{"id":19808,"date":"2023-03-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=19808"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:11:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:11:30","slug":"harveys-hellhole-the-2003-oscars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/harveys-hellhole-the-2003-oscars\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvey’s Hellhole: The 2003 Oscars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Welcome to Harvey\u2019s 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 the Oscars are on Sunday, let\u2019s go back twenty years, when Miramax basically ruled the Academy Awards \u2013 and Harvey was determined to get another Best Picture win.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise that Oscar Wars<\/em>, Michael Schulman\u2019s recently-released book on the Academy Awards, has a chapter devoted to Harvey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Titled \u201cThe Harveys,\u201d Schulman takes us back to the \u201890s and early aughts, when Weinstein used his talents as a huckster and bully to get some Oscar gold during every awards season. It began in 1994, when Weinstein tried to steal away the Best Picture Oscar from Steven Spielberg\u2019s Schindler\u2019s List<\/em> (considered a shoo-in for Best Picture that year) by making newspaper\/trade ads for Jane Campion\u2019s The Piano<\/em>, Miramax\u2019s Best Picture contender, boasting its success with New York and Los Angeles critics\u2019 awards. The ads had \u201cBEST PICTURE\u201d printed at the top and, in parentheses and small print, \u201cRunner-Up\u201d below it. The plan didn\u2019t work \u2013 List<\/em> won Best Picture. This must\u2019ve stuck in Weinstein\u2019s craw since, a few years later, Weinstein pulled a lot of foul shit in order for Shakespeare in Love<\/em><\/a> to get the Best Picture Oscar over Spielberg\u2019s Saving Private Ryan<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading the chapter reminded me how Weinstein spent the following Oscar seasons raging war on DreamWorks (which released Ryan<\/em>) and its Best Picture nominees. It\u2019s a war Harvey lost three years in a row, as DreamWorks releases American Beauty<\/em>, Gladiator<\/em> and A Beautiful Mind<\/em> (which DreamWorks released internationally) respectively all won Best Picture Oscars, defeating middlebrow Miramax entries The Cider House Rules<\/em>, Chocolat<\/em>, and In the Bedroom<\/em>. Considering how out-of-pocket his tactics were during this time (he\u2019s still seen as the one responsible for that ugly whisper campaign against Mind<\/em><\/a>), it appears Oscar voters were getting fed up with his incessant strong-arming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Schulman devotes a bulk of the chapter to how Weinstein\u2019s mad ascension as the industry\u2019s dirtiest player led to Shakespeare<\/em>\u2019s shocking win, he only drops a few paragraphs on Weinstein\u2019s true finest hour: Miramax\u2019s takeover of the 75th Annual Academy Awards in 2003. Weinstein made sure he\u2019d get some statuettes by packing up the final months of 2002 with a bunch of awards bait, including the Julie Taymor-directed Frida Kahlo biopic Frida<\/em>, the George Clooney-directed Chuck Barris \u201cbiopic\u201d Confessions of a Dangerous Mind<\/em><\/a>, and Phillip Noyce\u2019s previously delayed adaptation of Graham Greene\u2019s The Quiet American<\/em><\/a>, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. Miramax eventually received a whopping forty nominations, more than any studio that year. And, in the Best Picture category, two of them (Chicago<\/em> and Gangs of New York<\/em>) were Miramax releases, while Harvey and his brother Bob had a hand in producing two others (The Hours<\/em> and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since Harvey was betting on Gangs<\/em> being the Best Picture victor for Miramax, he spent a heavy amount of time over director Martin Scorsese\u2019s shoulder during its production. A big-screen adaptation of Herbert Asbury\u2019s 1927 book, about the brutal gangs who fought each other for supremacy in 18th-century New York, was something the filmmaker had been trying to get off the ground since the \u201870s. Unfortunately, he had to get in bed with \u201cthe devil himself,\u201d as Spike Lee called him when Scorsese told Lee about it, in order to do it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could spend the rest of the column listing all the ways Harvey made Scorsese\u2019s life a living hell on the Gangs<\/em> set (which was based in Rome, not New York), as stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis feuded on-screen while Scorsese and Weinstein feuded off. But this Independent<\/em> piece<\/a> that surfaced during the film\u2019s 20th anniversary a couple months ago basically says it all. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that Scorsese worked with Weinstein again a few years later, when he stepped in for Michael Mann to direct DiCaprio in the 2004 Howard Hawks biopic The Aviator<\/em>. But Scorsese made certain that Weinstein was not welcome on that set. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Gangs<\/em> was nominated for ten Oscars \u2013 and didn\u2019t win a damn thing. It turned out Weinstein should\u2019ve been putting his support behind Chicago<\/em><\/a>, debut director Rob Marshall\u2019s adaptation of the famed musical that co-writer\/director\/choreographer Bob Fosse first brought to Broadway in 1975, starring Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones as fame-seeking murderers in the roaring \u201820s. It had 13 nominations and won six, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Zeta-Jones. Plus, the $45 million picture was a box-office hit, grossing over $306.8 million worldwide. (Gangs<\/em>, which budget ballooned to $100 million during filming, only made $193.8 million.) And, unlike Scorsese, Marshall had positive things to say about his boss, who apparently had good notes and didn\u2019t meddle much. (Of course, Weinstein was too busy hassling Scorsese in Rome to get all up in Marshall\u2019s business.)  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chicago<\/em> wasn\u2019t the only big winner for Weinstein that night. Frida<\/em> got two wins, for Best Original Score and Best Makeup. Rings<\/em> also got a couple Oscars, for Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects. Despite facing scrutiny for wearing a prosthetic nose<\/a>, Nicole Kidman won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in Hours<\/em>, a movie that now bears the unfortunate honor of being produced by the alpha-asshole duo of Weinstein and Scott Rudin (who has also been called out for his abusive behavior<\/a> over the years). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That would be the last time Miramax won big at the Oscars. A few years later, Harvey and Bob formed The Weinstein Company and the elder Weinstein continued his toxic knack for scooping up Oscar trophies, eventually scoring Best Picture wins for The King\u2019s Speech<\/em> and The Artist<\/em>. It\u2019s kinda unfortunate that when people think of scandalous Academy Award ceremonies, they think of what happened last year with you-know-what, and not about those two-and-a-half-decades of Harvey Weinstein straight-jacking Oscars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the Oscars around the corner, let\u2019s go back twenty years, when Miramax basically ruled the Academy Awards \u2013 and Harvey was determined to get another Best Picture win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":19810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1498,1422],"class_list":["post-19808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-harveys-hellhole","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21766,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19808\/revisions\/21766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}