Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film

ISBN-13: 9780684862583

Media Type: Paperback(Reprint)

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 01-03-2005

Pages: 560

Product Dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.50(d)

Peter Biskind is the author of five previous books, including Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. He is a contributor to Vanity Fair and was formerly the executive editor of Premiere magazine. He lives with his family in Columbia County, New York.

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Introduction: The Story Till Now

"In the late '60s and early '70s, the studios didn't know how to market films for the youth culture, and they turned to new young filmmakers to figure it out for them. The exact same thing happened across the '90s, and when this generation came of age, it put out very original, distinctive, mature work. They revitalized American films after a decade of it being pretty fuckin' flat. It was the first real American New Wave since the late '60s."

— Edward Norton

On a crisp November morning in 1979, Robert Redford, one of the 1970s brightest stars, inaugurated a three-day conference of filmmakers and arts professionals at his home, a big-beamed ski lodge high up on the slopes of Mount Timpanogos, in the North Fork of Provo Canyon, Utah. It was only a decade since Easy Rider had exploded across the screens of America and kicked off the new Hollywood revolution of the 1970s, changing everything forever — or so it seemed. As that extraordinary era was drawing to a close, Kramer vs. Kramer became the number one grosser of the year, breaking $100 million; Bob Fosse's All That Jazz was a hit, and so was Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now. One of that generation's greatest pictures was still in the pipeline, Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, but so was Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, which is to say, the palace of wisdom to which that decade's road of excess had led would soon come crashing down. In a preview of things to come, the kids who went to the movies that year also lined up to see the first Star Trek, and the second Rocky, The Amityville Horror, 10, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Hurricane, and Meteor.

The new Hollywood had ended, more or less, by 1975, when Ho Chi Minh's armies marched into Saigon, Mike Ovitz — to go from the sublime to the ridiculous — founded CAA, Robert Evans vacated the executive suite at Paramount, and Universal released Steven Spielberg's Jaws, the first mega-blockbuster. By the second half of the decade, the rising tide of the civil rights and anti-war movements that had floated the films of the new Hollywood had receded, exposing a muddy expanse of shallows littered with studio junk. When the Ronald Reagan tsunami swept everything before it, the market replaced Mao, the Wall Street Journal trumped The Little Red Book, and supply-side economics supplanted the power of the people. The boomers who fought the war against the war were staring at the face of middle age, getting ready to move aside for the next

demographic wave, the grasping, me-generationists of the 1980s to be followed by the "Gen-Xers" or "Slackers" of the early 1990s, who couldn't be bothered with either the Yippies of the 1960s or the yuppies of the 1980s.

In Hollywood, the new television regime at Paramount reclaimed the asylum from the movie brat inmates who, like Jack Nicholson's Randle McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest, had disappeared with the medication cart. Studio heads, sitting happily astride bags of cash labeled Saturday Night Fever and Superman, had raised the drawbridge, stranding marginally commercial directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafelson, Billy Friedkin, Hal Ashby, and even, eventually, Scorsese and Coppola, on the far side of the moat. When E.T. burned through the summer of 1982, finishing what Star Wars started, the studios went off on a trip of their own, fueled by cash, not drugs.

In the perennial tug-of-war between art and commerce that is Hollywood, muscular producers were dragging skinny, coked-out directors through the wreckage of the 1970s onto their own turf, which is to say, commerce had won. In the coming decade, Hollywood would fly first class on the Simpson/Bruckheimer Gulfstream. Genres that used to be studio staples — like the family film — migrated to TV, pushing the majors in the direction of "event" pictures in an attempt to cash in.

Roger Corman, who produced B movies in the 1960s and early 1970s, used to complain that he'd had a hard time in the 1980s because the B movies had become A movies, with bigger budgets and real stars. Hollywood abandoned the experimentation of the previous decade, losing interest in how-we-live-now small films about real people — The Last Picture Show, Carnal Knowledge, Five Easy Pieces — in favor of megabuck fantasies. Everything that had been turned upside down in the 1970s was set right side up again. Cops regained their glow, even if they were black and therefore fish out of water like Eddie Murphy in the Beverly Hills Cop cycle. G.I.s were top guns again, and comic strip characters like Rambo, pumped up like balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, got a shot at winning the Vietnam War, while Superman and Batman refought battles that Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey (Death Wish) had won a decade earlier — sans capes. With the bland leading the bland, Spielberg's suburban fantasies replaced Scorsese's mean streets. The utopian attempts to defy the system launched by the most visionary of the new Hollywood directors — Coppola and George Lucas — had either failed, in Coppola's case, or succeeded all too well, like Lucas's Skywalker empire. You couldn't really blame people like Redford for just turning their backs on the whole sorry mess.

Redford was not your garden-variety celebrity. Even though he was virtually synonymous with Hollywood glamour, he saw himself as an outsider. Too straight and conservative in his personal habits, and too much the prisoner of the star vehicles crafted by George Roy Hill and Sydney Pollack, Redford was not about to volunteer for the next Dennis Hopper flick, which is to say, he was not going to hop aboard the New Hollywood's

sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll express. He remained married to the same woman, Lola Van Wagenen, for many years and was a stranger to the gossip columns. On the other hand, he was too liberal to embrace the old Hollywood establishment, and throughout his career, he devoted himself to deploying the power that celebrity confers to effect progressive social change, showing a particular affinity for environmentalism and Native American rights.

Still, despite his contempt for Hollywood and disregard for the trappings of celebrity, and despite the noises he made about being a regular Joe, he remained very much the star. Although soft-spoken and courteous, he was notorious for keeping people waiting, breaking appointments, and failing to follow through on commitments. In Hollywood, it was widely known that to make a deal with Redford was to fall into development hell — script notes, rewrites, and more rewrites — often going nowhere. Used to being flattered, deferred to, and yessed, he mistrusted the people around him. He valued loyalty, and gave it back — sometimes. He refused to delegate power to others but was indecisive and slow to act himself. Cautious by nature and almost paralyzed by perfectionism, he continually second-guessed the people around him. He could be charming and entertaining but, as one former employee put it, "He's not a people person."

Although Redford had been one of Hollywood's leading box-office earners for a decade, when he looked around him at the end of the 1970s, he didn't like what he saw. A decade earlier, the studios had been so desperate that directors like Scorsese and Robert Altman, who would have been — and virtually were — indies in the 1980s, could work inside the system, so that an institution such as Redford contemplated would have been superfluous. But the landscape had changed so dramatically since then that now it was a necessity. Redford understood that the most creative filmmakers were being increasingly shut out of the system. He also recognized that if a would-be filmmaker were brown, black, red, or female — forget it; his or her chances of getting a project produced were virtually nil. He knew that indie filmmaking was generally a trust-fund enterprise, because outside of a few federal grants and cash from the proverbial family friends, orthodontists, eye doctors, and so on, there was precious little money available to produce them. Raising money, not to mention writing, casting, shooting, and editing, was brutal, teeth-grinding work that could take years, and if by some miracle it all somehow came together, directors often found, pace the thimblefull of tiny, struggling distributors, that they had to release their films themselves, leaving them broke, exhausted, and disillusioned. In short, indies needed help.

Redford believed that American film culture could contribute more than stale sequels and retreads, that historically, before the renewed hegemony of the studios, film had been a medium for genuine artists and could be again if only they could be sheltered from the marketplace long enough to nurture their skills and find their voices. Oddly enough, he had or thought he had some firsthand experience with the problems they encountered. As he has said repeatedly, "I knew what it was like to distribute a film that you produced. In 1969, I carried Downhill Racer under my arm, fighting the battles that most people face." He came to understand, as he puts it, the dilemma of the "filmmaker who spends two years making his film, and then another two years distributing it, only to find out he can't make any money on it, and four years of his life are gone. I thought, that's who needs help."

In the mid-1960s, Redford had bought some land, semiwilderness nestled in a deep gorge some 6000 feet up in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Then he bought the lot next door, and the lot next door, and after he made some money on his big hit, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, on August 1, 1968, he and his partners bought the Timp Haven ski and recreation area. He must have thought, Build a ski resort and they will come. What he didn't know was that because of its comparatively low elevation, his resort got less snow and therefore enjoyed a shorter ski season than its competitors. Despite the money he poured into it, nobody, or almost nobody came. In fact, the no-snow zone he had purchased would become a running joke. But the hemorrhage of red ink wasn't funny.

Redford knew that Aspen, Colorado, had become the seat of the Aspen Institute, transforming the sleepy town into a Mecca for coneheads with a taste for skiing and a winter getaway de rigueur for Hollywood stars and investment bankers. By building an Aspen-like infrastructure on his land, he hoped to turn a white elephant into an arts colony that at best might enhance the value of the for-profit ski resort and at worst could do a whole lot of good. It was a brilliant stroke, allowing Redford to kill a multiplicity of birds with one not-for-profit stone.

The purpose of Redford's conference was to lay the groundwork for a novel organization that would nurture indie filmmakers. It would be called the Sundance Institute, after the bank robber Redford had played in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The whiff of outlawry that came with the name flattered his sense of himself as a Hollywood maverick. Or better, the new enterprise suggested a movie like The Magnificent Seven, with Redford like Steve McQueen, the golden-haired Hollywood star with his band of outlaws protecting the powerless farmers (read, indies) against the depredations of vandals and looters (read, the studios), so they could raise their crops (read, films) in peace.

The Redford name attracted an impressive array of brain power, but this convocation of like-minded souls was all very informal. The participants — many bearded, sporting the down jackets, plaid wool shirts, Levi's, and shit-kicker boots that later would become de rigueur at Sundance — stayed at the nearby resort. It was an idyllic spot. Rough-hewn cabins played peekaboo among the spiky stands of mountain pine and aspen that covered the slopes, while a bubbling brook meandered downhill, paused for a moment to form Bob's Pond, and continued on its way. On a clear day, the air was so crystalline it felt like you could raise your hand and touch the heavens.

Self-effacing as always, Redford, surrounded by his collection of Kachina dolls, diffidently served beer to his guests from behind the bar. His modest posture — "I'm here to listen and learn" — along with his Oscar-winning turn as director of Ordinary People a year later, would earn him the fond sobriquet, "Ordinary Bob," but in fact, it was all a bit much, teetering on the edge of kitsch, an Eddie Bauer theme park, Bobworld. (Later, the gift shop at his resort would be stocked with "Sundance" coolers.) Still, Redford had charisma and passion to spare, and they created a powerful gravitational field.

Explaining the lure of Redford's dream, Liz Manne, who would work for him many years later at the Sundance Channel, speaks for many when she says, "It was a combination of politics and aesthetics. He would talk a lot about the independent vision, and diversity, and the importance of unique voices. You wanted to believe in the shining city over the horizon. There aren't many opportunities in this world to do good work that you really believe in. So to be able to work for a guy who stands for what he stands for, who puts his money where his mouth is, and uses his power and his celebrity in a way that is not ignorant, but very informed, that's fuckin' great. At the beginning, I just felt honored to be a part of the mission. I was one of the true believers, I was a moonie."

At the end of the three days the participants, framed by the snow-capped peaks rising picturesquely behind them, posed for pictures in front of a split-rail fence below his home. When the photo op was over, Redford extended his arm to receive a golden eagle that had been nursed back to health after an injury. He removed its hood and thrust it into the air. As the great bird spread its mighty wings and took flight, catching the updraft and soaring high above them, none of the conferees could have been oblivious to the symbolism — Redford wasn't a movie star-cum-director for nothing — and even the most cynical among them could hardly help blinking back a tear. They were present at the creation. Like the eagle, Sundance was going to fly.

That same year, across the country in Buffalo, two frizzy-haired, unprepossessing brothers from Queens named Weinstein, more at home with pigeons than with eagles, were preparing to move their tiny film company, Miramax, named after their parents, Miriam and Max, down to New York City where the action was. The brothers were anomalies in the world of indie distribution. In contrast to many of their peers, the distributors who began their careers running college film societies in the 1970s, the Weinsteins had come up through the rough-and-tumble world of rock and roll promotion. Says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Classics, "We all reflect where we came from. The rock promotion business is cutthroat. You're fighting for your territory and using intimidating tactics."

In the late 1970s, Harvey Weinstein had acquired the Century Theater in downtown Buffalo, and to keep the seats warm when it was not being used for concerts, he and Bobby, as his brother was then known, began showing movies. When they moved their act to New York City, Bobby became president. But despite his lofty title, he was still Harvey's kid brother. Harvey always stuck up for him, saying things like, "You might not think Bobby's valuable to this company, but he is. And if you don't believe it, you can get the hell out. Don't fuck with my brother." But Bobby wanted to be his own man. One day he announced, "My name is Bob. Call me Bob." The two small-time music promoters set up an office in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment at 211 West 56th St., on the corner of Broadway. It was not a distinguished address. There was a madam working out of the building.

Harvey Weinstein, born in 1952, was a paler, doughier version of Bob, who was two years younger. He looked like what he was, the first pancake off the griddle, before it's quite hot enough. At six feet, 300 pounds and counting, he was larger in every respect than Bob, with eyes like olive pits staring out of a round, pasty face, neck like a fireplug, and hands as big as lamb chops. Someone, in other words, it might be prudent to cross the street to avoid. With his collar open, shirttails out, and dark crescents of sweat under his armpits, he looked like Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men.

Harvey could always be found with a Diet Coke in one hand and a True Blue in the other, chain-smoking, not so much inhaling as vacuuming up the entire cigarette, smoke, paper, tobacco, and all, one after another, pack after pack. The assistants learned to buy Coke by the case, cigarettes by the carton, candy bars by the gross, or at least it seemed that way, as if Harvey were a founding member of Sam's Club. He was a man of large appetites. Watching him feed was an experience not easily forgotten. It brought to mind the great scenes of movie gluttony — anything from La Grande Bouffe or the spectacular sequence in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life where a ravenous diner explodes like an overblown balloon. Always working on his weight, Harvey in the early days ate lunches that consisted of a tunafish salad sandwich on rye, toasted, a slice of American cheese, and the inevitable Diet Coke. But then he would chase it with a side or two of french fries as if to reward himself for his restraint. As Bingham Ray, a founding partner of October Films and now head of United Artists, once put it, bending over to mime a close look at an imaginary chest, " 'So Harvey, what did you have for lunch today? Let's see, pea soup, pizza, salad, custard.' That's why Harvey has started wearing black shirts."

Rather than trying to smooth the rough edges, Harvey flaunted them, tried to turn them into pluses. Even though he was known as someone whose word at times meant nothing, he fashioned a reputation for truth telling. He knew that the sweat, the food stains, the slovenly dress, the inner demons writ large on his battered face could be made to send a message, one that went, to quote Popeye, "I yam what I yam." And in the world of appearances — of Armani suits and 500SLs — in which he operated, as often as not, it worked. People admired his fidelity to his nature and often forgave him his sins. As Matt Damon puts it, "It's the old tale of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion's sitting on the bank of a river, and a frog walks by, and the scorpion says, 'Take me to the other side.' The frog replies, 'No, because when we get to the other side, you're gonna sting me, you're gonna kill me.' The scorpion says, 'I would never do that, please, I'm asking you for a favor, I can't swim, I need your help to get me to the other side of the river.' The frog finally agrees, takes him across on his back, and just as they get to the other side, the scorpion stings the frog. As the frog is dying, he says, 'Why did you do that?' The scorpion just looks down at him and says, 'Because I'm a scorpion, it's my nature.' It's the same with Harvey. It's his nature."

Harvey loved the limelight and could make himself extremely appealing. He liked, in fact, to be liked. He was funny, wielding a wicked, slashing wit that he could use on himself when he wanted to or just as easily turn against others, reducing grown men to tears. When he was on a roll, no one was funnier. Speaking of somebody or other, he once said, "He's the kinda guy, you gotta hold his hand when you're chopping off his head!"

And dwelling somewhere within Harvey's breast was the heart of — if not a poet, at least a cinéaste. He genuinely loved movies, A movies, B movies, horror, sci-fi, comedy, musicals, kung-fu, all kinds of movies, but particularly he adored foreign films, art films, "specialty" films. He loved to tell the story about going to see The 400 Blows when he was fourteen, which he believed, for reasons best known to himself, to be a sex film, but during the course of the hour and a half he spent in the theater, he was transported by the magic of François Truffaut. Says Mark Lipsky, Miramax head of distribution in the late 1980s, "I've heard that story — 'I saw 400 Blows, it changed my life' — a zillion times. It's significant that Harvey tells that story, not Bob."

Bob, dressed in black, always seemed a little off, uncomfortable in his own skin, as if he were not in the right place, but in some world of his own. If Harvey was bigger than life, Bob was smaller, more intense, a reduction, l'essence d'Herve. If Harvey was the outside guy, Bob was the inside guy. He was quieter, preferred to stay in the shadows. It didn't matter to Bob if he were liked or not.

Despite what Bob told the press — "We're artists. We're not interested in money" — he didn't much care about Truffaut. As former Miramax executive Patrick McDarrah succinctly put it, "This business is about ego and greed. Harvey is ego, Bob is greed." Bob liked exploitation flicks, commercial product that could go direct to video. He was focussed on the bottom line. Whatever the movie, he always wanted to know, "Are we gonna make money on it, Harve?"

If Harvey wore his heart on his sleeve, Bob was opaque, subject to extreme mood swings. "You can't really tell what's going on in Bob's mind," says Mark Tusk, who would become one of the most effective of the acquisitions shock troops in the mid-1990s. "He will turn on a dime."

Sundance and Miramax, the twin towers of the indie world, will cast long shadows across this tale. But in 1979, they were no more than dreams. Around the same time that Redford's eagle had taken wing and the Weinsteins had come to ground in New York, three modest indie features opened quietly to respectful reviews and decent business. None had the seismic impact of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's not-just-a-biker-movie, and all wore their earnestness conspicuously on their sleeves, but for those who hungered for an alternative to the slick, overproduced, and empty studio fare, they were cause for rejoicing. One was called Alambrista! (1978), directed by Robert M. Young, and produced by Michael Hausman; the second was Northern Lights (1978), written and directed by Rob Nilsson and John Hanson; and the third was Heartland (1979), directed by Richard Pearce and produced by Annick Smith. Alambrista! told the story of the struggles of a Mexican illegal to find work in the United States. Northern Lights paid tribute to the hardscrabble radicalism of the immigrant farmers who settled North Dakota and formed the Non-Partisan League to protect themselves against the big banks, granaries, and railroads. Heartland focused on the trials and tribulations of a stouthearted widow who braves the harshness of the turn-of-the-century West to homestead on her own. Whereas the twitchy, paranoid Easy Rider regarded the vast expanse of country between the two coasts as a redneck free-fire zone, Nilsson and Hanson, Pearce and Smith, celebrated it as, precisely, the heartland. All three films were made by Vietnam generation filmmakers, and all were marbled by a residue of its politics. Later, in the 1980s, the kind of salt-of-the-earth regionalism these films celebrated would degenerate into mindless boosterism for barnyards and square dancing, Garrison Keillor-style, but in the beginning they stood out like lonely sentries against the Hollywood hordes.

In 1978, Sandra Schulberg, the associate producer of Northern Lights, helped found the Independent Feature Project, the first institutional brick in the indie infrastructure. IFP conducted a series of seminars about working outside the system — how to raise money, how to produce, how to distribute yourself — it was like inventing the wheel. The goal was simple — to plug American indies into the distribution system already in place for foreign films — but the execution was anything but. Still, in 1980, the indies' Easy Rider finally appeared in the modest guise of John Sayles's The Return of the Secaucus 7, which, championed by the New York Times's Vincent Canby, played to surprisingly strong box office — an extraordinary $2-million gross. Despite their obvious differences, the two films were strikingly similar, with the autumnal Secaucus 7 mourning a revolution that failed, a gloss on Fonda's famous line, "We blew it." Unlike Rocky, Superman, and Porky's et al., Sayles's film dealt with a serious subject — the post-war exhaustion of the peace movement — that affected and might conceivably interest real people. "Financing really didn't exist when we started," says Sayles. "It was hard to get an independent script to an actor, and you didn't bother going to a studio unless your script was commercial. And even then if you weren't connected through an agent, they wouldn't read it. Independent films were truly on the outside." The Secaucus 7 cost a mere $60,000 out of pocket, was entirely financed by Sayles himself, and could never have been made at a studio — although, in a preview of things to come, it was appropriated by Columbia and morphed into The Big Chill.

The Secaucus 7 was followed by films like Louis Malle's My Dinner with André (1981) that grossed $1.9 million; Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing (1982) that did $1 million; Paul Bartel's Eating Raoul (1982) that did $4.7 million; Greg Nava's El Norte (1984) that took in $2.2 million; and a string of John Waters pictures featuring Divine, Mink Stole, and the rest of his patented menagerie of weirdos. In 1984, Jim Jarmusch made Stranger Than Paradise, which cost almost nothing and grossed $2.5 million. The same year, the Coen brothers, Joel, who had gone to NYU film school, and Ethan, who did not, made a wonderfully nasty film noir called Blood Simple for next to nothing that grossed $2.1 million. And another NYU graduate, Spike Lee, broke through with She's Gotta Have It in 1986 that grossed a phenomenal $7.1 million. David Lynch made his mark with Eraserhead (1977), and then Blue Velvet in 1986. It soon became clear that where before there had been a trickle of poorly funded documentaries, supplemented by the occasional underfinanced grainy feature, there was now a comparative flood of slick, reasonably well-produced theatrical pictures, some of which benefitted from the unprecedented level of public support by the National Endowments during the Jimmy Carter years. Suddenly, there seemed to be an indie movement that had people who care about film practically dancing in the streets. For the organizers of Sundance, the hope was that these home-grown filmmakers would generate the energy, excitement, and box office that Ingmar Bergman, the Italians, and the French New Wave had enjoyed in the 1960s.

But the few distributors with enough clout to command decent screens, like UA Classics, where Ira Deutchman, Tom Bernard, and Michael Barker cut their teeth, still primarily dealt in foreign films, which were successful enough that by the early 1980s, almost every studio had its own classics division. For the most part, American indies were still a curiosity, without a demonstrable audience. In 1982, Deutchman left UA Classics to team up with Amir Malin and John Ives to form a new company called Cinecom. "The studios were bidding up the price on the name-brand foreign films, the Truffauts, Fellinis, Bergmans, way out of proportion to what they could earn," he recalls. "As a startup, we said, 'We can't compete with what all these other people are doing. What can we do that's different?' We started tapping into what was just beginning to be called American independent films. It wasn't, 'This is the next big thing,' it was really just running away from what we knew we couldn't afford." As former Miramax distribution VP Eamonn Bowles puts it, "Specialized film was a rarefied little field. If a film did a couple of million dollars, 'Wow, that was great!' You could manage your assets, make sure you didn't get hurt, and eke out a modest profit."

But indie films had one advantage that would turn out to be decisive. Cinecom had the good fortune to open its doors right at the beginning of the video boom. "Many of these startup video companies were so hungry for product to put on their shelves that anything with sprocket holes was worth a certain amount of money to them," explains Deutchman. "Those folks had no interest whatsoever in foreign language films because people didn't want to read subtitles. These American films, despite the fact that they didn't reach a large audience theatrically, were worth something on video."

Video wiped out the foreign film market overnight and, along with cable and European public television, fueled the explosion of American indies with a gusher of money. Companies like Vestron, RCA/Columbia Home Video, and Live Entertainment began funneling cash directly into the production pipeline. Meanwhile, with Deutchman in charge of acquisitions, Cinecom released a string of hits, including Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, which took in $5.5 million; Spalding Gray's monologue film, Swimming to Cambodia, which did $1 million; and Sayles's third film, Brother from Another Planet (1986), which only cost Cinecom $400,000 and grossed $3.7 million.

Older distributors, like New Yorker Films, New Line, and the Samuel Goldwyn Company, also fattened themselves at the video trough, while litters of newbies scampered between their legs. UA Classics had been started