’92: Riots and Disney’s Fate

You’ve read and seen twist-of-fate fantasy stories about an innocent, even well-meaning person who inadvertently becomes part of a chain of actions that lead to evil. A courtly man loses his hat, a stranger finds it for him, but the man is John Wilkes Booth on his way to Ford’s Theater. Or a British WW1 sniper gallantly looks aside and lets Hitler live. You may have seen “The Howling Man”, a classic 1960 Twilight Zone about a turn of the century visitor to a European monastery who mercifully unlocks the cell of a helpless captive. Within seconds, that captive strikes him down and transforms into Satan.

I have an eyewitness story like that. It involves the Los Angeles riots, the end of apartheid in South Africa, a lavish event at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Harvey Weinstein, and the beginning of the end for the Disney we knew as kids. Here’s how it all happened, in the spring of 1992.

I was the producer of the Los Angeles International Film Festival, a division of the American Film Institute. AFI was founded by the federal government in 1967, but by the early Nineties it was a private non-profit agency. The festival was funded by a $1 million grant from casino and trade show mogul Sheldon Adelson, as well as major sponsors like AT&T, Apple, Kodak, Anheuser-Busch, Sony, and Paramount. A lot of people had a lot of money in the show. We would be the June grand opening event of 8000 Sunset, a new arts and retail complex built by Hazama, a hotshot Japanese property developer then making its name on the west coast.

On April 29, a jury acquitted the policemen who beat Rodney King the previous year. The 1991 beating, famously recorded on videotape, caused racial tension but no outbreak of violence. The acquittal got a far different reaction.

We were about seven weeks out from opening night. My boss, Ken Wlaschin and I left for lunch. When we came back, the AFI campus was strangely deserted. We drove up the steep hill to the parking lot. When we reached the summit and turned around to park, we finally saw what everyone facing the other way had seen: a vast panorama of the city, with dozens of pillars of smoke rising into the sky. The Watts riots of 1965 stayed in Watts. 1992’s wave of arson and looting didn’t.  My wife and I drove to day care and picked up our kids. For the next several days we mostly stayed inside as the city regained control of the streets. World TV audiences soaked it all up, 24/7.

Then it all stopped. Tense, uneasy calm descended on the City of Angels. Hazama Corporation’s Tokyo office was petrified, and postponed the opening of our shiny new festival center. With 200 films already on their way from 40 countries, we frantically rearranged our locations and schedule, creating and solving a lot of complicated logistical problems, cramming four months of prep work into three weeks.

In May, nobody even knew if people in L.A. would feel that it was safe to leave their houses to come to the show in June. At this all-hands-on-deck moment, Ken left for the Cannes film festival. It turned out to be a good thing, because I had some inside word about a South African film called Sarafina! showing there on May 11 that could be very useful to us if we could get permission to open our festival with it.

One overseas colleague who stood out for her intelligence and bravery was Ros Sarkin, director of the Durban Film Festival, University of Natal, South Africa. At the beginning of 1992, Ros tipped me off about black producer Anant Singh, an entrepreneurial hustler who turned Sarafina! from a London stage musical into a film shot on location in the ghetto of Soweto, parlaying the involvement of an American co-star, Whoopi Goldberg, into a locally financed $5 million budget. Months before the L.A. riots, Ros said it sounded right for us.

There was a complication: the film’s American rights had just been sold to Harvey Weinstein. Hey, no problem! We’d dealt with him for years, doing premieres together since Scandal in 1987. From our point of view, his exploitable weak spot was a hunger for artistic prestige that box office alone couldn’t assuage.

He had the movies we needed; we could confer the respectability he craved. (As Jay Leno would say, “What could possibly go wrong here?”)

Ken met up with him outside of the Cannes screening, and Weinstein instantly saw the positive publicity potential in an AFI screening at the prestigious Academy. The L.A. riots were, cynically speaking, a perfect backdrop for a splashy, newsworthy, multiracial gala premiere. Harvey jumped at our offer. He confirmed by fax that very day.

While still in Cannes Weinstein met with Disney’s Jeff Katzenberg to discuss the possibility of taking advantage of our June 18 festival opening to announce that in the interests of racial reconciliation in Los Angeles, the two studios made a highly unusual deal to split the distribution of Sarafina! This ‘altruistic,’ ‘civic minded’ deal helped persuade Whoopi to overcome her coy resistance to signing Disney’s contract for a sequel to her Sister Act, so it was already paying for itself.

The buildup to the June festival was exhausting, but response to AFI’s invitation-only event was instant and positive across the overlapping elites of Los Angeles and of the Hollywood media community. Dramatically it was the right moment for Hollywood virtue signaling, sure. But for a lot of the city, still shellshocked from early May, it was sincere.

Sarafina! was written by playwright Mbongeni Ngema in tribute to his wife, actress Leleti Khumalo, based loosely on her childhood experiences. She’d been performing the role on stage since she was 18. Khumalo had just turned 22 when she and Ngema landed in Los Angeles on June 15^th for a whirlwind, photoflash-filled visit to the film capital.

They met Mayor Tom Bradley, and were squired around town by Miramax’s shark-like publicity team. Miramax and Disney were thrilled with the positive press. AFI’s leaders basked in the Board’s approval. The big June 18 premiere, at the motion picture Academy’s huge Samuel Goldwyn Theater, was as usual aimed at the participation of the cream of Hollywood, “salted” with the eager cooperation of local black and Asian religious leaders and politicians. Everybody found an angle.

There’s a scene in Sarafina! that’s a parody of the Academy Awards, with totemic wooden dolls at Soweto’s ghetto version of the Oscars. Anant Singh emailed us with some concern about the Academy’s reaction to a reference to their trademarks, but they laughed it off, and Leleti proudly stood for photos alongside the eight-foot-tall Oscar statues that flank the screen at the headquarters auditorium.

The screening went over well. While the film was still on the screen, most of the festival staff went down to the lobby; we’d already seen it at the AFI. To our amazement, Harvey was hanging out at the bar, amiably chatting away about anything anyone wanted to talk about. You could see the astonished look on everyone’s face—“Could this be Mr. Scrooge?” We never saw him like that before, and wouldn’t see it again. But on that golden night, with his movie on screen at the Academy, with the political leaders of Los Angeles and the creative leaders of Hollywood praising him, he was accepted, and triumphant.

When the film opened in theaters in September, the Los Angeles Times, as always, expressed the views of southern California elites, with the following pontification:

“The message put forth in “Sarafina!” acquires particular significance in Los Angeles, a few short months after the uprising provoked by the Rodney G. King verdict. Long-simmering inequities are in sharper focus. A burgeoning underclass has struck back. When the movie was shown at the AFI Film Festival in June, the filmmakers dedicated the program to this city “in a gesture of concern and healing.”

In all cynical honesty, I appreciated the LA Times “plug”. It didn’t matter at that moment how I felt about their piousness. It made us look good to our bosses, and therefore helped us bureaucratically survive and even thrive for yet another year.

There were hints and rumors of other deals, even of a more formal, if unlikely business relationship between the distributor of Bambi and the distributor of The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball.

In the same fall of 1992, I was a juror at the Cork film festival, Ireland’s main film event. Their opening night film was an instantly notorious sensation, an Irish/UK production called The Crying Game. It was at the very least a bracingly different introduction to the land of my ancestors. Harvey Weinstein had the US rights, seeing another publicity bonanza. Nobody ever said that Harvey didn’t know how to gin up publicity.

At the Academy Awards in 1993, Jaye Davidson was the focus of massive press attention for playing the first trans role in an acting category. Billy Crystal’s opening comedy monologue was a song medley. To the tune of “The Tender Trap”, he sang “Those lips, those eyes, those thighs, sur-prise! It’s The Crying Game…”

And what could say “Walt Disney” better than that, right? By then, Disney and Miramax had tied the knot, and Sister Act II began shooting that summer, true to Whoopi’s word. The legendary home of family entertainment was handing over a fortune to be in business with a legendarily coarse man who built his business on provocation for sophisticates. Disney liked Oscars, and Harvey was good at getting them. At the 2002 Oscars, presenter Nathan Lane joked, “Gosh, I thought Monsters, Inc was a documentary about the Weinsteins”, to gleeful peals of audience laughter.

Harvey Weinstein shrewdly invaded the motion picture academy at cut-rate prices, buying his way into the rather inexpensive to buy-your-way-into foreign film category, then expanding into financing original productions, now with the seemingly limitless financial backing of Disney. It changed the public face of the company, and the cultural impact it had on the world. But why take my word for it? Here’s the verdict of Peter Bart, longtime editor-in-chief of Variety:

Some Disney veterans still cringe in recalling their company’s most troubling takeover: Miramax.  In empowering Harvey Weinstein with Disney money and muscle, the rulers of the Magic Kingdom in 1993 transformed a struggling indie distributor into an all-consuming producer-predator….None of the then-Disney executives want to discuss the inception of the “deal gone wrong.” I don’t blame them. At that moment in time, Disney was thriving (though hungry for award recognition) and Weinstein was ablaze with extraordinary dreams. Over time some were realized, making many people rich and famous. But along with triumph came personal disaster, for both himself and those whose lives he crossed.

The bolding was mine. Well, maybe they don’t want to “discuss the inception of the ‘deal gone wrong’”. But I did.