The Wildest Oscar Party Ever? – Hollywood Reporter
Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterCourtney Love tried to bash someone’s head in with Quentin Tarantino’s trophy, Sharon Stone fought with security, two reporters got into a fistfight on the red carpet, and a criminal being chased by cops was captured in the kitchen). Hollywood parties were more fun in 1995.
By
Scott Huver
It was 1:52 a.m. on March 28, 1995, nearly four hours past the conclusion of the 67th Academy Awards. Held at the Shrine Auditorium, and given how many entertainment industry power players called Beverly Hills home, local traffic was a bit busier than the average Monday night.
Near the city’s eastern border along Doheny Drive, a few glitzy afterparties were dying out, including Gramercy Pictures’ fete for the Oscar-nominated Four Weddings and a Funeral at Maple Drive restaurant, and the annual AIDS Foundation fundraiser at the Four Seasons Hotel thrown by Elton John — that year a four-time nominee for co-writing The Lion King‘s original songs. But farther up Doheny, a black sea of stretch limos and town cars flowed in and out of another, bigger, more raucous post-Oscar blowout still in full swing.
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In the backdrop, a mini crime wave was happening. Beverly Hills police officer Jay Broyles, then a 20-year veteran, patrolled the neighborhood in a black-and-white cruiser with his longtime K-9 partner Boss, a German shepherd. A report of an armed robbery a few minutes away crackled over the radio: Under the guise of asking for directions, a man flashing a handgun approached a couple on the street and demanded their valuables. Just 30 minutes earlier, a report of a gunman taking a wristwatch from a victim in West Hollywood had been followed by an additional strike moments later, when two people near a car wash on Santa Monica Boulevard were mugged. The MO of the three crimes matched that of the “Lost Bandit,” who’d used the same ruse in five other local crimes over the past three days.
Broyles spied someone sprinting across Doheny at Alden Drive, straight from the latest crime scene. As he approached his suspect, the runner was struggling to open the door of his getaway vehicle, a parked 1977 Plymouth Volare with an apparent wheelman inside who sped away at the sound of Broyles’ siren. The police officer ordered the running man to drop to his knees, and just as he was about to handcuff him, the mugger broke free. Releasing Boss from the patrol car, Broyles and the dog pursued him on foot.
About a quarter of a mile ahead, spotlights swiveled, music blared, limos circled and flashbulbs popped. Cue the Dick Dale surf-rock guitar riff that kicks off “Misirlou” on the soundtrack, because it was the night Pulp Fiction came to Beverly Hills. A local institution and power spot since 1936, Chasen’s restaurant was set to shutter for good in a matter of days. Even as the hour inched past 2 a.m., the elite invite-only party held inside remained in full-tilt-boogie mode. Packed at its peak with nearly 1,000 revelers, the strictly controlled guest list featured faces and names known to movie fans around the world.
Flush with cash from the company’s recent purchase by Disney, Miramax Films, founded by brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, had gone all out to champion its latest triumph, the narratively innovative, wildly unpredictable second film from maverick auteur Quentin Tarantino. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture, Pulp Fiction stood a strong chance of an Oscars sweep, with only the feel-good juggernaut Forrest Gump standing in the way.
Notorious for his relentless courting, even strong-arming, of Academy voters, Harvey planned his most epic post-Oscars bash yet, knowing, given Miramax’s Midas-like ability to alter the fortunes of Hollywood talent, if he threw it, they would come.
But Pulp Fiction was stymied at nearly every turn by Forrest Gump, including best picture. Only Tarantino and co-scribe Roger Avary shared expected original screenplay honors, and now that the suspense was over, it was time to cut loose. As promised, it was the hottest party in town, even spicier than the signature chili that Chasen’s staffers dutifully offered to every guest.
Madonna’s presence at the Oscar viewing party, where the Material Girl loudly heckled Forrest Gump from her table, anointed the bash from the outset as a must-attend. On the red carpet, Tarantino proclaimed himself perfectly content to various outlets: “It feels pretty damn good; it’s like buying a lottery ticket and getting depressed if you don’t win.” Inside, his trophy gleamed on the table he occupied alongside Hole frontwoman Courtney Love and photographer Amanda de Cadenet, adorned in look-alike dollar-store tiaras and vintage slip dresses that cost $40 in total.
John Travolta, his comeback now sans Oscar, was assured by his wife, Kelly Preston, and his father, Salvatore, that he couldn’t have squeezed one more iota of success out of his awards journey. Uma Thurman posed for photos in her iconic lilac Prada gown, grabbing Tarantino’s Oscar in one hand, with a lit cigarette in the other, next to a beaming Samuel L. Jackson.
Jessica Lange wafted through the party space toting her brand-new best actress Oscar for Blue Sky, while Martin Landau, the best supporting actor victor for Ed Wood, was embraced by Sigourney Weaver. Jodie Foster squeezed between Don Johnson and Madonna, while Anthony Hopkins squired his mother around. Hugh Grant, hot off the success of Four Weddings and a Funeral, cuddled in a banquette with his actress-model girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley amid a starry crowd that included his co-star Andie MacDowell, Kevin Spacey, Sharon Stone, Holly Hunter, Angela Bassett, Matt Dillon, Miranda Richardson, Jon Bon Jovi, Ellen Barkin, Jon Lovitz and Roger Ebert. Danny DeVito stealthily snapped candid photo after candid photo with a point-and-shoot camera. Jay Leno cracked wise at his fellow privileged attendees: “This is like an evening of free food,” he quipped. “Give the fat and wealthy free food.”
The next generation was well-represented: Rising starlet Cameron Diaz turned heads, while newly minted TV star George Clooney cut a dashing figure; 20-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio posed for photos with mussed hair and an ill-fitting suit; and Jennifer Tilly, elevated to the A-list by her Bullets Over Broadway nomination, waxed bittersweet over the locale’s last hurrah. “Everyone’s rushing to go to Chasen’s now that it’s closing down,” she told reporters. “I think it’s the last of the Hollywood landmarks.”
It was a remarkable convergence of Hollywoods Old and New, a fitting farewell to an industry institution and a welcoming-in for the latest constellation of stars. Harvey Weinstein got the party he’d hoped for, if not the armful of Oscars he craved. As the party got rowdier and raged toward the dawn, a now-foreboding hint of his competitive, cutthroat nature slipped into a comment intended to charm a reporter: “Tarantino, Travolta, Jackson and me, at 4 a.m., we’re going to [Tom] Hanks’ and [Robert] Zemeckis’ houses,” he said. “We’re taking [the Oscars] back. And if they don’t give them up, we’re going to get medieval on them.”
Weinstein’s thuggish joke was just one portent of the edgy, borderline sinister air that permeated the party from the very beginning. Security refused to allow Sharon Stone with her armed bodyguard inside because of a no-firearms policy. When Stone grew insistent, protesting she’d recently been targeted for violence, the security chief reluctantly relented. “She’s been getting death threats,” the security guard told a reporter with a hint of chagrin. “Now we know why.”
A testy exchange between two television reporters covering the red carpet escalated into a fistfight, prompting Love to scold, “That’s not a very Buddhist thing to do.” Inside, the grunge rocker quickly lost her own Zen when she realized she shared Tarantino’s booth with Vanity Fair journalist Lynn Hirschberg, who, years before, had penned a feature spotlighting Love and husband Kurt Cobain’s drug-fueled, often toxic romance. Love blamed Hirschberg for turning the public against her and held her partly responsible for Cobain’s 1994 suicide. “You have blood on your hands!” Love told Hirschberg, snatching Tarantino’s Oscar and lunging at the writer, apparently intending to bludgeon her until Tarantino intervened. The irony was not lost on the filmmaker, who reportedly told Hirschberg, “If she had killed you with an Oscar, it would have been like a scene from one of my movies.”
Outside Chasen’s, matters grew ever more Tarantino-esque: A man dressed in simple street clothes suddenly came rocketing down the red carpet, evading security and ducking into the tented party extension in the parking lot, pursued by two Beverly Hills police officers as paparazzi flashbulbs popped. Meanwhile, Broyles and Boss took a more circuitous route into the tent, wading through “a blurred image of black-and-white outfits” and emerging at the restaurant’s rear entrance, hoping to intercept their quarry should he slip out the back.
The fugitive was nonchalantly navigating past the all-star attendees to avoid drawing attention to himself, but the two patrolmen quickly spotted their noticeably un-tuxedoed suspect. After slipping into the kitchen to find an escape route, the Lost Bandit was cornered and escorted out without incident, to be booked — and subsequently convicted — on armed robbery charges.
As a Chasen’s insider confided later, “Probably 99 percent of the people there didn’t know anything was going on.”
The mugger’s reported weapon was conspicuously absent, however, forcing Broyles and Boss to retrace the arrestee’s steps, searching for the discarded firearm until sunup. The ’77 Volare, a Tarantino-ish getaway vehicle, was discovered abandoned in an alley a few blocks outside of Beverly Hills, but the wheelman, like the gun, was never found.
The last of the guests — including big-screen “made men” De Niro, Christopher Walken and Chazz Palminteri, who huddled in a banquette together — closed down Chasen’s around 3:30 a.m., at the fire marshal’s insistence.
Over time, the 1995 Miramax post-Oscar party would prove eerily prophetic, demonstrating the gritty underside lurking just beneath Hollywood’s glossy surface. Members of the uber-exclusive guest list, most of whom had unknowingly rubbed elbows with a criminal that night, would themselves become embroiled in a succession of extralegal circumstances often more bizarre and disturbing than even Tarantino himself might concoct.
Courtney Love’s trajectory was fraught with turmoil, having been arrested on drug charges a year earlier at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, following a week of a frantic search for a missing Cobain; less than 24 hours later, his body was found in their Seattle home, a suicide. She’d made headlines in the months prior to Oscar night, accused of punching fans and verbally abusing a flight attendant. Love image-rehabbed herself as an actress and fashion icon in 1996, but future arrests, overdoses and violent altercations ensured she’d remain an enduring fixture of court dockets and TMZ items for years to follow.
Hugh Grant’s dashing-but- flappable image was upended three months after the Miramax party, busted in his BMW during a Hollywood vice sting after soliciting oral sex from street prostitute Divine Brown. Sentenced with a slap on the wrist, Grant’s bigger concern was how catastrophic the blowback might be on his ascendant career. He dutifully continued publicity rounds for his latest film; on The Tonight Show, fellow partygoer Jay Leno led with the burning question on everyone’s mind: “What the hell were you thinking?” With an appropriately penitent look, Grant took a deep breath. “I think you know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing. And there you have it,” he said. Relieved laughter and approving applause signaled that the self-deprecating Grant effectively salvaged his stardom.
Kevin Spacey’s career skyrocketed in the year following the Miramax blowout. At the 1996 Academy Awards, he’d claim the best supporting actor Oscar for his turn in The Usual Suspects and in 2000 snag his second statuette, for best actor for American Beauty. His career flourished until 2017, when he was hit with a multitude of allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment, assault and battery over the course of several decades. Though he fended off civil and criminal prosecution, his career was effectively kaput; as an actor, as the old saying goes, he couldn’t get arrested.
Sharon Stone’s need for armed protection proved more than well-founded: She subsequently contended with a series of unbalanced admirers, including an Italian man who showed up at her house professing his intention to marry her in 2001; another in 2010 who broke into her home claiming to be the son of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and another found on her property in 2011 who’d repeatedly written to her from the prison psych ward, making bizarre demands including $20 billion, a gun silencer and bags full of diamonds.
Most notorious and monstrous of all: the party host himself, Harvey Weinstein. Though he would eventually claim not one but two coveted best picture Oscars and make forays into Broadway, television and politics, behind the scenes he amassed an industry-wide reputation for bullying, double-dealing, micromanaging and creative hijacking. In 2017, Weinstein’s ugly, predatory pattern of sexual misconduct — rape, assault, abuse — was exposed to the world. More than 80 women went public with horrific tales of his brutal, coercive and punishing tactics, including launching vicious, career-crippling smear campaigns against those who eluded him, from Mira Sorvino to Ashley Judd.
As the revelations drove the #MeToo reckoning, everything Weinstein valued evaporated: his marriage, his patina of prestige, his company bearing his name, his membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and his freedom. Over the next several years, the movie mogul was convicted of multiple sex crimes in New York and Los Angeles, sentenced to nearly four decades in prison.
Thirty years ago, the 1995 Miramax Oscar party had been a hell of a blowout, populated by a particular breed of Hollywood hellion arguably as devilish as its impromptu party-crashing holdup man, and still stands as a towering testament that in this town, reality is frequently far stranger than pulp fiction.
Veteran entertainment journalist Scott Huver is the author of the true-crime anthology Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin & Scandal in 90210.
This story appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySend us a tip using our anonymous form.
Source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/look-back-1995-oscars-afterparty-1236146184/
