Mischievously released in the week before Sundance, Peter Biskind's muckraking report about "Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film" has already caused quite a stir in the industry: worried by the unflattering portrait Biskind paints of Miramax co-chair Harvey Weinstein, Zach Braff, director of "Garden State," refused to enter a deal with the indie powerhouse unless Fox Searchlight joined. Filmmakers and industry insiders are fascinated by the book--but should moviegoers bother?
Biskind's last book, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is a terrifically readable history of film's rock'n roll generation: Coppola, Bogdanovich, Altman, Scorsese, Lucas, Hopper, and Spielberg all made for a wild cast, drunk on sex and drugs and rock'n roll, and the anecdotes are almost as good as the movies. Now that he turned to the 1990s, Biskind's focus changes from coke benders and playboy bunnies to the main obsession of that decade: money. "Down and Dirty Pictures" is a story of distribution deals, deferred payments, and net gross points.
Which is not to say that the new book isn't full of juicy gossip or larger-than-life personalities, first and foremost, Harvey Weinstein. The Miramax co-founder is portrayed as an abusive, monstrous presence who fosters young filmmakers by marketing the hell out of their movies and winning them Oscars -- and then screws them in every conceivable way, shredding and burying their films and careers when they didn't test well (to insiders, Weinstein has long been known as Harvey Scissorhands.)
In a supporting role, Biskind casts Robert Redford as a vain, slightly starry-eyed wannabe patron of independent film who couldn't be bothered to support the filmmakers who passed through his Sundance labs or won at his festival, which was single-handedly rescued by Steven Soderbergh's "sex, lies, and videotape" in 1998, where Biskind's book begins. (Hot off the press, it ends with the current brouhaha over Jack Valenti's screener ban.)
