So I finished the book by Biskind. I read the last 60 or so pages this Sunday evening. The last part was like the rest of the book, centered around Harvey Weinstien and the Sundance film festival. Biskind goes into considerable detail about Harvery's failings and his decline in behavior as well as the declining stature of Miramax as a film company. He makes his point that Harvey and Miramax had receded into relative equality with it's competitors like Focus films and Sony Classics which for a period of time Miramax always got the best of. In several instances Harvey berates reporters and employess and gets into squabbles with studio heads like Barry Diller. Biskind talks about how the studio system and the indie market have blended into some kind of hybrid form in some cases. The big studios now have their own indie wings which may, in some instances, be profitable as well as critically successful. Yet, the indie movement, that began in the late 80s with a flourish by Sodherberg and sex, lies.. had lost any steam from it by the early 2000s.
The whole phenomenon of Pulp Fiction and Quentin Tarrantino was long past by the time the dot com bubble burst and indie films were co-opted by the big studios. Biskind talks about how many directors went from first film to franchise, which shows that the indie movement had lost any momentum it had. It is rare that a filmmaker refuses the big bucks to stay loyal to some kind of indie aesthetic in their work. Jim Jarmusch is one American director who has not gone for the big payday. His films still have an indie aesthetic that few other filmmkaers have kept. He is also free of the restrictions of genre too. Richard Linklater is another filmmaker who keeps making films from a personal perspective. His latest boyhood is releasing on Friday and I'm going to see it on a day when I'm not attending the Japanese film festival on my Summer trip to Manhattan.
Now that I've read the book I know a whole lot about Miramax and Harvey Weinstein. In fact the book could easily be made into a biography about Harvey. In Biskind's book he is a larger than life character. Perhaps cliche in his typical Jewish movie-producer mold a la Barton Fink, but his personality almost always makes good copy. He and Miramax were a very essential part to the explosion of indie films in the 90's. They helped many films and filmmakers get their movies out there and by doing so launched the careers of many directors, writers, and actors who no one had ever heard of. On the contrary, they kept most of the money to themselves and treated filmmakers very badly in some circumstances. Throughout the book I kept asking myself, would I work for Miramax? I quickly said, "no." Then I thought, "maybe." In the 90's Miramax was at the forefront of the indie movement and I'm sure it was exciting to work for. Yet, as Biskind reveals, other players emerged to take the top spot from Miramax, particularly Dreamworks and later James Schamus and Focus.
I think I like Biskind's book about the 70's more than this one. This book was all Harvey Weinstein and Robert Redford. I enjoyed reading it very much, I just think the Easy Riders.. was more about filmmaking. This book gets lost too much "in the numbers." It provides some information about filmmakers, but it doesn't stir my conscience the way the other book did. Perhaps it's because I took a course on American film history that focused on the "New Hollywood" or, perhaps it is that that period of time was just better; higher quality films, more filmmakers seeking to make great films. The New Hollywood also lasted longer the Indie movement of the 90's. It is obvious from Biskind that the Indie movement went into severe decline in the late 90's. Biskind even dates the beginning of the decline with Pulp Fiction. He states that the Indie movement essentially died after it's release. After Pulp many filmmakers wanted to win the lottery like Tarrantino and the Indie game became not making high quality films, but getting rich and famous. And if I recall correctly those are the wrong reasons to get into filmmaking.
The New Hollywood had more substance the 90's Indie movement. There just wasn't, as I've read in the Biskind book enough quality from filmmakers in the 90's to rival the 70's. The films don't have the intensity, the drama, the pushing the art form forward that the New Hollywood had. I suppose that's because the 90's didn't have a Vietnam or a Civil Rights movement. In the 90's there was some films that dealt with sex and sexuality, but that movement was largely to come later with the debate about gay marriage taking hold only recently. I suppose the film industry was like many Americans in the 90's; they wanted money like the dot com boom and bust. And many of the films and filmmakers were like that; here today gone tomorrow. In the last section of the book Biskind talks about how many filmmakers suffered from the one and done syndrome. They would produce one film, then the rest of their career were relatively obscure. As a screenwriter and filmmaker myself, I was a little encouraged to know that I might make a film, yet I was discouraged by the fact that they seemed like internet startups. A big IPO, then disaster, which for a filmmaker is obscurity and irrelevance.
I suppose going forward I will know what to avoid if I ever get the chance to turn a screenplay into a film. The age old lesson of history should apply to myself; learn the lessons of the past or be condemned to repeat them.
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