Brutal Business: Book Review of Down And Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind

Actually, more than a review, this is a recommendation.

If you have any interest in Hollywood, movies, independent film making, or just about the entertainment biz in general, this book is a must-read.

Biskind is the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a study of Hollywood movies during the Seventies. This book is a sort-of sequel to that one, covering the period from the Nineties upto the year 2003.

But this time, the focus is mainly on independent films, and Miramax and Sundance in particular.

The book is subtitled Miramax, Sundance, And The Rise Of Independent Film.

I picked it up expecting to read an informative history of the last decade or so of the independent film movement.

Instead, I got a harrowing look into the shark-eat-fish world of Miramax, run by the brothers Weinstein – Harvey and Bob – who are compared more than once to mafiosi.

The book is based on hundreds of brilliantly done interviews with film makers, actors, agents, producers, distributors, including the principals, the Weinstein brothers themselves, who, after trying to strongarm the author into silence, finally relented and came on the record, rebutting almost every accusation levelled against them.

You have to read the book to know just how incredible their behaviour was. I mean, I knew Hollywood was brutal. But I didn’t know just how brutal. And I surely didn’t know that independent film makers, even major star directors and actors, could be treated so horrendously.

It’s beyond humiliation, bordering on unspeakable, even criminal at times.

If you want glamour quotient, there’s plenty here: from extensive studies of icons like Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Sodherberg, Kieslowski…it’s a long list.

There’s lots of dirt dished out about Oscar-lobbying, even jury-rigging (alleged, of course), and every other part of the movie making biz, with emphasis on small-budget to mid-budget (which in Hollywood means anywhere from $1 million to $70 million) movies and the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes.

The journalism is impeccable, the sources all listed with interviews specified with dates and times, and the contents are all the more startling for being reported with such accuracy and scrupulous integrity.

Recently, sitting in a dentist’s clinic waiting room, I picked up a copy of an old issue of Newsweek.

At the back of the book – I always read magazines backwards because the movie, music, book reviews are there at the end – I happened upon a brief piece of Harvey Weinstein, where he was asked to react to the publication of this book.

He laughed and made fun of the way he was portrayed in the book, as a ‘monster’, but denied none of it.

How could he? It’s all there in black and white, corroborated by a hundred different sources.

But when asked when the exposure of his brutal behaviour and the film industry’s abhorrence of his methods was resulting in a backlash, with fewer Miramax films being Oscar-nominated, he got het up and denied this completely.

Even so, the fact remains that Miramax’s Oscar-nominations have been dropping, as are their wins.

This book is one of those rare finds: A book about the Hollywood movie biz that really tells it like it is, is hugely entertaining and enjoyable (for the first time in my life I realized that there’s more drama happening behind the camera than in front of it, in Hollywood) and is not a muckraking chronicle by someone with an axe to grind, but a responsible, honest journalistic work.

Read it. And be horrified by what goes on in that old industry in the hills in the city of angels – and demons.