Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film
by Peter BiskindSimon & Schuster, 544 pp., $26.95
It’s no secret that the release of this new exposé from former Premiere Editor Peter Biskind was expertly timed, hitting stands just days before Sundance ’04 and as a typically rabid season of Oscar campaigning was coming to a close. The book became quite the conversation piece at the annual ski-and-schmooze event in Utah, and, despite scoring seven nominations, Miramax’s Cold Mountain was shut out of the big-prestige categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. Then there was Kevin Smith’s impassioned and entirely superfluous open letter to the press, in which the Clerks filmmaker defended his longtime friend, Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein, and decried the “recent bandwagon of unloading a character assassination sniper rifle.” For the most part, though, the dust appears to be settling, and one can now grasp at that which Biskind’s book largely lacks: perspective.
The author admits as much in his preface, citing “lies, fear, and lack of historical perspective” as roadblocks to getting the story straight. The pitfall of putting modern history to paper is the inevitable lack of distance from the material, and Biskind’s book tackles ultramodern history, beginning with 1989 and capping off, in the postscript, with films as recent as last year’s Lost in Translation and 21 Grams. With Biskind’s seminal study of Seventies gonzo filmmakers, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, he had the benefit of two-plus decades to hash out what happened and what kind of long-term effect that astonishingly productive era of filmmaking has had on the industry. With Down and Dirty Pictures, the author has had but a fraction of that time to chew over the material and to choose his words regarding it. What does he come up with? For starters, the death of independent cinema. Who pulled the trigger? “Miramax killed it.”
Biskind makes an interesting case, in this compulsively readable cataloging of everyone the bullying, bellowing Harvey Weinstein has burned in the past, including Todd Haynes, Alexander Payne, Mark Christopher (writer/director of 54), and Merchant-Ivory. (Compulsively readable, yes, but overstocked with clunking, metaphor-heavy writing, too: Witness his description of Steven Soderbergh, with his “prominent ears nestled in the nimbus of auburn ringlets that surrounded his face like an aureole of cotton candy,” topped off with glasses “that sat like a saddle on an aquiline nose cantilevered over a thin mouth.”) The book, which works in chronological order and under excessively cutesy chapter titles (“He’s Gotta Have It,” “Pumping Up the Volume”), examines to a lesser extent the rise and fall of October Films (indeed, its co-founder, Bingham Ray, is the book’s dark-horse hero), as well as the influence, deterioration, and chronic mismanagement of Sundance; however, Redford refused to sit for interviews, and that absence is felt keenly – most especially when Biskind resorts to psychologizing his subject: “A college dropout, [Redford] suffered from the intellectual anxieties of the undereducated and consequently sought the imprimatur of literary or museum culture, which is why so many of the films he directed himself, … with their lacquered veneer of exquisite pictorial beauty, are as lifeless as insects preserved in amber.” Biskind also contradicts himself at times, first ridiculing that Redford’s “tilt toward Native American and minority projects may have won points for him with People for the American Way, but it was not in and of itself a recipe for exciting filmmaking”; 400 pages later, Biskind accuses Redford’s Sundance Institute of failing in its goal to “help outsiders,” putting the blame that “women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and the poor still don’t have equal access to the camera” squarely on Redford’s shoulders.
One has to admire Biskind’s tendency toward incendiary proclamation, as well as his ability to coax similarly agitative quotes from his subjects. Down and Dirty Pictures relies heavily on unattributed quotes, but the ones he can put a name to are doozies, such as Spike Lee’s take on Harvey Weinstein: “He’s a lyin’ cocksucker! A fat bastard! A fat rat bastard!” As the case against Weinstein & Co. builds, Biskind’s book reads breathlessly … and feels edited as such, too: Down and Dirty is pocked with typeface and spelling errors, including the mangling of such names and titles as Jennifer Aniston, Julie Delpy, and Crumb. With a closer eye and, yes, the benefit of more time, these gaffes could have been caught, and Biskind’s undeniably important work could have been more measured, less hyperbolic. Taking its place beside John Pierson’s landmark Spike Mike Slackers & Dykes, Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures has the distinction of tackling the indie boom of the Eighties and Nineties first. I suspect it will be those books that tackle it second, third, or tenth down the line that will prove the most salient.
This article appears in February 6 • 2004.
