Karina Longworth

A brief history of Harvey Weinstein’s relationship with filmmakers and the editing room. Does he make movies better—or are Good Harvey and Bad Harvey working together?

“Plenty of filmmakers have lambasted Weinstein for his savage butchery — Luc Besson, Mike Leigh, James Ivory — while others have praised Harvey for helping them find their film in the editing room. Scorsese himself told Roger Ebert that the 168-minute version of Gangs — which was Scorsese’s most successful film in the decade since Cape Fear — is his director’s cut, which might be true. But it’s definitely true that any discussion of the editing of Gangs of New York always calls to mind, as critic Peter Bradshaw put it, ‘a butcher — an unprincipled villain who cuts and slashes, mangles and chomps: Harvey Weinstein.’”

How does a would-be blockbuster become a disastrous flop? A look at the decisions, large and small, that doomed Super Mario Bros. in the early 1990s:

“You can learn a lot about the way the movie industry works in a given moment by looking at its successes (whether accidental or engineered), but often you can learn even more by looking at its failures — the long-in-development projects that never make it to the screen, the labors of love gone wrong, the should’ve-been blockbusters that fail to land — particularly those that caught Hollywood by surprise, miscalculations that everyone involved has attempted to sweep under the rug. By digging up some of these misbegotten artifacts and examining them both within the context of their eras and in the cold light of the present, we’ll try to understand how seemingly inexplicable disasters happen.”

Smith now says self-distribution was the goal as far back as the first week of production on “Red State.” “Day four, I was sitting on the set and I realized that it felt like the Little Rascals — everybody was doing it for love, we weren’t gonna get paid. And I thought, We’re gonna pull this off for 4 million bucks. And then we’re gonna sell it, get paid probably $4 million, if we’re lucky, and based on all my previous experiences in this business, that would be the last money we would ever see. I know what happens next. If I sell to Lionsgate, that’s $20 million [in marketing budget] tacked on top of my movie, and I have to make $24 million back. But then we know that’s not the case, because we know [the studio] doesn’t keep all the money, they only make 50 percent. So now my horror movie that cost $4 million to make has to make $48 million to break even? I’ve never made a movie that’s made $48 million, and it’s certainly not gonna be this one.”