Miramax, Disney Not A Marriage Made In Heaven

Though there are hundreds of arcane sub-divisions and categories, the movie business actually divides the product it produces into two groupings: audience movies and art movies.

Audience movies are movies which make money, or at least look like they should. Art movies do not, and most of the time aren’t even art, but they serve a function: They are the argument against the overall vapidity and greediness of the movie business. Like corporate lawyers who take pro bono cases or athletes who lend their names to charity fund-raisers, the movie business trots out art movies as proof of humanity. Then it sucks up the losses on the foreign imports and serious documentaries and figures out how to contrive a sequel to “The Fugitive.”

A few years back, though, the oddest thing happened. Harvey and Bob Weinstein, New York brothers who had survived on the fringes of the business for a decade, turned their tiny Miramax company into a major player by - gasp - selling the foreign pictures they acquired for distribution the way hucksters sell umbrellas on the Manhattan streets.

“It’s going to rain, it’s going to rain,” the Weinsteins would shout, doing everything they could to surround every film they released in a sexy cloud of controversy. Their shining moment was turning a film by the brilliant but hopelessly obtuse English film and theater director Peter Greenaway called “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” into a cause celebre after it was awarded an X rating by the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board. Hauling the ratings board into court was a big hit with journalists, and the notoriety made the movie one as well.

The Weinsteins’ success attracted suitors, and two years ago, they sold their company to the Walt Disney Co. Disney was looking to expand its holdings and enhance its artistic prestige, which aside from its animated projects, could charitably be estimated at zero. But this new association hasn’t altered the way Miramax does business, as illustrated by the current imbroglio over “Priest.”

Made for English television, “Priest” is an anguished melodrama about a young Catholic priest grappling with both his conscience and his commitment. He turns out to be gay, while the other priest in the parish is living with his female housekeeper. They are the good guys. The bad guy is a bishop who cares more about the church’s prestige and holdings than its mission.

Before anyone but critics had seen “Priest,” Miramax began beating the drums about how controversial it all was, which had its desired effect. Clergymen came out of the woodwork to denounce it, of course, and this office received the expected fax from the locally based Christian Life Coalition, which turned its attention away from those bare bottoms on “NYPD Blue” long enough to brand “Priest” as grossly offensive. Their missive urged Christians to boycott not just Miramax, but the Walt Disney Co. and all its subsidiaries, including the amusement parks.

Never mind that no one in the Christian Life Coalition has seen “Priest.” (As more than one of these watchdogs has told me, you don’t have to put your face in manure to know it stinks.) They have only done what Miramax hoped they would do, which is to call attention to what is, after all, an “art” movie, a seriously minded if not particularly penetrating movie which without the hoopla, would have likely gone unnoticed in a marketplace saturated with “Tommy Boys” and “Major Paynes.”

But according to sources quoted in The Wall Street Journal and other media, the executives at Disney are anything but pleased. Unlike Miramax, they take all this boycott stuff seriously and are concerned all this might keep the upcoming family blockbuster “Pocahantas” from achieving its potential. This means it might make only $275 million instead of $300 million.

The company is also nervous about Miramax’s acquisition, at a cost of $3.5 million, of the year’s actual most controversial film, “Kids,” a drama about an HIVpositive teenage boy who has unprotected sex with unwitting teenage girls. The sex scenes in the movie are said to be graphic enough to earn it an NC-17, and Disney, like most of the other major studios, has a corporate policy against releasing NC-17 films, which Miramax is expected to adhere to.

There are rumors that the Weinsteins may now try to buy Miramax back, or that they will form a new, non-Disney outlet to distribute “Kids.” The marriage was always the corporate version of Julia and Lyle anyway, although it wasn’t always clear just who was the beauty and who was the beast. The Weinsteins bray about artistic expression and intellectual freedom, but they gleefully exploit it all to make a buck. Disney, built on family values and wholesomeness, has hardly been adverse to pocketing its share of the proceeds of “Pulp Fiction,” which, after “The Lion King,” was its most profitable film of 1994.

The Weinsteins’ real sin, of course, is that they dared to bring their art to the malls and multiplexes, where Hollywood’s beloved audiences might actually confront and enjoy it. Forgive them Father, for they know exactly what they do.