Word: biskind
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Stories like this rarely make the sunny spots on Entertainment Tonight, but they fill practically every page of Down and Dirty Pictures (Simon & Schuster; 544 pages), an expose of the independent-film business by longtime show-biz journalist Peter Biskind. The book is being released just in time for the Sundance Film Festival, that hotbed of indie-film deals that starts in snowy Park City, Utah, this week. Biskind--whose last book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, chronicled how the sex-drugs-and-rock generation revolutionized 1970s cinema--has done some exploratory surgery on the underbelly of the indie-film scene...
...sees the 1970s in movies as an interregnum between the old studio system and today's blockbuster machine, when idiosyncratic directors were able to persuade the moneymen to bankroll dark, even cynical, movies like MASH and Network for a mass audience. It's a familiar thesis--see Peter Biskind's 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls--but well fleshed out with interviews with big names (Scorsese, Coppola, Altman) who rise to the always daunting challenge of explaining why their work was so darn brilliant. The best insights come from actress Julie Christie, who distills the theme of '70s movies...