“All The Boys Love Mandy Lane”
What is it? An indie slasher throwback about a group of attractive high schoolers, including the titular former outcast-turned-hottie (Amber Heard, in a career-launching role), who find themselves stalked by a mysterious hooded figure who may be the reckoning for the accidental death of a classmate.
What the hell went wrong? Mostly the victim of circumstance and timing, “All The Boys Love Mandy Lane” began as an AFI thesis for writer Jacob Forman, before landing director Jonathan Levine (who’s gone on to make “50/50,” “Warm Bodies,” and the upcoming Seth Rogen comedy “The Night Before”). The film premiered to warm responses from horror fans at TIFF’s Midnight Madness in 2006, where it was picked up by Harvey Weinstein, for $3.5 million and eventually set for a July 2007 release by genre label Dimension. But there was a rare rift between the brothers, with Bob Weinstein (who hadn’t seen it before Harvey bought it) apparently believing that a wide release wasn’t a right move, backed up by some disastrous test screening results. Doubly nervous after “Grindhouse” flopped, the Weinstein Company sold the film to the movie’s German distributor, Senator Entertainment, who were in the process of setting up a U.S. division. They too, pushed the film back, and then folded after the disastrous 2009 release of Bret Easton Ellis adaptation “The Informers” (also starring Heard), leaving it in the posession of one of the company’s backers, hedge fund Cedar Lane. They too, went into liquidation, but producer Keith Calder managed to buy the film back for low six-figures, returning the film to square one.
How did it all shake out? In a twist worthy of the one that ends ‘Mandy Lane’: by the Weinsteins releasing the film in the end. The film had been released in many territories around the world over the years (the U.K. were the first to get it, early in 2008), but when Calder bought the rights back, Tom Quinn, who’d lost to TWC in the initial bidding war when he was head of Magnolia, had become the head of Harvey & Bob’s VOD label Radius-TWC. Always a fan, he bought the film back with the approval of the brothers, and the film was finally released in theaters and on VOD on October 11th, 2013, over seven years after its premiere.
Bitterness Level: 0/10. The lack of U.S. release certainly never hurt the filmmakers’ careers, it seems (Levine was recently in the running for Marvel’s “Spider-Man”), and they even turned a profit, it seems, “The cray thing is that I’ve had movies make money, but this was the only time I’ve ever made money on my points,” Levine would tell the Wall Street Journal.
“Gangs of New York”
What is it? Martin Scorsese‘s historical drama set in the notorious Five Points district of Manhattan in the mid-19th century starring Daniel Day Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Cameron Diaz, about the violent turf wars waged in the immigrant-heavy, poverty-stricken district by rival criminal gangs.
What the hell went wrong? According to Harvey Weinstein, in peculiarly chatty mood at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival, even on set, “Gangs of New York” was a pissing contest, mostly due to the clashing of its two male stars. But difficulties with egos and elephants that turned out to be tigers aside, the real battle was yet to come when Scorsese, in his first film with Miramax, delivered his initial cut. Already late after production had run on, and out of the frame for the original mooted December 2001 slot, perhaps if anyone could have got away with delivering a three-hour-36-minute film to Harvey Scissorhands it would have been Scorsese, but he didn’t, and so began the arduous process of whittling down to an acceptable length.
How did it all shake out? They got there eventually, with a film that Scorsese has said on the commentary track to be his preferred, definitive version, but is about an hour shorter than that first cut he delivered. And despite some of the more lukewarm reviews of Scorsese’s career, the expensive film made money, becoming his biggest worldwide hit to that point and garnering a massive haul of 10 Oscar nominations. Indeed, even now remains his fifth highest-grossing film overall (all five of his top earners star Leonardo DiCaprio, incidentally). The issue now really is, that despite all that, and despite even what Scorsese says, “Gangs’ is regarded as such an inexplicably disappointing Scorsese film that for a certain type of cinephile the assumption has to be that the director’s original cut is some sort of lost masterpiece white whale, done in by a Weinstein hatchet job. Indeed, some who’ve seen an alternate cut, like David Poland, have indeed hailed it as a huge improvement — Poland calls it “an opera” (though it should be noted that he says the superior October 2001 cut he saw is only about 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release, so presumably it’s an interim version between the original 3h 36m and the final 2h 40m versions).
Bitterness Level: 3/10. Scorsese’s way too class an act and way too savvy an operator to publicly lambast or even challenge Weinstein, but it does say something that aside from co-production “The Aviator,” which he was locked into before the full ‘Gangs’ saga played out, he has not worked with Weinstein as a producer since. And to read between the lines of a typically blustery quote from that TIFF interview with Weinstein, it seems there might be a little lingering animosity, even if Harv is making light of it here. When asked if there was a chance the long cut of ‘Gangs’ might surface (something Scorsese has already denied), Weinstein quipped that Scorsese wouldn’t do so because, “He says, ‘You think I’m that fucking stupid that I’m gonna put out the director’s cut at three hours and 36 minutes? That would prove Harvey’s a genius!’”
“Killshot”
What is it? An adaptation of the 1989 novel by “Out Of Sight” and “Jackie Brown” author Elmore Leonard, “Killshot” was a hard-boiled crime tale about a couple (Diane Lane and Thomas Jane) sent into witness protection after witnessing a crime by a part-Native American hitman (Mickey Rourke) and his protege (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), becoming targets for the pair.
What the hell went wrong? Over a decade in the works and languishing on the shelf for several years, “Killshot” was undoubtedly a disappointment given the glittering array of creatives who worked on it, including some of the people behind some of the best crime movies ever. “Killshot” was one of several Leonard novels bought by Miramax for Quentin Tarantino after the success of “Pulp Fiction” (“Jackie Brown,” adapted from “Rum Punch,” was the only film to result), and was originally intended to reteam Tarantino with “True Romance” helmer Tony Scott, with Robert De Niro and the writer/director as the bad guys, and Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman as the heroes. That version never materialized, but it eventually ended up with another, more unlikely Weinstein favorite, John Madden, becoming one of the brothers’s first projects after they left Miramax, and with Tarantino ‘presenting’ the film as an executive producer. With a script by Hossein Amini (who’d go on to write “Drive”), the film got underway in 2005, with release set for March 2006. But it was pushed back repeatedly after disastrous test screenings, and eventually reshoots of as much as a third of the film were commissioned, with new material written by Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, who would both pass away before the film saw the light of day. There were further re-edits (Johnny Knoxville was cut from the film entirely), but even a late 2008 release date came and went without the movie hitting theaters.
How did it all shake out? The last delay meant that the film outlived the Weinstein Company’s distribution deal with Miramax, but the company finally slated it for release in the dead zone of January 2009, hoping to cash in on Mickey Rourke’s Oscar nod for “The Wrestler.” Interestingly, despite early trailers from 2006 having touted his name, the film was eventually released with Tarantino’s name nowhere to be found, suggesting he took it off (though the iTunes synopsis for the film still includes it). Release is still a rather grand word for it: it landed in just five theaters, and took just $18,643.
Bitterness Level: Madden seems prosaic, telling Cinemablend that the delay “had to do with the Weinstein Company, where they were and what they were.” Rourke sounds like a solid 8/10, though, throwing the filmmakers (and, presumably, Knoxville) under the bus in a 2008 interview, “I think somehow they fucked up the ending. They hired an actor at the beginning who really sucked and they started cutting his part out. Then when they cut it out completely, the ending didn’t make any sense. So they ended up with their finger up their ass.”
Outro: Aside from those recent examples we mentioned earlier, with “Shanghai,” “T.S. Spivet,” “Grace Of Monaco,” and the as-yet-unreleased “Suite Francaise,” there’s plenty more that sat on a Weinstein shelf for many years. Kiarostami’s “Through The Olive Trees” went several years before seeing a release, while the company bought Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Pulse” for the remake rights (surprise: it was terrible), before offloading the original to Magnolia five years later. Gallic action-thriller “Dobermann,” starring Vincent Cassel, was picked up in the U.S. by Miramax, but never saw the light of day there, while it took two years for Daniel Espinosa’s “Easy Money,” which starred Joel Kinnaman, to hit U.S. theaters.
Gwyneth Paltrow‘s flight attendant rom-com, “View From The Top,” was delayed nearly 18 months after 9/11, and it took three years for John Dahl’s WW2 film, “The Great Raid,” starring James Franco, to hit theaters, and Renny Harlin’s “Mindhunters” nearly the same amount of time. Finally, the company picked up Black List-approved indies “The Details,” with Tobey Maguire and Elizabeth Banks, and “Butter,” with Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Garner — the former took nearly two years before it was released, the latter a year.
