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Hollywood Spin
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Sundance Swirl
Après-screen conversation at Sundance is sure to be a little more sizzling this year thanks to a well-timed new book by roving show business journalist Peter Biskind.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
By Richard Horgan
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Back in 1996, as executive editor of Premiere Magazine, Peter Biskind inter~viewed Grainy Pictures’ president John Pierson about his book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, which offered a first-hand look at the explosive growth of independent film and the Sundance Film Festival.
“Is it good that Miramax, which you have a deal with, dominates indie distribution?” asked Biskind. Pierson, a producer’s agent with colorful tales about everything from Roger and Me and She’s Gotta Have It to Clerks, replied, “Miramax may have more power than other people, but I don't find the same amount of bullying abusiveness that I read about where Microsoft is concerned. They're not charging you for press screenings yet, are they?”
No. But as Park City, Utah prepares for the 20th annual Sundance Film Festival (January 15th through the 25th), Biskind now offers his own 544-page answer to that original question in the form of a new book entitled Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film. Thanks to a coy decision by Simon & Schuster to withhold all advance copies of the January 6th release as well as a few strategically placed leaks, the media has been dutifully reporting that the film industry is abuzz over the book’s unflattering portraits of Sundance founder Robert Redford and Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein.
But not so fast. As Biskind writes himself in the book, "The disconnect between appearance, as it is presented in the media, and the reality of what actually occurs behind the scenes is as great in Hollywood as it is in Washington, if not greater.” In other words, no one in Hollywood is really surprised by Down and Dirty Pictures’ alleged tales of Redford strong-arming independent filmmakers and Weinstein wreaking high decibel, penny-pinching havoc. They are already well familiar with the gist of these stories.
Rather, agents, publicists and studio executives are morbidly fascinated by the spectacle of that rare journalist able to break through the tightly controlled, acquiescent, tit-for-tat rules that govern modern era entertainment journalism. Thanks to the success of his previous Hollywood tome, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls… and the unimpeachable nature of an east coast advance, Biskind once again lifts the industry gossip veil up high, much like Amy Wallace did a few years ago with her Los Angeles Magazine profile of Variety chief Peter Bart.
Meanwhile, Pierson is following suit this week by re-issuing an updated version of his seminal work under the title Spike Mike Reloaded, with a new introduction by filmmaker and former client Kevin Smith. The book is available through, ahem, Miramax Books.
Pierson, who is friends with Biskind and says he re-released his book partly in response to the latter’s highly publicized offering, claims the last movie to break out of Sundance in a big way without the benefit of big names or industry connections was Smith’s 1994 comedy Clerks, which introduced audiences to Jay, Silent Bob and the unfettered truth of convenience store employee logic.
Long gone, he claims, are the days when Hollywood could come to the mountain and sneak up on something like 1989’s sex, lies and videotape or 1992’s Reservoir Dogs.
"Instead of blaming Sundance for becoming this monolith, you really have to look at all the other parties -- press, all media, distributors, the other various and sundry agents -- for essentially ceding all their power to Sundance," Pierson told The Salt Lake Tribune this past Sunday. "It wasn't an invasion, and it wasn't an unfriendly takeover. Step by step, company by company, they decided to let Sundance decide what the cream of the crop was."
While the cacophony of Sundance now plays out at a fever commercial pitch, the maestro conductor remains Harvey Weinstein. Back in 1989, when he snapped up Steven Soderbergh’s celebrated flick, he was just another struggling independent. Today, he is riding ten years of bankrolled Disney cash to increasingly less independent-like heights (the budget for Cold Mountain is pegged at a lofty $80 million).
So, do things like Biskind’s book and the hay made over comments therein by people such as Ben Affleck about Miramax keep Weinstein awake at night? Hardly. Truth is, he is probably more concerned this week with test screening results for Mindkillers or the fact that Bravo has jumped into the Project Greenlight mix.
Unlike Robert Redford, who refused to participate in Down and Dirty Pictures, Weinstein seemingly had no qualms about granting Biskind multiple interviews. That’s because few people understand the inner workings of the dream factory better than Weinstein. Since the ministrations of his larger-than-life management style are already well known on both coasts, all he’s really doing here is temporarily granting his acolytes permission to discuss the behavior out loud.
| In an essay in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Bullies Are Not What Ails Hollywood,” Frank Rich was one of the few journalists to offer a broader and more tempered historical perspective on the well-orchestrated Down and Dirty Pictures brouhaha. After noting that no one today would be granted the kind of access that led to his recently deceased friend John Gregory Dunne’s 1969 exposé The Studio, based on a full year spent on the 20th Century Fox studio lot, Rich wondered what kind of future Weinstein can look forward to within the confines of a gilded Hollywood cage.
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“In this sense Harvey Weinstein becomes an almost — I stress, almost — poignant figure in Down and Dirty Pictures because he seems to have misplaced the meaning of his own success,” writes Rich. “His problem is not that he is a bully. As John Dunne writes in his other nonfiction account of the movie business, the 1997 Monster, there's a case to be made for the effectiveness of "bully boy" producers, from Otto Preminger to Don Simpson.”
“The trouble comes when the bullies join the establishment, a process that arguably began for Miramax once it was bought by Disney in 1993.”
| Which brings us to the conspiracy theory portion of this week’s column. Since this is Harvey Weinstein we’re talking about here, the mad genius of monster Sundance buzz and intricate, envelope-pushing Oscar campaigns, is it possible that he might have been happy at the prospect of any negatively perceived buzz surrounding Biskind’s book? If he is indeed eager to buy back Miramax from Disney, as some reports have claimed, then perhaps his cooperation with the author is part of a tacit strategy to pave the way for that secession?
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If you buy into this scenario, then the Weinstein brothers are already plotting towards a secret future target date, when they can once again reclaim their place as true independents in the wake of diluted corporate Disney profits, the December resignations of Board members Roy E. Disney and Stanley P. Gold and the duo's ongoing anti-Eisner campaign via savedisney.com.
Or maybe the Weinsteins will simply continue to busy themselves with the increasingly high stakes of down and dirty box office success. As Pierson put it in that February 1996 interview with Biskind, “In 1985, the ceiling for an indie was supposed to be $10 million, then Kiss of the Spider Woman came along and did 17. And you went from The Piano, at 28, to The Crying Game, at 63. And the ultimate culmination of that is the phenomenon called Pulp Fiction [the first off-off-Hollywood film to top $100 million].”
| “It unfortunately gives further credence to this idea of quantifying everything according to how much business it does,” Pierson continued. “Audiences become more obsessed with keeping up with the huge hit of the moment rather than with casting a wider net and checking out a lot of different films, which was traditionally the case with the off-Hollywood audience.”
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As the line between Hollywood and abrogated independent specialty labels continues to blur and people in winter coats get ready once again to obsess about the dollar amount of high-altitude distribution deals, this year’s Sundance Film Festival provides the perfect punch line to Biskind and Pierson’s twin tomes. Namely, the debut of Fox Searchlight’s The Clearing, the first “independent” film to star festival founder Robert Redford.
Meanwhile, the cocktail chatter about Biskind’s book is already well underway. To wit, here is what someone featured in Down and Dirty Pictures claimed this morning via a post on the web site IndieWire.com: “As someone who was extensively "quoted" in the book, I was surprised to learn much of what I supposedly said. I think some of it was wishful thinking on the part of the author, looking for some juicy stories.”
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