Peter Biskind
Bloomsbury 2004
545 pp + illustrations
£18.99
ISBN 9-780747-5657-03

“Independent filmmakers don’t make money. They’ll spend all the money they don’t have to make the movie. Their parents’ money. Steal money, go into debt for the rest of their lives. The movie can be as good as it’s gonna be, or as bad as it’s gonna be, but it’s theirs.”

So says Quentin Tarantino in Peter Biskind’s entertaining portrait of the American ‘indie’ world of the 1990s. As we approach 2005, the ‘90s are coming into clearer focus and Biskind’s book vividly evokes those great little movies – Clerks, Reservoir Dogs, sex, lies and videotape, Gas Food Lodging – and the personalities that made them special. Biskind wrote Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the racy 1998 account of the sex,.drugs and rock’n’roll years of New Hollywood in the 1970s. Writing history as a soap peopled with colourful characters - who snorted coke on whose patio, who slept with whose girlfriend, who was the first geek to make a movie for a big studio - that book has become an indispensable way into a fascinating time. Down and Dirty Pictures is just as fast moving, except Hollywood is not what it was in the ‘70s. The radical and stoned counterculture no longer feeds into the industry like it once did, and now the trade off between ideals and success is more cautious.

Perhaps Biskind’s biggest coup here is to make talk of money interesting, and money flows through this book like coke flowed around swimming pools in the ‘70s. Down and Dirty Pictures is full of talk about percentages, grosses, margins and profits where Easy Riders used to riff on uppers, downers and bags of weed. Young film directors are still anxious to get their vision up on screen, but what they take home at the end of the day matters just as much. Richard Linklater, who, with Slacker (1991) and that tribute to the youth of ’76, Dazed and Confused (1993) was a key player in the indie explosion, still clings to the idea that Hollywood boils down to the maverick director versus the uptight bean counter in the studio front office. Conversely, Ben Affleck sees good movies in movies that make money for the bean counters. Things have changed since the idealistic ‘70s and the distinction between art for art’s sake and the need to be an industry player comes into strange and awkward proximity throughout Biskind’s book.

At the heart of the ‘90s for Biskind are two men who in their way epitomized the changing times. On the one hand, Robert Redford, the founder of the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival, early launch pad for the American independents, stood for a certain kind of freedom from studio mentality and slide rule filmmaking. On the other, Harvey Weinstein, the boss of Miramax, the company that put the indies in the multiplex, shaped the indie world with the ethics of a mako shark. Controversially, Biskind has complaints to make about both men. Redford, long seen as the beacon of liberal integrity in his roles as an actor – The Candidate (1972), All the President’s Men (1976) – and in his aspirations for the industry, becomes a faltering, indecisive totem before a landscape of dog eat dog. Meanwhile, invited to the Miramax offices when Harvey heard that he was writing this book, Biskind writes: “The odour of menace hung in the air like the smell of burning tires.” Yet for all Weinstein’s finagling – the acquisitions round at the 1997 Toronto Film Festival resembles a scene from Fight Club – Miramax gave us Tarantino, Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), and the Scream franchise.

The clash of ideals and profits is nothing new in Hollywood. It is an ongoing theme as the major studios buy up talent and talented people get exploited, then shunted into oblivion. Biskind’s book feels like he is searching for the ideal combination in an era when even the talented had to become money-headed to survive. In amongst the backstabbing and bad mouthing that occurs throughout what is a bitter book, certain figures become beacons of realism and rectitude. One of them is Bingham Ray, founding partner of October Films, that independent outfit which took an obscure thriller on HBO and made it into the $5.8 million hit The Last Seduction in 1995 and put British director Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996) into American cinemas. Ray remains a running sore on the Weinstein status quo: “I still believe that there are decisions that you make that aren’t motivated by financial gain. The independent world isn’t like the Hollywood world. The motives are different. The goals are different, people aren’t necessarily trying to get rich and powerful, they’re trying to push art first while thinking everything else will take care of itself. That’s the naïve part of it, it doesn’t happen that way.” Another moral voice is Cathy Konrad. Co-producer of Kids (1995), and producer of the Scream films, Konrad was bitter following the Weinsteins’ failure to market her Kate and Leopold (2001): “So your movie comes out, it’s floundering, it’s the holidays, and Harvey doesn’t even call. He loves you for a minute, and then he just steps on your face and you’re a piece of shit again. What I don’t like about Miramax is that they profess a loyalty to filmmakers, they talk the family talk, but family doesn’t treat family like that.”

Biskind has already come in for a lot of criticism from those who say he distorted conversations or misreported events. But history this recent is bound to be contested. It is still hard to be subjective about the ‘90s. But if you want some great stories about what fame did to Tarantino, what Spike Lee really thought of Harvey Weinstein, how Clerks epitomized the indie spirit, and who benefited, this agile multi-stranded book is the Magnolia of film books. And if you lose track of who said what, there’s a very useful cast of characters in the back!

Richard Armstrong

© 2004 Richard Armstrong