Harpooning Hollywood

Peter Biskind talks about Harvey Weinstein, Robert Redford, his new book, "Down and Dirty Pictures," and the wild stories he can't tell about '70s Hollywood.

By David Bowman

Feb. 2, 2004 | It was bad enough that writer Peter Biskind psychically peed all over the Sundance Film Festival in his new book. Then he jinxed producer Harvey Weinstein -- a man rotund in both personal girth and temper -- from a shot at yet again walking onto the stage of the Kodak Theatre to collect another Oscar for best picture.

In a Salon interview last week, Weinstein tried to spin the Academy Award nominations as an overall win for Miramax ("City of God" was a surprise nominee in several categories). But the fact remains that Weinstein's big-budget baby "Cold Mountain" was not a nominee for best picture. Or best director. Or best actress. It only got a shot at best actor (for Jude Law), and best Zellweger (uh, sorry, I mean best supporting actress), and some "minor" technical awards like cinematography and editing, not to mention original song and original score (and as we all know, Harvey can't sing).

"I don't feel like dumping on Harvey and crowing over him," Biskind says over the telephone last Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the Oscar nods were announced. "You have good years and bad years, and this is not shaping up as a good year for him." Pause. "I liked 'Cold Mountain,'" he goes on. "I'm surprised, frankly, that it didn't get nominated. I think [Anthony] Minghella is a really good director. He's a smart guy with a good cast. Those battle scenes in the beginning were right up there with 'Saving Private Ryan.' Is this not what you want to hear?"

No, no, no. We have no anti-Weinstein agenda. It's just that he figures so notoriously in Biskind's new book, "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film." In its pages, Miramax chief Weinstein is portrayed as the screaming Attila the Hun of independent cinema. Even worse, he partnered with Sundance founder Robert Redford, who is portrayed as a vapid golden boy now pushing 70, who only founded the Sundance Film Festival because the mountain he bought in Utah didn't get enough snow to turn it into a ski resort.

When this year's Sundance festival opened two weekends ago, Biskind's book cast a terrible pall over the opening proceedings. Weinstein, some said, blubbered around contrite like some Ralph Kramden at Alice's funeral, while Redford just lay low, like an aging ski bum minus Viagra. The days of quitting your day job at Blockbuster and maxing out your Visa card to produce a Sundance-worthy masterpiece of American cinema seemed dead and buried.

Yet by Wednesday of Sundance week, Biskind was forgotten, replaced by the buzz over "Open Water," a quasi-"Jaws" remake shot on a shoestring by a Brooklyn couple who used real sharks as props. Several miles east of Park City, presidential hopeful Howard Dean threw a televised fit that made even Weinstein's temper seem as threatening as a stick of cream cheese. At festival's end, the only film of note appeared to be a documentary about a man who ate Big Macs for a month, not exactly the kind of film that gives us the next Quentin Tarantino, let alone the next Redford.

Salon first interviewed Biskind the day before Sundance began, when halfway across the country Weinstein still believed that -- regardless of what Biskind had written about him -- he still had a good shot at an Oscar nomination. Biskind talked to us at the legendary White Horse Tavern in New York. With his fuzzy hair and even fuzzier mustache, he looked like Gene Shalit's doppelgänger. We sat under a photograph of a drunken Dylan Thomas, and Biskind warned he'd have to leave in 45 minutes to make a CNN taping.

So is Harvey Weinstein your Macbeth?

More like my White Whale. My Moby Dick.

What's the difference between Weinstein and Jack Warner? Or any other Monroe Stahr-style producer from the 1930s?

For one thing, the context has changed. In the 1930s, extravagant mogul behavior was taken for granted. It was a much more rough-and-tumble era. Now Hollywood is buttoned-down and corporatized, so Harvey stands out like a sore thumb. He probably would have fit in really well in the 1930s. Harvey is cut from the same cloth as Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. No question about that. But there is a ferocity, an out-of-control quality, in Harvey that you don't find in the old moguls.

Does the average Joe really understand the difference between independent cinema and the studio days of "Sunset Boulevard"?

The studio system started to disintegrate after World War II. A Senate decree separated the studios from the theaters. Then the attendance started to slide. Then the rise of television. The [McCarthy-era] blacklist. It all started to go to hell in the late 1940s and throughout the '50s. By the 1960s it was a total mess. And then you have the new Hollywood.

So the new Hollywood is corporate?

What I'm calling "new Hollywood" is the 1970s people. In those days, studios weren't corporate. The corporatization trend was just starting. TransAmerica bought United Artists. Gulf & Western bought Paramount. But at the same time, in the case of Gulf & Western, Charlie Bludhorn, who ran it, was as crazy and mogul-like, and took as much interest in the studio, as any "Last Tycoon." He was a real character in his own. I think TransAmerica was similar to what we have today, sort of a faceless corporation.

Say I work at Blockbuster Video. If I can get my orthodontist uncle to bankroll me $20,000, can I become the next Quentin Tarantino? Or are those days over?

It's harder. If you're as good a screenwriter as Tarantino, write a script and get people interested in it, and get a movie star attached to it -- which is what Tarantino did with "Reservoir Dogs" [in 1992]. He got Harvey Keitel attached to it. I don't think the film would have gotten made without Keitel. Well, I take that back. Tarantino says he was so determined to make the film that he would have shot it on toilet paper.

I think it's both harder and easier today to make independent films. There are more people doing it. The way has been paved. The trail has been blazed. People know it's possible and they see the rewards if they're successful. The same way, I think a film like [Kevin Smith's] "Clerks," which was made for $27,000 with no stars by someone completely unconnected to the movie business -- never been to film school, and had very little family money -- I think those days are nearly over. Everyone says -- and I think that it's true -- you couldn't get "Clerks" into Sundance today. The bar has been raised. The movies are glossier. The budgets are higher. They have movie stars.

How was your first book, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," about the wild outsiders who saved Hollywood film in the 1970s, received by the movie industry?

I think it was received very well. Some of the people it focused on were unhappy. The Robert Altmans of the world, the Peter Bogdanoviches. Some people were very cool with it, like Warren Beatty. Martin Scorsese was pretty OK with it. He wrote me a note, and I heard through Robbie Robertson that he was fine. Scorsese took a grown-up attitude: "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. I did live through that era. I did do that stuff. Someone is going to write about it. It's not the end of the world."

Other people were more freaked out. I always thought the best comment about "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" was -- not to drop names -- when I ran into Oliver Stone. And he told me that he had run into Billy Friedkin [i.e., William Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection"] in the men's room at some hotel right after Oliver had read "Easy Riders." Oliver said, "I read this book. I see you acted like a real motherfucker in the 1970s." And Friedkin just turned to him and smiled and shrugged, "Eh, it's just a book."

I think that's a healthy attitude. I never understood why Francis Coppola would get so upset. If I had made the two "Godfathers" and "The Conversation" and "Apocalypse Now," I wouldn't give a shit what people said about me. They could say that I was a pederast and I wouldn't care. You make films like that, you're safe for life, I would think. But apparently people don't feel that way.

Next page: How a friendly story about the 10th anniversary of Sundance turned into a Robert Redford hatchet job