THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 170 FEBRUARY 28, 2018
BARBARA ALPER/GETTY IMAGESI b e l i eve
[Bob] knew what
was going on
[from the start].
He was protecting
Harvey. He
k n ew h e wa s a
big asshole.
WACHOW I A Kconcerts to show movies, joined by Bob, who
had dropped out of school at the State
Universit y of New York at Fredonia in 1973
and followed his brother to Buffalo, where
he still was very much a junior player.
“Harvey seemed resentful that he had to
bring along Bob,” says someone who worked
with the brothers, “while Bob seemed resent-
ful for not getting enough credit, for being
overshadowed.” His resentment spilled over in
subtle ways. “If you ever see any project they
did together, it was always ‘Bob and Harvey
Weinstein,’ ” in that order, says a former
employee. “Bob insisted his name come first.”
While Bob demonstrated financial
savvy (and a commercial sense that later made
his Dimension label a bigger earner thantesting you,” she says. “They start out small.
He wasn’t the big baller he became.”
There were others he tested, too. One local
woman, who requested anonymity, describes
her interaction with him around 1975, when
Harvey would have been 22 or 23. She was work-
ing as the manager of the Downtown Buffalo
Answering Service, where she was responsible
for collections. Harvey and Corky were notori-
ously late making payments. When the woman
contacted Harvey, he said he’d get her tickets
for an upcoming Hot Tuna show in exchange
for leeway on the bill. She agreed and was told
to swing by his house for the tickets. When
she knocked at his door in Cheektowaga, a
suburb of Buffalo, a roommate answered: “He’s
in the tub.”Miramax), he never shared Harvey’s passion
for film as art. Increasingly, film itself was
tugging Harvey away from concerts, as
Robinson saw when he became obsessed with
bringing the restored silent classic Napoleon
to Buffalo after it had made a splash in Los
Angeles, performed with a live orchestra led
by Carmine Coppola. He wanted to present the
picture in Buffalo with Coppola conducting.
“This is an important thing,” he kept telling
Robinson. “We need to bring this to Buffalo!”
In the end, the movie came to Buffalo
without Coppola. “I’m telling you, the man was
distraught,” says Robinson. “His heart was out
t here. We were ready to cr y.”Perhaps naively, the woman made her
way to the bathroom, knocked and entered.
Harvey was in the bath. “Can you wash my
back?” she says he asked. Flustered, she said
she was late meeting friends and rushed
out, grabbing her tickets from the dining-
room table. When she got to the concert, she
decided she should thank Harvey anyway
and went to his office. There, he put his arm
around her and tried to kiss her, making it
clear what he expected.
“He wanted a blow job,” she says.T
he partners expanded their activi-
ties, taking over a local concert venue,
the 3,000-seat Century Theatre, built
in the 1920s, with a chandelier and balcony that
would throb when audiences pounded their
feet. Soon, they were using downtime betweenWhile she loathes what Harvey became, she
says, “These things pull you back from abso-
lutely hating this man.”B
y the early 1980s, Harvey’s dreams had
outgrown the Century and perhaps
Buffalo, too. After serving as a facilita-
tor, he began to think of himself as an artist
in his own right, a director like so many of the
men he admired.
Locking himself in a cottage he had bought
just north of Buffalo, he worked with Bob on
a screenplay, Playing for Keeps (see sidebar on
page 172), based on a draft by Jeremy Leven.
“I did kind of write the movie,” says Leven,
“although by the time they finished, there
wasn’t much left other than an intense WGAarbitration for credit, which I won. But they had
already printed the posters and other mate-
rial as though they had won, so I don’t think my
name appears anywhere but IMDb.”
The siblings set about co-directing the film.
“It was a fucking disaster,” says an executive
who spent time on the set.
Power exacerbated the worst of Harvey’s
instincts. Brewer, who produced the movie
with the brothers, was approached on set by
a young female crewmember. She told him
Harvey had invited her to his hotel to dis-
cuss work, then attempted to kiss her. After
she resisted, he tried to force oral sex on her.
Brewer offered to call the police; she declined
but asked him to keep Harvey away from her.
As the film neared its 1986 release, Harvey
directed his anger at those closest to him.
Brewer had heard rumors about his violent↑ Harvey (left) and Bob in their Miramax offices in 1989 in
NYC. “If you ever see any project they did together, it was
always ‘Bob and Harvey Weinstein,’ ” in that order, says a former
employee. “Bob insisted his name come first.”