When Harvey met Quentin: True Romance

In Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, the author Peter Biskind quotes a comment that the director Quentin Tarantino made in 1994 about his loyalty to Miramax, the mini-major studio which produced Pulp Fiction. "If I put myself on the open market, I could write my own cheque," observed Tarantino, at the time the hottest director in Hollywood and well aware of his status. "But I don't want to put myself on the open market. It's not just about the money. It's everything all together: the money, the autonomy, the creative freedom. I'm their Mickey Mouse. He could come by the set every day as far as I'm concerned. We just talk about how great we are!" "He", of course, was Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of Miramax Pictures.

Thirteen years have now passed, and one can't help wondering if Harvey and Quentin still like to gas on set about how great they are. Tarantino is still directing attention-grabbing films and Weinstein remains among the most high-profile producers in Hollywood. But when the two of them get together, tempers flare: Weinstein insisted on cutting Tarantino's mammoth martial-arts epic, Kill Bill, into two films a few years ago; and now he's taking the scissors to Grindhouse, Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's paean to the tradition of sleazy double bills. It was such a flop in the US that Weinstein has said he'll distribute them internationally as separate films. How on earth have such notorious egos managed to maintain a working relationship that stretches back over 15 years?

There were fireworks from the very start. Tarantino and the Weinsteins, Harvey and Bob, first came together when Miramax bought Reservoir Dogs, the succès de scandale at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992. These days at Sundance, deals are made straight after, or occasionally even before, screenings (a practice Miramax did much to encourage). Back then, distributors bided their time and Reservoir Dogs hadn't picked up a deal after the festival, even though Miramax and other companies were interested. Bob and Harvey themselves viewed the film, first in LA post-Sundance, and then again at their New York offices with Tarantino present. Harvey was concerned that the violence, particularly the notorious ear-slicing scene, would limit the film's box-office prospects, and tried to persuade Tarantino to cut it. The first-time director vehemently refused, and won. Reservoir Dogs went on to be a cult hit, setting up Tarantino's subsequent career and establishing Harvey Weinstein as an indie talent-spotter and a bold distributor.

They were an unlikely match, yet Tarantino and Weinstein shared the fact that neither had taken a traditional route into the film industry. The two men come from very different backgrounds. Tarantino, 44, was born in Tennessee but raised largely in Southern California by his working-class single-mother (she was only 16 when she gave birth to him); he famously worked in a video-store and tried to become an actor before he switched to directing. Harvey Weinstein, by way of contrast, was born some 11 years earlier in New York City to a solidly middle-class Jewish family. He and his younger brother Bob (with whom he still works to this day) started out as concert promoters, before moving into film distribution with the founding of their company Miramax, named after their parents Miriam and Max.

Weinstein and Tarantino's relationship has been compared with that of an indulgent parent and a particularly favoured child. You only have to see how much slack Weinstein is willing to provide Tarantino with the length of his films. Pulp Fiction (1994) was 152 minutes long, and Jackie Brown (1997) a much contested 154 minutes. According to Biskind, Weinstein and Tarantino rowed about Jackie Brown's length after a preview in Seattle, an argument which ended with Weinstein securing a promise from Tarantino not to complain if, at the length he wanted, it made less than $70m. It duly took $40m domestically. Kill Bill Vol. 1 clocked in at a brisk 111 minutes, but Vol. 2 ran for 136 minutes, and remember, they were originally going to be one, four-and-a-quarter-hour-long movie. While collaborating on Gangs of New York and The Aviator, with the producer known with some venom in the trade as "Harvey Scissorhands", not even Martin Scorsese was allowed to exceed three hours as a running time - although that may have been Scorsese's own prudent choice.

It should be noted that Harvey Weinstein has forged fruitful relationships, perhaps even harmonious ones despite his reputation for shouting matches, with several directors. Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, Cold Mountain) and Lasse Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules, Chocolat) all came back to work with him. On the other hand, the list of auteurs who worked with him on one film and then never again is considerably longer: Gus Van Sant (who sold Good Will Hunting to Miramax), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine), Guillermo del Toro (Mimic), Iain Softly (Wings of a Dove), and so on. I know for a fact that one person on that list swore never to work with Weinstein again, after Weinstein tried to make the director recut his film and then did a half-hearted job of releasing it in the US.

Weinstein and Tarantino's mutual admiration is sure to have been tested by Grindhouse, their latest collaboration, which was produced by the Weinstein Company. (The Weinsteins set up their new outfit after a divorce from Disney, in which the Mouse House kept the rights to the Miramax label.) The film's two-for-one, three-hours-and-eleven-minute package is made up of two main features spliced together like an old-fashioned double bill: Tarantino's feature Death Proof, wherein various women are stalked by a murderous stuntman with a "deathproof" car, comes with Robert Rodriguez's zombie movie Planet Terror, along with some trailers for fake films made by a few of Tarantino and Rodriguez's filmmaker friends - Eli Roth (Hostel), Rob Zombie (House of a 1000 Corpses) and Britain's own Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead). Tarantino and Rodriguez have long been friends and collaborators, ever since they each contributed a quarter to the portmanteau film Four Rooms (1995) and then reteamed for From Dusk Till Dawn in 1996: if Tarantino has been the Weinsteins' Mickey Mouse, then Rodriguez, director of the hit Sin City, is something like their Donald Duck. (I guess this makes Kevin Smith Goofy.)

Grindhouse offers a joint homage by Tarantino and Rodriguez to exploitation movies of yore, the sort of movies, made mostly in the Seventies, that were thrown together in a few weeks on chump change and lurid imagination, and played in cinemas that had once been vaudeville venues (hence the tag "grindhouse"). The kind of films Tarantino himself, a notoriously omnivorous cinephile, especially of so-called "schlock", used to pore over obsessively back in the days when he was a video-store clerk.

American critics - especially, curiously, those with higher-brows more in the habit of praising arthouse experimenta - responded largely positively to Grindhouse on its release, particularly to its cheeky pastiche of exploitation films' degraded patina, scratchy surfaces and crash editing. The current issue of the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine, devotes no less than 12 pages to Grindhouse the film and grindhouse the genre.

The public, unfortunately, hasn't respond so positively. Grindhouse tanked when it opened over the Easter weekend in the US, and so far it has pulled in just $24.4m after six weeks on release. By contrast, Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 took $22m in its first weekend, while Kill Bill Vol. 2 took $25m, and even those latter figures were considered by the industry disappointing given the advance hoopla that preceded Tarantino's return to film-making after a six-year sabbatical.

Soon after Grindhouse opened, Weinstein went on record about how "incredibly disappointed" he was with the the film's opening figures. "We tried to do something new and obviously we didn't do it that well," he told LA Weekly's journalist Nikki Finke. His comments would suggest that Weinstein, who famously slimmed down recently from his former rotund figure, has added humble pie to his diet.

Grindhouse has been one of the most thoroughly autopsied films of 2007, with pundits across the media debating why it failed. Some blamed the Easter weekend timing of the release, a slot usually reserved for family fare; others, the film's disturbing use of violence towards women which might have put off half its potential audience, (although defenders would cite that, before they get killed in Death Proof, the ladies get to speak some vintage Tarantino dialogue). But the sheer heft of its running time has been cited as the biggest problem, a gruelling 191 minutes which simultaneously put off viewers and meant that the film could only be seen four times a day at cinemas, thus reducing box-office gross.

"Our research showed the length kept people away," said Weinstein to Finke. "It was the single biggest deterrent... We originally intended to get it all in in two hours, thirty minutes. That would have been a better time. But the movies ran longer, the [fake] trailers ran longer, everything ran longer."

The solution to recouping the Weinstein Company's approximate $100m investment in the movie (it cost, depending on who you believe, somewhere between $50m and $67m to make, and $30m in promotion and advertising) has been to break it up and start again, a reanimation experiment not unlike those performed on body parts in the schlock-horror movies that Grindhouse salutes.

Death Proof has been carved off the original Grindhouse negative, recut to make it 127 minutes long, and will now premiere in its new incarnation in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It was at Cannes, remember, that Pulp Fiction premiered in 1994, and, beating off particularly stiff competition from Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Red, and Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun, went on to win the Palme d'Or. Tarantino later served as president of the jury at Cannes, where he and his colleagues bestowed the Palme on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, invoking suspicious mutters from cynical observers who couldn't help pointing out the coincidence that Fahrenheit was executive-produced by Tarantino's old partner in self-admiration, Harvey Weinstein. Tarantino indignantly denounced accusations of bias at the time.

Weinstein will almost certainly be walking up the Cannes red carpet with Tarantino again for Death Proof's premiere on Tuesday. He'll have been in town for some time already, supporting another Weinstein Company movie, My Blueberry Nights, the festival's opening-night film by Wong-Kar Wai. Years back, Miramax distributed Wai's Chungking Express at Tarantino's urging. Just to complete the cosy picture on this year's Croisette, also showing out of competition in the festival is Michael Moore's latest documentary expose, Sicko, another Weinstein Company-backed picture.

Originally, the US-release version of Grindhouse was planned to tour at least the UK and other selected territories. Now, only the stand-alone, recut version, Death Proof, is scheduled to open here in September. No date has been set for Rodriguez's Planet Terror. Before Grindhouse even opened in the US, Tarantino was trying to put a positive spin on the possibility that the epic version might not travel. When asked by a journalist about its release trajectory, he replied, "We're still kind of figuring that out right now. But we've done three different things here. I made Death Proof, [Rodriguez] made Planet Terror, and the two of us together made Grindhouse. And they are three different things. We cut our movies down to the bone in order for them to work as far as Grindhouse was concerned. And it was really kind of an exciting experience. Most auteurs don't have any impetus to try to cut their movie down to almost past the point of comprehension! And it was a really wonderful exercise to do that... But I could do that because I knew that for roughly half of the planet Earth it will be released in its full-on version, which will be a different movie."

The internet is full of postings by overseas fans made despondent by the fact they won't get to see the full Grindhouse theatrically - although the DVD will no doubt be available soon on import from North America. Lawbreakers, meanwhile, can already download camcorder versions of it from bit-torrent pirate sites. It seems strangely fitting that such versions further degrade the already scuzzy image quality, and apparently in some "cam" versions, the top of heads of movie patrons walking in and out of the film can be seen, thus recreating the whole grindhouse experience to which the film pays homage.

Given Grindhouse and its constituent parts is precisely the kind of film fodder that recoups its money eventually on ancillary (rental, retail and TV sales), the whole exercise may not be such a fiasco in the end. The film was heavily pre-sold to territories before it premiered, and so may even have already made its money back. Finke observes that one of the reasons Weinstein - despite his reputation, literally, for snippiness - was so permissive with Tarantino and Rodriguez's running times was that Grindhouse formed "a cornerstone of their fledgling company's financing" when they were setting up the Weinstein Company.

It remains to be seen how the whole Grindhouse story will shape the Weinstein-Tarantino saga, particularly whether Tarantino will continue to be indulged with high budgets for future projects, such as his long-awaited, much-mooted, but still unmade Second World War epic, Inglorious Bastards. Weinstein, meanwhile, badly needs a hit to keep his company afloat, after not just Grindhouse but also the poor performance of such recent Weinstein Company releases as the Sienna Miller vehicle Factory Girl and Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, both of which were meant to harken back to the literary core values of Miramax's golden years, and which both flopped at the US box office. The Weinstein Company has been aggressively diversifying into other areas - fashion, publishing, and internet content sites. Its few theatrical hits have been fairly low-brow fare, namely the horror spoof Scary Movie 4, and the slapdash cartoon Hoodwinked.

Where does that leave the Weinsteins' poster boy Quentin Tarantino? He may still be their Mickey Mouse, but Disney's Mickey stopped starring in his own movies years ago...

QUENTIN AND HARVEY: THE HITS AND MISSES

Three films that worked...

Reservoir Dogs (1992) Miramax backed down when Tarantino wouldn't cut the ear-slicing scene, and were rewarded when the film hit big on the cult circuit, announcing the arrival of a distinctive new talent. US box office earnings: $2.8m

Pulp Fiction (1994) Tarantino's crossover hit mixed timelines, genres and faces famous and obscure, scored seven Oscar nominations and won for best screenplay, and became Miramax's first $100m-plus earner. Worldwide box office: $213m

Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) A love letter to Uma Thurman, martial arts, Asian cinema, this rape-revenge drama had critics and viewers swooning again. Worldwide box office: $180.9m

... and a couple that didn't

Four Rooms (1995) Only a quarter of this ghastly hotel-set portmanteau movie is QT's fault, so it's often quietly overlooked. But we haven't forgotten. US box office: $4.3m

Jackie Brown (1997) Okay, QT's tribute to Pam Grier and blaxploitation movies didn't make nearly as much money as Pulp Fiction - in fact it's considered a financial flop - but for many it still counts as his richest and most emotionally nuanced film. US box office: $39.7m