The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  Weinstein knows one thing better than anyone on this planet: what the 5,700 voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will like. He instantly made a bid on the movie and called his friend, Cannes official Frémaux, who decides where movies in the Cannes Official Selection will play, and asked him to move The Artist into the 2011 main competition. That Frémaux did.

  With TWC behind it, The Artist was the buzz title to see on the Croisette well before the opening-night film had even screened. Sure enough, at festival’s end, Dujardin wound up winning the Palme d’Or for Best Actor, which put the film on the road to a long string of wins on the awards circuit, including five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Costume, Score, and Actor in a Leading Role, which Dujardin became the first French actor to win (after nominations for Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, and Gérard Depardieu). A grinning Frémaux attended the Weinsteins’ glittering Oscar after party on the Sunset Strip along with Meryl Streep, whose gold dress matched her Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in the Weinsteins’ The Iron Lady. He was basking in the first-ever Best Picture Oscar win for France.

  Cannes helped to make that happen. But so did Weinstein, and the French knew that he had done much to push their films at the American box office. He also picked up French crowd-pleaser The Intouchables well before its star Omar Sy beat The Artist’s Dujardin for the Best Actor César in February. After TWC turned The Intouchables into a summer American specialty hit, the French Oscar selection committee picked it as their official French submission for the foreign Oscar. Rust and Bone would have been the other obvious choice, but Audiard had already had his crack at the Academy with A Prophet. It was time to give someone else a chance.

  Clearly, after The Artist, Weinstein has plenty of sway with the Festival de Cannes, and so, in 2012, he leverages two genre flicks into the competition lineup before they disappear into the ether of box-office disappointments. Frémaux is willing to accept a weak movie—even in the main competition—as long as it boasts a respectable auteur and several stars worthy of the massive Palais red-carpet photo op.

  Two stylish films from Australian directors fit the bill. John Hillcoat’s $22 million period gangster film Lawless boasts a sprawling global ensemble including Brits Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman, Americans Shia LaBeouf and Jessica Chastain, and Aussies Mia Wasikowska, Guy Pearce, and Jason Clarke. And Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly offers golden star Brad Pitt, fresh off his triumph the year before in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. That he could be counted on to walk the carpet with Angelina Jolie doesn’t hurt.

  Lawless started out its life in development with husband-and-wife producers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher’s Red Wagon shingle at Sony. Screenwriter-musician Nick Cave and director Hillcoat, who had collaborated on outback western The Proposition, adapted Lawless from Matt Bondurant’s 2008 novel The Wettest County in the World, loosely based on the author’s grandfather and two great uncles running booze in Virginia during Prohibition.

  But Lawless is among the many films these days that no longer fit inside Hollywood’s reduced studio parameters; Sony passed. “It had heart, but it was violent,” Fisher tells me in a phone interview before Cannes. “Ten or fifteen years ago a studio would have made it in a second.”

  So Wick and Fisher, producers responsible for such high-end fare as The Great Gatsby, Memoirs of a Geisha, Stuart Little, and Oscar-winning Gladiator, did what many studio producers are doing these days. They went indie. With a strong ensemble cast led by LaBeouf— "who was in from day one,” says Fisher, “up or down he was always there”—plus Hardy, Chastain, and Wasikowska, Wick and Fisher lined up overseas financing. Glen Basner’s FilmNation presold individual overseas territories at Cannes 2011, showing early footage to buyers. And CAA brought in financing from Annapurna, owned by Silicon Valley master of the universe Larry Ellison’s twenty-six-year-old billionaire sprig Megan Ellison. The final piece of the package: the Weinsteins acquired North American rights.

  Weinstein’s other competition offering, also backed by Annapurna, is Dominik’s stylish Killing Them Softly, adapted from George V. Higgins’s 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade and set in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2008. Pitt plays aviator-shaded Jackie Cogan, a hit man who arrives to investigate a Mob-protected poker game that has been looted. The lowlife culprits are Frankie and Russell (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn), who are trying to pin the blame on the game’s overseer, Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who once successfully organized a heist of his own card room. Cogan is supposed to wipe them all out, and hires an old crony (James Gandolfini) to do the job. But he’s out of shape, drunk, and washed up. Cogan must do the job himself. Softly or not.

  Pitt has remained loyal to Dominik since he starred in his lofty, too-long 2007 artful western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which failed at the box office. Pitt believed in Dominik’s take on genre violence in Killing Them Softly, which added a conceptual layer of political resonance to the equation. “I like violence in movies,” Dominik explains at the Cannes press conference. “The most dramatic expression of drama is violence. Jackie is . . . concerned with violence not being cruel to the victim . . . Crime films are about capitalism. With this movie genre it’s perfectly acceptable for all the characters to be motivated by money. We were in the middle of an economic crisis when it all came together.”

  As jaded, practical, cool-as-ice Cogan, Pitt earns strong reviews, better than the film. But even though the world media tend to adore America-bashing (hence the rapturous Cannes reaction in 2004 to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11), Cannes critics aren’t buying Dominik’s heavy-handed political pedantry. As a movie star in front of a press conference microphone and video cameras in a viral world, liberal Pitt also recognizes that he can’t afford to espouse the politics of the movie, even if they’re his own. “I love America and find it an exciting place to be right now,” he states carefully. “Innovation, fairness, and justice are ideals to be protected. Violence is an accepted part of the gangster world, murder is accepted as a possibility when dealing with crime. Playing a racist would be more difficult for me.”

  The film’s neophyte backer Megan Ellison makes her own mark on Cannes, having financed three projects via Annapurna that are selling in the Cannes market through her foreign sales company Panorama. They might not have gotten made without her, including one film she rescued from development limbo that wasn’t ready in time for Cannes: Paul Thomas Anderson’s $35 million post–World War II drama The Master. Sitting on a hotel terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, FilmNation CEO Basner, who built Weinstein’s foreign sales operation before going out on his own, tells me, “She’s smart, straightforward, and interested in film. She has good taste.”

  Top-dog talent agency CAA has packaged all of fledgling Annapurna’s projects, helping the young producer to put together The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow’s $45 million bin Laden drama Zero Dark Thirty (released through Sony), which luckily wound up earning enough global coin to pay for Annapurna’s losses on such also-rans as The Master and B-movie producer Randall Emmett’s 2011 Anchor Bay release Catch .44. Hollywood doesn’t want to make dramas anymore, the ones Warner Independent and Paramount Vantage used to handle—movies in that mid-range between $10 million and $50 million that aren’t presold brand names or tentpoles—and Ellison does.

  Even though she paid for the movies, Ellison did not have an easy time working with the intimidating Weinstein on Killing Them Softly, Lawless, and critics’ favorite The Master, which all stalled out at the North American box office. The Master took a rather unorthodox opening berth in September, skipping the fall festival circuit altogether because it previewed in seven cities around the country in 70-millimeter presentations—ahead of the Telluride Film Festival, which refused to play the film as a result. TWC supported an Oscar campaign for The Master, which was beloved by critics and the Academy actors’ branch—Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams all secured nominations.
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  While some reported that Ellison would never work with the mogul again, in a reminder of Hollywood’s “never say never” adage, Weinstein wound up acquiring her Wong Kar-wai martial arts epic The Grandmaster right before it opened the Berlin Film Festival in February 2013; it was released that summer. Annapurna also backed David O. Russell’s holiday 2013 Washington scandal drama American Hustle, reuniting Silver Linings Playbook stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence (Columbia Pictures), and has invested in Anderson’s next, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice. Ellison is also partnering with her brother David Ellison’s Skydance Productions (Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol) on a movie for which she spent $20 million for the rights: the fifth Terminator film, to be scripted by Laeta Kalogridis (Avatar, Shutter Island) and Dracula 2000 director Patrick Lussier.

  But Lawless and Killing Them Softly aren’t all that Weinstein is selling at Cannes 2012; before the festival he also scoops up (for some $4 million) market title Quartet, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut starring Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, and Billy Connolly as three people in a home for aging opera stars.

  And right on the eve of opening day, he acquires most territories for the out-of-competition official selection The Sapphires, directed by Aboriginal actor and theater director Wayne Blair, and written by Keith Thompson and Aboriginal playwright Tony Briggs, whose mother and aunt were part of the late-sixties all-girl pop group of the title. The entertaining period musical is shot by Warwick Thornton (previous winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Samson and Delilah) and stars Aboriginal actress Deborah Mailman (Radiance), Aussie pop star Jessica Mauboy (Bran Nue Dae), and Bridesmaids’ rising Irish funnyman Chris O’Dowd. When the film fails to incite much interest in Cannes, the Weinsteins hold it for release the following spring. (It grosses $2.5 million stateside.)

  Stateside acquisitions execs were crossing their fingers in the hope that Weinstein would leave them with something else to buy. “TWC has everything,” says one buyer as he finalizes his company’s “black book” schedule of screenings and meetings. Out of the Cannes market, TWC also nabs James Gray’s unfinished New York period drama (later entitled The Immigrant) starring Joaquin Phoenix, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Renner. (It goes on to play in competition at Cannes 2013.)

  But Weinstein knows that so far none of the 2012 crop of TWC Cannes films is Oscar fodder. And so he has other fish to fry. He arranges a demonstration that is designed to say to the American press, “Here’s what I really have up my sleeve.” He invites the festival media to the Salon Diane at the Majestic Hotel in order to introduce preview footage of the real diamonds in his late-year lineup, three upcoming Academy Award hopefuls that aren’t yet ready to unspool on the Croisette, but that he plans to push all the way to the Oscars.

  He shows five minutes of planned September release The Master; two and a half minutes of Russell’s Philadelphia family comedy Silver Linings Playbook, starring Cooper, Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Chris Tucker, Julia Stiles, and Jacki Weaver (November 16); and eight minutes of Quentin Tarantino’s western by way of the antebellum South, Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz (a global partnership with Sony slated for December 25).

  The media like what they see. Weinstein has won Best Picture two years in a row with The King’s Speech and The Artist, and he’s poised to enter the awards fray again with all three films, which take very different routes getting there.

  Designed to show off the acting prowess of its stars, the Cannes promo footage from The Master gets the media excited about the Oscar prospects of this visually stunning, well-acted period drama about a troubled alcoholic World War II veteran (Phoenix) who falls under the spell of a charismatic cult leader (Hoffman). His wife (Adams) isn’t so sure that her husband’s mission to “fix” this lost soul has merit. It’s clear that Phoenix and Hoffman are on some kind of collision course. Which one is the master is the question.

  After the Cannes press is teased with a small taste of Silver Linings Playbook, Russell’s follow-up to Oscar winner The Fighter, the prognosis is less clear. Russell adapted the script from Matthew Quick’s novel and does not seem to have the tone nailed; the footage plays as a romantic dramedy, and it doesn’t necessarily translate in a few-minute clip. We can see that Cooper had lost his marriage, his mind, and his meds; Lawrence seems similarly addled. (Russell and editor Jay Cassidy tinker with it right up to the Toronto festival deadline.)

  Spaghetti southern Django Unchained is still in mid-production—it won’t wrap until the first week of July—and there’s a real question as to whether it will finish in time for its planned release. While the film certainly isn’t as sensationally exploitative as its 1975 predecessor Mandingo, it’s provocative, steering into sensitive, little-explored areas of America’s slave past. Tarantino is playing with volatile material that has the potential to both dismay and wow critics and smart-house audiences. Not to mention the Academy voters.

  The Django footage reveals that Weinstein is selling a bang-up western packed with physical comedy, bloody action, and hell-bent revenge, a film shot in the classic widescreen tradition of Sergio Leone, even if the setting is New Orleans and Mississippi two years before the Civil War. Sophisticated German Dr. King Schultz (Inglourious Basterds Oscar winner Christoph Waltz) approaches a chain gang and attempts to buy one of the slaves. When the guards don’t go along with this idea, he shoots them both and literally releases Django (Foxx) from his chains. He is now a free man.

  While Schultz poses as a dentist, with a big molar swaying on top of his horse and buggy, he’s actually a bounty hunter. He needs Django to identify some pretty nasty slave drivers he knows only too well, and the ex-slave is eager to help him. They find the men on the plantation of Big Daddy (Don Johnson); watching Django stalk across the grounds to shoot one of the men who abused him is chilling. He whips another to death. He also wants to find his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is owned by evil plantation owner Calvin Candie (a beefy Leonardo DiCaprio with long greasy hair).

  Schultz, appalled by southern America’s racist ways, tries to protect Django, who blooms under his tutelage and turns out to be a pretty good shot. Tarantino is taking the revenge western to a whole new level as the two bounty hunters shoot their way through the unsuspecting South. It looks like the first Leone-esque section of Inglourious Basterds, and it’s about fighting injustice, except this time it’s not Brad Pitt against the Nazis in World War II—it’s an angry black man getting his own back from racist white southerners before the Civil War.

  This is the challenge faced by Weinstein. This is not your ordinary movie to sell overseas or domestically—or to the Academy. But when Tarantino breaks the rules with style and panache, critics and audiences follow, as Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds have proved.

  THE CANNES RESULTS

  Lo and behold, Benh Zeitlin’s Louisiana bayou drama Beasts of the Southern Wild does well at Cannes: it takes home both the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize for best film in Un Certain Regard and the Camera d’Or for best first film. (And it goes on to score $12.8 million at the summer box office, which gives it a good start on the year-end awards race.)

  In a surprise on Cannes awards night, Beyond the Hills’ nonpro actresses, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan, share the best actress prize, while On the Road comes up empty-handed. (The $25 million On the Road does not fare well at the North American box office, either, yielding just $720,000 in limited release toward a worldwide total of $9 million.)

  Rust and Bone, perhaps because it is aimed at a younger audience, also comes up empty-handed. Each jury has its vagaries; others in the past refused to give prizes to such eventual Oscar winners as the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River.

  As expected, Haneke scores his second Palme d’Or in four years with Amour, bringing his two stars up to share the glory on the stage. I’m not the only attendee
at Cannes who feels both Trintignant and Riva deserve to win the top acting prizes, but ironically, that is prohibited due to a change of rules that occurred as a result of Haneke’s previous award winner, The Piano Teacher. Says Haneke: “There was a great division in the jury. Some members wanted [The Piano Teacher] to be awarded the Palme d’Or or, at the very least, all the other prizes. [They said,] ‘We’ll give him the Grand Prix de Jury, the Jury Award, and the two acting prizes.’ As a result of that, the rules of the festival were changed so there couldn’t be that concentration of awards [for one film].”

  “The Palme d’Or was a very moving and very strong moment for all of us,” Riva later writes me in an e-mail. “Each good film corresponds to a stage in our life, and thus seems gratifying. Amour happened as I’m approaching the last stage of my life. I was not expecting it at all. The film’s success makes all of us happy. The awards are pouring into our hands. One feels like we are truly sharing our lives. We all have several lives, and this very moment in my life is, for me, the most gratifying.”

  SPC’s strategy for Amour through the summer and fall, after the trifecta of the Telluride, Toronto, and New York festivals, is to get as many Academy actors, writers, and directors to see the film as possible. They want to create an aura around it, making it a film voters feel compelled to see. It’s not a given that the Academy voters will respond well to Amour’s excruciating end-of-life subject matter. SPC creates a tasteful and restrained Oscar campaign for the film, which wins one award after another on its road to the Academy Awards. In the end, the greatly moving, elegantly wrought slice-of-life builds solid voter support, and both Haneke and Riva become serious Oscar contenders.