I miss Harvey Weinstein. Not the Harvey Weinstein you see today, the slimmed-down mogul who's acquired the Halston fashion brand, invested in a MySpace-style website for the rich and famous and bought the Ovation arts channel. Not the Harvey Weinstein who told the Hollywood Reporter last year that "we are focused on other areas outside of film."
The Harvey Weinstein I used to know -- the Oscar impresario who collected gifted young filmmakers the way Tiger Woods accumulates golf titles -- was truly, madly, deeply in love with movies. He was the man behind "City of God," "Amelie," "Shakespeare in Love," "Pulp Fiction," "In the Bedroom," "sex, lies, and videotape," "Trainspotting" and "Sling Blade," to name but a few.
Today's Harvey has lost his way, not to mention his magic touch. Since he cut his ties with Disney, leaving his Miramax label behind and starting the Weinstein Co. with his brother Bob at the end of 2005, he seems to have lost his passion for making the kind of classy fare that earned him an unprecedented string of 11 consecutive Oscar best picture nominations.
He's become a clone of his brother, the guy who kept Miramax in the black during lean years with horror spoofs and action fare. When today's Harvey points to the Weinstein Co.'s successes, he finds himself boasting about Bob movies, be it "Hoodwinked," a crass takeoff on "Little Red Riding Hood," or "Scary Movie 4," a scatological movie spoof that squeezed a few last laughs out of the brothers' old Miramax franchise.
Too much of the rest of the Weinstein Co. slate has aimed low and missed. Harvey's Oscar slate was full of fizzles, led by the dramatically inert "Bobby" and the woeful "Factory Girl," which got more buzz for its last-minute re-editing than its artistic ambitions. The latest failure is "Grindhouse," an expensive attempt to relive the glory days of '70s exploitation cinema. The 192-minute movie won admiring reviews, thanks to Quentin Tarantino's gleefully kinetic "Death Proof" segment, but has flopped at the box office, dropping off a brutal 63% in its second weekend, grossing only $19.6 million in 10 days of release.
I feel like putting Harvey's picture on a milk carton. Has anyone seen the crazy, spittle-spewing, chain-smoking hustler who would bellow insults, twist arms and shamelessly hype whatever movie was due that week? I miss the old Harvey, the man who would've locked "Grindhouse" auteurs Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez in an editing room until they cut 40 minutes out of their movie. I miss the old Harvey, the cinema carnival barker whose passion for film was often indistinguishable from his paranoia, abusive behavior and vitriol.
