WEINSTEIN, HARVEY

WEINSTEIN, HARVEY (1952– ) and BOB (1954– ), U.S. entertainment executives. The brothers were raised in Flushing, New York. Harvey enrolled at the University of Buffalo, while Bob went to the State University of New York at Fredonia; however, neither Weinstein graduated. Harvey became involved in concert promotion on campus, and eventually purchased a theater where he booked music acts and featured films between performances. The Weinsteins went to the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 and purchased the soft-core film Goodbye, Emmanuelle, which enabled them to start Miramax. The studio, named for the Weinstein's parents and set up at first in Harvey's one-room apartment in New York, distributed independent and foreign films other studios refused to handle. The Weinsteins' first Academy Award win was for the Danish film Pelle the Conqueror (1987), which took the 1988 Oscar for best foreign film. When Miramax received a $5 million investment from Midland Montague in 1988, the brothers began producing their own films, such as Scandal (1989), about the British Profumo scandal. However, Miramax first major successes were sex, lies and videotape by Steven Soderbergh, which cost $1.1 million to make and pulled in $24 million in the North American box office, and the Oscar wins for My Left Foot (1989). The Crying Game (1992) led to another hit for Miramax, garnering six Oscar nominations and one win for the studio. In 1993, Bob Weinstein founded Dimension Films, a studio for genre films, such as Scream (1996) and Spy Kid s (2001). The Piano (1993) was the next hit for Miramax, with three Academy Award wins and Cannes' Palme d'Or. In 1993, Disney purchased Miramax for $65 million, but left the Weinsteins in control of projects under $12 million. When the Motion Picture Association of America's Ratings Board handed down an x rating to the film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), the Weinsteins sued, which led the board to create the nc-17 rating for films featuring adult content that was not pornographic in nature. Miramax continued to rack up hits with Pulp Fiction (1994), Il Postino (1994), Trainspottin g (1996), The English Patient (1996), Good Will Hunting (1997), and Shakespeare in Love (1998), among many other titles. In all, Miramax projects received 243 Academy Awards nominations and the studio enjoyed 57 wins before Disney took full control of the company and its film library in 2005. The Weinsteins still retained control of Dimension Films, and launched a new venture called the Weinstein Co.

[Adam Wills (2^nd ed.)]