Down and Dirty Pictures by PETER BISKIND (2005-08-01) by Peter Biskind

Down and Dirty Pictures by PETER BISKIND (2005-08-01) Reviews

• 
  Seth

  Here's a summary of Down and Dirty Pictures:
  
  1) Harvey Weinstein acts like a lunatic because of some movie deal
  2) Another either repellent or uninteresting Hollywood exec has a bad business experience because of some movie deal
  3) An either repellent or uninteresting actor or director has a bad creative experience because of a movie deal
  4) Repeat above for 12 chapters
  
  Possibly the most interesting thing about the book is how the author, Peter Biskind, somehow manages to bring himself across as equally repellent as his characters despite not even being part of the story. He's the type of know-it-all who feels the need to interrupt his reportage about the distribution of Life is Beautiful to rattle off the titles of six obscure Holocaust movies he thinks are better.
  
  Despite all that, DaDP is surprisingly readable, assuming you don't actually have any interest in Nineties independent movies. Biskind assumes you've seen them all, even the ones that were forgotten months after they came out. This book isn't about great food; it's about how that food makes it's way through assholes that shit it out into the world.
• 
  Still

  Want to know how horrible a person Harvey Weinstein is? I mean, apart from being a rapist.
  Harvey's always been a right bastard and so has his brother Bob.
  Favorite part was the segment on the Weinstein-Billy Bob Thornton feud.
• 
  Tom

  A book I really enjoyed, with stories of Hollywood , insider gossip, how the whole thing is a shady messed up world. I haven't found another book quite like it about the movie business, still looking.
• 
  Sam Quixote

  I'm one of those who came of age in the `90s and who loves film, remembering all the great films that that decade produced is great fun as well as finding out how they came about from the mouths of the filmmakers themselves. That said, I loved the book but it goes further than talking about the directors and actors, to the guys who held the purse-strings and the exposure, namely the Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob, who created Miramax and Dimension, and Robert Redford, the movie star who founded the Sundance Film Festival.
  
  You read about the Weinsteins' humble beginnings as concert promoters onto small films released on tape, and then small pictures released widely to garner a small profit. From there they go large, getting more pictures, some of which gain success enabling them to seem attractive to a massive corporation like Disney who then buys them and gives them the financial clout to corner the market on low budget films. Redford starts Sundance which then grows, after the initial few years, into a recognisable entity and then comes to be regarded as the place to have your film shown at, given how guys like the Weinsteins go there to buy films.
  
  The Weinsteins themselves come across as monsters. Both screaming and abusing staffers, making them wait hours for meetings, docking pay, threatening them, throwing furniture. They really seem like bipolar ogres smashing around to get what they want. Redford comes across as a control freak who is unable to make decisions and thus contributes greatly to the Sundance brand failing to become as mainstream as he had hoped.
  
  Contributions are from many recognisable faces, from the superstar directors Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee and Kevin Smith to actors Edward Norton, Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Even Harvey Weinstein agrees to contribute to the book (Redford declines as he holds grudges). Biskind uses these to create a vivid and compelling portrait of the `90s throughout. While some might say the narrative is repetitive (Weinstein doesn't change nor does Redford and the anecdotes rarely differ - Redford bumbling about, Weinstein screaming foaming at the mouth) I found it too interesting and could easily have kept reading until the present day (it stops at 2003).
  
  I loved it, as a fan of good writing and a fan of film, it's a fantastic read and utterly great fun. Here's hoping Biskind does a follow up of the `00s.
• 
  Vincent Masson

  This book was an education for sure. It knocked me out of a fantasy I had about the movie business, and for that, I am grateful. I always knew movies were a business, but nothing prepared me for the complete and totally calculated way they are treated in Hollywood, as described in this book. I had always wanted an account of the early days of my filmmaking heroes - such as Steven Soderbergh, and this is about as good as I could have hoped for.
  
  Sadly, the book is also overwritten. The author insists on inserting his own opinions about the movies being discussed, which were often frivolous and unnecessary. The chapters are more episodic, and feature a great deal of "He said, she said", instead of an objective, free flowing chronology.
  
  A must read for anyone looking to enter the film industry.
• 
  eely

  peter biskind’s silly vendetta against robert redford makes me think he was not the right person to write this book. he treats the sundance institute like an indie slaughterhouse and backs up his claims by saying redford means well but is simply a reticent and prideful man who only cares about his own interests at the end of the day. he’d reluctantly give redford a compliment and then backtrack by listing all the “atrocities” he’s committed against indie filmmakers, while simultaneously expounding on many (but definitely not all—he was careful to skirt around the most glaring one) of harvey weinstein’s myriad faults, and then basically forgiving him for them “because that’s just the way he is” and that’s how the job gets done. he paints redford as the villain in scenarios in which he did nothing wrong, and will then explain, in an overly forgiving tone, how weinstein verbally assaulted a woman at a public event or threatened to kill an employee because they didn’t have the paperwork he needed.
  
  overall, this book is a nicely detailed exploration of the indie boom post-1980s high concept, conglomerate conscious cinema. but it’s entirely too unbalanced in favor of miramax, and I now know more about harvey weinstein than I ever, ever wanted to know.
• 
  Alex Abbott

  This Harvey Weinstein guy seems like a real jerk. Bingham Ray, however, I would love to grab a beer with— rest his soul.
• 
  Johnny Roastbeef

  3.5★
  
  An intriguing look into the world of independent filmmaking and distribution with the focus mainly on movers and shakers such as Miramax, October and Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. Most of this book is incredibly eye-opening, to see what goes on in the not so glamorous side of the business. However, when you’ve read one incident you’ve kind of read them all leading to a repetitive experience, notably during the Sundance elements.
  
  As you would expect the Miramax stories and anecdotes are mouth watering and had the chapters been smaller would’ve no doubt converted this book into a ‘page turner’. Still, it’s a great insight into how one company, in this case Miramax, transformed from an indie distribution powerhouse into a conglomerate backed studio, thus helping to turn the independent business model they had successfully spearheaded on its head and bringing an end to this specific era of filmmaking.
• 
  athony

  What's your favorite movie? Is it Magnolia? The Royal Tenenbaums? Pulp Fiction? Raising Arizona?
  
  If you're like me, you take great comfort in how fundamentally different these movies are, how they seem to come from a realer place than, say, The Matrix, or Star Wars.
  
  You may then be surprised to open this book up and flip through its pages to find that numbers, figures, and dollar signs are all you see.
  
  The disarming truth of American independent cinema is that, in a sense, there is nothing different about it. The ones who made the deals which brought us our favorite movies were suits who were successful to the extent that they cheated, lied, and stole. There was a hidden empire behind these movies, and it was no less a monarchy than Hollywood. We are dismayed to find that any notion of "independence" disappeared by 1994, and all watersheds of queer or feminist cinema were quickly forgotten about by that time, as well.
  
  Peter Biskind does plenty to disabuse us of the idyllic notion that an impassioned, artistic vision is all you need to succeed. But -- and I think this is as much Biskind's intention as the self-evident truth of the matter -- the book fails to attribute anything damning to the space and act of creation itself. We would not have had the movement that engendered Magnolia et. al. without the Weinsteins, sure, but it was still discerning, compassionate, and artistic minds which produced these films. The "dirty" which pervades this book comes not from the ideology or production methods of the films themselves, but from the competitiveness of the players involved in marketing and the homogenization of a certain style.
  
  If you've wondered exactly where your favorite movie come from, this may be the most informative book you could possibly find on the subject. Biskind lends valuable attention to the provincial film movements of the early '80s and the queer and feminist ones in the late '80s and early '90s, largely forgotten in the public consciousness today, and traces the cultural forces that led the Coens and the Andersons to become the filmmakers we do remember.
  
  Peter Biskind's understanding of '90s American cinema is a nuanced one, and essential if we are to engage with these movies responsibly.
• 
  Ryan

  Read this slowly over a few months. Peter Biskind at his best writes the most entertaining Hollywood insider books
• 
  Robert

  12/13/18: Still a completely addictive read. And who knew that Harvey Weinstein would turn out to be even more of a complete monster than this book had already painted him as? Oy veh.
  
  A quasi-sequel to Biskind’s Easy Riders Raging Bulls, which I re-devoured recently, Down and Dirty Pictures illuminates how the seeds the 70’s filmmaking mavericks planted sprouted a decade or so later. It is less about independent movies themselves as it is about the complicated process of how they are funded, how they get made and how they get distributed (or not distributed as it turns out). It starts in the mid-80’s but really gets going with the 1989 release of Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the game changing hit launched at Sundance that kick-started the independent film scene into the glory days of the 1990’s, when Miramax films rose to prominence and Sundance was cemented as the annual launching pad (and studio acquisitions feeding frenzy) for indie films that it remains today. It’s a fascinating, juicy read, but also rather depressing. The main players are Harvey Weinstein, the man who with his brother Bob founded Miramax Films, and Robert Redford, the movie star who launched Sundance. Problem is that Weinstein is a massively insecure, volcanically abusive, horrible human being – the kind of boss who populates your worst nightmares - and Redford is a passive aggressive control freak (milder-mannered and well-meaning, but no less of a nightmare). Between them and their studios and organizations they did the world of independent film a whole lot of real good and a whole lot of terrible-bad. The genuine indie films – funded outside of the studio system and made out of passion and love above all other concerns, including monetary – were eventually supplanted by bigger budgeted quasi-indies. There is a world of difference between genuine zero-budget films like say, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) or Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994), and such relatively big budgeted, Oscar-winning indie/mainstream hybrid fare like Shakespeare in Love (1998). Once the big studios got involved in indies (after all, Miramax et al proved there was big money to be made) the former kind of film became the extreme exception and the latter the norm; as usual, the little guys got almost entirely squeezed out. Today the extreme polarization is evident: 75% of the year the mainstream Hollywood movies available are mainly a wasteland of superheroes, sequels, franchises, and retreads, while late in the year we are offered the more mid-budget independent efforts, which sprout up just in time for Oscar season (luckily we haven’t yet devolved to the point where shitty, bloated, empty blockbusters like Man of Steel are Oscar bait for anything other than technical awards). In short, the entire situation - further marginalization of the work of artists in favor of expensive corporate junk - pretty much sucks. But I digress. Back to the book, Biskind is a fine writer, with a talent for film analysis – as above, the book is more about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking but Biskind occasionally editorializes, and his pithy observations are to my mind generally spot-on (Bravo, I say regarding his contempt for the borderline offensive Roberto Begnini starrer Life is Beautiful (1997) and to his praise for excellent but all-but-forgotten films like L.I.E. from 2001). He is also adept at explaining the rather convoluted progression/regression of the indie film scene, keeping it all compulsively readable, hard to put down, and all those other clichéd phrases. But as I said earlier, it's a pretty depressing story. By the way, Down and Dirty Pictures was published in 2004 – I’d be very interested in reading an updated version.
• 
  Trish

  I finally polished off Peter Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures," the saga of the rise and fall of independent film in its Sundance and Miramax incarnations, from "sex, lies, and videotape" to the big-budget, mainstream not-really-indie flicks Miramax now supports (Kate and Leopold? She's All That?)
  
  I'm a big fan of Biskind's gossipy dissection of the "golden age" of 70s cinema, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," and "Dirty Pictures" shares the same dedication to movie minutiae, the same exhaustive sourcing, and the same penchant for titillating tales (although this time around instead of sex and drugs we get frequent updates on both Harvey Weinstein's temper and his inhalation of various foodstuffs). In fact, the anecdotes about Harvey's rages -- frequently attributed to anonymous, no doubt fearful sources -- grow tiresome. Enough! We get it! The man's a pitbull! Now tell me more about the movies ...
  
  Truthfully, this seems like a story told before the time was ripe. Yes, since the events described are recent we have the benefit of fresh memories, but genuine insights seem obscurred by the copious details, byzantine deals, and unwieldy cast of characters. It's like those Magic Eye mosaics -- supposedly if you stare long enough you can spy the clipper ship floating beneath the surface flotsam, but I've never had the patience for those. Just draw me the damn picture!
  
  Still, it's a fascinating book if you love movies or, in particular, if you have ever dreamed of making your own. Fascinating and discouraging. As a collaborative and commercial art, filmmaking requires resources, which means inspiration, vision, and talent won't get you across the goal line. You have to have the means, the opportunity, and the personality to persuade someone with deep pockets to commit to your dream, and you run the risk that the dream will become a pitbull-populated nightmare. Honestly, there is no truly independent cinema, unless you can make your entire movie yourself. Otherwise, you're bound to be dependent on someone to finance the filming and post-production, to distribute and market the movie, to put it on the screens and put asses in the seats.
  
  Where is the National Endowment for the Arts in all this? Are there grants that would enable filmmakers to create without commercial considerations? Of course, grants don't necessarily allow greater independence; they just enforce different constraints.
  
  Yesterday I saw a CNN/Money story that posited Newmarket as the "new Miramax." Biskind pointed out in his book that every new indie (October, Grammercy, Focus, et al) has been anointed the "new Miramax," but only Miramax is really Miramax, in all its profane glory.
• 
  Jen Crichton

  I started to read this book in October 2017 as the Harvey Weinstein me-too details exploded in plain view. I had heard that Down and Dirty Pictures was sloppily written, could use tightening up by a good editor and was ultimately depressing. All true. But the portrait of Weinstein that Biskind drew back in 2005 is as damning as the view of Weinstein that has emerged more recently.
  
  This book shows how abusive, cruel, sadistic Weinstein was to every person who worked for him, male and female. Sometimes stories of sexual abuse and harassment are so at odds with the deference with which a man treats his male colleagues that the disconnect creates a cognitive dissonance that has to be bridged. No effort needed here. Harvey W's abusive behavior with young women can be viewed as a seamless extension of his abusive behavior with competitors, peers and underlings. With both groups, Weinstein seemed intent on humiliating, dominating and making life a misery for them. Kudos to Barry Diller called him out as a bully to his face in about 2000, and to Spike Lee who anticipated that "God don't like ugly" and that one day Harvey's heinous behavior would come back to bite him in the ass (that’s a mild paraphrase of what Lee actually said).
  
  DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES is supposed to be equally about Robert Redford and the rise of Sundance. But that story is such a bland tale of Redford's egotism and egocentricity -- anyone who has read a Vanity Fair dispatch from Sundance can write that subplot in their own head on their own. Just breeze through those chapters.
  
  It’s fascinating to read about the rise of Harvey knowing the fall that lay ahead. And fascinating to see how Harvey set his own trajectory in motion.
  
  It is a wonder the fall took so long. According to Biskind, Harvey's powers were on the wane and his movies were losing money (despite the suites at the Peninsula Hotel) even at the time of the book's publication in 2005. A slew of film people had already vowed never to work with such an abusive, unethical bully again. But the book was also criticized for being a hatchet job on Harvey. Pretty sure Harvey's forces had gone into overdrive to undermine its credibility.
  
  If I were Biskind and his publisher, I would retrofit the book to be about the rise of Miramax, cut the lackluster Sundance story, and add a hundred paged epilogue. Edit well and send back out to the world. The book as it is is no sacred text. But the story is an important one that should be read and learned from. And it stops in the second act, just as Harvey's trajectory begins to enter its long -- and then sudden -- decline.
• 
  James

  Biskind researched the crap out of this book and the portrait of Miramax is even more terrifying than you can believe. I kept wishing they'd come out with one more flop at the right time to finally doom them but the book also convinced me that every other straight white male in the film business also admired their relentless misogyny, homophobia and starfucking. I loved the presence of Spike Lee in this book, constantly goading Miramax and all of the film studios, calling the Ws "Satan" and that "fat rat fucker," as well as Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes managing to make "Far from Heaven" by telling W. to fuck off. But the overall portrait is of independent film as the same old shit, nothing but a con to get directors and actors desperate for exposure to sign over all of the money in their movies to Miramax or Sundance (Robert Redford is as bad as the brothers) and getting nothing if they break or flop.
  I held back a star because this book could have held back 15-20 superfluous W. anecdotes. You know by the 10th one that he will scream at people, hit them, throw stuff, and act as a sexual predator and will get away with it for decades and decades because the movie business is completely rotten. I would have loved more interviews with Spike, with Todd Haynes, with Christine Vachon, with Kimberly Peirce, with Jane Campion, or Cheryl Dunye. Soderbergh and David O Russell are also overexposed and are not nearly as talented as they think they are.
• 
  Inna

  Very amusing description of the US independent film scene during the 1990s, especially of its business aspects. I am not sufficiently familiar with the field to judge each argument on its merits. In any case the notion that during the 90s there was an attempt to create a middle ground between the traditional independent film scene and large Hollywood studios, an attempt that eventually failed, makes sense.
• 
  Jon

  Fascinating, with some great insider information and thoughtful perspective on the industry. I'd say it's as good or better than Easy Riders, Raging Bulls but the 'in-progress' nature of the subject matter causes this to end on a "to be continued" note rather than providing an opportunity for reflection and retrospective.
  
  I'd love to read an updated version that ends with either the Weinsteins leaving Miramax in 2005 or - better yet - one that runs up until 2017.
• 
  Nick Savage

  Amazing. Start to finish. It starts off sprinting and never slows. Peter Biskind has the ability to take reality and pace it like a non-stop action movie. The insights into the film business are better than most industry books I've read. call into work, cancel plans, set aside a day or two to read this, once you pick it up you won't put it down.
• 
  Sean Condon

  Tries to push the idea that the distributors are the true heroes of the indie film business; I do not buy it. Pretty interesting but nowhere near as good as Easy Riders Raging Bulls.
• 
  quinn

  fascinating and prescient. learned about a lot of movies that mean a lot to me and maybe 14 other people
• 
  Bob Box

  Read in 2004. Biskind is always a good read about Hollywood.
• 
  Simone S

  Peter Biskind è l’autore di uno dei libri più importanti sul cinema indipendente statunitense degli anni Settanta, la cosiddetta Nuova Hollywood: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, del 1998. Sei anni dopo pubblicò Down and Dirty Pictures, cioè il suo ideale seguito, basato sul cinema indipendente negli Stati Uniti della fine degli anni Ottanta e dei primi anni Novanta.
  
  Il libro si apre con una citazione di Edward Norton che sostiene che alla fine degli anni Sessanta gli Studios non fossero più capaci di produrre film per giovani, e per questo trionfò la Nuova Hollywood, con registi nuovi che risolsero quel problema. Una cosa simile avvenne negli anni Novanta. E il libro parla proprio di questo.
  
  Gli anni Ottanta al cinema avevano infatti ripristinato un ordine (reazionario), coi poliziotti che non erano più corrotti ma eroi, e magari pure simpatici, coi soldati statunitensi che vincevano le guerre (anche quelle già perse), e più in generale con film che vendevano fantasie e fughe dalla realtà piuttosto che realtà scomode.
  
  In un clima simile, Robert Redford provò a dare spazio a giovani cineasti (magari non necessariamente bianchi e maschi) col suo Sundance Festival, e i due fratelli Weinstein a New York fondarono la casa distributrice Miramax, curiosamente partendo dalla musica rock, non dal cinema. Ed è su questi due fenomeni che Peter Biskind si concentra principalmente, dando anche spazio ad un’altra casa di distribuzione, la October di Bingham Ray, Jeff Lipsky e Barry Greenstein.
  
  Il libro è lungo e pienissimo di informazioni, però non posso dire che lo stile dell’autore mi abbia convinto al 100%. Il testo si basa su centinaia di interviste e testimonianze, ma spesso si sofferma su particolari per me più che secondari come litigi, minacce, odi personali, e frecciatine velenose tra i vari personaggi dell’ambiente del cinema indipendente made in USA. Più volte ho dovuto ricorrere a Google solo per scoprire chi fosse al centro dell’ennesima faida, magari per rimanere deluso dall’inutilità delle persone coinvolte.
  
  Mi sarebbe piaciuto leggere qualcosa in più su film e registi menzionati nel libro, che non del gossip intorno agli stessi, specialmente perché il tono del libro rimane più o meno lo stesso andando avanti coi capitoli, e con gli anni (il libro copre dal 1989 al 2002, approssimatamente). Soltanto imbarcando un sacco di informazione ridondante nella lettura del libro si riesce a capire il ruolo delle piccole case distributrici dei primi anni Novanta nel diffondere il cinema indipendente negli Stati Uniti, così come si capisce come le cose siano cambiate quando le grandi case di produzione se ne appropriarono (la Disney comprò la Miramax) e quando i distributori si misero a produrre (un conto è distribuire qualcosa di fatto in maniera indipendente, un conto è finanziare progetti).
  
  Il primo capitolo fa un preambolo sulla situazione pre-1989. Sundance aveva rilevato lo US Film Festival nel 1985 (nonostante a Robert Redford pare che non interessassero i festival), ma ottenne fama soprattutto nel 1989 quando un ventiseienne Steven Soderbergh ci presentò Sex, Lies and Videotape (Sesso, bugie e videotape, per Norton paragonabile a The Graduate di Mike Nichols). E fu la Miramax a distribuirlo, vincendoci Cannes. Miramax che cominciava praticamente allora, ma che già aveva chiara la strategia di cercare Oscar e pagare poco i suoi film (il primo Oscar fu per Max Von Sydow in Pelle the Conqueror, Pelle alla conquista del mondo, 1987).
  
  I capitoli successivi di Down and Dirty Pictures vanno in ordine cronologico e Biskind parla un po’ di Miramax, un po’ del Sundance, e un po’ della October, fondata nel 1991 da Jeff Lipsky e Bingham Ray (che dovettero unirsi a Amir Malin per avere dei soldi, che era meno idealista e cinefilo).
  
  La strategia della Miramax agli esordi era fondamentalmente quella di comprare film da club di cinema e venderli come prodotti diversi per portarli in sala (come il documentario The Thin Blue Line di Errol Morris del 1988 venduto come un film del mistero/dell’orrore). E poi si lanciava anche su prodotti potenzialmente scomodi, tipo Scandal (Scandal – Il caso Profumo, 1989), o My Left Foot (Il mio piede sinistro, 1989) che gli fece ottenere cinque nomination agli Oscar. I Weinstein non erano belle persone, ma l’azienda era in continuo fermento. Harvey cominciò anche con la sua abitudine di cambiare il montaggio in post-produzione sforbiciando bene bene Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988) di Tornatore (il nickname di Harvey era Scissorhands, Mani di forbice). Miramax dopo l’ottimo 1989 ebbe due anni pessimi, tanto che i fratelli pensarono di vendere, ma non lo fecero.
  
  Nel frattempo Sundance organizzava laboratori per cineasti più il famoso festival, ma avere a che fare con Robert Redford pare non fosse semplice perché voleva controllare tutto. Il 1991 fu un buon festival con Poison di Todd Haynes (Roger Ebert si rifiutò di salutarlo per questo film, scrive Biskind, ma Ebert ha contestato questo fatto), Slacker di Linklater e City of Hope (La città della speranza) di John Sayle. E nel 1992 Tarantino presentò Reservoir Dogs (Le iene), nonostante fosse un film di genere e violento, tutto ciò che a Redford non piaceva (ma il festival lo dirigeva Geoffrey Gilmore).
  
  Potrei continuare a riassumere il contenuto del libro in questo e facendolo sembrare un libro sull’arte cinematografica, o almeno sul mercato da essa generato, ma vi prenderei un po’ in giro. Preferisco farvi un esempio delle informazioni più interessanti (badate bene: ho scremato!) fornite da Biskind in un suo capitolo tipo. Prendiamo, per esempio, il capitolo nove, sul 1997.
  
  Miramax: Matt Damon a Harvard sta scrivendo Good Will Hunting (Will Hunting – Genio ribelle, 1997), mentre Ben Affleck esce da Dazed and Confused (La vita è un sogno, 1993) di Linklater (insieme a Matthew McConaughey), un disastro (ma non era un progetto personale). Will Hunting la vendettero a Castle Rock e ci lavorarono un anno mentre facevano feste con tutti i loro amici. Però poi le cose andarono male e i due chiesero a Kevin Smith di intercedere con Miramax, e Harvey Weinstein buttò milioni in questo progetto che a tutti gli altri (tipo Jack Lechner) sembrò una follia.
  Sundance: Redford lancia il progetto Sundance Cinemas, che si rivela un disastro totale (mentre lui scompare per fare The Horse Whisperer, L’uomo che sussurrava ai cavalli, 1998). Qualcosa di simile successe con Sundance Productions, lanciata nel 2000 ma senza grosse conseguenze.
  October: (ovvero la nuova Miramax, anche se in soldoni non arrivava minimamente ai suoi livelli) si accaparrò Happiness (Happiness – Felicità, 1998), ma era difficile distribuirla per la qualificazione (e la casa madre Universal non dava così tanta autonomia).
  Weinstein con un gioco al rialzo fece pagare caro a October (Cassian Elwes) The Apostle (L’apostolo) di Robert Duvall, perché già Miramax non faceva più acquisti per distribuire, ma voleva produrre direttamente e poi distribuire. E Orgazmo di Parker e Stone se la accaparrò Greenstein per October.
  Ci siamo capiti? Down and Dirty Pictures è zeppo di informazioni, ma temo che per la maggior parte si tratti di cose che lasciano un po’ il tempo che trovano. Per esempio, è importante dirci delle feste di Damon e Affleck? O delle strette di mano di Todd Haynes?
  
  In ogni caso, nel mare di informazioni in cui ti sommerge il libro, ci sono isole di cultura e di fatti interessanti da scoprire.
  
  Se la Miramax deve ringraziare Tarantino all’inizio degli anni Novanta, verso la fine furono film come Good Will Hunting e Scream 2 a farle fare soldi. E Damon e Affleck devono molto ai Weinstein, a cui sono rimasti fedeli negli anni, anche se pare che non videro un centesimo per il loro film che finì per guadagnare 350 milioni di dollari. Tutto questo mentre Jackie Brown deludeva (anche lo stesso Tarantino) dopo l’enorme successo di Pulp Fiction (1994), facendo pure arrabbiare Spike Lee.
  
  Nel 1998, l’opera prima di Aronofsky (Pi, π – Il teorema del delirio, 1998) fu snobbata da Miramax e October, ma la comprò Amir Malin di Artisan e lì restò il direttore (che era un drop out di Harvard). Miramax si incaponì con 54 (Studio 54, 1998), che invece fu un disastro. Andò bene invece con Shakespeare in Love (con Harvey che rimontava di continuo il film per far salire i punteggi delle proiezioni di prova). Velvet Goldmine, invece, fu un altro disastro finanziario, ma la Miramax ha dimostrato negli anni di saper far fruttare i successi e nascondere bene gli insuccessi.
  
  L’anno successivo, Harvey Weinstein distrusse Wide Awake (Ad occhi aperti) di M. Night Shyamalan, arriva a farlo piangere (lui e Rosie O’Donnell). La tattica di Harvey pareva essere: trattare malissimo qualcuno per poi chiedere scusa, inviando fiori e dicendo che lui fa tutto per amore del cinema. Harvey trattava invece bene Kevin Smith, ma il suo Dogma era diventato qualcosa di difficile da distribuire (troppe polemiche).
  
  In pratica, la storia della Miramax si può riassumere così: un’epoca del bronzo tra 1979 e il 1986 (terminata con l’insuccesso di Playing for Keeps, film scritto e diretto dai fratelli Weinstein). L’epoca d’argento fu il 1987-1993, anno in cui fu comprata da Disney e ci fu un notevole cambio generazionale. E poi l’epoca d’oro tra il 1993 e il 1999 (con l’Oscar per Shakespeare in Love). Poi altro cambio generazionale, e perdita di una direzione chiara (Harvey Weinstein prima scese in politica coi Democratici, poi ebbe un infarto). Dopo l’epoca d’oro, furono parecchi i film abbandonati come The Yards (2000) o The Golden Bowl (2000), e ci furono produzioni travagliate come Gangs of New York (2002) che portò Harvey a scontrarsi con Scorsese, che voleva carta bianca dal suo produttore. In pratica, quando la Miramax distributrice di film indipendenti divenne produttora, finì l’indipendenza dei cineasti…
  
  La October, dopo un po’ di insuccessi, chiuse i battenti a causa delle continue guerre interne tra Bingham Ray e Scott Greenstein. Greenstein, responsabile del grande successo di The Apostle, rimase al timone negli ultimi mesi, fino alla vendita alla Universal, che poi la vendette a Barry Diller che la trasformò in USA Films (fu la USA Films a distribuire Traffic di Soderbergh, che con Schizopolis nel 1996 aveva fatto un film personale che non aveva convinto nessuno e poi aveva accettato di malgrado di girare Out of Sight, 1998). Comprata da Vivendi e poi ripresa da Universal, fu successivamente fusa con Good Machine e diventò Focus Features. Praticamente, a fine anni Novanta le grandi imprese maneggiavano le indipendenti ma non sapevano bene che farci. Grazie a Traffic, invece, Soderbergh si associò a Clooney in una piccola società di produzione, Section Eight, per finanziare gente come Christopher Nolan, Gonzalo Iñárritu e Alfonso Cuarón.
  
  Nei primi anni Duemila, dentro la Miramax, la Dimension Films di Bob Weinstein faceva soldi (con gli Scream e Scary Movie, 2000), ma la Miramax stessa era in difficoltà, con vari film presi e poi persi in post production hell (tipo il controverso O (O come Otello, 2001) di Tim Blake Nelson – il produttore Eric Gitter denunciò Harvey Weinstein per i ritardi distributivi), e Harvey che continuava con l’avventura politica. Faceva aggressive campagne stampa (anche non dichiarate, avendo in tasca giornalisti vari), a favore o contro film (a volte contro anche quelli distribuiti da lui stesso, come Dead Man di Jim Jarmusch). La Miramax fece anche affondare All the Pretty Horses (Passione ribelle, 2001), distruggendo il lavoro di Billy Bob Thornton (e anche rovinandogli temporaneamente la vita). Alla fine solo Chocolat di Lasse Hallstrom funzionò, facendo parte di un genere che Biskind definisce euroamericano, con un sapore europeo ma coi dettagli tutti imposti dal mercato statunitense). Con Amélie e In the Beedroom le cose andarono bene nel 2001, ma i disastri di Gangs of New York e Kate & Leopold di James Mangold non furono facili da superare.
  
  Il punto è che ormai la Miramax non era più la casa distributrice di film indipendenti della fine degli anni Ottanta: si impelagava in produzioni da 100 milioni di dollari, era difficile dire che fossero progetti indipendenti! E molti dei registi nati con Miramax decidevano di non tornarci, viste le esperienze poco felici che avevano vissuto (la lista include Alexander Payne, Todd Haynes, James Gray, David O. Russell, Larry Clark, Jim Mangold, Todd Field…). E anche chi ci tornava non lo faceva con entusiasmo: Spike Lee si bruciò con Harvey tentando di fare Rent, tanto che dichiarò che avrebbe preferito vendere calzini a 5 dollari per tre paia prima di tornare da lui. E fu profetico nell’augurargli che tutto il male che aveva fatto gli sarebbe tornato indietro (tornò precisamente nel 2018)!
  
  Insomma, questa è una lettura che posso consigliare soltanto a chi abbia una vera passione per il cinema indipendente statunitense degli anni Novanta, e che abbia pure voglia di leggere un tomo notevole sapendo di poterci cavar fuori soltanto un numero limitato di informazioni realmente intriganti ed interessanti. Sarò onesto: ho fatto fatica a terminarlo, credo che ne sia valsa la pena, ma mi piacerebbe leggerne una versione lunga la metà e senza un sacco di aneddoti decisamente inutili.
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  Soph

  this felt like such an education on a topic (miramax/the 90s and early 2000s film industry) i am so invested in. incredible read, i felt like i just took a whole crash course.
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  Brenden Gallagher

  I had some problems with Biskind's beloved classic "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." I felt that Biskind had trouble balancing his reverence for his subjects with the requirements of the historian in that one. I felt that he often excused bad behavior -- especially misogyny-- of his subjects and had difficulty separating truth from legend. As a result, it was sometimes difficult to parse whether you were reading a credible history or a work of legend. While that book is an essential classic, it is a flawed text.
  
  Oddly enough, in a book about the once-larger than life Harvey Weinstein, Biskind does a much better job bringing his subjects down to Earth.
  
  "Down and Dirty Pictures" is the unflinching, incredibly detailed (it runs at 25 hours on audiobook) story of independent film from "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" to "Gangs of New York." It is a story of indie film from its rebirth to its near-death as every studio set up an "indie" in-house.
  
  The book is must-read material for anyone working in the entertainment industry because Biskind might be better than anyone at recounting the interactions between business and art that define Hollywood, though Kim Masters who appeared in the special thanks for the book deserves consideration there as well. Why did Tarantino become Tarantino? Why don't more people know the names of Allison Anders or Alexandre Rockwell? What even is an indie? The answers are all in here and they are so complex and so fascinating that it is alternately exhilarating and heartbreaking.
  
  While the book is as excellent an account of 90s independent film as one could imagine, the book also has a serious flaw that becomes more noticeable with each passing year. While Harvey Weinstein is depicted as an abuser -- his mistreatment of Miramax employees, collaborators, and competitors examined at length -- there is no mention of his sexual crimes. It is unclear if Biskind was undermined by NDAs or if he himself hoped to avoid litigation at a time when no one would go on the record about Weinstein's sexual assaults and other crimes. This stuff was known by his sources at that time, and Kim Masters has said that this story was out there for years before the Times published. But, the absence of discourse around Weinstein's sexual crimes and how his misogyny likely ended countless careers for women in Hollywood renders the book incomplete regardless.
  
  With that massive caveat, I think "Down and Dirty Pictures" is among the best film histories ever written. It is recent enough to be relevant to anyone working today and yet, it is distant enough to feel like a timeless classic not even 20 years after its publication. Hopefully, Biskind or someone else will plug the holes in the narrative, but if not, "Down and Dirty Pictures" will still stand as a monumental document of a complicated time in Hollywood history.
• 
  Llewellyn

  This book makes Miramax and the Weinsteins out to be a pox on, not just independent cinema, but the film world as a whole.
  
  The Weinsteins sound like the worst caricature of Hollywood producers. Demeaning to everybody around them, almost psychotically so to interns, but having no sense of what makes movies good, driven solely by greed and their own ego.
  
  It made me not so much want to watch more independent movies, but viscerally angry that they have been able to thrive despite destroying people's careers, making terrible movies, and making people despise them along the way, yet have few still would speak about it to protect their careers.
  
  While the book doesn't say it, it really seems like the Weinsteins set out to actually destroy the nascent American independent cinema of the 90s. By flooding the market with over-marketed foreign films, buying films by up-and-coming directors and never releasing them, or chopping up films in post-production hell, they stifled careers and prevented the industry from evolving.
  
  Some people praise their ability to market indies to the world at-large and merging indie with studio system, but they also seem responsible for the current wasteland that is creative filmmaking, where studios imitate indie films to make films cheaply and overmarket them, giving them some praise simply because they were supposedly independent.
  
  They probably didn't invent the concept of hyping movies for Oscars and belittling the competition, but they may have mastered it. And you look at some of the heavily praised Miramax movies of the last two decades and begin to wonder if they were good or simply the result of successful word of mouth marketing campaign.
  
  But who cares if the company producing it is the same kind of demeaning, manipulative personality that people avoided the major studios for in the first place? Who cares if it crosses some border of sex and violence.
  
  The book criticizes Redford and Sundance for not knowing what they were doing, but looking at a list of the films that came out of Sundance and I couldn't help but get a little sad for what was and what could have been. Sundance was a beacon of integrity in comparison. You had movies like Blood Simple, El Mariachi, and Stranger than Paradise.
  
  Then you look at some of the movies that Miramax brought up, like Dogma and Gangs of New York that make it seem like they have any idea what makes a good movie and maybe they were all terrible all along.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Aj

  UGH, FINALLY finished this. I have to say that most of the reason that I hated this book had little to do with the research or the author's ability to string together a history narrative. I hated reading this book because basically everyone in it is terrible. I was indifferent regarding most of the known players in this book (the Weinsteins, Redford, etc.) prior to reading it, but am now in full on loathing for everyone. It makes me glad I'm not much of a movie fan anymore because I feel dirty having supported any of these people.
  
  Overall, the author did a great job with the subject, up until the last few chapters where it sort of petered out rather than made a strong wrap-up. And while I get why it did kind of meander to a stop rather than actually conclude (events and what happened next weren't KNOWN because the book timeline ended in about 2004/2005, and all of these players are mostly still in the game), it felt really jarring considering the meticulous tone of the earlier chapters. Moreover, big players through the first 2/3rds of the book just... didn't appear again. Most jarring examples are Bingham Ray, who ended up in a coma and wasn't seen again until the last chapter where, whoops! He's fine! He's working for Universal! Just, what? Also, Redford, for being a huge presence in the earlier chapters just doesn't exist except for a brief mention in the conclusion chapter.
  
  So, while I'm glad I read this book as it gave some pretty deep history and insight into the US's independent film movement, I am SO FREAKING GLAD I'M DONE WITH IT AND NEVER HAVE TO READ IT AGAIN.