Rating: 
Summary: Inaccurate, but wildly entertaining and fun read
Review: The reviewer vitaminj is right on the money...this book has got to be one of the most addictive can't-put-em-down type books and is so engrossing, engaging and interesting right from the get go that it should be a quick read. Of course the reason for this is that in all honesty Biskind is nothing more than a gossip columnist. His choice of words, editing, the way he sneaks quotes and double-truths on top of one another and foreshadows certain events to keep the reader wanting more are all mostly associated with gossip/Page Six type writing and not real journalism. To put it bluntly, Biskind is not J. Hoberman or Jonathan Rosenbaum, but a very talented writer who bends many facts and quotes (80% of the quotes from his "Easy Riders..." book were wildly overexagerated and flubbed around to make the story better) to suit his own needs. Still, despite those faults, this book is undeniably entertaining and fun to read, you will not be bored! Recommended read.
Rating:
Summary: Absorbing as ever, but...
Review: There are two unavoidable criticisms attached to Peter Biskind's recount of the Independent movie era of the 90's, and they both do and don't have merit to them. First is that the book is, essentially, also swallowed by the figure of Harvey Weinstein, destroying careers and making enemies with one tantrum after another. The other is that there just isn't enough love of movies, at least not to the extent of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, perhaps the most definitive book ever written about what it means to be a movie artist and movie businessman. As for Harvey, I find his character the center of Down & Dirty Pictures in a way that reads like a great soap opera villain, if not a great antihero - his rants and explosions are the maniacal work of a movie lover who just couldn't quite be an artist - a Salieri to a Mozart. His is the figure you love to hate, the raging cloud of doom hovering over one career after another - which is a compliment to Biskind's ability to characterize. The other criticism, though, is far more valid. Despite its occasional praise on the occasional unsung great movie (Out of Sight, In The Bedroom), I think Down & Dirty is plagued by having just too much ground to cover. Not only are there a dozen or more important movies, both in and out of Miramax, that are totally ignored (Blair Witch and Boogie Nights both changed the industry in their own way, and both merit about a sentence to Biskind), but the focus of the movies we do see can tend to even softpedal the story of what went on - for example, although the stint of Harvey's insanely aggressive marketing of Chocolat is brought up, it's Oscar campaign is almost wholly ignored. Biskind could probably fill a second volume of this book, one that will certainly be a point of major importance for all future discussion about the era as a whole, because what's here, even at its most absorbing, feels like the quickest 15 years you'll ever experience.
Rating: 
Summary: **
Review: This book had a hard act to follow from the author's previous book, so it suffers from that. I'm not someone who sees every movie released, so I didn't see a lot of films mentioned in this book. My main interest was in the Robert Redford section, and the reputed dirt on him wasn't so bad. He's passive aggressive, and took advantage of his position to gain control of material, and didn't return calls and is chronically late. Not gossipy enough for my taste! The overrated Tarentino's delusions of grandeur were interesting to read about. But, just as a fan of the film, I was disappointed no mention of the film SPUN was included. SPUN is about as indie as you can get, and was the best indie film of the past five years.
Rating:
Summary: Pete Biskind and his Hatchet
Review: This book is a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. It is a very good example of investigative journalism and also an example of poor editing. Please don't include everything you learned. Maybe he needed Harvey Weinstein to edit the book!What is good is a very detailed (perhaps too much so) look at the evolution of independent films from "Sex, Lies, & Videotapes" to the current state of independent films approaching the Hollywood route. There is no question he did exhaustive research and while he has been criticized for doing a hatchet job on Miramax and Redford, there are too many stories with the same theme for the portrait painted to not be substantially correct IMO. If you are a fan of film, whether you are a casual weekend fan of Hollywood fare or a student of serious film, there is something here for you. But generally this will be of interest if you enjoy following the business side of films and how the personalities affect this. However, the book also does a great job overlaying the careers of Steve Soderberg, Quentin Tarantino and Damon/Affleck in enough detail for the fans of "stars". The Damon/Affleck section is particularly interesting as it showed two kids viewed as actors making a conscious effort to tap into the indie craze to get their break in the business. In many respects it's like the old Stallone/Rocky story of having the screenplay and forcing Hollywood to use the author as the star. Now for the negative. His earlier book "Easy Rider/Raging Bull" covered the 70s film explosion in great depth. It appears he was trying to recreate the magic in this book. While the evolution of independent films is a worthwhile subject, what he ended up with is a book about Miramax with brief interludes about other stories that can almost be distractive. Just look at the title where he tries to throw too much explanation. To me, this is an unauthorized biography of Miramax. That's OK. There's plenty to cover there and he did it quite well. But to continue the charade by occasionally throwing in visits to the mess @ Sundance just distracts the reader. Maybe he thought it would help sell books by throwing some dirt on Redford. This book is a real commitment. It is long, detailed reading that takes time. But the payoff is worth it. It easy to see while you are reading that there will be many upset executives and I doubt he will have as much access if he makes another attempt at a Hollywood subject. Overall, I recommend this book for serious readers of Hollywood or the business of Hollywood
Rating: 
Summary: Well-Researched, Fascinating, Alarming
Review: This book is essentially a history of Miramax, the mother of all indie distributors, and its Don-like founders, the execrable Weinstein Brothers, with a "sub-plot" running through the book about Robert Redford's Sundance Festival, as well as the rest of the so-called "Independent" Film Movement. It's an ugly story about horrible people and, since I don't particularly admire very many films that sprang out of the Indie movement, underfinanced and amateurish movies.
After reading this book you may very well feel like taking a shower -- or many showers. You may even consider jettisoning your DVD collection in order to protect your family from inadvertently poisoning themselves with whatever virus has destroyed the hearts, souls, and morals of the movers and the shakers of the film industry, indie or otherwise.
Prospective auteurs should read this book in order to understand the sort of sub-human monsters and almost insurmountable odds they will be facing when they attempt to get financing and distribution rights for their film. On the other hand, maybe they shouldn't read it, because it very well may goad them into another career choice in a less vicious industry -- say politics, for example.
All in all, this is a great, well-researched, fascinating book about a brutally ugly subject. Those prone to misanthropy should perhaps avoid it.
Rating:
Summary: A Dynamic View of What it Takes to Make a Film
Review: This book was written by Peter Biskind who was the executive editor of Premiere Magazine and is also the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It is a very readable history of the independent film business from its beginnings as sub-titled foreign movies in art houses to the development of American films made outside of the studio system. Central to this story is the rise of Miramax and the Sundance Institute, Festival and Channel. Sundance was formed to help new talent develop their projects and give advice on script development, shooting and editing problems. This helped some filmmakers complete a feature length movie. Also at this time other people from film schools developed feature length pictures using their own resources. Usually these pictures were made with the film makers own funds or funds borrowed from their friends or parents Miramax a distributing company that bought films and released them in the United States began buying these pictures usually at the cost of production with a promise of back end participation if the film made money. Harvey and Bob Weinstein ran the company. Harvey would take a budding auteur's artistic vision and recut it to make it more commercial. This usually was done after first screening it before a preview audience. The result was that suddenly pictures which had no chance of recovering their production expenses began to turn a profit after Miramax bought the picture and bore the expense of post production, publicity and advertising. Miramax then took on the awards ceremonies spending the money and time to get nominations and awards for their most worthy actors, directors and pictures. This became possible when every Academy member was sent a videotape (later the DVDs we've heard so much about) of the films in contention. This meant that independent pictures that only got a limited play or no play in some cities could be seen and voted on by all the academy members. A second aspect to this was that the press also received a videotape or DVD and they could be lobbied to publicize the independent pictures nominated. Also of course the Golden Globes Awards voted on by the Foreign Press Association became a tracking award for the Academy Awards because of the distribution of tapes and later DVDS. One thing that wasn't clear in the book was how a film gets nominated in the first place. Also hinted at is the fact that many Academy members are older than the typical moviegoer, but the book does not tell us what this means as how it effects the films and talent voted on. The Sundance film Festival also became an important showcase for new filmmakers to market their films. Soon the studios took notice that a small film could be a significant profit center and started or bought their own independent film subsidiaries. Sony Classics, Focus Films (Universal), Fox Searchlight, October Films and others all became studio subsidiaries. Of course the biggest fish of the group, Miramax, was bought by Disney and given an acquisitions budget of Eight Hundred Million Dollars !!! This turned the business on its head. In the beginning most independent films were made for less than a million dollars. The indie movement came of age and pictures that would have had only limited release in art houses located in the big cities started to have wider releases into the malls across the country. Acting stars like Gwenth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Billy Bob Thornton were created almost overnight and so were directors like Quentin Tarrentino and Steven Soderberg. Under the studio system it would have taken these people twenty years, if ever, to reach the status they did in a few years under the independent film system. However the system changed when Miramax began to produce films on its own instead of buying the offerings of new talent and marketing them. The expenditures for production were ten or twenty times the cost of a true independent film and acting stars and star directors were needed to guarantee box office return. Miramax boxed itself into the same financial straitjacket the studios are in. It became more and more of a producer than a marketing organization which could take a new filmmakers first film and market it profitably thus giving the nascent filmmaker a chance at a second film and a career. Also established talents were less likely to work for scale as bigger profits were realized. However the possibility of doing more serious work and achieving artistic recognition through the awards has kept established actors and directors interested in doing independent films which have more creative freedom and are thus more likely to generate awards than the studio genre fare.
Briskind's thesis is that the production costs and marketing budgets have become so swollen that what was once an industry giving new talent a chance has become a miniature studio system with its own stars and directors. It is no longer concerned with the small budget personal films of first time directors but driven to make commercial films which needed greater and greater returns to sustain the overhead. The result; the first time filmmaker is being squeezed off even the art house screens or his or her work is not given long enough runs to gather an audience. Even Sundance became commercially minded shifting its orientation from helping new talent to sometimes looking for properties to produce. It also became a market place for the commercial interests to scout new talent for their systems. Briskind makes the point that independent films, where once artistic vision was the primary focus, have now been so commercialized that money considerations dominate what gets made to the detriment of the artists vision. The studio subsidiaries now scoop any up one that makes a successful first film but there are no second chances for those who show promise but tried and failed. Briskind has documented his thesis with fact after fact and quote after quote. However this bookis not just a fact tomb. He has profiled and analyzed many of the players large and small praising and skewering the most dedicated (those that refuse to commercialize their artistic instincts) to the mightiest like Harvey Weinstein and Robert Redford. This was a fascinating and insightful book on the subject matter, well written and well documented. Any one interested in films should read this book. Edsopinion.com
Rating:
Summary: Encyclopedic
Review: This is a fascinating book, but it will be of interest mainly to people with an intense fascination in the business of making independent films. Still, for anyone sharing this passion, DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES is an encyclopedia. Author Peter Biskind cannot have omitted a single detail in the complex history of this industry. As such, the book's greatest virtue also is its largest flaw. As is common in this type of scholarly work, the very thoroughness of his research does, in spots, make for boring reading. There cannot be a detail which escapes his notice, or a participant whom he failed to interview. Some of his anecdotes about Harvey Weinstein, the head of Miramax Films, alone would make DOWN AND DIRTY worth the hours of reading time. For anyone with a curiosity about the independent film business, DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES is the definitive book.
Rating: 
Summary: A good read, but I wanted more... and less....
Review: When Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" came out, I spent almost a week with my nose buried in it. Its stories about the great filmmakers of the 60's and 70's were thoroughly captivating, endlessly entertaining and (as with the best gossip) occasionally a bit questionable. So when I heard Biskind was working on a follow-up, to focus on the indie film era of the late 80's and 90's, I was all down with that. One could, potentially, write 10,000 pages on the subject. So Biskind focuses his gaze to concentrate mostly on Sundance and Miramax, the Weinstein's and their colleagues (Soderbergh, Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Billy Bob Thornton, Matt and Ben). There's a lot of surprising stuff here. And, unlike with "Easy Riders," it's not stuff that happened decades ago. It's backstories from recent movies, some of which are thoroughly astonishing. While that scaled-back approach gives the book a more wieldy structure, it also leaves one hungry for more information on, say, the Coen Brothers, Wes and P.T. Anderson, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, et al. John Pierson's "Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes" covered a lot of that territory, but still... I'm disappointed Biskind doesn't dig deeper into the production and lore of, say, "Boogie Nights" or "Magnolia" or "Dazed and Confused." Meanwhile, he loads on the details of the economic aspects of the business, but in such a fast and loose way it's occasionally confusing. For a book with a footnote that explains a simple term like "turnaround," it's frequently, surprisingly opaque with the numbers and the ins-and-outs of complicated deals. Nevertheless: Good book, kept me riveted for a few days, it's just a shame Biskind couldn't cram as much detail between the covers as he did with "Easy Riders."
Rating:
Summary: A timely sobering assessment of the indie film dream
Review: When Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls came out, I thought I had had my fill of the 70s New Hollywood, but that book made me see the period afresh without the usual mythologizing. The American independent film boom of the nineties, which became symbolized for the mainstream media by The Sundance Institute and Festival and Harvey and Bob Weinstein's Miramax, is the subject of this equally well written, well researched and engrossing tome. This is a particularly brave book because so many players have a vested interest in keeping the idea of "independent cinema" alive even if the truly innovative and maverick filmmakers remain a minority in America film, while much of the highly touted product promoted by Miramax and New Line is as exciting, dangerous or refreshing as a prestige picture from the factory system of the 30s and 40s (but with less staying power). Unlike Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the filmmakers here emerge as nicer, more earnest, generally focused on their craft and less in love with the perks of success. Biskind saves most of his critique for the mini-majors like Miramax, the passive-agressive tendencies of a certain New Hollywood superstar, and the cynical goldrush mentality that has turned a nice little film festival into an uber-Cannes nightmare for desperate young filmmakers. A great book that I hope signals a sea-change in the current state of entertainment journalism. Yeah right. Well, it is still a great book anyway.
Rating:
Summary: The Neverending Story
Review: While Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is a very informative, engaging book about filmmaking in the 70's, his take on the evolution of the indie world in his endless, 500+ page "Down and Dirty" is disappointing. The book seems to have an anti-Miramax, anti-Weinstein brothers, anti-Robert Redford agenda, which clouds many of Biskind's sometimes interesting, somewhat worthwhile insights, perspectives and anecdotes into some of the main players in the indie world. Repeated spelling, grammar and punctuation errors and the endless space dedicated to whining complainers suggest that Biskind's editor did him no favors. Perhaps Biskind would have been better served taking more time in reviewing the material and focusing more on other key filmmakers and/or the evolution of documentaries and documentarians like Michael Moore. There is certainly enough controversy and juicy stuff surrounding that guy. While the Redford negativity can easily be explained by his decision not to participate in the tome, the Weinstein anecdotes (Biskind explains how Brother Harvey participated) are sometimes entertaining but get very tired and way too mean-spirited too quickly. Can these guys really be that bad and so devoid of goodness? Didn't they have something to do with the Concert for New York? The book contains an extensive catalog of Weinstein stories, some funny, but many that seem like they are just a chance for competitors and disgruntled former employees to get back at the Weinstein brothers. I wanted to learn more about the industry and about the movies themselves, not about some of these two bit players who Biskind acknowledges failed to succeed in their own efforts. Biskind gets off the subject by telling Weinstein stories involving political events in 2000 (to Biskind's credit the details are incredible). If the book was 200 pages shorter and/or offered a wider perspective, it would have been more interesting. Having been in Sundance a few times myself, it seems to me like Weinstein and Redford are still kings... but this book leaves me asking who are the princes?
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