If you're wondering just how far the nearly insolvent
ex-mogul Harvey Weinstein has fallen, here's a handy metric: He can't even stop
a Canadian filmmaker from making an unauthorized documentary about what a
gargantuan dick he is. A Canadian!
According to the New York Times, Barry Avrich, a
documentarian who last made a movie about uber-agent Lew Wasserman, has secured
$1 million in funding for Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project, which
promises to be a "powerful, uncensored account of a brilliant, feared,
charming and yet loathsome character." Avrich is Canadian, and the money
comes from Movie Network and Movie Central, two Canadian companies.
As the title suggests, Weinstein is not cooperating
with the project, which is in itself a remarkable development: There was a time
when Weinstein could have gotten a pesky little filmmaker like Avrich shut down
in a day with either a phone call to his backers or a sweeter offer of his own.
Here's how David Carr put described Weinstein's facility for either bullying
his critics or buying them off in a 2001 New York profile:
As the keeper of star-making machinery, Weinstein has
re-engineered the media process so that he lives beyond its downsides. His
other assets-a book-publishing company and a working knowledge of the frailties
of most reporters-mean that when Weinstein acts like a numbskull at Cannes, he
gets a pass.
A. J. Benza, who held Weinstein harmless when he was
a gossip at the Daily News, has a book on Talk-Miramax that will become a
movie. Liz Smith calls him the Irving Thalberg of our age, and Weinstein
reciprocates by giving her a steady taste of star quotage. Rush and Molloy
can't blurb one of his actors without mentioning how "critically
acclaimed" his last project was.
"He owns you guys, all of you," bitches one
West Coast film executive. "All media is controlled out of New York, and
he is the king. He has the kind of Teflon none of us can understand."
His shadow was so long a decade ago that even actual
photographs of Weinstein assaulting then-New York Observer Andrew Goldman never
saw the light of day:
"You know what? It's good that I'm the fucking
sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town." Weinstein said that
to Andrew Goldman, then a reporter for the New York Observer, when he took him
out of a party in a headlock last November after there was a tussle for
Goldman's tape recorder and someone got knocked in the head. Weinstein
deputized himself and insisted that Goldman apologize. His hubris would be
hilarious if he weren't able to back it up. Several paparazzi got pictures of
the tussle, but Goldman bet me at the time that they would never see print.
I mailed him his dollar a week later.
No more. According to the Times, Weinstein tried some
of his old tricks on Avrich, but they appear to have lacked the force that they
once carried now that they're coming from a debt-ridden and increasingly
desperate producer who can barely gather together enough scratch to release his
next film and can't afford to buy back the company he named after his parents.
Weinstein seems to have had some success in convincing American firms to stay
away—"Over the last several months, Mr. Avrich said, he has unsuccessfully
sought advance backing from American film distributors"—but his tentacles
are too weak to make it across our northern border.
And Weinstein's efforts to throw Avrich off course
just sound pathetic:
Initially, Mr. Avrich said, Mr. Weinstein advised him
not to make the movie. Later Mr. Weinstein suggested that Mr. Avrich make a
film instead about Arthur Krim, the onetime head of Orion Pictures, who died in
1994.
Finally Mr. Weinstein told
Mr. Avrich that Quentin Tarantino was considering a competing project that
would chronicle Mr. Weinstein's professional life, which has ranged from
work as a concert promoter in Buffalo, through the heyday of Miramax, which
released hits like "Pulp Fiction" and "Shakespeare in
Love," and beyond.
Paula Woods, a spokeswoman for Mr. Tarantino, said
Mr. Tarantino had told her that he and the Weinsteins were "unofficially
kicking around the idea" of a Weinstein documentary.
Yes, Quentin Tarantino is going to make a documentary
about Harvey Weinstein to bury Avrich's little project. And if you keep saying
mean things about him, Harvey will totally get this huge guy he knows to beat
you up, so just stop, OK?
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