INDEPENDENTS' DAY

By RICHARD CORLISS

Your basic movie-mogul breakfast menu would include strawberries, decaf, a splash of Evian, maybe a Diet Coke. But Harvey Weinstein has never got with fit-for-life cuisine. One morning at the recent Sundance Film Festival, the co-chairman of Miramax Films eagerly devoured a greasy omelette (the secret ingredient: cholesterol) while schmoozing with a reporter about art, movies and life in general. It's been said that a family of four could subsist for a month on the crumbs that stick to Weinstein's shirt. That family may soon need to find other means of dietary support: the big guy has shed 50 lbs. and is down to a merely huge 225. He hopes to drop 65 lbs. more. "I want to be Paul Newman's weight," he says in the burly baritone that has struck awe, fear and amusement into the small independent-film community.

That community, usually ignored by the big Hollywood players, is now the hot place to be. In last week's honor roll of Oscar nominations, four of the five finalists for Best Picture (The English Patient, Fargo, Secrets & Lies and Shine) were released by independent companies; only Jerry Maguire came from one of the seven major studios. Indie films did handsomely in all top categories: three of the slots for Best Actor, four for Best Director, all five for Best Actress. For once the Oscars looked less like the Tonys and more like the Obies. Off-Hollywood had beaten Hollywood at its own prestige game.

Weinstein, 44, and his partner-brother Bob, 42, had special cause to rejoice. Miramax corralled 20 nominations, more than any major studio and the most ever for an indie outfit. The English Patient, with enough sand and grandeur to make it Lawrence of Arabia with women, snagged 12 nominations. The Weinsteins have also scored in the real world of the box office. Scream, the teen horror movie made by their company's Dimension Films division, has scared up nearly $80 million--more than most of Miramax's nominated films. From its 1996 slate, the company has grossed $250 million, as much as all the other indie companies combined.

In a volatile business, the Weinsteins have long been king of the indies. "They're artists, entrepreneurs and passionate maniacs," says DreamWorks exec Jeffrey Katzenberg. "They have extraordinary gut meters for what's good, they're unbelievable salesmen, and they're equally painful to have to deal with. Together they are the Irving Thalberg of our time."

In his time of triumph, Harvey Weinstein grandly spreads the glory around. "This is a great moment for independent films," he says. "It shows that risk has its rewards." The risks are mostly of finance, not of film form. The big winners among little movies didn't dabble in delirious innovation (the hallucinogenic Trainspotting got only a screenplay nod). The primary appeal of their stories is not to the young mass audience, which prefers spectacular fantasy and broad comedy, but to older viewers, more sophisticated and more sentimental, liberal in their politics and conservative in their desire for humanist affirmation--folks very like the typical Oscar voter. This audience wants, as Fine Line president Ruth Vitale puts it, "movies that touch your heart, that make you pause, think, maybe pick up the phone and call your dad."

The current declaration of independents is really Hollywood's declaration of artistic bankruptcy. The majors are less capable now than ever of making and marketing the high-quality, middlebrow "people pictures" that the Academy has always rewarded, from Marty to Annie Hall to Ordinary People to Driving Miss Daisy. The allure for the high-stakes gamblers who run the studios is the $100 million special-effects film, like the Twister-Flood-Dante's Peak epics--"movies that seem programmed off the Weather Channel," as Bob Weinstein drolly says.

The moguls are like teenagers: they want movies with big kicks and fast returns. That makes the slow-fuse payoff of the quieter people pictures anathema. "Normal thinking at the studios is if audiences aren't there the first weekend, they're not coming," says Gramercy's Russell Schwartz. "But our films have to be discovered. We live by word of mouth." And Oscar has the biggest mouth around. The day after the nominations were announced, the box office for Shine jumped 40% from the previous Wednesday.

The strong indie showing seemed a victory for a favorite hero of old Hollywood films: the nervy little guy. That can be misleading, since most of the "independent" companies are owned by media conglomerates: Miramax by the Walt Disney Co., Gramercy (which released Fargo) by Polygram, Fine Line (Shine) by Time Warner. October Films (Secrets & Lies) is partly financed by mighty Allen & Co., but despite rumors that it is open to a takeover bid, Bingham Ray vows to maintain autonomy. "We're at the peak of our game right now as a privately held, true independent," he says.

Harvey Weinstein has his own definition of independence. "It has always meant independent of the seven major studios," says Harvey, "and that's how we operate. Disney is our big daddy or rich uncle. Basically, they're our bank. You can say Disney or you can say Chase Manhattan." Miramax has the freedom to run its business so long as it works within budget guidelines and doesn't buy movies rated NC-17. "A hundred-percent freedom," says Disney CEO Michael Eisner. "They're completely autonomous. And they should be. They keep their costs down and their ideas up. They look rough-and-tumble, but I always knew they were secret intellectuals and closet film experts. They run the business very well." Eisner has reason to be pleased. In 1993 Disney bought Miramax for about $75 million, the cost of a single A-budget studio film. Today, one movie boss believes, the company is worth more than $1 billion.

Not bad for a couple of movie-mad kids from Queens, New York. Their parents, Bob recalls, "used the local theater as a baby-sitter. They'd drop us off at a triple feature and pick us up six hours later." (The boys must be grateful for the benign neglect of Miriam and Max Weinstein; the company is named after them.) After a stint as rock-concert promoters in Buffalo, New York, Harvey and Bob got into film distribution, making their rep with the 1989 hits sex, lies, and videotape and My Left Foot. Often they saw themselves as custom tailors, trimming foreign films to make them more accessible to U.S. audiences and earning the elder brother the withering sobriquet "Harvey Scissorhands."

The Weinsteins also enjoy hondeling and hectoring. In 1993 Miramax heard that TIME was about to run a story revealing that Jaye Davidson, the "female" lead in The Crying Game, was a man (hardly a scoop, since Davidson had won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor). Furious, Harvey called a top editor 18 times in one day in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the nonsecret a secret.

Miramax has always had a genius for picking films. Sometimes it picks them out of the gutter. The Miramax tactic: find a pretty orphan, take it home, dress it up and show it off. When TriStar said no to Pulp Fiction, the Weinsteins eagerly said yes and snagged their biggest hit ever. Last year 20th Century Fox backed out of The English Patient just before the film was to begin shooting. Instead Fox pinned its Oscar hopes on another sweeping morality play, The Crucible--only to see it swept away, at the box office and in the Oscar race.

Any movie executive would prefer fathering films to merely adopting them. But while you can make a lot of money producing pictures, you can also lose a lot. Miramax did indeed tank with some of its early in-house productions, like The Lemon Sisters with Diane Keaton and The Long Walk Home with Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. It has been more successful with genre films birthed by Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films. Dimension plans sequels to Scream, From Dusk Till Dawn and Total Recall, originally made by another studio. Miramax, which traditionally had more pickups than homegrown product, is making more of its own films. The company is plunging into musicals, with movies of Chicago (possibly starring Madonna and Goldie Hawn) and Rent. Weinstein has vaguer plans for a monthly magazine, code-named Max, and for TV. "I don't think we need to do sitcoms," he says, "but rather more innovative stuff balanced with commercial properties."

There's always a risk when little companies get big dreams. Right now the entire indie industry needs caution. The current boom could be only a bump. Aging moviegoers could go back to TV. Or the next film by English Patient director Anthony Minghella could be more like his previous, invisible effort, Mr. Wonderful. Or the major studios could emerge from their stupor and figure out how to make the kinds of films from which the indies have profited.

But Harvey Weinstein is not a timid soul. His eyes for movies are as big as his stomach. And as his gut shrinks, those eyes get bigger. If there were an Oscar for chutzpah, he and Bob would win every year.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

For more information, see our Web report on independent films at time.com/indies

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles