Last night I finally finished Peter Biskind's "indie-film-in-the-'90s" book "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film." While Biskind's '70s version of the same thing, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," is among my favorite non-fiction books of all time, I was less impressed with the new book, simply because it's less interested in telling stories about the movies than it is in prosecuting Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein for the crime of being an asshole.

A lot of the book is enjoyable, especially when Biskind goes into the backstories of some of the important films (whether successes or failures) that I spent the '90s watching. But these great stories mostly take a back seat to yet another story of Harvey treating his employees, associates, directors, and actors like dirt, acting in a threatening manner towards (especially female) underlings, being a glutton, and generally behaving like the most rotten, evil individual who ever walked the Earth.

I don't doubt most or all of the stories are true - in fact, I have no reason to believe they're not, especially since Weinstein has made no effort to sue Biskind for libel. But in putting together an authoritative account of the very important '90s indie film movement, Biskind should have done a lot more skipping around, and given a lot more space to the actual films than to just Harvey yelling at people. In 'Easy Riders,' there are 50 or 60 main characters and he had access to everyone; the author should've known to not make this book so repetitive.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, as about 95% of the book is about either Miramax or one of its offshoots (October Films, USA Films, etc.) and the Sundance Institute is barely covered at all, except for when Biskind bashes Robert Redford with even more venom than he does Harvey. One wonders what's more outrageous - that such loathsome men as Weinstein and Redford enjoy so much power, or that Biskind wasted an entire book ranting about them.

There are a smattering of good stories- the "Pulp Fiction," "Clerks," and "Good Will Hunting" backstories, the tale of agents chasing Robert Duvall through a hotel in order to buy "The Apostle," etc. - but 'Down and Dirty' is so fixated on Evil Harvey that it can't come close to measuring up to its predecessor.