Everybody likes a good sequel. But good sequels are hard to come by.
For every Godfather II, there are a zillion Blair Witch 2’s or Dirty Dancing 2’s. Maybe it’s because sequels are basically all about making money.
Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Picture: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film is a sequel, of sorts, to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his history of ‘70s America film and the maverick directors who created it.
And this sequel is also about making money. It tells how, in the early ‘90s two juggernauts changed the movie industry - Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival and Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Productions.
Whether this change was good or bad for movies in general is up for debate. Sundance, the famous movie celebrity hangout is Colorado, started as Redford’s dream ski resort, but its altitude was too low for good winter powder. So he changed it into a dream movie lab instead, where unknown screenwriters, actors and filmmakers could have their projects and scripts “nurtured.” Unfortunately, Redford’s bland tastes led to equally bland indie films - usually regional dramas featuring frontiers and farmers.
But his annual Sundance Festival quickly became a showcase for edgy, breakout independent films and directors. When Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film Sex, Lies and Videotape premiered there, it took off like a rocket, setting off a mad scramble for the next “indie” Orson Welles.
Miramax , meanwhile, was a cheapie distributing company in New York run by two brother, Harvey and Bob. They put out B-horror movies, soft porn and the occasional arty foreign film they picked up from European festivals. Their dream was to have a breakout hit: a foreign film that crossed over from the art film circuit to the Cineplexes.
It was Neil Jordan’s 1992 film The Crying Game that showed Miramax the light. When early audience surveys proved people were willing to keep a secret about the ending, they milked the Irish director’s movie for all it was worth, making $60 million off a $3 million film. To this day, Jordan claims he was never fully compensated for The Crying Game’s runaway success (Weinstein claims he got everything coming to him in his contract).
The big sea change, though, came with the smashing success of 1994’s Pulp Fiction. Quentin Rarantino proved to be as much of a blowhard egomaniac as Harvey and Bob, so it was a match made in heaven that led to a $100 million blockbuster – an astronomical sum for an “independent” film. By this time, Miramax had the leverage to hook up with a major studio - Disney - that purchased Miramax, allowing the Weinsteins to tap its vast resources of promotional machinery, money and, crucially, lawyers in their bid to take over Hollywood.
Their go-go attitude led to a paradigm shift at Sundance, and in Hollywood. As small independent film distributors hooked up with big studios – Universal, Fox, and Disney – the content of indie films got less and less edgy. Too much was to stake to wide release films like Kids or Todd Solondz’s Happiness. And too many young filmmakers began to see Sundance and Miramax as springboards to sell out to Hollywood. It was bound to happen. (Much of the book is devoted to the rising careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, whose original script Good Will Hunting led to a Hollywood education they’ll never forget.)
Biskind’s sequel is also chock-full of tales of juicy deals and Hollywood rip-offs. Marimax - like other rising independent distributors in the ‘90s - would descend on Sundance, Cannes and other film festivals, checkbooks in hand, ready to scoff up the latest hot directors and films – sometimes even before seeing the films. It led to outrageous bidding wars on films that, in retrospect, were not worth their $10 million-plus prices (Billy Bob Thornton’s Slingblade, Zhang Yemou’s Hero).
Weinstein – and intimidating, 300-pound presence who would routinely fire people in a hail of abuse one day, then rehire them the next – emerges as the dark centerpiece of this tale – a Darth Vader if there ever was one, but also a guy who truly wanted better films to be made and released. Though he had an unfortunate tendency to edit foreign release so that Americans would “get it” (earning him the industry nickname “Harvey Scissorhands”), he was also canny enough to put his company’s money into the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Fahrenheir 9/11 when Disney balked. You can’t count the Weisteins out, even after their less-than-amicable split with Disney Corp. They’ll be back. Just like the Terminator.
