Stories like this rarely make the sunny spots on Entertainment Tonight, but they fill practically every page of Down and Dirty Pictures (Simon & Schuster; 544 pages), an expose of the independent-film business by longtime show-biz journalist Peter Biskind. The book is being released just in time for the Sundance Film Festival, that hotbed of indie-film deals that starts in snowy Park City, Utah, this week. Biskind — whose last book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, chronicled how the sex-drugs-and-rock generation revolutionized 1970s cinema — has done some exploratory surgery on the underbelly of the indie-film scene and found it has plenty of ulcers.
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In any history of movies in the '90s — or in any room — Weinstein looms large. Biskind portrays Miramax's Brobdingnagian bully as a movie-loving maniac prone to physical violence, verbal attacks and financial shenanigans. Those sins are usually forgiven because his little studio in Manhattan's Tribeca has backed many of the best, most original flicks in recent memory, including Pulp Fiction, The English Patient and Chicago, and he ponied up big time when MGM got cold feet about co-funding Cold Mountain.
Biskind's book fleshes out Weinstein's psyche as well as his sicko behavior — and it ain't pretty. He's depicted delivering death threats like a movie mafioso, expecting fealty like a feudal lord and bringing woe upon anyone who asks for back-end profit participation. From Affleck to director Ed Zwick, friends and enemies alike unload their hysterical, often horrifying Harvey stories. Gasp as the mad mogul pushes aside his fellow Shakespeare in Love producers onstage at the Oscars! Cower as he throws stuff across the room! Wince as he chews out loyal employees! And the critics rave. "He's like a little Saddam Hussein of cinema," says Bernardo Bertolucci. "He's a true vulgarian," says Kevin Smith. "The devil himself. Satan! Lucifer!" says Spike Lee.
In sharp contrast to Weinstein's brutish antics, Sundance founder Robert Redford's influence over the indie world is portrayed as Zen-like, though the actor's enigmatic, elusive nature keeps him mostly in shadows throughout the book. (Unlike Weinstein, Redford refused to talk to Biskind.) Still, Redford emerges long enough to double-cross his former protg, Steven Soderbergh, whose sex, lies, and videotape was shown in Park City in 1989, by plucking the movie Quiz Show out from under him. Redford sabotages his own efforts to launch a Sundance Cinemas chain by hooking up with a financially unstable partner and generally comes across as an indecisive visionary with a decidedly unhip sense of humor. (He always says, "Be funny, like Chekhov," according to one of Biskind's sources.)
While Redford and Weinstein constitute the Beauty-and-the-Beast heart of the story, much of Biskind's narrative revolves around the less well known (and, frankly, less colorful) figures responsible for the growth of indie-film distribution. As a work of history, it's not comprehensive: indie actor Ethan Hawke merits nearly a dozen lengthy references, while groundbreaking documentarians Errol Morris (The Fog of War) and Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine) are barely mentioned. And Biskind found some sources reluctant to talk openly about more recent controversies. "There was a clarity of recollections," he admits, "but also a clash of agendas."
As for Biskind himself, he might well want to consider placing himself in the author-relocation program. His "blood runs cold" imagining the wrath of Weinstein, he says in an interview. "I don't think he comes across as likable, but certainly the book credits him with taking independent film out of the art-house ghetto and into the multiplexes." Whether or not Biskind's book becomes a pulp nonfiction hit, one thing seems certain: he'll never eat lunch in Tribeca again.