The House That Tarantino Built
Like all business structures created for delivering art, Hollywood experiences times of deep panic. When the industry formula stops working, Hollywood must humiliatingly ask for the help of independents like Quentin Tarantino, and say: What we were selling yesterday is not being bought today and, worse, we don't know why.
In these times, 'suits' and 'creatives' work together, antagonistically, until Hollywood is confident enough to tell the independents to get lost. But Quentin Tarantino will never be told to get lost.
His new film, Kill Bill, has been variously described as a love letter to samurai movies, westerns and Uma Thurman. It is really a love letter to Hollywood and, in particular Harvey Weinstein the head of Miramax.
Quentin Tarantino's films seem at first to be subverting Hollywood conventions. However, Hollywood has deftly used Tarantino as a 'trojan horse' with which to subvert independent film. Quentin Tarantino's true effect has been to create the arthouse/studio hybrid.
Miramax, the film studio which nurtured Tarantino's career and has released all of his films, today controls 6.6 per cent of the movie business. It is regarded as having created the business model to beat, thanks to Quentin Tarantino. Harvey Weinstein refers to Miramax as the "House that Quentin built".
However, in the 1980s, the Weinsteins, who set up Miramax, were a joke. They would take reasonably successful films from Europe "fashion them to American tastes" and then release them to a modest profit - a policy of slash and burn in the editing room which earned him the nickname 'Harvey Scissorhands'. By 1990 they were in the process of creating a new formula, one which would define the next decade's relationship between independents and studios.
The rest of Hollywood was in trouble in 1990: that deep feeling of panic had returned to Hollywood for the first time since the Seventies, when moribund studios turned to the crazies to help them make cash.
Hollywood found its new formula with Jaws. Revenge was sweet. They were able to turn to independent filmmakers and say: "what you were selling yesterday is not being bought today and, we know why". The blockbuster was on its way in, and independents were out.
The ailing business model which faced Harvey Weinstein in 1990 was simple: open as big as possible. With each week after the opening weekend, studios get a smaller and smaller share of profits from cinemas, so the logic of the model is: "If you advertise heavily then even a badly received film could make vast sums of money for the studio before running out of steam".
For a few years between 1990 and Pulp Fiction the old formula was dead and no new formula had taken its place. So independents had free reign.
Pulp Fiction created the status quo formula for the next decade. It defeated the old model with an equally simple one: "open small".
Miramax would buy many films, open them in a few cinemas, build up word of mouth, try to gain free publicity with controversy and if one of those films broke out, advertise it to the hilt, take it wide and start sending Academy members Porsches in their favourite colour.
Miramax was creating hybrids of arthouse and studio cinematography. Errol Morris, director of celebrated documentaries The Thin Blue Line and now the Fog of War, was sold to the American people as "a detective, with a camera". Harvey Weinstein was a brilliant and, therefore, brutally simple marketer.
After hearing Morris plugging The Thin Blue Line on the radio Weinstein sent him a letter to explain to Morris - "You were boring" - and threatened to replace him with an actor who would instead go on radio to plug the film properly. It went on to make $1.5 million, unheard of at the time for a documentary of its kind.
With Pulp Fiction, independent films broke through the psychologically vital $100m barrier. The studios created mini-Miramax divisions of their own. A new business model reigned and independents were once again seen stalking studio corridors.
But this defined independent success as using Hollywood's tools against Hollywood: heavy narrative, slumming stars, violence and escapism.
Needless to say Hollywood's response to Tarantino's mockery was not fear and shame but unimaginable delight at a new alternative to the ailing Eighties blockbuster formula.
They could say: You are selling us Hollywood fare, we are Hollywood. Come and work for us.
The death knell for that formula has sounded, I would argue, with Tarantino's latest opus: Kill Bill.
Kill Bill was released on several thousand screens, like a generic blockbuster and Miramax is gradually abandoning its strategy of releasing many small independent films (giving them all a small chance of success) and concentrates on prestige productions like Gangs of New York.
The art house/studio hybrid is breaking down and directors are choosing sides. Films like Intolerable Cruelty and Possession reveal which side once provocative filmmakers like the Coens and Neil Labute have decided on.
When the new panic sets in and the relationship between studios and independents is renegotiated, Hollywood may find that the independents have their own business model: Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ is well on its way to becoming the most successful film in US domestic history. Ironically, the only truly independent production is actually coming from rich actors-turned-directors like Sean Penn or Sofia Coppola.
They have autonomy and do not use it, as Tarantino does, to produce gleeful Hollywood fare.
6th May 2004