too many plot twists, too-ugly furniture,” Entertainment Weekly critic Ty Burr wrote in 1997. Even future auteurs Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket) and the Wachowskis (Bound) made their feature-film debuts helming hipstery, hardboiled flicks. (Of course, these are the ones that have received Criterion releases.)
At some point, Bob and Harvey Weinstein decided that if people were gonna rip off movies from their star discovery, who already had other projects lined up for them around that time, they might as well get in on the action.
Kinda released in December 1995, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead was one of the first Clinton-era neo-noirs to get slammed as a Pulp clone. Andy Garcia stars as Jimmy “The Saint” Tosnia, a smooth-talking, malt-drinking, Denver-based ex-con (“a bitch’s bastard” is how Jack Warden’s storytelling old-timer/secret narrator describes him) trying to stay on the straight-and-narrow by running a video service where dying people leave parting words for their loved ones. He gets roped back into the life by his old boss, a quadriplegic kingpin only referred to as The Man with the Plan (Pulp castmate Christopher Walken, stepping in for a rehab-bound James Caan). The Man wants Jimmy to scare a guy (a pre-The Good Wife Josh Charles) out of marrying a former girlfriend of The Man’s mentally disturbed son, who’s been on a violent, child-molesting tear ever since they broke up.
Jimmy rounds up a stereotypical crew of old buddies for the job. There’s the tattooed family man (William Forsythe), the old pro with health issues (Christopher Lloyd), the loose cannon (Treat Williams), and the Black guy (Bill Nunn). Of course, the plan goes horribly awry, prompting Jimmy to protect his friends when The Man goes on the warpath.
Director Gary Fleder and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg, both old chums and Boston University alums, came up with Denver as their first film. In an interview on the recently-released, Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Denver, Fleder said Pulp didn’t influence the movie (filming took place the summer before Pulp hit theaters). But he did admit that Tarantino’s 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs inspired him to make a cool crime caper of his own. Fleder even hired Dogs scene-stealer Steve Buscemi to play a damn-near-superhuman assassin named – I shit you not – Mister Shhh.
Working with cinematographer Elliot Davis (who would later work on better Tarantino clones like Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight) and production designer Nelson Coates, Fleder floods Denver with overstylized images, full of dark-but-colorfully lit characters populating shots obviously lifted from Edward Hopper paintings. While the movie is awesome to look at, the story itself is agonizingly derivative. Fleder and Rosenberg go overboard on trying to make Denver as hip and brotastic as Dogs. When the characters aren’t throwing hella-dated racial epithets and homophobic slurs out there, they’re speaking in insane underworld slang Rosenberg made up. The Man lets Jimmy know he and his pals are all on borrowed time by calling them “buckwheats,” meaning they’ll be killed in a way that also, and rather unnecessarily, involves anal assault.
It’s almost like the actors banded together to give performances that elevate the morbid, problematic material. (Lloyd is the movie’s MVP, going out like a true G.) Garcia is both a lover and a fighter in this, attempting to spark a doomed romance with an alluring lady named Dagney (Gabrielle Anwar – where the hell did she go?) while also serving as a protector of sorts for a strung-out hooker (uber-goth siren Fairuza Balk) with – everybody say it with me – a heart of gold. You can also catch a young Don Cheadle and Playboy pinup-turned-anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy in bit roles.
As expected, the critics went all buckwheat on Denver, obviously bringing up the Tarantino comparisons. Roger Ebert originally had good things to say when he saw it at Cannes earlier that year – but his opening-day review was less-than-enthusiastic. “It’s so overwritten it becomes an exercise in style rather than a story about its characters,” he wrote, later adding, “The characters talk like they were raised on 1940s noir movies, and then given a quick course in advertising copywriting.”
Bad press and mediocre test screenings made the Weinsteins give Denver a tepid theatrical rollout, as the $8 million picture only grossed a meager $529,677, Fleder, who would go on to direct the hit studio thrillers Kiss the Girls and Don’t Say a Word, admits on the Blu-ray that he regrets going into full-on tragedy mode in the second half, as bodies gruesomely pile up before a ridiculous-ass ending that seems like it came from Harvey Scissorhands during post-production. Fleder did return to the Weinsteins in 2001 to direct a troubled adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story Imposter, which also bombed at the box office.
The dismal Denver didn’t stop Miramax from acquiring bullet-riddled quirkfests that weren’t made by their star player. Remember, this is the same studio that almost distributed that 1999 cult carbon copy (and your ex-boyfriend’s favorite movie) The Boondock Saints – until Weinstein realized that writer-director Troy Duffy was a bigger enfant terrible than Tarantino and dropped the project. (The whole bloody affair was chronicled in the 2003 doc Overnight.)
While Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead became another Miramax release that got dumped and discarded, it was a harbinger of things to come. As smart-ass, pop-culture-savvy, macho-as-fuck crime sagas clogged multiplexes and video stores for the rest of the decade, at least this film crashed, burned and left a nice-looking corpse first.
“Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” is available to stream on Pluto TV.
