The 80s Movie Podcast
Edward Havens
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Miramax Films: Part Three
This week, we continue out look back at the films released by Miramax in the 1980s, focusing on 1987. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It’s the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, concentrating on their releases from 1987, the year Miramax would begin its climb towards the top of the independent distribution mountain. The first film Miramax would release in 1987 was Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls. And yes, Lizzie Borden is her birth name. Sort of. Her name was originally Linda Elizabeth Borden, and at the age of eleven, when she learned about the infamous accused double murderer, she told her parents she wanted to only be addressed as Lizzie. At the age of 18, after graduating high school and heading off to the private women’s liberal arts college Wellesley, she would legally change her name to Lizzie Borden. After graduating with a fine arts degree, Borden would move to New York City, where she held a variety of jobs, including being both a painter and an art critic for the influential Artforum magazine, until she attended a retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard movies, when she was inspired to become a filmmaker herself. Her first film, shot in 1974, was a documentary, Regrouping, about four female artists who were part of a collective that incorporated avant-garde techniques borrowed from performance art, as the collective slowly breaks apart. One of the four artists was a twenty-three year old painter who would later make film history herself as the first female director to win the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow. But Regrouping didn’t get much attention when it was released in 1976, and it would take Borden five years to make her first dramatic narrative, Born in Flames, another movie which would also feature Ms. Bigelow in a supporting role. Borden would not only write, produce and direct this film about two different groups of feminists who operate pirate radio stations in New York City which ends with the bombing of the broadcast antenna atop the World Trade Center, she would also edit the film and act as one of the cinematographers. The film would become one of the first instances of Afrofuturism in film, and would become a cultural touchstone in 2016 when a restored print of the film screened around the world to great critical acclaim, and would tie for 243rd place in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films Ever Made. Other films that tied with include Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. A Yes, it’s that good, and it would cost only $30k to produce. But while Born in Flames wasn’t recognized as revolutionary in 1983, it would help her raise $300k for her next movie, about the lives of sex workers in New York City. The idea would come to her while working on Born in Flames, as she became intrigued about prostitution after meeting some well-educated women on the film who worked a few shifts a week at a brothel to earn extra money or to pay for their education. Like many, her perception of prostitution were women who worked the streets, when in truth streetwalkers only accounted for about 15% of the business. During the writing of the script, she began visiting brothels in New York City and learned about the rituals involved in the business of selling sex, especially intrigued how many of the sex workers looked out for each other mentally, physically and hygienically. Along with Sandra Kay, who would play one of the ladies of the night in the film, Borden worked up a script that didn’t glamorize or grossly exaggerate the sex industry, avoiding such storytelling tropes as the hooker with a heart of gold or girls forced into prostitution due to extraordinary circumstances. Most of the ladies playing prostitutes were played by unknown actresses working off-Broadway, while the johns were non-actors recruited through word of mouth between Borden’s friends and the occasional ad in one of the city’s sex magazines. Production on Working Girls would begin in March 1985, with many of the sets being built in Borden’s loft in Manhattan, with moveable walls to accommodate whatever needed to be shot on any given day. While $300k would be ten times what she had on Born in Flames, Borden would stretch her budget to the max by still shooting in 16mm, in the hopes that the footage would look good enough should the finished film be purchased by a distributor and blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition. After a month of shooting, which involved copious amounts of both male and female nudity, Borden would spend six months editing her film. By early 1986, she had a 91 minute cut ready to go, and she and her producer would submit the film to play at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. While the film would not be selected to compete for the coveted Palme D’Or, it would be selected for the Directors’ Fortnight, a parallel program that would also include Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire, and Chantel Akerman’s Golden Eighties. The film would get into some trouble when it was invited to screen at the Toronto Film Festival a few months later. The movie would have to be approved by the Ontario Film and Video Review Board before being allowed to show at the festival. However, the board would not approve the film without two cuts, including one scene which depicted the quote unquote graphic manipulation of a man’s genitalia by a woman. The festival, which had a long standing policy of not showing any movie that had been cut for censorship, would appeal the decision on behalf of the filmmakers. The Review Board denied the appeal, and the festival left the decision of whether to cut the two offending scenes to Borden. Of all the things I’ve researched about the film, one of the few things I could not find was whether or not Borden made the trims, but the film would play at the festival as scheduled. After Toronto, Borden would field some offers from some of the smaller art house distributors, but none of the bigger independents or studio-affiliated “classics” divisions. For many, it was too sexual to be a straight art house film, while it wasn’t graphic enough to be porn. The one person who did seem to best understand what Borden was going for was, no surprise in hindsight, Harvey Weinstein. Miramax would pick the film up for distribution in late 1986, and planned a February 1987 release. What might be surprising to most who know about Harvey Weinstein, who would pick up the derisive nickname Harvey Scissorhands in a few years for his constant meddling in already completed films, actually suggested Borden add back in a few minutes of footage to balance out the sex with some lighter non-sex scenes. She would, along with making some last minute dialogue changes, before the film opened on February 5th, not in New York City or Los Angeles, the traditional launching pads for art house films, but at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco, where the film would do a decent $8k in its first three days. Three weeks after opening at the Opera Plaza, Miramax would open the film at the 57th Street Playhouse in midtown Manhattan. Buoyed by some amazing reviews from the likes of Siskel and Ebert, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, and J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, Working Girls would gross an astounding $42k during its opening weekend. Two weeks later, it would open at the Samuel Goldwyn Westside Pavilion Cinemas, where it would bring in $17k its first weekend. It would continue to perform well in its major market exclusive runs. An ad in the April 8th, 1987 issue of Variety shows a new house record of $13,492 in its first week at the Ellis Cinema in Atlanta. $140k after five weeks in New York. $40k after three weeks at the Nickelodeon in Boston. $30k after three weeks at the Fine Arts in Chicago. $10k in its first week at the Guild in San Diego. $11k in just three days at the TLA in Philly. Now, there’s different numbers floating around about how much Working Girls made during its total theatrical run. Box Office Mojo says $1.77m, which is really good for a low budget independent film with no stars and featuring a subject still taboo to many in American today, let alone 37 years ago, but a late June 1987 issue of Billboard Magazine about some of the early film successes of the year, puts the gross for Working Girls at $3m. If you want to check out Working Girls, the Criterion Collection put out an exceptional DVD and Blu-ray release in 2021, which includes a brand new 4K transfer of the film, and a commentary track featuring Borden, cinematographer Judy Irola, and actress Amanda Goodwin, amongst many bonus features. Highly recommended. I’ve already spoken some about their next film, Ghost Fever, on our episode last year about the fake movie director Alan Smithee and all of his bad movies. For those who haven’t listened to that episode yet and are unaware of who Alan Smithee wasn’t, Alan Smithee was a pseudonym created by the Directors Guild in the late 1960s who could be assigned the directing credit of a movie whose real director felt the final cut of the film did not represent his or her vision. By the time Ghost Fever came around in 1987, it would be the 12th movie to be credited to Alan Smithee. If you have listened to the Alan Smithee episode, you can go ahead and skip forward a couple minutes, but be forewarned, I am going to be offering up a different elaboration on the film than I did on that episode. And away we go… Those of us born in the 1960s and be
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