Chapter 12, Making a Difference (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)
But that’s the thing about Doing Right. It can be just as addictive as any drug. Suddenly you’re getting handshakes and pats on the back and called a Mensch and you’re the talk of the town because you Did Right. You didn’t do it for the praise, or at least you tell yourself that, but there’s a rush to it all the same.
It hit Steve [Spielberg] too. Suddenly a Spielberg Production [
Maus] won an Oscar for something other than technical categories, and it did so while raising millions for a worthy cause. Suddenly
Hooked! wasn’t going to live up to it in his mind. He was “Hooked” on something else now.
“Bernie,” he told me at the Oscar after party, “I think it’s time for
Schindler.”
Schindler’s List was a script that he’d been toying with for years. He’d alternately thought about making it himself, or talked with big names like Scorsese and Pollack and Polanski. He’d never felt “ready” for such a big leap into drama, particularly with everyone seeing him as the “blockbuster guy”. But now, with
Maus getting near universal praise, he felt ready. “I need to do this for my children and family,” he told me.
Maybe I was high on it all myself. “Let’s do it,” I said. “MGM. Christmas release. Proceeds to the [Holocaust] museum. It’ll probably crash and burn, but let us do
Jurassic Park too and that should help cover the costs.”
“I want to direct
Schindler,” Steve told me.
“Absolutely. Before or after
Jurassic?”
“Instead. Give JP to Burton. If he can do with that what he did with
Maus and
Scissorhands, he’ll knock it out of the park.”
Steve set into
Schindler with a passion I haven’t seen from a director in years. Beatty, Costner, and Gibson all wanted to play the titular role, but Steve gave it to Liam Neeson based on his success in
Dead Poet’s Society for Hollywood Pictures. Steve even liked the pathos he gave to the Lizard. Filming began in the spring of 1991, just weeks after we’d signed the deal.
Steve ultimately didn’t even take a share for himself, considering it “blood money”. Just enough to cover his company’s expenses. We brought in our other partners on
Maus, ultimately seeing the film co-produced by Brooksfilms under the neutral B&B Productions label, and funded in partnership with Jack Tramiel of Commodore.
Production went well. Steve outdid himself. It was gut wrenching in all the right ways. Neeson was sublime and deservedly took home the Oscar. You knew all that. It would debut for Christmas of 1992.
Strangely, this put it up against MGM’s other Big Important Picture,
Malcolm X, which we’d scooped up from Warner. I’ll talk about that one at another time.
The important thing is that
Schindler, which we released two weeks after
X, became a surprise hit! Even the Germans loved it, making it a breakout hit there. Guilt? Hoping to identify with Schindler? Who knows? It would go on to break $300 million at the international box office, with about $25 million of it going to the museum. I’d have given more away but after the kerfuffle with the board over
Song of Susan I wasn’t about to make that same mistake again. They can have their 30 pieces of silver.
Yea, I just said that. Sue me.
But if Steve and I were ecstatic, then Spike was furious. “You fucked me, Bernie!”
“I did no such fucking thing, Spike. Nobody expected this to happen with a Holocaust movie!”
“Even from Spielberg?”
“
Especially from Spielberg! He does killer shark movies!”
I eventually talked Spike down. I even showed him our projections for
Schindler, which we gave an even chance of breaking even and were prepared to write off entirely. Of course, we didn’t expect much better than breaking even with his film either, to be honest. And
Malcolm X still made bank, breaking $70 million internationally after a surprisingly good international showing. And pretty soon he had a new target for his ire: The Academy, which gave all the statuettes to Steve and Clint Eastwood.
Would
Malcolm X have done better if we’d delayed
Schindler? Who can say?
But he wasn’t the only one who saw red. When
X failed to take home a single statue in March of ‘93, not even one for Denzel, the streets of Brooklyn erupted into angry protests and soon counter-protests as the simmering tensions between the Black and Jewish communities exploded once again. The Nation of Islam, even, hypocritically enough, Farrakhan himself (which is kind of ironic given
his recent admissions), used the opportunity to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. Some of my own tribe said some stupid shit that Steve and I had to call them out on. There were even some isolated incidents of rioting and a case of arson that the press blew up into “as bad as LA” (it wasn’t!).
But what a story, right? “The Oscar Riots!” People rioting over the fucking Oscars!
No, Peter Jennings, you putz, they were rioting over decades of poverty, bigotry, antisemitism, and ethnic tension. If it hadn’t been over a couple of movies, it would have been over something like George Steinbrenner benching Charlie Hayes.
Steve and Spike agreed to appear together to ask for calm. Steve pushed for more people to see
Malcolm X and got it a slight bump at the Box Office. Others reportedly went to see
X and Schindler both, wondering what all the fuss was about.
That fucking riot probably made us another $10 million, if you can fucking believe it.
We took some of the
Schindler and
X money to help rebuild Brooklyn and support community healing initiatives, once again trying to do the right thing—the same right thing that got us into the mess to begin with.
The whole contrast between the event and the shit I got over
The Song of Susan really put a lot into perspective for me. You do the right thing and raise millions for charity and suddenly have to defend your job. You inadvertently cause a fucking riot, and you make millions.
I guess no good deed goes unpunished after all…and no bad deed unrewarded.
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