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This book brings movie history up to date with the increasing commercialisation of indie cinema, the impact of Miramax, Tarantino - the cinema of the 80s, 90s, up until now. This is the history of the cinema of our era - all of the gossip behind our celluloid pop culture. The hardcover version of this book is beautiful and very heavy - you feel you are getting your money's worth both in weight and in readability. Buy one for yourself, then one for everyone else for Christmas.
Criminal
Where Easy Riders was salacious in its stories and anecdotes of Hollywood's new breed of talent, Down and Dirty focuses more on the emerging independent generation of filmmakers, starting with low budget films such as Clerks, Sex Lies and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs, allied with Robert Redford's emerging Sundance Film Festival.
The gossip of Easy Riders is replaced by stories of ingenious marketing, credit card filmmaking and sleeper hits. Soderbergh, Smith and Tarantino are the star directors, Weinstein and Redford are the ones who made it happen.
While still enjoyable, there's much less scandal in this one - although the various stories of Harvey Weinstein's outrageous temper and backstabbing more than makes up for it. Recommended.
Told in much the same style as Easy Riders, Raging Bulls it is a wild mixture of serious comment and salacious gossip. Biskind writes beautifully, handling another huge topic with an enormous cast of characters deftly. He is assisted by the fact that many of the players and the films are already well-known to the reader but he has a wonderful talent for the one-line character profile (often a one-line character assassination) and he chooses his quotes well.
It is evitable given his larger than life personality and aggressive business practices that Harvey Weinstein comes to dominate the book in much the same way as the Weinstein brothers have dominated the independent film business. Harvey Weinstein is a fascinating although in many ways deeply repellent character – very aggressive, prone to outbursts of rage, guilty of some very dubious business practices, a man who will shaft someone just because he can – however he is responsible for some of the best films of recent years and at least he loves movies (unlike some of his competitors). In Biskind’s view he made the independent film business. Taking it out of its niche and finding a much wider audience but he is also responsible for corrupting it; as Mirimax increasingly became a studio with a more conservative attitude, eschewing rather than courting controversy, and an ever increasing reliance on stars. This has made life much more difficult for genuine independent film makers like John Sayles and Spike Lee who find it very difficult to get funding.
Absolutely fascinating, particularly if you are familiar with the films of the period (or if you want to be reassured that you do not have the worst boss in the world).
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