BOB GARFIELD: This week, in Park City, Utah began the annual independent film festival known as Slamdance -- as opposed to the world-renowned Sundance Festival which also convened this week in Park City. The smaller and more obscure event exists in direct reaction to the enormous success and market power of Sundance, the Robert Redford brainchild credited with the independent-film revolution. But now, according to a new book by author Peter Biskind, Sundance has ceased to be a cultivator of small films by diverse new talents and has ultimately failed in its founding mission. The book is called Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of the Independent Film. Peter Biskind joins me now. Peter, welcome to OTM.

PETER BISKIND: Thank you, Bob. Glad to be here.

BOB GARFIELD:This year's Sundance will be showcasing the year's indie darlings, several of whom may become next year's studio stars. In your book, you suggest, though, that Sundance has failed in its central mission. Why? And how?

PETER BISKIND:Well when Sundance was first started in 1979, the idea behind it was to nurture and give opportunities to excluded groups, like, you know, essentially women, minorities of various hues, Native Americans. The notion was that Hollywood was such a powerful force that people who were not somehow connected to Hollywood had no chance whatsoever of making films. And you know, the reason I said that in, in some sense in terms of its original mission it's failed is that for the most part, that's still the case.

BOB GARFIELD: Well Sundance is in its 20th year. Was there a turning point when it became clear that the original mandate or raison d'etre, anyway, for Sundance had given way to something else?

PETER BISKIND:Well, Sundance initially emphasized so-called "regional pictures," and there was a whole cycle of what came to be known rather derisively as the "granola films." Usually they were set on farms, and you'd have virtually no plot and the interest of these movies tended to be minimal. Those were the kind of movies that Sundance specialized in, in the late '80s. In 1989, Steven Soderbergh came along with Sex, Lies and Videotape, and transformed the festival, so that Sundance started to move away from those kinds of movies towards more traditional genre movies which previously it had shunned. And another turning point was 1992 when Quentin Tarantino attended the festival with Reservoir Dogs which was kind of an earthquake for Sundance.

BOB GARFIELD:Speaking for myself, I'm not a purist, but I at least, you know, once a month, get on my knees and bow to whatever Miramax Mecca is, because for all that it has been co-opted, and the indie industry has been co-opted by the big studios, nonetheless I get to go to films with fairly substantial distribution that don't have explosions in them -- that actually have some sort of aesthetic underpinnings to them, and I don't have to travel to some art house to do it. Isn't that a success in and of itself?

PETER BISKIND:Miramax transformed the independent business, essentially by taking films like Sex, Lies and Videotape -- taking them out of the art film ghetto, moving them into the multiplexes and the malls. That started with Sex, Lies... - with a film called Scandal the same year - and it just snowballed after that. Of course Miramax's huge success was Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction which broke a hundred million dollars -- an enormous amount of money for an independent film at that time; an enormous amount of money for a Hollywood movie. It's still an enormous amount of money.

BOB GARFIELD:And yet, in your book, you say that Harvey Weinstein and Miramax have, in effect, killed the independent film movement. How can both things be true?

PETER BISKIND:As Miramax and other independents became increasingly successful, as the films made more and more money, they started to change, which is endemic to the film business. Budgets started to go up, they started to attract attention of the Hollywood studios. Now it seems to be the case that every single "independent film," quote/unquote has a major movie star in it. I think a perfect example of that is Miramax's current Oscar contender Cold Mountain, which 15 years ago Miramax would have made that film for probably under 5 million dollars. It's essentially the story of a guy walking through the woods. And now the film cost upwards of 80 million dollars, if not more. So I think that's a good indication of the direction that Miramax is going in.

BOB GARFIELD:Ecologically, wouldn't it be assumed that if the so-called independent film movement has been co-opted by the studios, that a genuine independent film movement would spring up to create the one million dollar and two million dollar films that are no longer being made by the Disney-owned Miramax and so forth?

PETER BISKIND:Yes, I think that's true. I mean I think as the upper reaches of the independent movement gravitate towards the studios, there's new foliage at the bottom -- you know, that new, new filmmakers are constantly coming up, and it's true that it seems to forever renew itself. You know, I also wouldn't want to be too negative or pessimistic about the so-called "indiewood" films that are coming out now. I mean a lot of these movies with movie stars like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation in some ways achieve the best of both worlds. In other words, they do have movie stars, they do have fairly large budgets, lot of production value, and yet they still retain a lot of what was called the indie spirit, which is to say plot is minimal, there's not much of a narrative in Lost in Translation, and there's no Hollywood happy ending. So in many ways it remains an independent film even though it has a lot of the trappings of Hollywood movies, and these movies have been able to cross over and make money which is really terrific, because if they don't make money, they're not going to exist.

BOB GARFIELD: Peter, thanks very much.

PETER BISKIND: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Peter Biskind is author of the recently released Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film. [SCENE FROM PULP FICTION PLAYS]

MAN: You know what they call a, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

MAN: What do they call it?

MAN: They call it Royale with Cheese.

MAN: Royale with Cheese.

MAN: That's right.

MAN: What do they call a Big Mac?

MAN: Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.

MAN: Le Big Mac. [LAUGHS] What do they call a Whopper?

MAN: I don't know. I didn't go to Burger King.

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