Focus Features

In today’s recession-era film acquisitions environment, bidding wars for Sundance pictures often resemble those recent high-level confabs between the nation’s largest banks pondering the financial meltdown and the collapse of Lehman — the ones where everyone sits around a table and calmly discusses the fate of the nation’s economy. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but anyone who has seen acquisition executives from competing companies huddle together after a Park City film screening and agree on which company is the natural fit for a movie need only remember the fight to purchase Shine at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 to realize how things have changed. Scott Hicks’s Shine is an inspirational drama about a schizophrenic child piano prodigy, and it arrived at Sundance for its world premiere with most rights, including the U.S., available. Executives wept after the first screening, and soon there were three offers on the table. Pandora Films selected Fine Line as the film’s distributor, and on January 21, 1996, its head, Jon Taplin, went off to dinner to celebrate. As described in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, Hicks had previously met with various U.S. distributors when shopping his script, and at the Miramax meeting he was kept waiting for 90 minutes. “They didn’t even offer me a glass of water,” he is quoted as saying as explanation for why he was cool on the company’s subsequent offer. When Miramax head, Harvey Weinstein, who believed that his offer for the film had been accepted, heard that Fine Line had the movie, he stomped over to the Mercado Mediterraneo restaurant to confront Taplin. A near fistfight ensued, with Weinstein shoving Taplin into a corner where he verbally berated him. Much of what he said is unprintable in this family-friendly website, and Weinstein was soon escorted from the restaurant by the manager and two waiters. Reflecting back in Biskind’s book, Weinstein says, “I ruined my reputation, I killed it forever with these people, and rightly so, because I behaved extremely badly – because I’m passionate about movies.” Taplin echoes Weinstein’s “passion” line in his own recounting on his blog, writing that he later patched it up with Weinstein and that such emotion “is still sorely missing in many film executives.” For a more dramatic version of this story, readers might check Sundance 2011. A filmed adaptation of Biskind’s book is planned, and Vincent D’Onofrio has been reported to be playing Weinstein. 

In today’s recession-era film acquisitions environment, bidding wars for Sundance pictures often resemble those recent high-level confabs between the nation’s largest banks pondering the financial meltdown and the collapse of Lehman — the ones where everyone sits around a table and calmly discusses the fate of the nation’s economy. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but anyone who has seen acquisition executives from competing companies huddle together after a Park City film screening and agree on which company is the natural fit for a movie need only remember the fight to purchase Shine at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 to realize how things have changed. Scott Hicks’s Shine is an inspirational drama about a schizophrenic child piano prodigy, and it arrived at Sundance for its world premiere with most rights, including the U.S., available. Executives wept after the first screening, and soon there were three offers on the table. Pandora Films selected Fine Line as the film’s distributor, and on January 21, 1996, its head, Jon Taplin, went off to dinner to celebrate. As described in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, Hicks had previously met with various U.S. distributors when shopping his script, and at the Miramax meeting he was kept waiting for 90 minutes. “They didn’t even offer me a glass of water,” he is quoted as saying as explanation for why he was cool on the company’s subsequent offer. When Miramax head, Harvey Weinstein, who believed that his offer for the film had been accepted, heard that Fine Line had the movie, he stomped over to the Mercado Mediterraneo restaurant to confront Taplin. A near fistfight ensued, with Weinstein shoving Taplin into a corner where he verbally berated him. Much of what he said is unprintable in this family-friendly website, and Weinstein was soon escorted from the restaurant by the manager and two waiters. Reflecting back in Biskind’s book, Weinstein says, “I ruined my reputation, I killed it forever with these people, and rightly so, because I behaved extremely badly – because I’m passionate about movies.” Taplin echoes Weinstein’s “passion” line in his own recounting on his blog, writing that he later patched it up with Weinstein and that such emotion “is still sorely missing in many film executives.” For a more dramatic version of this story, readers might check Sundance 2011. A filmed adaptation of Biskind’s book is planned, and Vincent D’Onofrio has been reported to be playing Weinstein.