The Miramax Effect

Weinstein continued the trend, whether he was massaging Oscar nominations for Pelle the Conqueror or indulging his soft spot for high-toned drivel like Cinema Paradiso. Yet he was hardly the first to exploit the market for prestige crowd-pleasers. What was fresh about Miramax is that the company responded to, and created an audience for, a new world spirit of dark, spiky, refined-pulp beauty.

Virtually all of the company's signature hits offered the lure of a certain bracing artistic jolt factor. My Left Foot (1989), which marked the first of Weinstein's take-no-prisoners Oscar campaigns (though few were aware of it at the time), may have looked on the surface like vintage awards bait, except that Daniel Day-Lewis, writhing in his wheelchair, played Christy Brown with such a fearsome, guts-twisted-inside-out cussed intensity that the result was perhaps the single most unsentimental tale of a handicapped hero ever filmed. The company pushed the envelope of subversion with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1990), an unrated saturnalia of rage, disgust, and bodily fluids, and then, in the fall of 1992, it stepped up its assault on moviegoing as we know it with a pair of neoclassical land mines, Reservoir Dogs and The Crying Game.

It's not that we'd never seen anything as violent as Reservoir Dogsbefore. It's that we hadn't seen anything so violent that also had that swagger, that was so giddily nonchalant. (Yes, Malcolm McDowell sang ''Singin' in the Rain'' in A Clockwork Orange, but when Michael Madsen in Dogs sliced off that guy's ear, he danced.) Then again, once you got past the torture and the Nixon-era FM pop tunes, the black suits and the skinny ties, the revelation of Reservoir Dogs is that Quentin Tarantino, for all his bloody nihilism, was a new-style old-school virtuoso. He'd made a heist film, full of revolving flashbacks, with a finesse that would have knocked noir audiences of the '40s out of their seats.

That, more than anything, became the Miramax legacy: the way that the company rekindled the pleasure of big-screen storytelling by making it feel hazardous again. The Crying Game, with its amazing ''secret'' (the basis for Miramax's greatest marketing campaign), said that life is a thriller, a despondent love story — but that if you lift its dress, you never know what you'll find. A year later, The Piano (1993), with its Emily Brontë-goes-contempo erotic grandeur, became the ultimate art chick flick, as Holly Hunter's mute heroine used sign language to tap an unexpressed river of feminine spiritual fury.

Pulp Fiction, of course, was the apotheosis of Miramax: a banquet of talk, violence, forbidden games (John Travolta shot heroin!), and storytelling bravura. Each moment was heightened, as if it were the only moment that mattered, by Tarantino's pop entrancement. Yet the fact that it became the first Miramax blockbuster, competing with Forrest Gump at the 1995 Academy Awards, changed Harvey Weinstein. Two years later, when he swept the Oscars with The English Patient, he turned, perhaps forever, into the Cookie Monster of the Academy Awards, insatiable for nominations and statuettes.

The company, I would say as a direct result, lightened its taste, becoming ever more middlebrow and user-friendly. There were still artful Miramax films to come: Good Will Hunting, The Wings of the Dove, The Talented Mr. Ripley (coproduced by Paramount), Shakespeare in Love(ditto by Universal), and Chicago.With the Scream franchise, the company's genre division, Dimension, revived horror as a form of high sadistic play. Yet if Miramax's reign was far from over, the movies themselves were no longer, in any true sense, defining. Independent films from other companies — Breaking the Waves and Boogie Nights, Happiness and The Blair Witch Project, Far From Heaven and Sideways — were now as bold and bright, as dark and dazzling, as Harvey's gems. Miramax had remade the world of movies, which is why that world can now go on without it.