Down and Dirty Pictures

by Peter Biskind

As Quentin Tarantino puts it, “Independent filmmakers don’t make money. They’ll spend all the money they have to make the movie. Money they don’t have. Their parents’ money. Steal money, go into debt for the rest of their lives. The movie can be as good as it’s gonna be, or as bad as it’s gonna be, but it’s theirs.”

It was once said, if Hollywood is like the Mafia, indies are like the Russian mob. In both cases, the bad guys will cap the good guys, but in Hollywood they do it with a certain degree of finesse—they send a basket of fruit over for your assistant afterward—while the indies just whack you—and your wife and kids for good measure.

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.

If Hollywood made “movies,” indies made “films.” If Hollywood sold fantasy and escapism, indies thrived on realism and engagement. If Hollywood avoided controversial subjects, indies embraced them.

Alarmed, Film Finances, the completion bond company, sent David Korda, the son of Zoltan Korda, who directed the 1939 version of The Four Feathers, and was a member of the famous British film family, to the set.

Universal, which had picked up the film in the waning days of the Frank Price regime, probably for its soundtrack, unceremoniously dumped it. Says Tom Pollock, who succeeded Price, “What was done to it is what Harvey has done to so many other movies since.”

Brantley herself came from Granada, the crème de la crème of British production companies.

disheveled Brit named Nik Powell. Powell and his partner, Steve Woolley, a clever, boyish-looking young man with fine features who wore his brown hair gathered into a ponytail, ran Palace Pictures.

Miramax, like every distributor, took its costs off the top, and was accused of “grossing up” movies, spending what would have been the filmmaker’s cut on marketing to drive up grosses, thus swelling its share of the profits, while raising the profile of the company—a not uncommon practice in the industry.

“Distribution costs on an independent film should always be only direct, out-of-pocket costs—the cash spent on that one, specific movie. Second, there should be real, documented, invoiced expenses.”

the Orson Welles in Cambridge or the Landmark Theaters or the Laemmles in L.A. You didn’t put art films in certain theaters, because you bastardized them, you commercialized them.

In short, Harvey was McMiramaxing foreign films.

Harvey demanded they shorten it; they refused. According to Ivory, Miramax “withheld the last payment of the money that they’d owed to us, and of course we needed that money to pay the lab and the recording studio, and the interest on the bank loan. Even though I had final cut, he thought if he held the money back, we might cave in. We told Paul what was happening, and Paul got on the phone to Harvey and said, ‘Lay off and pay ’em,’ so they did.” Merchant didn’t talk to Harvey for ten years.

One of his triumphs at Skouras had been High Hopes, which he had picked up and made into a modest hit.