BY ANDREW MOODY

“Had the Weinsteins been born seventy five years earlier, they might have been found running numbers on Hester Street, bootlegging whiskey, or sitting across a card table from Louis Lepke, the head of Murder Incorporated.”

In the years following Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein’s arrest, trial and conviction for sex offences, Hollywood has been in a state of free fall. Weinstein was arrested and charged with rape in New York in May 2018, and was found guilty of two of five felonies in February 2020. The former Oscar winner was sentenced to 23 years in prison and began serving his sentence at Wende Correctional Facility. His earliest possible release date is November 9, 2039, when he will be 87 years old.

Peter Biskind’s 2004 historical study of 90s indie cinema Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, remains compulsive reading, but in a different way to his 1998 classic bestseller on 70s film Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs and Rock n Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. With all of the ruined careers, criminal charges and genuine nastiness exposed publicly of the 90s independent filmmakers and their hangers on, Biskind’s book on Harvey Weinstein’s reign as the king of Hollywood now seems perversely suspect. 

In one of the many interviews with Peter Biskind, Harvey Weinstein was quoted as saying:

“I’m not the kind of Jew who marches politely to the gas chamber. I’m the kind of Jew who says, I’m gonna track you down and kill you, you SS fuck – and your family.”

Back in 2004 when Miramax still ran Hollywood, these words may have meant something different, a kind of hip, Tarantino style machismo and wit. Now, in the cold light of day, with Weinstein a convicted rapist, it’s hard not to find them deeply troubling. From his humble New York Jewish upbringing in Queens, working with younger brother Bob in the cutthroat music industry, Harvey gained enormous power within the indie film industry, having an evident talent for self promotion, as well as discovering burgeoning talents such as Steven Soderburgh (writer/director of Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989)), and Quentin Tarantino with his striking debut Reservoir Dogs (1992), as well as keeping a stable of fine actors like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Sadly, Biskind (now in his 80’s) had enjoyed an enormously successful career as a film critic and writer until Weinstein’s arrest and conviction. As a teenager in the 90s, I devoured many of his books, including his scintillating study of 1950s Hollywood Seeing is Believing: Or How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (1983).

His masterpiece could well be his 2010 biography: Star: Or How Warren Beatty Seduced America, which combines the detailed research and knowledge of seventies cinema with the fascinating career of Warren Beatty, possibly the biggest movie star of New Hollywood. However, when Biskind chose (unwisely) to attempt a history of post-digital American cinema to “explain” Trump’s presidency and the Liberal Hollywood perspective on US politics: The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism (2018), just around the time of Weinstein’s arrest and the start of the traumatic #MeToo phenomenon, it was a case of too little too late. Widely panned by the critical press, The Sky is Falling seems likely to be the last words published by a formerly ingenious, bestselling writer.

As for the “great” artists of the 1990s, it’s clear that game is up. Awful pictures like Soderburgh’s Beneath the Candelabra (2013) and Tarantino’s excruciatingly bad The Hateful Eight (2015) seem indicative of the end of an era.

Reading it again all these years later, one of the main attractions for the curious minded film fan is to see where the lies end and where they begin. If nothing else, Biskind very clearly knows where all the bodies are buried. Most damning of all is the fact that Down and Dirty Pictures has now been redacted from Wikipedia. If you do choose to read it, bear in mind that this is a very serious, very malevolent attempt to paper over one of the worst scandals in American history.