Author Sees Bigger Clout for Indie Film Firms

Five years ago, the buzz in Hollywood’s studio commissaries was all about author Peter Biskind and his “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” It was a sex, drugs and rock-drenched look at a generation of film icons -- Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg -- who revived a near-dead movie industry only to see the era’s creative flame doused by commercial success.

Now Biskind is back, and with an unexpected message: Things are actually getting better in the film business.

The author’s “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film” is set for publication by Simon & Schuster Inc. next week and serialization in Vanity Fair’s February issue.

In a conversation with The Times, Biskind argued that Hollywood was finding a new balance between art and commerce, thanks to healthy friction between major entertainment corporations and their own captive independent divisions. That tension erupted recently when Oscar-hungry film units such as Miramax Film wound up at odds with piracy-panicked parents such as Walt Disney Co. over a seemingly innocuous issue -- an industrywide ban on the distribution of free screening copies during awards season. The controversy, Biskind said, showed that tiny corporate units, almost unnoticed, had blossomed into surprising importance.

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Question: You’ve been looking closely at the independent film business for four years now. What have you concluded?

Answer: I’m actually optimistic. I think that we’re in a pretty good period for independent film, pace the screener controversy. In fact, the screener controversy is interesting in two respects that are dialectically related. In the first place, I think it demonstrated how invisible [the independents are] to people who handed down an edict literally without understanding these companies. They made a decision in total ignorance and disregard of these entities. On the other hand, they were astonished at the backlash and the power that these people had. They checkmated them. So I think the way the whole thing played out showed how important independents had become.

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Q: Why “invisible”?

A: I think most of the players in Hollywood are hard-pressed to identify, other than a couple of directors like [Quentin] Tarantino and [Steven] Soderbergh, some fairly major people in the independent world. It’s always been pretty invisible, partly because it’s based in New York. When I started writing, I would ask people whom they considered important. They would say, no one knows anything about these people. I heard this over and over again. Yet they’re winning Oscars left and right.

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Q: Who are the key figures?

A: Harvey and Bob [Weinstein, of Miramax]. James Schamus and David Linde at Focus. Mark Gill at Warner. Tom Bernard and Michael Barker at Sony Classics. The folks at Lions Gate. The Fox Searchlight people. There’s an independent mafia that goes back to the ‘80s. People that all grew up together. People who know each other and worked together for years and were rivals.

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Q: Have you calculated what percentage of film industry dollars and cents come from the independents?

A: No, I haven’t. My suspicion is that it’s really small. But I think the cultural effect is huge. I think there was a kind of exchange of DNA [between independent film units and corporate parents]. When Disney bought Miramax, I think “Pulp Fiction” became a great example. There was a melding of studio values and independent values. So you got a whole slew of films that had big Hollywood stars. “Pulp Fiction” was maybe the first important one. But more recently you had “About Schmidt” with Jack Nicholson, “Adaptation” with Nicolas Cage, “Lost in Translation” with Bill Murray. You have bigger projects with bigger stars.

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Q: What companies have best learned lessons from their independent divisions?

A: That’s difficult. The Disney-Miramax marriage, which everyone said would never work, has indeed been extremely contentious. But it has really been the most successful of all and has never been replicated. I think you’d have to say the lesson Disney learned, because in many ways they had no choice, was “Hands off! Let them do what they want.” Also, Sony Classics at Sony has had that kind of relationship.

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Q: What corporations have done the least to capitalize on the independents’ surge?

A: Warner has been the last company to jump on the bandwagon. Warner, going back to the [Bob] Daly-[Terry] Semel regime, has always been associated with big-budgeted Hollywood movies. In the time of studio dinosaurs, they were the brontosaurus. They were the least adapted, until finally those films stopped making money. The films had worn out their welcome. It still remains to be seen how serious they are. I think also Paramount lagged behind.

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Q: Have we come to a place where no major film company can succeed without accommodating the independent world?

A: I think that’s an overstatement or an exaggeration. It gets back to the question about how much of the bottom line these divisions account for. I don’t know that they’re absolutely essential to the economic well-being of the studios. But I do think Miramax is making a huge contribution to Disney.