I applaud the sentiments of Michael Moore’s statement on Weinstein, as Godard touches on Howard Hughes’ antics in Histoire(s) du cinéma, among the precursors to and templates of Harvey’s fetishistic hotel suite A-List assembly line.  Not privy to what is going on with Moore’s Trump documentary which The Weinstein Company has rights to and the topics broached therein, Piri’ Miri Muli’ can nonetheless assume Michael was in a tough spot, adding to the fact that he’s performing solo on Broadway in the evenings. Weinstein had Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 on the Disney budget, and then got it out despite Disney trying to bury it.  Moore’s Trump documentary is going to get out somehow, and right-wing websites were trying to smear Moore by association. I have no idea what Harvey’s thoughts of Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 were during production, but taking a project that no studio would touch made Harvey a lot of money, and he no doubt relished having the final cut.  Seeing it on the first day in a packed suburban theater has not, so far, been forgettable for me, and the money it made was a boon to documentaries of different stripes.  Moore notes that he was the only director to sue Harvey after getting stiffed on the film, but they were able to do business again. Harvey donated to Liz Warren once, but was a big Hillary supporter, and Bernie and other progressives were nowhere in his funding radar.

My favorite films of 2000-2010 had relatively few US titles, but during the early-to-mid 90s a lot of talent was making use of Harvey’s Miramax and a lot of that was excellent.  The old intro, which I liked for some reason, triggers the memory of being in a cinema and thinking you were going to see something novel:



The films, though, were often male adolescent narratives that related self-referentially to the code of the latent or foregrounded fetish eroticism of Hollywood films. The Weinstein Company films I’ve actually watched were 2014's Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’ documentation of the Snowden leak, 2013's Art of the Steal, a necessary intervention in the Philly art scene, one Woody, and Moore’s 2007 Sicko, which had an under-credited effect on American healthcare policy. Miramax’s last good year was 2008, three years after Harvey left, with Reprise and Happy-Go-Lucky making my list but the Disney division saw a quick quantitative and qualitative drop-off of titles after that. Mind you, I am sitting down to new films but mostly foreign and a few other US indies and sometimes sporadically enough to bring forth the tragedy of missing the Criterion restoration of Tarkovsky's Stalker in the theater, but I hopefully will see it projected someday and it looks great on dvd. The timing of actresses finally turning on Harvey may be vaguely related, as a few reporters have suggested, to where Harvey is in his career and the quality of his recent output... a Tom Stoppard script turned out to be a bubble in the last straw.  I'd like to see the actresses use their platform to focus on NBCUniversal burying the story, but NBCU is still in a position to retaliate.

Ronan Farrow’s revenge against Woody and Harvey is real-life drama.  Hollywood consists of monsters and formulas.  von Stroheim’s best films and megalomania methinks tops Woody’s and I don’t know whether Eric would fare better or worse in today’s world.  Harvey appreciated the French New Wave, which was in many ways inspired by Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte and the lectures of Henri Langlois, who said that the quality of audiences are formed incrementally by the quality of the films they’re watching.  During the 90s some good indies, many by Harvey, would do well in the box office but after 9-11 the studio junk took over, and box office data strongly suggests the American audience similarly declined. 

It’s possible that the outcome of this drama will be that the studios and the formula will choke what’s left of independent film.  This is where my own prescription would differ slightly from Moore’s.  We will no doubt see the media conglomerates trumpeting diversity and gender balance, but the potential of a new wave of female auteurs can only be realized through a de-monopolization of the distribution companies’ control of the theaters, television, and home marketing.