BOB, HARVEY, ART AND MAMMON

They've shocked Hollywood by making millions from art movies, done a deal with Disney and acquired Tina Brown. Just who are the Weinstein brothers?

TINA BROWN has been working at Miramax for over a month now, and so far so good. No reports of broken chairs or slammed doors. Harvey and Bob are obviously on their best behaviour. Either that or the Weinsteins have finally met their match in the former editor of the New Yorker.

Miramax and the Weinsteins have a reputation to live up to. They run the most exciting and successful independent film distribution network in the world. As a result, Disney bought the company and has made the brothers chief knife-sharpeners for its cutting edge. Miss Brown is part of the plan, launching a new magazine which will also serve as a crucible for new screen-writing talent.

But the Weinsteins are famous for other reasons. Or rather infamous. They hold senior positions on both Vanity Fair's New Establishment index and Fortune Magazine's biggest bastard bosses of all time poll. Together they have shaped the story of film-making in the last 10 years. Anyone in the business will say that you can't afford to ignore them. You don't have to like them, mind you. But that's another matter entirely.

A potted history of the Miramax story would go like this. It is the mid Sixties and Harvey, the older brother is sneaking off to the local fleapit in the stale suburbs of Long Island with some of his teenage mates and invites little brother Bob to tag along. The movie is French and has something about "blows" in the title. It all sounds pretty racy.

The film was actually The Four Hundred Blows, and while Francois Truffaut's powerful biographical account of an abused childhood was not exactly what a gang of hormonally charged boys had been expecting, it was to utterly change the lives of two of them.

Harvey and Bob went home that night with a new light in their young eyes and a determination to found a mighty film distribution empire that would take art house movies and transform them into multi-million-dollar box- office sensations.

In the process they would cause a revolution in the Hollywood machine and become the most talked-about players in the business. And being good Jewish boys they would also name the whole thing in honour of their parents, Miriam and Max.

By the early Seventies, the brothers, scions of a New York diamond-cutter, did the usual middle-class thing and dropped out of college to become rock promoters. With dad's business nous and a $50,000 loan to buy an old theatre in Buffalo, they were soon attracting acts like Billy Joel, Genesis and The Grateful Dead, alternating these with cheap triple features which ranged from old Marx brothers comedies to cheesy blockbusters like Spartacus.

Miramax was founded to distribute concert films, but had its first big hit when the brothers spent $180,000 stitching together two comedy benefit performances by the Monty Python troupe for Amnesty International into The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. They made $6m.

From that point Miramax gradually began to dominate independent film distribution in the US. The list of their successes is truly astonishing: Cinema Paradiso, sex, lies and videotape, Muriel's Wedding, Like Water for Chocolate, My Left Foot, The Piano, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Crying Game. They bought an obscure Italian romance and took Il Postino on a joy-ride to the Oscars.

At the same time, Miramax began to handle the kind of feisty American film-making that Hollywood - because it's too much trouble and doesn't make much money - has long ignored. Hollywood was wrong, of course. Reservoir Dogs was the bloody midwife for the career of Quentin Tarantino, just as Pulp Fiction brought John Travolta back from the dead. They took a low budget oddity about a mentally retarded murderer and won Oscars, uh- huh, for Billy Bob Thornton, and Sling Blade.

The brothers also rode as white knights to the rescue of a floundering middle-budget adaptation of, as its director Anthony Minghella now brutally admits, "a movie whose central motif is Herodotus, focusing on a man with burn injuries." The English Patient won nine Oscars in 1997 and grossed over $200m worldwide.

By then Miramax had been bought by Disney for $60m, in a unique takeover deal which swallowed the Weinstein brothers whole , but then, like the children of Zeus, left them alive and intact. No one can complain of the Disneyfication of Miramax. Rather, the worries have been the other way round. The Texas Board of Education, probably still reeling from Trainspotting, ditched a $45m stake in Disney this July, largely because it regarded too much of the Miramax output to be overly bloody and sexually explicit.

Their success in recruiting Tina Brown this summer shows that their empire is still expanding. Last October they raided the top talent at Channel 4's film production arm, signing Colin Leventhal and David Aukin - a "European dream team" according to Harvey - to launch a major new British production company with $50m in the bank.

Only last month it was announced that Miramax had sold the film rights for Tolkien's works to New Line for an astonishing $130m trilogy of films based on The Lord of the Rings. The brothers remain closely involved in the project, to be shot in New Zealand with 15,000 extras and a tentative release date of early 2000.

The Weinsteins have so obviously been good for the film industry, and for all the right reasons, that it comes as something of a shock to discover that so many people actively dislike them. Really, really dislike them. And fear them. They are such horrors to work for that Miramax staff once founded a self-help group, Mir-Anon, to salve each other's wounds.

That the brothers made it into a bosses from hell list is no surprise. Anecdotes abound - like the one about the office junior fired for making a mistake during the annual Miramax softball match in Central Park. The boys rehired him later in the game. Harvey says that he doesn't remember the incident but that: "It sounds like some kind of joke." Well, obviously. But what is telling is that no-one thought so at the time. "It was the worst experience of my life," says another ex-employee about his time there. "It was Japanese management theory on acid."

By all accounts the burly Harvey is the worst. He became so enraged at losing the film rights to Shine that he was once escorted from a restaurant during the Sundance Film Festival. He particularly enjoys roughing up the press, once bombarding Time with dozens of calls because he believed the magazine was about to print the twist in The Crying Game. It didn't matter that the actor playing the lead female had already received an Oscar nomination for best supporting male.

Others suspect that the brothers, 46 and 43 respectively, have developed a sophisticated good-cop/bad-cop routine. Harvey makes the threats and triggers the tantrums, leaving Bob to pick up the pieces. At the same time, to distinguish between the two may be like comparing the kick of a donkey and an ass. Ex-Miramax hands say chairs topple, doors slam and phones fly when Harvey and Bob completely lose it.

Even their friends admit dealing with the Weinsteins is always interesting. Harvey's enthusiasm for the cutting room has earned him the nickname "Harvey Scissorhands". Anthony Minghella called them "angels" after rescuing The English Patient from its production cash crisis. "Angels with claws," he added.

David Weismann, the producer of Kiss of the Spider Woman says Harvey can be both "amazing, persuasive, crass and relentless". He calls them: "Formidable, atavistic flashbacks to how the movie industry got started." The actress Ellen Barkin praises their rough-hewn style: "They're very different from the standard Hollywood movie guys. They eat Twinkies and drink Diet Coke. It's just a lot different than someone picking at a green salad with lemon juice squeezed on it and drinking a Perrier."

Other gastronomic reports speak of day-old pizza for breakfast at the Miramax headquarters in New York's TriBeCa district. "Like the eastern- European Jews who invented Hollywood, the Weinsteins are chutzpah personified, imperious and megalomaniac," a recent profile in the on-line magazine Slate observed. "This is an age when more and more studio chiefs are anonymous number crunchers and dealmakers. But Harvey and Bob run their studio as a fiefdom, imposing their will on directors and stars. Miramax might as well be called Weinstein Brothers."

And why not? They have, as always, an uncanny touch. Behind the brashness and the histrionics is a love of cinema that blossomed that evening nearly 30 years ago when Truffaut's masterpiece unfolded before two impressionable teenagers. Sure, they make money from films, but they make money from good films. They have single-handedly saved independent cinema in the US, or at least made it profitable - which is pretty much the same thing.

Under the Disney deal, they have complete control on any film which comes in under a budget of around $12m. The Weinsteins typically make films which cost less than half that at any of the major studios. And they are usually at least half-way decent. Some of their critics say that under Disney, Miramax is playing it safer. "I think that they were gutsier when they were independent and had less money," says J Hoberman, a film critic with the Greenwich Village Voice.

And yet there is Shall We Dance, a sweet and moving story of a disillusioned family man who redeems his marriage through a passion for ballroom dancing. But in Japanese, with subtitles. The Weinsteins bought Shall We Dance for $300,000 and made $9m. Millions of Americans saw a wonderful film last year because the theatre owners trusted in the boys' judgement that the picture had legs. Chasing Amy cost only $250,000 and made $12m.

And they never give up. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf was made in 1991, at the time the most expensive French film ever; it has never been shown in the US, but it will be later this year. Late maybe, but thanks to Miramax, better than never.

Some critics are clearly offended by the slightest taint of commercialism. If you're going to cosy up to capitalism, then Disney is about as bad as it gets. But the Weinsteins admire Disney and according to Harvey they can still do "the off-beat innovative interesting things". It's just that now they can be sure where the money is coming from.

Woody Allen trusts them enough to let them release his last six films, including the forthcoming Celebrity, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio. At the same time Miramax has evolved a schlock-horror wing, Dimension Films, which makes more money than all the arty films put together. Dimension is run by little brother Bob, and like everything they do, it is done with wit and style.

Scream showed just how much blood money was left in horror movies. Halloween H2O revived an ancient formula and Jamie Lee Curtis after a quarter of century and turned out to one of the best films of 1998. There are even plans for a $75m sequel to Rambo. Harvey makes jokes about brother Bob's achievements at Dimension. "I'll be the Robin Hood of film distributors," he says. "Robbing from the rich - my brother - and giving to the poor - foreign language movies."

The reality is that it is difficult to imagine anything coming between the Weinstein brothers. Something bound them tightly together, as a family growing up in the suburbs of New York and later as business partners. Their parents obviously left a mark - why else Miramax? - and Harvey, as always the spokesman, says that home was always a place where ideas and imagination were prized.

Their private lives are rarely glimpsed behind the sometimes grotesque facade, but there seem to be marriages and wives to be thanked at awards ceremonies. The brothers are deep-rooted liberals, their names on the invitations to the now-notorious White House fund-raising coffee mornings. Harvey is said to have given at least $10,000 to President Clinton's legal defence fund. He is also a passionate advocate of good causes, from the rain forest to gay rights and Aids research.

It is a measure of their success that most of the major studios have signed up their own independent divisions, particularly after Miramax captured over a dozen Oscars in the 1997 ceremony. Harvey is typically abrasive about the threat from rivals. "These companies are going to be drowning in red ink," he says. "It's such a huge mistake. You go into the lion's den and you pull the lion's claw, the lion's going to roar."

But perhaps these days, it does so with a more mellow tone. Harvey admits, "Bob and I grew up as underdogs and if there's a theme to the movies we make, it's about an outsider who can come in and change things." But they've been there and done that. Now the future is Tina Brown and, according to the Disney business plan, a chain of Miramax stores and licensing deals.

Bob admits that mistakes have been made. "There is a difference between being passionate and abrasive," he says. "So if in the past I have been abrasive, I will certainly try to learn from that." Harvey has also attempted contrition in recent months. "I have a lighter touch, I'm hanging up my shears," he avers. "I'm trying to be more self-deprecating and take criticism constructively."

The brothers are currently said to be working on a warts-and-all biography which will be published later this year, inevitably by Miramax Books. They promise to take a long, tough look at themselves in the process. "We've been praised and criticised. We know we're controversial," Harvey says. "We plan on be analytical, anecdotal and critical, even of ourselves." But only up to a point. "If I didn't exist, they'd have to invent me," says Harvey. "I'm the only interesting thing around." !