Down and Dirty Pictures tells the tale of the rise, success, and decline of the American independent cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s. At the heart of the book, as the subtitle to the book makes clear, is Miramax, the Sundance Institute with its filmmaker labs and film festival, and a host of other initially independent film "studios" of the era. In Down and Dirty Pictures Biskind argues that Mirimax, in particular, which began as a buying or acquisition house and distributor of independent films, transformed movie making in the US in the 1990s. Mirimax, Biskind contends, led the way in transforming film distribution in the American cinema of the 1990s, arranged the shotgun marriage of independents and big corporate studios, created the infrastructure of the American independent film industry, and brought American independent films, as a result, to a broader audience including those audiences who went to see films at America's cookie cutter mall based film chains.
Where Mirimax led, others--think Max Weber and isomorphism--like October and New Line, followed. By the mid and late 1990s once independent institutions like Mirimax, had become part of the studio system. Disney, for instance, bought Mirmax in 1993. October was purchased by Universal in 1997. New Line became part of Turner in 1994, part of Warner Brothers when Turner and Warner's merged in 1996, and was merged with Warner Pictures in 2008.
Success, as it often is, was, as Biskind makes clear, a double edged sword for American independent film industry. Mirimax, now part of a larger studio, was able to bid more for the right to distribute independent films and increasingly moved into the film production business and began to produce films just like the studios before it built around Hollywood stars with their big salaries, all of which drove up the cost of "independent" film acquisition and film production in the process. By the 2000s independent cinema, particularly mid-budgeted "independent" cinema, was on life support. The now studio owned independents were increasingly struggling and it became increasingly clear that the studio owned "independents" were of really of limited interest to the studios who owned them. The studios proved to be more interested in film by the numbers comic book films, broad comedy films, sequels to both, and nostalgic reboots of 1960s and 1970s TV shows, all of which continue to dominate Hollywood studio big budget equals big profit oriented filmmaking today. As a result low cost independent auteur films were almost back to square one.
Biskind's book doesn't neglect the dark sides of the captains of the American independent film industry. Harvey Weinstein, co-owner and head of Mirimax with his brother Bob, is shown for the angry, intimidating, back stabbing, film editing (not always wrongly), user of completed films as leverage, bullying and belitting of employees, directors, producers, journalists, virtually everyone and anyone, make money at all costs flim flam man he was and is as recent events have shown once again. Redford is shown to be inconsistent and indecisive. Jockeying for power with its almost inevitable back stabbing is shown to be at the heart of American film corporate culture just as it is in broader capitalist corporate culture today.
Recommended particularly for those interested in how the Hollywood film making industry really works. Annoyance: Descriptive passages that read more like a work of fiction than a work of non-fiction. Caveat: the same caveats that applied to Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls.
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