Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film

Hollywood: Part II

Down and Dirty Pictures is Peter Biskind's utterly engrossing sort-of sequel to his fantastic 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. The seventies' filmmaking ethos of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls — that is to say, booze, sex, drugs (and more sex) — was the precursor to the nineties "independent" film movement. Biskind's witty, impeccably researched and hopelessly entertaining new saga chronicles the birth, and demise (at least spiritually) of the two "twin towers" of independent film, Sundance and Miramax.

Biskind attempts to dig as much dirt as possible on Robert Redford, Sundance's founder, but (alas?) there isn't all that much Redford dirt to be dug; the Golden One's presence is conspicuously diminished in the book's second half. The Redford here is imperious, passive-aggressive, indecisive and manipulative ... but he's no Harvey. Biskind seems to have no shortage of sources who were eager to air their gripes against Miramax's Harvey Weinstein. Harvey is the book's gravitational center, the villain, and what a perfect villain he is: venomous, nasty, spiteful, abusive, paranoid, grudge-collecting ... the list goes on. Two favorite Bad Harvey stories: 1) when he and Quentin Tarantino very nearly got into a fistfight in the lobby of a Seattle multiplex over the length of Jackie Brown, and 2) his letter to Miramax director Errol Morris (after hearing him on a radio interview) which, in part, read: "Dear Errol, You're boring .... If you continue to be boring, I will have to hire an actor in New York to pretend that he's Errol Morris.")

Biskind charts Miramax's acquisitions of the movies (sex, lies and videotape, The Crying Game, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, Sling Blade) that made the studio the powerhouse it was. And I can tell you one thing for sure: the directors now are a lot less insane (and, some might say, much, much less entertaining) than the directors of the early-seventies. Quentin Tarantino, for instance, isn't scary; Dennis Hopper, notably, was. Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and, yes, even Billy Bob Thornton, look like earnest little Cub Scouts compared to their raving, drugged-out and brilliant forefathers.

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