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Title: Down and Dirty Pictures : Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film by Peter Biskind ISBN: 0-684-86259-X Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.19 (21 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Too much to live up to
Comment: Peter Biskind has in recent times become one of my favorite writers on the movies, alongside Roger Ebert, Peter Travers, and David Ansen. His latest, Down and Dirty Pictures, is good but it has a couple of things working against it from the outset. First, it will always be in the shadow of Easy Riders Raging Bulls, Biskind's seminal book on 70's Hollywood which was an excellent work from start to finish. Second, because most of what Biskind chronicles is fairly recent memory, it seems a bit like overload. Diehard film fans will simply be rehashing old news (for them), whereas the stories in Easy Riders were far enough in the past to be almost new again.
The book clearly has elements that are anti-Miramax and, to a lesser extent, anti-Sundance but it shouldn't change your opinion if you are, say, a big Robert Redford fan. That isn't to say that Redford and the Weinsteins don't deserve some criticism, but the intelligent reader should be able to read between the lines and understand that Biskind's perspective is not the last word on the subject. The movies are the thing, after all, and both Sundance and Miramax have produced great ones. What bothers me most is Biskind's grudging praise and all-too-easy condemnations. A few years ago he wrote a negative piece on Sundance for Premiere Magazine - now it seems he's trying to nail the coffin.
I enjoyed this book a lot and I do recommend it, although it is a bit dense and can take some time to get through.
Rating: 3
Summary: A good read, but I wanted more... and less....
Comment: When Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" came out, I spent almost a week with my nose buried in it. Its stories about the great filmmakers of the 60's and 70's were thoroughly captivating, endlessly entertaining and (as with the best gossip) occasionally a bit questionable.
So when I heard Biskind was working on a follow-up, to focus on the indie film era of the late 80's and 90's, I was all down with that.
One could, potentially, write 10,000 pages on the subject. So Biskind focuses his gaze to concentrate mostly on Sundance and Miramax, the Weinstein's and their colleagues (Soderbergh, Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Billy Bob Thornton, Matt and Ben).
There's a lot of surprising stuff here. And, unlike with "Easy Riders," it's not stuff that happened decades ago. It's backstories from recent movies, some of which are thoroughly astonishing.
While that scaled-back approach gives the book a more wieldy structure, it also leaves one hungry for more information on, say, the Coen Brothers, Wes and P.T. Anderson, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, et al. John Pierson's "Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes" covered a lot of that territory, but still... I'm disappointed Biskind doesn't dig deeper into the production and lore of, say, "Boogie Nights" or "Magnolia" or "Dazed and Confused."
Meanwhile, he loads on the details of the economic aspects of the business, but in such a fast and loose way it's occasionally confusing. For a book with a footnote that explains a simple term like "turnaround," it's frequently, surprisingly opaque with the numbers and the ins-and-outs of complicated deals.
Nevertheless: Good book, kept me riveted for a few days, it's just a shame Biskind couldn't cram as much detail between the covers as he did with "Easy Riders."
Rating: 1
Summary: File under BUSINESS, not MOVIES
Comment: Do you really look forward to the Power Issue of Premiere Magazine? Can you name the CEO of Paramount? Do film grosses and the business of movies interest you? You may like this book.
Do you love movies, plain out-and-out love them? Then this book is not for you.
Movies could just as easily be widgets in this repetitive, uninteresting chronicle of Mirimax and Sundance. They are secondary to the barrage of executives and deals and boring old business that this book relays.
Imagine having seemingly unlimited access to some of the greatest film makers of the 90's, and all you can come up with is what [jerks] the Weinsteins are. Don't stop the presses.
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Title: Hollywood Animal : A Memoir by JOE ESZTERHAS ISBN: 0375413553 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 27 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Studio by John Gregory Dunne ISBN: 0375700080 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind ISBN: 0684857081 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 04 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: American Sucker by David Denby ISBN: 0316192945 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: When Hollywood Had a King : The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence by Connie Bruck ISBN: 0375501681 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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