''There's a lot of risk and reward in the history of the company,'' says Harvey Weinstein. And never were the risks steeper, or rewards greater, than in 1993, when Disney bought Miramax for the now-astonishingly-bargain-basement price of about $80 million. The potential for a corporate culture clash was evident. Disney had stockholders to please and an assiduously family-friendly image to cultivate; Miramax courted controversy with an appetite that expanded with every headline, protest, and NC-17 rating. Nonetheless, the deal made sense. With an ever more noteworthy track record of turning underdogs from My Left Foot to sex, lies, and videotape to The Crying Game to The Piano into gold, Miramax gave Disney a handful of assets it had been lacking: adult prestige, bicoastal media cool, and a renewable supply of Academy Award nominations. As for what Disney gave Miramax, that was simple: money — and lots of it — in the form of a hefty bonus structure for the Weinsteins above their seven-figure base salaries, and a budget that eventually rose to $700 million annually.
For the first few years of the partnership, the sailing was relatively smooth. Disney could tolerate the occasional Walt-is-turning-over-in-his-cryogenic-tube jokes that would accompany, say, the release of Miramax's inflammatory gay-Catholic drama Priest(1995) in exchange for the revenues, raves, and seats at the Shrine Auditorium that came with movies like Pulp Fiction. In early 1997, the partnership may have reached its pinnacle: Wes Craven's Scream gave Bob Weinstein's Dimension division its first blockbuster franchise (''It was Dimension's defining moment,'' says Bob Weinstein, ''the movie that put us on the map''), and The English Patient gave Harvey the one trinket he'd always wanted — a Best Picture Oscar. ''We gambled the company on that movie,'' recalls Harvey Weinstein, who had never before spent so much on a film (even Pulp Fiction cost only $9 million). ''It was a pivotal moment—Joe Roth [then Disney's movie chief] and Disney gave us the ability to spend $27 or $28 million and make a bigger movie. At the time it was pretty shocking in the so-called 'indie headquarters.'''
The following year brought Miramax its biggest box office hit yet, Good Will Hunting, a movie that epitomized Miramax's ability to sell the backstory — in that instance, the friendship between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck — as aggressively as the movie itself. A year after that, Miramax took home its second Best Picture trophy, when Shakespeare in Lovestunned Saving Private Ryan and cemented Harvey Weinstein's reputation as the most brutally effective campaigner in Oscar history. Among the runners-up that year was Life Is Beautiful, which the company turned into the most successful foreign-language film in U.S. history until that time. Meanwhile, Dimension was becoming a serious earner for Disney, launching successful franchises in comedy (Scary Movie) and family adventure (Spy Kids, created by Robert Rodriguez, whom Bob Weinstein calls ''the godfather of Dimension'') alongside the Screamtrilogy.
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