‘Down And Dirty Pictures’ is a sequel of sorts, taking up the thread in the late 80s, tracing the resurgence of independent filmmakers under the auspices of Robert Redford’s Sundance festival in Utah, and also the rise of Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax Pictures, a company that through its aggressive acquisitions strategies dominated the independent sector first, then the Oscars lists, and then the mainstream, with films such as ‘sex lies and videotape,’ ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘The English Patient,’ ‘Good Will Hunting’ and more recently ‘Cold Mountain’ and ‘Fahrenheit 911.’

The main difference between the two books is that ‘Easy Riders’ dealt with what is by Hollywood standards ancient history, while ‘Down & Dirty Pictures’ operates in more contentious recent territory. Many of the executives, filmmakers and actors mentioned are still in the business, some in their prime, so it was a far more difficult task to get insiders to dish the dirt.

“It was much harder,” Biskind confirms. “A lot of people are in mid-career and working and can be hurt by what they say, and Miramax has a reputation for being vindictive and punishing people. But I found the filmmakers for the most part surprisingly outspoken, even though they had something to lose. Even Kevin Smith, who’s well within the Miramax camp, complained a lot, and I found that interesting, because when the friendly people complain it gives it extra credibility.”

There are few saints in this story. Even Robert Redford, a more benign character than the bullying Weinstein brothers, comes across as a controlling, procrastinating, perfectionist individual whose directorship of Sundance is compromised by his parallel careers as an actor and filmmaker.

“Well, I think he is a bit of a ditherer!” Biskind laughs. “I did interview Redford in 1990 and once I got him in the room, he was pretty forthright. I was surprised, he was not someone who hummed and hawed. He admitted a lot of problems with Sundance and addressed them more or less, but he is renowned for a procrastinator; he’s passive-aggressive. With the Weinsteins, you often hear someone say, ‘At least you know where you are with Harvey; Harvey will stab you in the stomach as opposed to the back!’”

By the early 90s, Biskind contends, the Sundance festival had deteriorated into a haven for worthy, wishy-washy ‘granola’ films touting marginal Americana. This was all changed by the release of Quentin Tarantino’s debut ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ whose impact was akin to tossing a grenade into a hippy commune.

“A sleepy hippy commune where everybody smokes so much dope they’re fast asleep,” qualifies Biskind. “Or maybe a sewing circle. As I said in the book, when you think about it, before ‘Reservoir Dogs’ people rarely died in Sundance films except of old age and boredom or AIDS. In ‘Reservoir Dogs’ they die bloodily and painfully, and it created a huge scandal because it was a violent genre film. There were a few exceptions, like the Coen Brothers, but for the most part Sundance films were really soft.”

Tarantino’s second film ‘Pulp Fiction’ pretty much changed the face of independent film in the 90s and established the director as Miramax’s golden boy. Since then he has enjoyed a remarkably privileged relationship with the Weinsteins, to the extent that he could convince Harvey Scissorhands (as he became known due to his propensity for brutal post-production doctoring) to release ‘Kill Bill’ as two separate films.

“Tarantino has a very commercial sensibility,” says Biskind. “He’s the ideal director for him because he makes films that are intensely personal but he also responds very well to the more lurid aspects of popular culture. Plus he knows a lot about film, as Harvey does, and he’s outspoken and aggressive, and I think the Weinsteins have contempt for people who kowtow to them – while demanding it. Quentin doesn’t. And besides, he made them a hundred million dollars. As Harvey says, after ‘Pulp Fiction’ all he had to do to sign up a filmmaker was say, ‘We’re the company that made ‘Pulp Fiction’ and that was it. Harvey is Harvey Scissorhands with other directors, but not with Quentin. They’ve tried to get him to cut every single film he’s made, but he’s refused. He and Harvey got into a big fight about ‘Jackie Brown,’ but now they’ve pretty much given up.”

One of the more intriguing subplots in ‘Down And Dirty Pictures’ is the crucial role two Irish films – Jim Sheridan’s ‘My Left Foot’ and Neil Jordan’s ‘The Crying Game’ – played in Miramax’s fortunes.

“It is interesting,” Biskind says. “‘My Left Foot’ was one of the key hits of 1989 which was a banner year for Miramax. It established a relationship between Harvey and Daniel Day Lewis, no matter how conflicting it was. The famous thing Day Lewis said about Harvey was something like, ‘You’re a great distributor but in all other ways you’re a failure as a human being.’ Which Harvey actually likes to quote! And then ‘The Crying Game’ of course totally made them attractive to Disney, which changed the whole trajectory of the company. Prior to that, it was very likely they might fold.”

A rather more infamous episode was the mismarriage of Harvey Weinstein and Martin Scorsese, which spawned the grievously flawed but still impressive ‘Gangs Of New York.’

“It was a marriage made in heaven and hell,” is Biskind’s verdict. “Thematically it was kind of the 70s meets the 90s. The 70s was an auteur’s decade where the directors got an enormous amount of power, whereas the 90s was in many ways a producer’s or distributor’s or marketer’s decade. So the collaboration-slash-confrontation between Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein really embodied the whole theme of the book, and the climactic wrestling match at the end between Daniel Day Lewis and Leo Di Caprio rolling on the ground and exhausting each other is emblematic of the collision between Harvey and Scorsese, which was very explosive. Scorsese is physically small but he’s an extremely commanding presence and insists on having his own way. He throws things and screams and has to have everything just so, and with the two of them on this one movie, there were definitely fireworks.

“It’s funny, I was about to say Harvey has no respect – the way he treated Bertolucci for example – but he does in some ways worship those filmmakers, he was desperate to work with Scorsese. Harvey came up of that 70s generation. And yet when he gets to work with them, he tends to zero in on the signature scene – the scene that makes it a Scorsese film – and cut it. He couldn’t deal with the rats in ‘Gangs,’ he wanted to cut the ear-slashing sequence in ‘Reservoir Dogs.’ You know, this one story that I was told, and I don’t know if it’s true, is that Harvey is supposed to have told Scorsese, who has worked for years with (legendary ‘Raging Bull’ editor) Thelma Schoonmaker, ‘She’s too old, get rid of her!’ Which if it’s not true, it should be, because it’s just a perfect Harvey-ism.”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.