BEFORE PETER BISKIND'S Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (Simon & Schuster, 544 pages, $26.95) came out, the buzz among interested parties was mostly about Biskind's unflattering portrait of Robert Redford, a man more used to being depicted as Utah's only non-Mormon saint. It's true that the Sundance Institute's founder sounds like he's spent the last 20 years (at least) starring in The Way I Are, emerging from the anti-testimonials of embittered directors and scalded employees as not only an evasive and dithering control freak--he's clearly one infuriating boss--but an aesthetic dullard. Touchingly, he's not entirely unaware of the latter problem: "He's so self-critical, it's sad," one ex-Sundancer told Biskind. "He thinks he's square and pedantic and boring." Bingo, you think, and why not do something about it? The man's an actor--can't he pretend?
Yet partly because Redford really is boring and Biskind is no fool, Sundance's eminence blond ends up as a minor character in this sprawling, low-minded book. With one exception, so does practically everybody else--even Sundance discovery and Miramax golden goose Quentin Tarantino, no slouch at generating colorful copy or noisome opinions. Barreling through Biskind's pages like a Pac-Man chomper, Harvey Weinstein turns Down and Dirty Pictures into a one-man show.
Even with guarded cooperation from the man himself, mostly denying that he actually called So-and-So that, it's no surprise that Biskind's take on Miramax's cochairman is mostly warts, more warts, and a goiter or two, with the occasional quick buss on Harvey's capacious keister tossed in. But if this eternally voracious Citizen Cannes is a monster, he's a great one. Thanks to all the atrocious behavior Biskind has churned up--and he's not the world's most selective guy with a spade--Weinstein doesn't just come off as a David O. Selznick for the age of ancillary profits. He's also the star of a gross-out comedy
Naturally, Biskind's stated ambitions reach considerably higher. Offered as a sequel of sorts to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his highly entertaining shaggy-cocaine story of the 1970s filmmakers who briefly transformed Hollywood before Hollywood bit back, Down and Dirty Pictures is ostensibly the saga of the scrappy, aggressive next-generation auteurs, inspired by the '70s revolution but marginalized by the Industry's resurgent conservatism. When Redford first set himself up as their thoughtful patron, his preference for domestic dramas and regional Americana--i.e., low-budget clones of his own massively dreary movies--went against the grain of everything bold in the new breed's movies. He was initially reluctant to add a festival to the Sundance menu. But only the fluke triumphs of Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape, Todd Haynes's Poison, and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs saved his ski-lodge Cinematheque from being stifled by its own virtue.
Meanwhile, Weinstein and his brother Bob--the enigmatic Beria to Harvey's ebullient Stalin--were energetically driving Miramax from a fly-by-night distributor to an art-house gorilla, in the process swapping an early reputation for making edginess pay for an equally well-earned one for making prestige pay lots better. By the mid-1990s, after the Weinsteins' company had become the brightest button on Mickey Mouse's shorts and Tarantino's (and Miramax's) Pulp Fiction changed the rules of the game by making $100 million, indie filmmaking had been transformed from a sideshow to big business, simultaneously institutionalized and commercialized--at least for the lucky directors who didn't end up more out in the cold than ever.
THE BONE BISKIND keeps picking, with increasing absent-mindedness--much in the way that he describes Harvey Weinstein ignoring his own food only to gobble everybody else's leftovers--is whether this was a Good Thing. The old integrity-versus-selling-out paradigm flutters over the book like a Post-It note run up a flagpole by mistake. On one side, we get Allison Anders lamenting the indie movement's lost camaraderie and idealism in the wake of her pal Quentin's breakthrough. On the other, we find Soderbergh in a position to turn mini Redford himself and sponsor other filmmakers after Erin Brockovich's success. Here's how he describes their reaction to the carrot he offered: "'God, yeah. I'm really tired of making movies that nobody sees.'"
The theme is a red herring, though. Less passionate about this bunch than he was about its '70s predecessors, Biskind can't really get too worked up about indie film's supposed corruption, and most of his readers won't care either. He's talked to everybody, but despite paying lip service to a few of the movement's also-rans, he's much happier doting on indieland's crossover directorial stars--Soderbergh, Todd Haynes, Kevin Smith, and of course, Tarantino--and you don't catch him praising many obscure masterpieces. Nor does he waste much time arguing for or comparing the merits of the indie directors' actual work, which is probably just as well; his taste may be less bland than Redford's, but in its own way it's just as conventional. Anyway; analysis isn't his thing--analysis doesn't sell copies.
The book's basic fraudulence is that its drama ends early, with Sundance's transformation into an Industry bazaar, Pulp Fiction's boffo B.O., and Miramax's acquisition by Disney. The Weinsteins' company went from the scruffy indie outfit that broke The Crying Game to the "minimajor" able to back movies that cost $100 million, spawning competitors, both genuine independents and in-house studio divisions, all vying to be "the new Miramax." As Biskind puts it, "at the same time the indie world was being Miramaxized, Miramax itself was being Disneyized"--the moral of the story, and so much for that. But that's when the author warms to his real subject, which is money and dirt. If Bob Woodward's instant-history books are "political pornography," in Joan Didion's handy phrase, the bulk of Down and Dirty Pictures amounts to hundreds of pages of deal porn--through which Harvey Weinstein charges as indefatigably as John Holmes.
Admittedly, Biskind is a livelier writer than Woodward, but no great challenge there: Whoever composed the take-out pizza flyer on your windshield is a livelier writer than Woodward. Because this is where Harvey Weinstein takes over as the book's central character, and Harvey is nothing if not compulsive, everything happens over and over: the fiddling with newly acquired movies that won him the nickname "Harvey Scissorhands," the brow-beating of upstart rivals and terrorized employees alike, the obnoxious public behavior, the braggadocio ("I am Ariel Sharon! You are the Palestinians with sticks and stones"), the gluttony for more--more profit, more product, more leftovers, more Oscars, more victories, more prestige, more validation. As so often happens with porn, the cumulative effect of so many acquisitions, financial maneuvers, vendettas, test screenings, editing-room face-offs, and boorish social episodes is simply to make your eyes glaze over. By page 400 or so, having long since lost track of which festival you're at or which competitor, out-of-favor Miramax panjandrum, or hapless reporter Citizen Cannes has just threatened to tear a new one, you can't remember who's screwing who.
Despite a litter of factual errors--Max Von Sydow played Death in The Seventh Seal?--I don't doubt that Biskind's overall picture is roughly accurate, and its details are certainly vivid. One of his set pieces is a six-page description of the fight between Miramax and rival October Films to buy Robert Duvall's The Apostle at the 1997 Toronto Film Festival, replete with double-crossings, re-created screening-room and cell-phone dialogue, and more syntactical variations on the word fuck than you would expect to find this side of a Scorsese movie. But as it dawns on you that you couldn't care less which company wins (October did), you find yourself wondering how much of this was worth recording for posterity.
