Trash talk Peter Biskind’s Hollywood ‘exposé’ BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film By Peter Biskind. Simon & Schuster, 558 pages, $26.95

Have you ever left a theater saying, "That movie was great! I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the studio executives green-lighted it!" No? How about: "I loved that movie! I wonder how much the distributor paid for domestic rights?" Okay, but surely you’ve spent more than one idle moment musing, "Can Harvey ‘Scissorhands’ Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Pictures, really be as obnoxious as every article and interview in which he’s mentioned has led me to believe?" If you’re still not exclaiming, "Yes! Been there!", perhaps Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures is no more the book for you than it was for me.

The buzz about Down and Dirty Pictures is that it’s the hard-hitting exposé of two enterprises associated with American independent film: Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, whose annual Sundance Film Festival has launched many careers, and Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax, the company behind such indie landmarks as sex, lies, and videotape, Pulp Fiction, The Crying Game, and The English Patient. The truth is that Biskind has written a soggy compilation of repetitive anecdotes that pound home what any student of Hollywood should know already, that the Sundance/Miramax version of independence is a professional culture that recognizes the same priorities as do the major studios and churns out products every bit as pre-sold, conformist, and compromised.

The critical insight Biskind brings to his task is unequal to his appetite for insider gossip, which is bottomless, as he demonstrated in his previous book, the ’70s-Hollywood survey Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex–Drugs–and–Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. There, he was obsessed with famous directors’ drug intake and philandering. For his portrait of Redford in Down and Dirty Pictures, he contents himself with establishing that the star blows hot and cold on ideas, sometimes comes late for meetings, and left more than one project in the lurch so he could act in Out of Africa. All this doesn’t exactly add up to a devastating indictment.

Redford and Sundance are just side attractions in the book, however; Biskind loses interest in the festival early on and appears barely able to keep awake while writing about it (the 1990 festival was "a snooze"; 1997’s was "a real snoozer"). The main subject of Down and Dirty Pictures is the walking horror movie that is Harvey Weinstein. Biskind piles on accounts of the mogul’s abusiveness — sometimes physical — toward filmmakers and employees, and as depressing as some of these incidents are, I suspect that Weinstein, who let Biskind interview him for the book, likes the way he comes off in it. Far from a scathing assault on a crude and destructive producer, Down and Dirty Pictures is a 500-page ego stroke for Weinstein, whose excesses he describes with a mixture of awe and affection.

Biskind proves again and again that his values are the same as Miramax’s. He applauds the company for achieving "a critical mass of extraordinarily gifted executives, who set the stage for the remarkable four-year run that culminated in Shakespeare in Love." About Miramax’s acquisition of Matt Damon & Ben Affleck’s Good Will Hunting project, he writes that Weinstein "did what he does best — he saw the potential, accepted the risk, met their price, and executed with lightning speed." The book is less an exposé than a cross between a company annual report and the kind of trade magazine that features joky columns about goings-on at the hotel bar during conventions.

Biskind has interviewed Hollywood producers for so long that he writes the way they talk (or the way he thinks they talk; everyone sounds the same in his transcriptions). I can do it, too: Biskind sits down, writes about Steven Soderbergh, goes: "On March 8, he met with Pollack. He was excited, thought, Wow, Sydney Pollack!" Biskind sees a Kevin Smith movie, is excited, goes, "Down and dirty, in ragged black and white with nonactor friends, Clerks exploded with testosterone-drenched trash-talk." I’m reading this, I’m going, this is a book about cool indie movies, right? Why am I, like, reading production reports from the set of fuckin’ Scream?

Dizzying in its trashiness, perfunctory in its critical analysis, Down and Dirty Pictures is the reductio ad absurdum of entertainment journalism. As such, it’s completely unnecessary, since the genre is already its own parody.