Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (15 page)

The night before the Sundance debut, our entire crew
was sprawled out across the rental condo’s floors with markers and cardboard, making ridiculous protest signs to combat Westboro’s many GOD HATES FAGS placards.

—Thor Hates Straights

—God Hates Critics

—Down with Mutants

—God Hates Rainy Days and Mondays

—God Loves Mewes’s Cock

—God Hates Phelps—Except Megan. God Thinks She’s Hot.

—God Loves, Man Kills

Malcolm carried my favorite sign by far—one I suggested only he can make and carry into battle with these Holy Rollers.

“Their entire campaign is predicated on three words: GOD—HATES—FAGS,” I explained to Malcolm, who is gay as the day is long. “We counter with three words of our own, packed with more power and truth than
their
tired three words, and you hold a sign that reads DICK—TASTES—YUMMY.”

Considering this entire free-for-all was all just a twenty-first century rendition of hiring Alan Dershowitz to show up at a press conference for the
Clerks
ratings battle, naturally, Jon and I invited Harvey and Bob to the premiere screening. We were trying to make the Miramaxiest non-Miramax movie ever made, under a production company banner we named after the man. The bar SMitzvah would happen soon, and both Jon and I would be men in our hero’s eyes.

Then, a week before the fest, Jon received an invite to a party Harvey would be hosting at Sundance … at the same time as our screening.

The Jets were involved in an important AFC title showdown, so Harvey’s party was a football-watching shindig, thrown with a billionaire buddy at the posh Stein Eriksen Lodge at the top of the mountain in Park City, where corporate muckety-mucks could gather and watch the game. About two hours before the screening, we got a call from Sundance head John Cooper, who told us that Harvey had phoned him, asking what could be done about moving the
Red State
screening, maybe starting it
after
the Jets game. Cooper told him that moving the start time of our film wasn’t possible, as there were over a thousand people lining up to see the flick at the start time that’d been established a month prior.

So then Harvey called Jon Gordon, telling him to stall the screening so everyone at the party could watch the rest of the Jets game.

Not even
asking
; flat-out
telling.

The guy we named our company after wanted us to delay the debut screening of our flick at a film festival, just so he could watch a fucking football game.

We told him not to come. If it was such a hassle for a major film distributor to go to a film festival to see a film made by two of his biggest supporters, please—enjoy your football party.

Our crude crusaders loaded up onto the bus and headed over to the Eccles Theatre, which was housed in a high school in Park City. When we got to the theater, it was already a melee: Four Phelpses were given an area from which to protest, surrounded by more lights and cameras than I’d seen since the days of shooting
Jersey Girl
at the height of Bennifermania. But better than the image of church vs.
fourth estate was what was lined up beyond them: kids from the high school had taken our call to arms seriously and created their
own
antiprotest signs—a hilarious collection of innocent inanery aimed at the fucking Phelps Yelps bunch. Signs that read “GOD HATES SIGNS,” or my all-time favorite protest placard of 2011—“GOD HATES THAT THERE WERE ONLY 2 SEASONS OF PUSHING DAISIES!” As the Phelps clan sang God Hates America (their fundamentalist Weird Al Yankovic–like cover of “God Bless America”), the Park City Protest Kids sang Lady Gaga songs back at them.

The day of the screening, I auctioned off a pair of seats online for a thousand bucks, which we donated to the Sundance Institute. They were the last two seats available anywhere near the Eccles; the flick had become such a hot ticket. We eliminated our press screenings, so there were only two chances to see
Red State
at Sundance—which really irritated the fuck out of a bunch of people who wrote shitty things about me and my last flick. The line to get into the theater was massive, but the Phelps counter-protest circus was almost like a perfect preshow, so folks were kept entertained while they waited—kinda like the monitors with clips you watch while in line for the Simpsons ride at Universal Studios.

Because of the antics outside, the screening was starting late. I was backstage, getting ready to intro the screening, nervous as hell, when Jason finds me and says, “Harvey’s here and he wants to come backstage to see you.”

I knew Harvey wasn’t there for moral support; he just wanted props for showing up at all. And I was in pregame at that point, steeling myself for what was going to be a
career-changing (some would write career-destroying) night. I said, “Keep him away, please.”

When I got up on stage to intro the film, I kept things light.

“Sorry we’re running late,” I began. “My family came and they were out in the parking lot, holding up signs.”

I introduced my producers, Jon Gordon and Elyse Seiden. It was really cool for Elyse to be on a Sundance stage as the producer of a film because she’d been working the ticket booth at the previous year’s Sundance. I told the crowd we’d started shooting September 21, 2010—so, essentially, from first shot in production to our Sundance debut, it’d only been a whirlwind four months. Then, I hit ’em with the joke I’d beat into the ground for the rest of the year, everywhere we showed the flick …

“Ladies and gentlemen,
Red State
is not a comedy, like
Clerks
and
Mallrats.
It’s a horror movie—like
Jersey Girl
.”

With that, I sat in the back of the Eccles Theatre, right by the door, watching the Little Movie That Could start its long chug up the hill. I’m enjoying the fuck out of the first public exhibition of
Red State
at one of the world’s most renowned film festivals, where only seventeen years prior I’d debuted my
first
feature—a film Harvey eventually bought and released through Miramax. I’d returned to the two roads, diverging in a yellow wood. Last time, I took the path everyone takes. This time, I was gonna try the road less traveled to see if it made any difference.

About seven minutes into the screening, I hear the unmistakably boisterous baritone of Harvey Weinstein, and he was
not
using his inside voice. I pushed the door curtain to the side and I saw Harvey in the lobby, talking at his assistant
at full volume, barking about the Jets game and what the score was. You know what kind of message that sends, when the biggest name in indie film is at your screening
not
watching the movie?

I was flabbergasted. This was the man who taught me that every screening room deserves churchlike reverence while the movie’s playing. You
never
talk during
any
screening, in the theater or in the lobby—that’s what Harvey instilled in us back in the day. And here he was, committing a mortal cinematic sin … at a Harvey Boys screening.

Although I was outraged, I did nothing. I told myself, “Without this man, I wouldn’t even be here right now. Let it go …”

I returned to my seat against the back wall of the theater, beside the curtain door. After a minute, the loud-ass talking started again, as Harvey told his assistant to make sure some muckety-muck didn’t leave the party—that he’d be back soon.

I told myself, “Everything you have in this life you’ve got because of Harvey Weinstein. Let it go …”

And then he got louder. So loud that he was competing with the movie. That’s when I suddenly both grew up
and
grew a set of balls.

I pulled the curtain to the side and whisper-shouted, “
Hey!
”

Harvey looked over at me. With fire in my eyes and in my belly, I called out to him, “
Shut the fuck up!
”

The look of surprise on his face was quickly replaced by anger when I added, “Yeah, shut the fuck up. I would
never
do this to you. I would never come to one of your screenings and act like an asshole. Shut the fuck up!”

The expression on his face was one I’d never been on the receiving end of but had often heard about from others who’d gotten into it with Harvey Weinstein. He looked like he was gonna come over and punch me, so I closed the curtain and sat back down, terrified—waiting for Harvey Scissorhands to come tearing through the cloth, seeking to bloody my face to the (Mira)max.

And nothing happened. After a beat, I opened up the curtain to look again, half expecting to take a fist to the chin. But Harvey was gone. He took off. Now that I think about it, it was the last time we spoke.

About an hour later, I got up onstage carrying a hockey stick:

A week before the festival, in conversation with Malcolm, I’d had the notion of having a powerful totem in my hands—something that would give me the courage and strength I’d need in order to jump up there and burn down my village to save it. A game-used Gretzky hockey stick seemed like the appropriate spear of destiny, as I was trying to skate to where the puck was
gonna
be.

The day of the screening, a man named Shawn Chaulk took three flights from upper Alberta to Salt Lake City, Utah. The owner of the world’s largest collection of game-used and game-worn Wayne Gretzky memorabilia, he was carrying my Excalibur: the last stick Gretzky ever touched as an Edmonton Oiler. Mere months later, the Trade of the Century would send the Great One to Los Angeles, where he’d play for the Kings, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Malcolm had quietly looked for Shawn on the Web, asking him if he could help us out with the off-kilter wish.
Being a Gretzky acolyte like me, Shawn understood my friend’s bizarre request to borrow the most significant stick in his collection for one night, so it could lend a fat filmmaker some nerve at the Sundance Film Festival. The guy spent the better part of a day on planes to reach us, but it was an assist of which even Wayne himself would be proud, I’m sure. I still love Malcolm for making that happen.

Stick in hand, I gave a barn burner of a speech in which I advocated for art and said the business half of the show-business equation was out of control—particularly marketing spending.

“I never wanted to know jack shit about business,” I said at one point. “I’m a fat, masturbating stoner. That’s why I got into the movie business: I thought that was where fat, masturbating stoners went. And if somebody had told me at the beginning of my career, ‘You’re going to have to learn so much about business, finance, amortization, all that shit, monetization,’ I would have been like, ‘Fuck it. I’m just going to stay home and masturbate. That’s too much work, man.’”

Then came the moment of truth: Some folks sat through my passionate plea for art because they were waiting to see me dangle and burn at the imagined auction. That’s when I brought Jon Gordon up on stage with me, who opened up the bidding for
Red State.
I quickly bid twenty bucks, Jon “sold” me the flick, and boom—I’d picked my distributor in the room, auction style. I then told all assembled, “Ladies and gentlemen, when I came here seventeen years ago, all I wanted to do was sell my movie. And I can’t think of anything fucking worse, seventeen years later, than selling my movie to people who just don’t fucking get it.”

During the speech, I praised Harvey for what he taught me, referring to the creative film distribution Jon and I were planning for
Red State
, but in my heart I was really thanking Harvey for his last lesson—the one he imparted by trying to postpone our screening and then ignoring the film in favor of game stats in the lobby. This was a man who’d asked me to write that Harvey-defense piece after Peter Biskind’s book
Down and Dirty Pictures
told a warts-and-all tale of indie film’s rise in which Harvey looked a little less than heroic. I could always be counted on as the “
Harvey rocks!
” mouthpiece, and what I said would be given placement in the media because I was known for being overly candid and disastrously honest. As such, aside from making the View Askew movies there, my side gig at Miramax was also credibility clown.

After the screening, Jon and I found a quiet corner and moment to lick our wounds. “The Harvey Boys, sir …,” I lamented. “We were literally stupid enough to call our production company the Harvey Boys. And Harvey doesn’t even give a fuck. We’re alone.”

But we weren’t alone, we were just
indie
. We were, in fact, the indie-est game in town at
the
indie film festival that year. Everyone else was trying to sell their flicks to the highest bidder, and there we were—the
Harvey
Boys—announcing we were were gonna handle the flick ourselves—like we’d been taught by our sensei.

Harvey’s brother Bob turned out to be the silver lining to the Weinstein cloud. Bob had skipped the debut screening of
Red State
in favor of the Jets game, so he was at the screening in the Park City Library the next morning instead. After the flick, he grabbed me in the hallway and said, “Who
knew you could direct action?” It was Bob who gave Jon and me the grown-up props we’d dreamed his brother might’ve greeted us with the night before. Bob—the genre-junkie brother with his many
Scream
sequels—listened to Jon and me tell him our grand plans for a fifteen-city four-walling tour starting at Radio City Music Hall. Bob’s eyes lit up as he anxiously sputtered, “That’s how Harvey and I started, back in the old days!” I didn’t bother telling him that was our idea: that both Jon and I—the biggest Miramaxkateers on the planet, possibly bigger cheerleaders for the dream that was Miramax than even Harvey himself—had based everything we were doing with
Red State
on the nascent days of indie film in Weinstein country. Instead, I just nodded, smiling.

Then Bob inadvertently proved himself more astute and supportive than his brother when (in classic Bob Weinstein fashion) he also gave us his cut suggestions. And even though our flick didn’t belong to Miramax, or Dimension, or the Weinstein Company, I took a couple of Bob’s notes—for old times’ sake.