Film: Everyone has a Harvey Weinstein story. Or at least anyone remotely involved in the film business over the last two decades.
With his fuel-injected ego and his consumptive personality, Weinstein is the notorious cinematic salesman who shepherded and steam-rolled films such as sex, lies, and videotape, My Left Foot, Pulp Fiction, The Crying Game, Shakespeare In Love, The Piano and The English Patient to Tinseltown glory and box-office success.
Despite being sub-titled "Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film", Peter Biskind's book is really the story of Miramax, the film distribution and production company which Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob endearingly named after their parents, Miriam and Max. The company, along with Robert Redford's influential Sundance Institute and Film Festival, had a hugely formative effect on the emergence of independent film-makers into the mainstream and out from beneath the long shadow of the Hollywood studio system. Over the last 20 years or so, films screened at Sundance and later marketed by Miramax effectively changed the face of cinema.
So far, so good. Nice Boy Bobby Redford and Bad Boy Harvey Scissorhands join forces to defeat the Evil Studios and liberate the poor Indie Auteurs from their penury and their bad haircuts, thus saving great cinema for the world, or at least until the sequel. Well not exactly, as Barry Norman might have put it.
As Biskind describes it, the relationship between Miramax and Sundance was not a happy one, and, in turn, their individual relationships with the independent film-makers became even worse. Not that the poor independents turn out to be a particularly likeable or even admirable bunch most of the time. In fact, at a certain juncture, it begins to sound a lot like good old Hollywood.
Yet Miramax has changed the way in which we perceive cinema over the last two decades. Knowingly or not, we have all fallen victim to its relentless marketing campaigns, been seduced by the notion that an Oscar nomination or 22 (as Miramax received in 1994) somehow is a watermark of cinematic excellence, believing all the way to the multiplex that the Miramax film was the one to see. The one that showed we had discernment, intelligence, and independence of mind, unlike those sheep in the next queue, trudging in to consume the Hollywood studios' latest movie-burger. (All this despite the fact that the Disney Corporation bought Miramax in 1993, and the distinction between the Weinsteins and the studios became increasingly blurred.)
Miramax's success was based on a simple enough formula. A genuine eye for talent and a good movie; buy early and buy cheap; test-screen the films to death in the malls of middle-America; then butcher and bully the film and film-maker into submission; launch a huge and often inspired publicity drive; and finally (crucially but mysteriously) convince enough members of the Academy to vote for your picture come Oscar time.
But if Weinstein is the bully-boy, could we not take comfort in the golden boy goodness of Robert Redford and Sundance? Redford has always been something of an icon, with his good looks, his intelligence, his much-vaunted conscience and, of course, his Gatsby-esque embodiment of the all-American mythology of success. We always knew that Miramax were thuggish, but Redford's apparent fall from grace seems more revealing, more shocking in the book somehow, although it is only dealt with superficially, and Sundance fades into the background as the story progresses. Redford comes across as a control freak who fails to take control, an unsuccessful entrepreneur masquerading as an altruistic philanthropist, and a charmer who has erased you from his memory-bank before the sparkle has faded from his smile.
Biskind says the book is a sequel, of sorts, to his wonderful earlier book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his blood-and-guts chronicle of that generation of film-makers in the late 1960s and 1970s, which included the likes of Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg, who changed the face of American, and ultimately world cinema forever. But like most sequels - to pursue one of those film analogies to which Peter Biskind is so partial - it never really lives up to the original. Unlike its predecessor, this is not a book about films or film-making but about the marketing of film, about film-making by the popularity poll. This is the new dawn of test cards and scores, the era of giving the public whatever it wants. The actual making of the films seems decidedly absent from proceedings. All the action happens before and after the films are made, and that is the action of the deal and the dollar.
And the story is always the same, though told in painstaking (and, at times for the reader, painful) detail. It goes something like this: These guys made a movie for next to nothing. Then this movie goes and makes all this money. So the indie film-maker guy goes: "That sonofabitch Harvey owes me all this cash . . ." And Harvey replies: "I broke my ass to make that movie as successful as it was . . . We don't owe that guy a red cent." When you realise the amounts of money they are talking about are in the region of $228 million for The English Patient, or $226 million for Good Will Hunting, you begin to understand why it's all getting a little heated. But for all this it is never clear exactly who is actually telling the truth and there is often an implicit understanding that you can't completely rely on Harvey Weinstein.
Yet somehow, despite the occasional gem of a story or an illuminating cameo, none of this is really all that fascinating, unless you're a struggling film producer, or a devotee of Hollywood Babylon, or even just plain old Quentin Tarantino, who enjoyed reading about himself so much they've quoted him on the book jacket. There is something too knowing about it all, and one tires of the endless wise-crack metaphors; and can we really forgive a book so impeccably researched for referring to Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan as British?
What made the earlier Easy Riders, Raging Bulls so compelling was that it was a window into a world of true cinematic greatness, of epic figures of reckless talent and unfettered vision, worthy of Peter Biskind's passion and scrutiny. Miramax and its dizzy world of dollars, deals and dazzle seems unworthy by comparison. Certainly, a man such as Harvey Weinstein would have found a place in the earlier story but, as the leading man of this weighty volume, he rings fairly hollow.
At one point in Down and Dirty Pictures, film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci recalls watching the actor James Gandolfini in The Sopranos and recognising certain mannerisms that reminded him of Harvey Weinstein. When asked if he were making a film about the Weinsteins, would he cast Gandolfini as Harvey, Bertolucci replied: "Yes, but I don't think I would have him as the main character. He doesn't deserve it." How right he was.
Down and Dirty Pictures By Peter Biskind, Bloomsbury, 545 pp. £18.99
Alan Gilsenan is a film-maker and theatre director. His latest film is Timbuktu