Down and Dirty Pictures (Peter Biskind)

AMAZON I think two things when I read books like this--nasty, dirty, tell-all gossip-spreaders. Thing #1: Boy, this guy likes to dish, but he never really mentions the fact that his dishing career would be nothing without those he's dishing about. It's the symbiotic relationship of the gossip columnist, which, when understood, leads to: Thing #2: Boy, gossip sure is fun and funny. It reinforces all of those Hollywood stereotypes we love to love, while carefully neglecting all those normal relationships that don't make good reading. From what I understand, Biskind tends to build his hypothesis and then bend the interviews to match it, rather than the decidedly more scientific way. But hey, he's no scientist. He's a gossip columnist, right? Well, at least one subject (Ben Affleck) has complained that he was asked to interview under the impression he adding to balanced journalistic look at the rise of Independent Film, instead of a manual on why Harvey Weinstein and Robert Redford are bad, bad people with questionable personal habits. Actually, a website has sprung up (which I'm sure Miramax had nothing to do with) speaking out against him, with the sparky name of http://www.biskindblows.com, although not all the links are good. Three things annoyed me: 1. Biskind's hateful movie reviews, which he'd tack in on the end of a sentence as if his few words explain the reason these films didn't do so well (most of the reviews were for films that tanked). He'd just throw them in off the cuff, as if these opinions were not only common knoweledge (nobody disagrees over film, after all), but that the common knoweledge is just something he plucked of the tree of opinion to color his sentence, instead of making the book partly about his opinions instead of the "facts." 2. Early on he calls to task all those people "too afraid" to speak out against the characters he's set his sights on. Well, it's never good business to talk turkey against people you still want to do business with, but more than that, isn't this a case of the light drinker who tells the alcoholic that he doesn't have a problem? If you tell Biskind you'd rather not comment, suddenly you're a coward and must be suffering under the heavy weight of oppression from those you won't speak out against. 3. The index sucks. I found two or three mistakes and non-entries without even trying. Speilberg said his previous book was all lies, and maybe this one is too, but if you love movie gossip then you'll enjoy reading these lies as much as you enjoy the lies of the people they lie about. You know, those grandiose expensive lies they project onto those big sparkly screens. Personally, I love 'em to death. Where we saw it: Book | We deign to rate it: 55 outta 100
Posted by Martin at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)