It was 1994, and Miramax, a New York company which had risen from nowhere to bestride the independent-film world like the proverbial colossus, was on the eve of its golden age. Founded in 1979 by the notorious Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob, Miramax had gained its footing in 1989 with the release of three films that were well received by both the critics and the public: Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot, and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. The brothers were able to exploit the lure of the first film in particular to break out of the urban art-movie ghetto and into the mall-based suburban multiplexes, pushing the small film to a remarkable domestic gross of $25 million. Four years later, on the back of the even more successful Neil Jordan hit, The Crying Game, the Weinsteins managed to make themselves attractive to the Walt Disney Company, which bought Miramax in May of 1993 for between $60 and $80 million and gave it a huge infusion of cash.

For good and for ill, the company was very much the expression of the brothers’ volatile personalities. Harvey, born in 1952, was a paler, doughier forerunner of Bob, who was two years younger. Harvey looked like what he was: the first pancake off the griddle, before it’s hot enough. At six feet, 250 pounds and counting, he was larger in every respect than Bob. And rather than trying to smooth his rough edges, Harvey flaunted them, turned them into pluses. He knew that the sweat, the food stains, the slovenly dress, the inner demons writ large on his battered face, could be made to send a message, one that went, to quote Popeye, I yam what I yam. And in the world of appearances—of Armani suits and SL500s—in which he operated, it worked as often as not. People in the movie world admired his fidelity to his nature and often forgave him his sins. As Matt Damon puts it, “It’s the old tale of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion’s sitting on the bank of a river, and a frog walks by, and the scorpion says, ‘Take me to the other side.’ The frog replies, ‘No, because when we get to the other side and you have what you want, you’re going to sting me.’ The scorpion says, ‘I would never do that. Please, I’m asking you for a favor—I can’t swim. I need your help.’ The frog finally agrees, takes him across on his back, and just as they get to the other side, the scorpion stings the frog. As the frog is dying, he says, ‘Why did you do that?’ The scorpion just looks down at him and says, ‘Because I’m a scorpion, it’s my nature.’ It’s the same with Harvey. It’s his nature.”

Harvey loved the limelight and could make himself extremely appealing. He liked, in fact, to be liked. He was funny, wielded a wicked, slashing wit that he could use on himself when he wanted to or just as easily turn against others, reducing grown men to tears. When he was on a roll, no one was funnier. Speaking of somebody or other, he once said, “He’s the kind of guy, you gotta hold his hand when you’re chopping off his head!” And dwelling somewhere within Harvey’s breast was the heart of, if not a poet, at least a cinéaste. He genuinely loved movies, A movies, B movies, horror, science fiction, comedy, musicals, kung fu, all kinds of movies, but he particularly adored foreign films, art films, “specialty” films. He loved to tell the story about going to see The 400 Blows when he was 14; he had naēvely expected it to be a sex film, but during the course of the hour and a half he spent in the theater, he was transported by the magic of Franćois Truffaut. Says Mark Lipsky, vice president of sales and marketing for Miramax in the late 1980s, “I’ve heard that story—‘I saw 400 Blows, it changed my life’—a zillion times. It’s significant that Harvey tells that story, not Bob.”

Bob, often dressed in black, always seemed a little off, uncomfortable in his own skin, as if he were not in the right place, but rather some world of his own. If Harvey was bigger than life, Bob was smaller, more intense, a reduction, l’essence d’Harv. If Harvey was the outside guy, Bob was the inside guy. He was quieter, preferred to stay in the shadows. It didn’t matter to Bob if he was liked or not. Despite what Bob told the press—“We’re artists. We’re not interested in money”—he himself didn’t much care about Truffaut. Bob liked exploitation flicks, commercial product that could go direct to video. He was focused on the bottom line. Whatever the movie, he always wanted to know, “Are we going to make money on it, Harv?” To make sure Miramax made money, in 1993 Bob started his own division, Dimension Films, which would acquire and produce genre movies.