Toronto Dispatch: Harvey of the Realm
Among the many regular sightings on the festival circuit, one that tends to make me perk up is Harvey Weinstein. The famous indie film huckster, co-Miramax founder (with brother Bob) and current head of The Weinstein Company doesn’t negotiate the same show-stopping deals that reinvented the model for independent film distribution when he helped the world discover the likes of Quentin Tarantino in the early nineties, but he’s still keeping company with the same gang of filmmaker buddies he helped discover over a decade ago. There’s a certain charm to a Harvey festival appearance, especially when he’s lingering in the background, as he did on Sunday night during the Q&A following the premiere of Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno at the Toronto International Film Festival. Like Tarantino, Smith has a relationship with Weinstein that goes back nearly fifteen years, when Miramax purchased Clerks and emboldened the notion that ultra-low budget comedies could turn a profit. So even if The Weinstein Company isn’t embarking on the same historic deals and indomitable marketing strategies that put the brothers on the map, there’s something innately amusing about seeing the distributor stick with the people he knows best.
Harvey infamously interrupted the press conference for Tarantino’s Death Proof at the Cannes Film Festival last year just to rebut claims that Grindhouse was a flop (but Harvey…it was); fortunately, on Sunday night, he remained in the shadows. When Smith came onstage at the packed Ryerson Theater and explained how he convinced the Motion Picture Association of America not to rate his film NC-17, the director joked that it probably deserved one, anyway. “Did it feel like an NC-17 film?” Smith asked the audience. “How many people say yeah?” The crowd went wild, of course, but backstage, I spotted Harv, his eyes glued to a Blackberry in his left hand, inconspicuously raise his right — like a proud papa, a satisfied executive, or maybe both.
