Peter Biskind

Peter Biskind

Peter Biskind was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 20 August 2004 by Colin McCabe.

In the late 80s a generation of film-makers began to flower outside the studio system. In the following decade, the independent movement bloomed; the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino began walking away with prizes at Cannes and eventually at the Academy Awards. Many of these directors were discovered at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival and then scooped up by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, whose company, Miramax, laid waste to the competition.

In his new book Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind, acclaimed writer of the best-selling Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, tells the story of the film-makers and independent distributors who revitalised Hollywood. We were delighted to welcome him to the NFT stage to discuss Weinstein, Miramax and this intriguing period in cinema history.

Interview © BFI 2004

Defining 'independent'

Brian Robinson: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Brian Robinson from the National Film Theatre - and welcome to this very special event to celebrate the launch of Peter Biskind's latest volume of contemporary Hollywood history. We're delighted to have Peter Biskind here in the audience and he's going to be introduced and interviewed by Colin MacCabe who's an enfant terrible of British film production. They are both people who are no strangers to controversy. There's going to be a chance for questions after a lively introduction between these two. Please welcome them on stage. Thank you. Colin MacCabe and Peter Biskind. [applause]

Colin MacCabe: Okay, good evening. It's a great pleasure for me to have Peter Biskind here this evening. Peter has written some of the best books about films over the last three decades, and the one that he's just published now, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance & the Rise of Independent Film is an un-put-downable book. If you're ever interested in films and you start reading it, you just actually can't stop. I'm going to ask Peter a series of questions for the first 35 minutes, and then throw the discussion open to the audience.

Peter, I'd like to start with, in some sense, a rather boring question, and it's one you play with at the beginning and the end of the book. What is independent film?

Peter Biskind: I was hoping, actually, that you wouldn't ask me that. 'What is independent film?' is one of those 'how many angels fit on the end of a pin' questions, which has been debated ad nauseam. In the 80s, when independent film started, there was a general consensus... that's one of those phrases they always say... no 'general consensus' is redundant. There was a consensus in the 80s, more or less about what an independent film was, and it was defined, for the most part, negatively, against the Hollywood film, in other words an independent film was everything or anything that a Hollywood film was not. So that if a Hollywood film was a narrative film that stressed action and special effects, an independent film was a film that stressed script and character. Hollywood made movies, independents made films. Hollywood movies were directed by directors, people who made independent films were film-makers... and on and on... Hollywood films were expensive and over-produced, independent films were inexpensive and, to some degree, under-produced. That was pretty much the picture, so to speak, in that decade, and things became a little more confused in the 90s when the distinctions between independent films and Hollywood films began to blur, and now it's impossible to tell...

CM: The reason I ask that in some ways... the narrative of the book is effectively the narrative of independents becoming a part of Hollywood. That is to say, on the one hand you have Miramax, and you have Miramax ending up, by the mid-90s being bought by Disney, and on the other hand you have Sundance, set up very determinedly by Redford, outside Hollywood, but increasingly the finance and the backing for it being linked to Hollywood. You don't really tell us what you think of that process.

PB: Well the independent film world has always been a kind of glass-half-empty-glass-half-full world, and I think that metaphor really describes the trajectory of independent films. One the one hand I think the legacy of the 90s has been this... what's been called an 'Indiewood' film - these films that exist halfway between the traditional Hollywood movie and the traditional independent movie - I'm talking about movies like Lost in Translation [Sofia Coppola, 2003] and About Schmidt [Alexander Payne, 2002], the Alexander Payne, David Russell, P.T. Anderson, Wes Anderson movies that have budgets of about 20-30-40 million or a big Hollywood star, but nevertheless they virtually have no... like a movie like Lost in Translation virtually has no plot. It's a low-concept movie, it's almost impossible to describe it if... imagine if you were pitching that movie to a studio, it'd be almost impossible to describe it. And there's no real resolution, it's a very open-ended movie, there's certainly no traditional Hollywood happy ending, so in other words, even despite the presence of Bill Murray, it's not a movie that a studio would ever produce.

And I don't think that that's a bad thing, I think that those kinds of movies had been, for the most part, quite good, and, at the same time... many people would say they're not really independent movies because they are in fact produced either directly or indirectly by studios, but I do think there is this thing... there's a kind of independent aesthetic, vague as it may be, that really distinguishes these films from your full-blown Spider-man 2 [Sam Raimi, 2004]. So I think that's... the fact that we've been bequeathed an infrastructure... there are agents who do nothing but sell independent films and find work for independent film-makers. Even though they are from William Morris, and even though... I don't know that people realise this, but William Morris more or less packaged Pulp Fiction [Quentin Tarantino, 1994]. Packaging used to be - and still is in some quarters - a dirty word, but most of the talent in Pulp Fiction were William Morris clients. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as long as these film-makers can pretty much work within the system on their own terms.

The best example of that is David Russell's Three Kings [1999], which was made at Warner Brothers, one of the most conservative studios, and yet it's an extremely unconventional studio movie. So that at the same time as you have this level of Indiewood films, you also have new film-makers coming up from the bottom, taking advantage of really the new... very inexpensive DV technology, which has really democratised film-making, even further than it had been, so what Francis Coppola predicted at one point around 1975, speaking about the what was then new - video technology, that pretty soon a little old lady in Columbus, Ohio would be able to make films in her garage, he was a little premature but I think that's more or less coming true. I think, on the whole - it's a long answer to that question - on the whole things are looking pretty good for the independent film scene now, despite the changes that have taken place.

Pulp Fiction and Harvey Weinstein

CM: Your book starts really with Sex, Lies and Videotape, both the biggest hit that Sundance had had - actually arguably perhaps the biggest hit that it's ever had - but also the movie which took Miramax to a different level. Could you describe exactly how you think the film fits in to Miramax's trajectory before we look at a clip from it?

PB: One thing which is interesting about it is the amount of money Miramax paid for it. They paid something like a million for the movie, which was unheard of in those days, for a movie where video rights were already spoken for. The video rights were going to remain with the producer, Columbia TriStar. All the other distributors thought that Miramax was crazy that Harvey had essentially destroyed his company, and Harvey had been very aggressive buying that movie and putting up that kind of money, and prior to that the acquisitions game, which is how these independent distributors work... they wouldn't produce movies themselves, they would acquire movies that other film-makers had made... had been a gentleman's business, where people would sit by the fax machine until a fax came through announcing somebody's new movie was up for sale, and then they would get on-line, have polite lunches and discussions, and politely make offers to buy the movie.

There was none of this frantic hysterical bidding that occurred later. Well, Harvey was a whole lot more aggressive than any of these companies, and that's the way he got sex, lies and videotape. Then he, instead of putting the movie in one theatre and leaving it there for a year, and taking a tiny ad in a newspaper that you needed a magnifying glass to see, which is how independent films were customarily distributed and marketed in those days, he spent millions of dollars promoting the movie and pushing the movie out of arthouse ghettos into the multiplexes, which is the way the movie ended up grossing 25 million dollars. And that was a huge step in the mainstreaming of independent film.

CM: Right, I think we can now look at the clip from sex, lies and videotape, if the lights will go down and the screen light up...

[Clip: sex, lies and videotape]

CM: Okay, your book, I don't know whether it was intentional or just the way that it grew as it wrote, but it's a gripping story, and there's absolutely no doubt that the central character is Harvey Weinstein, and you've created in the book a really terrifying portrait of... I think actually that's enough!... How did that happen?

PB: You have to talk to Harvey's mother to answer that question. I think it's an accurate portrait. Harvey's a complicated guy - there's a side of Harvey which is incredibly charming, he's really smart, he's great company when he wants to be. I interviewed him extensively and I had a great time interviewing him and looked forward to the interviews, because he was so enjoyable to be around when he was being nice. But there's another side to Harvey, which I did try to portray in all its glory, and that is a kind of scary side. He does have a side to him which is quite brutal, and he's known for - as I suppose everybody here knows - he's known for yelling, bullying, threatening people, throwing things. Everything on his desk can become a weapon, so if he has a book or a cassette or a picture frame or a paperweight or a pencil or a pen... so there is definitely that side to him. I didn't intend to portray him as a monster, because I feel like... it's a rounded portrait... certainly Harvey has made a huge contribution to the independent film world. The 90s would not have happened in the way they happened for independents had it not been for Harvey, and I wouldn't have probably written this book had it not been for Harvey, so I do feel that he's made an extraordinary contribution, on the other hand there is this sort of bad Harvey, and I try to portray both sides of him.

CM: But what you suggest in... it's very cleverly done in the book because you don't really state this, but you spend quite a lot of time on Harvey - I didn't know - that the Weinsteins had actually directed a film together, and you spend quite a lot of time on that, and then perhaps it's the repetitive core of the book - are these scenes where Harvey comes up to a film-maker and says 'hey can I show you something - I've re-cut your movie, would you like to come into my room and watch it on the video... ' and the impression one gets, as the book goes on, that this is less for commercial reasons than for his desperate desire to be a film-maker.

PB: Yes I think that's true. In fact I think it is stated explicitly. Several people in the book say that Harvey was a film-maker manqué. He directs films through surrogates, in a sense. By re-cutting your film he becomes the director on some level. He talks about collaborating with a director. If you think about it, it's a strange way for a distributor to talk, but in fact that's pretty much what happens, and I actually got hold of a series of faxes back and forth between one of the directors and Harvey, and he really did watch the film over and over again, and here's a guy who's running a multi-million dollar company, distributing 40 films a year, and he's apparently sitting and watching this woman's film over and over and over again and supervising the editing of it - re-editing of it, and making small changes and having this engaging exchange of faxes, which is extremely time-consuming. It's a very bizarre situation when you really think about it.

CM: The second film we've got a clip from is Pulp Fiction, which really lifted Miramax another level entirely. Could you sketch that in the business arc of Miramax?

PB: Pulp Fiction only cost about $8.5 million. It was the first independent film that grossed $100 million and in some ways it was the Star Wars [George Lucas, 1977] of independents. It had the same effect on the independent film scene that Star Wars had on the movies of the 70s, which is to say that when the studio that produced it, namely Miramax, found out how much money they could make on a movie like this they just lost interest in the smaller films. It wasn't sufficient any more to make $5 million or $10 million, or even $20 or 30 million if you could shoot for $100 million. Once Pulp Fiction showed it was possible, that's what they were going for. So it really changed the nature of Miramax. It also, again by virtue of the fact it made so much money and rehabilitated, in some sense, two stars - John Travolta and Bruce Willis - whose Hollywood careers were virtually over, it made independents an attractive for Hollywood stars who wanted to launder their résumés in some sense.

So subsequently Sylvester Stallone did Cop Land [James Mangold, 1997], and once you started getting Hollywood stars in these movies, inevitably, even though they worked for way less than their going rates, nevertheless the budgets of movies started creeping up, and you got budget-creep in independent film, so movies that could have been made for $2 million were suddenly being made for $8 and 10 million, and once the budgets started going up, the companies that were financing them needed to protect their investments, so it became a kind of vicious cycle, because then they put more stars into the movies to protect the investment, and started changing the scripts to buff the rough edges, to make them more commercial, or they started changing the kinds of films they were accepting and deciding to finance, in terms of making the more commercial movie to protect their investment. Pulp Fiction began to transform the whole landscape of independent films, and the ultimate expression of this is of course a film like Cold Mountain [Anthony Minghella, 2003], which is essentially a story about a guy walking home through the woods, which you could have made for $2 million, and instead they made it for $80 million.

CM: Let's look at Pulp Fiction now. I'm afraid it's a DVD, not the celluloid version, and apparently there may be a little hitch in the start-up, but could we look at Pulp Fiction please.

[Clip: Pulp Fiction]

PB: Great movie...

Bringing people back to life

CM: Let me ask you something at a more meta level, which is... I was talking to someone and trying to decide why this book was so addictive, and they said 'well it's just gossip.' What makes this so addictive is it's gossip like you've never seen it before, because it is meticulously researched, annotated... where does that come from? Where does that desire in you to do that kind of writing come from?

PB: I don't know... You just get fascinated by these stories and these characters. After you get into it for a while, and after you get into the material for a while, you really want to find out what actually happened, you want to find out the truth, and often you have to interview a lot of people about the same incident to get different versions of the truth, and you also know, especially in this case, that you're going to get challenged constantly by Miramax or other interested parties. So you follow a kind of daisy chain of... one person you interview, one person - they suggest other people and you follow the chain. I do want to say one thing about gossip though, which is... this comes up a lot... it's interesting that one of the goals in writing a book like this is you want to try to bring these characters to life, as if it's a non-fiction novel, you want... especially when you're dealing with people in the business side of films.

It's one thing in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls if you're writing about Coppola and Scorsese, people that everybody knows about, but if you're writing about somebody like Amir Malin or Bingham Ray, that nobody's ever heard of outside the independent film world, you need to dramatise them, bring them to life, and to do that you have to know and present minute details about their lives - what they eat for lunch, how they dress, what kinds of homes they live in, how they speak - all of it is... this kind of book is built out of an accretion of tiny details and so if you know that you've got to do that and you get yourself fascinated by these characters, it's not as inexplicable... to me it just seems the way I work, it seems natural, it's hard to answer that kind of question.

CM: One of the things I was wondering - are there models, are there writers that you admire, who you are conscious of writing in the wake of?

PB: In terms of film books, there's a handful of classic film books in the last two decades I guess. Something like Indecent Exposure, about the Begelman affair at Columbia, Steven Bach's book Final Cut, about the making of Heaven's Gate [Michael Cimino, 1980], Julia Phillips' You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, and I'm leaving one of them out... but there's a handful of those kinds and they're all very rich in detail, and for me those are the film books that were gripping and came to life and jumped off the page, and that's what I was trying, to some degree, to emulate.

CM: You really do succeed in bringing these people to life really very effectively. With Weinstein you have this kind of monster, front and centre, but the other lead is a much more mysterious figure and I presume this is intentional - is Robert Redford. It goes all through this book and you have almost no sense of what he's like, but that seems to be what Redford's like, is that... ?

PB: That's putting the best spin on it, the most positive construction on it. In fact the truth is I had written an article in 1991 about Sundance, that came out in the American Premiere magazine, that was quite critical of the institute, and essentially Redford never forgave me for it, and therefore would not co-operate with me and would not sit for an interview for this book, and also prevented other people who worked for Sundance from speaking to me some of the major figures at Sundance. So I couldn't really get as close to Redford as I wanted to and ultimately, even though the book is set up as a kind of dialectic between Sundance and Miramax in a way, and what happens in the course of the decade, it seems to me that in some sense Sundance becomes more like Miramax, and Quentin Tarantino is a pivotal figure in this, because Redford defined the pure independent, especially at the beginning at Sundance - it was founded in 1979, oddly enough around the same time that Miramax was founded. The independent world in its purest, most anti-Hollywood state was defined by the institute in those days, and it evolved and moved more towards the Miramax position, which was the crass, to some degree... make money. So I gave up trying to describe Redford in the kind of detail I describe some of the other characters, so that's actually the reason I'd like to think it was intentional, but it wasn't.

CM: One more on the detail of the book and then two final general questions. There's a hero in the book, there's Bingham Ray, who kind of waltzes through the book, drinks too much, smashes himself up in a car crash, and yet somehow you give the impression of someone who's still managing to maintain a certain faith in independent cinema, even as he's stabbing the partner in the back...

PB: Bingham Ray started his career in the 80s and in the 90s became on of the co-heads of a company called October, and Bingham plays a big role in the book because he represents the old way of distribution independent films and, to some degree, October was torn apart - there was another partner called Scott Greenstein who came from Miramax - and October was torn apart by the conflict between Greenstein who represented the Miramax way of doing business, and Bingham Ray who represented the old, more conservative way of distributing independent films. Bingham is an extremely articulate, colourful person, and after the book came out, unfortunately he got fired. He was head of UA Classics at that point - and hopefully not as a result of the book - he got fired after the book came out. But he's a very colourful person, and he represented, for me, the pure blue flame that animated the independent film world in the 80s, which has been pretty much lost in the 90s.

CM: The final question I want to ask you is... in some sense everything so far is positive, the book is fantastic, but reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, one has no problem being interested in the characters, because you're interested in the films. One of the things reading this book made pretty clear to me is actually, American independent cinema in the 80s and 90s... the characters, the deals are more interesting than the films.

PB: Well actually, one of the figures in the book... it's funny, you start to think of them as characters after a while... I found myself on a cruise ship with Francis Coppola... I thought 'God, he really exists... ' I was so used to thinking of him as a character in this book that I slaved over for so long... anyway, one of the people in the book, who's needless to say on the business side, said 'you're never disappointed by a deal. Films come and go, the come out, nobody goes to see them and they're over with, but a deal lives forever... ' something like that, and to some degree I think that's true. I think as a whole, with the exception of certain films like sex, lies and videotape and Pulp Fiction and Tarantino's other films, the films of the 90s don't hold up in the same way the films of the 70s do. It's an interesting question why not, and some people don't even agree with that. But I think it's true that, on the whole, it was a less interesting decade film-wise and, in some sense, as I say in the book, it was a distributor's decade as opposed to a film-maker's decade, which is a weird thing to say and to premise a book on, but I do think that there's a lot of truth in it.

The future of independent film

CM: Okay - questions.

Audience: I wanted to know what you thought of what's going on with Miramax at the moment - they've laid off about 30 per cent of their workforce. Harvey Weinstein's trying to separate Miramax from Disney, his brother Bob is staying with Disney... Miramax seem to be breaking apart at the moment...

PB: I don't think it's clear exactly what's happening, the scenario you just laid out is one of the scenarios that one's been reading a lot about. I think the seeds of it have been present in the relationship between Miramax and Disney from the very start, all of which is described in the book, and I think the book allows you to understand why this is happening. For the longest time, Harvey and Michael Eisner have not gotten along, and in fact neither of the Weinsteins have gotten along with the Disney people. It was a very strange marriage to begin with, two companies with totally opposite cultures, Disney being obviously the family-oriented company, the home of Mickey and Donald, and Miramax being the home of Quentin Tarantino, so you can obviously see the potential for conflict. Harvey's always felt that he could run Disney better than Eisner, he'll talk to anybody about all the mistakes that Eisner's made, the biggest being refusing to allow Miramax to produce Lord of the Rings [Peter Jackson, 2001] which, as Harvey points out, was a multi-billion dollar mistake.

I think the essence of the problem is that Miramax, in becoming so successful, changed its business plan. It's a much different company than it was in 1993 when Disney bought it. It's not the company that acquired and released 40 low-budget films a year and threw them against the wall and saw which ones stuck... and pursued Oscars for the films they thought had Oscar potential. It's now a company that wants to produce Cold Mountain, and Harvey announced that he wanted to do Green Hornet as his Spiderman [Sam Raimi, 2002]. Well that's a much different company, it's much more of a traditional studio model and it means essentially that the company's not going to be as profitable, and I think that's the root of the problem with Eisner and with Disney, and I think at this point, my feeling is that Harvey's over-reached and that Eisner is in the driver's seat, and I don't see any scenarios coming out of this that are particularly attractive for Harvey. Bob will be fine because Bob is much more the kind of film-maker, bottom line, oriented film-maker that Disney likes.

Audience: What's your opinion of the film The Last Seduction [1993]?

PB: That was one of the first movies that October acquired and it was interesting that, because it had already... it was an HBO movie, it had already played on HBO, and then they were able to release it theatrically, which was very unusual, and the movie did very well for October, and it was one of their first hits. Beyond that I don't really know what... I don't think it had any... I think it's a great movie, I agree with you, but I don't think that... it was made by John Dahl who went on to make one or two other movies but it seems like he hasn't fulfilled the potential of his first films, from my point of view.

Audience: How do you see the next decade going for independent film-makers?

PB: That's a good question. It's very early in the decade. I said it earlier, I think it's an interesting and positive time for independent film-makers, even though it may not seem that way, if you're a film-maker yourself, because it's still a struggle, but I think the combination of the new cheap technology and... the fact that Miramax is not around any more, is not really present on the independent film scene, I think has allowed a lot of other companies to step in and thrive and create a little more diversity, and I think probably... Miramax did its thing, which was, on the whole, probably valuable, and now the Miramax era is over, so we're living in the post-Miramax era.

It's hard to predict really what's going to happen in the next three or four years, but there are a lot of very vital companies out there that have money for production. Warner's Independent, run by Mark Gill, who was at Miramax for ten years, Focus Features, run by James Schamus and David Linde. Linde was at Miramax. Miramax spores went out and colonised other companies, but a lot of them are anti-Miramaxes, they've defined themselves as the nice Miramaxes and I think that's a good thing. They've taken what they can learn from Miramax, but without the film-maker-unfriendly attitude that Miramax often display.

Audience: A number of film-makers, since the publication of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, have come out saying that it was fictional in their opinion. I wondered what your opinion of that was, first of all, and secondly whether that has prevented you getting further access to these people...

PB: Well I think that's a lot of nonsense, obviously, I certainly don't think that I made it all up, and it's all fiction. There's probably certainly mistakes in the book, and there are probably stories in the book that may not be true, but most of the book was researched very... everything was footnoted, everything was researched very thoroughly and for the areas of real controversy, I interviewed four or five, six sources, for example, there's a classic nexus of controversy about Robert Evans and Francis Coppola over both Godfather films, and I interviewed endless people on that and really was unable to get to the bottom of it, but in those cases I said so, and when things were rumoured, when I wasn't absolutely certain something had taken place, I presented it that way, I said it was rumoured, or said to have happened, phrased it in such a way that it was clear that it wasn't necessarily fact, but this was what somebody was reporting.

So far as my access to those people... I haven't really tried to get access to those people except for Beatty - since then. Beatty's been fine. Most of those people aren't really making films any more, and so there really hasn't been any occasion when I've wanted to get access to them. As far as being a help or a hindrance in researching this book goes, it was a little bit of both. It made some people nervous, but on the other hand... the independent world is very different from the Hollywood studio world, and there's surprisingly little overlap, and the fact that I was focusing more on the business side of the independent film world made it a bit easier for me because these were people who were not accustomed to being interviewed. People didn't call and say 'tell me how you run your business... ' That's very flattering, and I think people felt that they wanted to be part of the history... recognised as players in the history of this movement, and whether they took a few shots or not it was still worth it.

Back to business

Audience: [partially inaudible] People make salacious comments... did you make the decision to leave that out and focus, as you've just said, more on the business side... and why was there a lag between the American publication and the British publication?

PB: It was a conscious decision, because I felt, in the 70s there was a real rationale for getting people's private lives. That was the decade of personal film-making, you really could not understand what happened to some of those people and their careers without understanding the drug culture of the 70s. The 90s is a completely different kind of decade. There certainly is drug-taking in the independent film world, but it's not as widespread and it's not a routine part of life the way it was in the 70s. Certainly on the business side, on the distribution side, in the 70s you can argue that people's personal lives reflected the kinds of films they made, and to understand the films you really need to know a lot about their lives. But you don't need to know a lot about Harvey Weinstein's personal life to understand the marketing plan for sex, lies and videotape. There really isn't a direct relationship.

So I felt that there really wasn't any rationale to get into people's personal lives, and to some degree it was a distraction to the story that I wanted to tell. The second part of the question was why was there a lag between the American publication and the British publication. There certainly were changes made in the book to accommodate Britain's mediaeval libel laws, but there weren't major changes. I was reading the book the other day, because I hadn't read it in a while - reading the British edition, which I hadn't read at all. I didn't even... when you have to make those kinds of changes it's like cutting your fingers off, but after they're made, I didn't even notice, reading the book, what the changes were, so it's pretty much identical to the American edition.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: It's an interesting question, I've thought about this a lot. There's been a lot of attention given to... people certainly do... like Kevin Smith, who's one of Harvey's... who's in the Miramax family, he's just a very outspoken guy, and I think Kevin did take some grief from Harvey. In fact I read Kevin some of the most... the quotes that I thought might get him into the worst trouble, and he was okay with all of them. I didn't have to do that, because the whole interview was on the record, but when you interview somebody, somebody was saying when you're writing a book, you come back to people three or four times - it may be more - and you develop a relationship and I felt... sometimes you feel like you have to save people from themselves. You don't want to just ruthlessly ruin their... sometimes people just say things they don't realise they're saying, they don't understand how it's going to look on the page, and I read Kevin some of those quotes and he was okay with them. He wrote a letter in to Variety, talking about how much he loved Miramax and how he loved Harvey more than he loved his own father, but he never said he was misquoted.

Ben Affleck, on the other hand, did say he was misquoted, even though he insisted on quote-approval and had approved every single quote in the book. People will say anything. It's the counterpoint, or the other side of the coin to the whole question of... do writers inevitably betray their sources, which is the famous Janet Malcolm essay about journalism. Sometimes they do, or sometimes there's an argument that it's intrinsic to the process, but there's the other side of the coin which is that sources betray the writer often. They'll pop up and say 'I didn't say that,' or 'you misquoted me.' Everything I do is taped, so I very painstakingly, in terms of transcribing the tapes and putting the quotes in the books... generally speaking, and it happens every now and then, but generally speaking, the quotes are accurate, so people will always say 'I didn't say that,' or Harvey will call in and say... Harvey actually called a lot of people in the book and said 'did you say what he said you said?' Miramax is fanatical about stuff like this. I knew that was going to happen and I had to take that into account, therefore was extra careful in terms of quoting people.

Audience: Did Harvey Weinstein try and control the book?

PB: He tried to control the book in the sense that he tried to get me not to write it [laughter]... by essentially offering me a contract in Miramax Books for a different book. Harvey is somebody who's very skilled in manipulating the press, and if you're somebody like Harvey, you understand ultimately that it makes more sense to tell your own story than have your enemies, people that hate you, tell your story. When you interview somebody over and over again, generally you establish a relationship with them, and unless they're really heinous people, a bond is created and I felt a certain affection for Harvey, and I think it was probably smart that Harvey did let me have that access to him. I think it humanises Harvey in the book and I think, on the whole, it's better for people who are written about in this way to co-operate, because if you don't, as I said, you get people that despise you telling your story and that can never be a good thing.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: I think that probably there's some truth in that. I also think that it attracts the wrong kind of people to film-making, because one of the knocks against the effect of Miramax creating this huge acquisitions bubble, as they did in the mid 90s, was that you can go to Sundance with a film that cost $80,000 - or $27,000 in the case of Clerks [1994], Kevin Smith's film, which he sold for $227,000, and that was nothing compared to, say, paying $10 million for Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade [1996]. Think about that, what that must be like for a young film-maker to go to Sundance and sell a film like that and suddenly be catapulted from obscurity to wild celebrity in a day. That tended to attract, I think, people who were less interested in making films, or expressing their personal visions, than in becoming Hollywood directors. Look at all the independent film-makers who jumped from their first or second independent film to directing Batman 5. It used to take ten years for somebody like Soderbergh or the Coen brothers to go from their first film to a Hollywood movie and now it happens overnight. So there's definitely been a truncation of the lifespan, so to speak, of independent film-makers and, as I said, it's attracted people really aren't auteurs, as independent film-makers used to be.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: I certainly think there's a resurgence, a renaissance of documentary film, also in the sense that documentary film is generally cheaper to make than feature film. It's a very viable medium. I don't think it's going to replace feature films. I think it will exist, and hopefully will exist alongside feature films, but I think it's great that there's a new interest in documentary film.

Shakespeare in Love

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: Well there was constant discussion about... I got a lot of calls about optioning Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as a Hollywood feature and I did... but it never happened, and there was a documentary film made, based on the book. This book has been optioned by the same film-maker. When I was interviewing people I would ask, especially directors, who they would cast as Harvey Weinstein [laughter]. The responses were everyone from James Gandolfini to Jabba the Hutt [laughter].

Audience: A lot of screenplays are bought up and then the films are kept in the vaults and never see the light of day, even on DVD. What do you think about that?

PB: I think it's a bad idea. That was one of the things that Miramax were notorious for - other companies didn't do that. Once Miramax was bought by Disney, it had access to, so to speak, the Disney bank. They could afford to pay $1 million or $2 million for every single film that they acquired, and they pretty much had the acquisition field to themselves. So they acquired like a kid whose parents gave him $100,000 to go to FAO Schwartz, the big toy store in New York. They could just buy up everything, and they only released about 40 films a year, so they bought way more than they could release, and many times they would buy films and decide that they couldn't make any money on them, and they just sat on them. Often they changed the title and released them on video, and there are still many many films... it's impossible to figure out how many films Miramax still has and has never released, partly because the titles change all the time, partly because there are just so many of them.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: Well, I felt like... it's a hard question to answer... when I started I felt like those close readings of films, although interesting to me really required that readers have seen the films. I tried to write it in such a way that even if you hadn't seen the films you could follow it, but after a while I felt like there was a surfeit of opinion and analysis. So many books had been written about analysing films and there are almost as many books about Hitchcock as there are about Shakespeare. It just started to bore me, and as I got... I was an editor of film magazines at that time, and I guess reporting and facts seemed more interesting to me than analysis and opinions. What I tried to do in Easy Riders was combine them - it's mostly a reported book, but I try to do a little bit of analysis of the films. I did that less so...

CM: There's some analysis...

PB: There's a little bit, and I actually would have liked to have done more, but I just became obsessed with these stories, and Miramax was this monster that I had created in this book - I mean I didn't create it, but in the book it started just pushing out at everything else, and I had a whole section of the book on Artisan, going through The Blair Witch Project [Daniel Myrick, 1999], which there was just no room for, and I felt that I had gone... the United States during the Vietnam War people used to say they'd waded so far into the river that they had to go through to the other side... I felt like I had told so much of the Miramax story that I felt that I needed to tell the rest of it and I couldn't just ignore Gangs of New York [Martin Scorsese, 2002] and that pushed some of the analysis out of the book, unfortunately. Film is so complicated, you want to do justice to all aspects of it, which is what I tried to do, but you're rarely successful, because to so every aspect justice just takes a lot of space. You think when you're starting a book that you have an infinite number of pages, but after a while you realise it's like writing an article - you run out of space and you have to make choices.

CM: We've followed Miramax through the big bang, through Pulp Fiction, but I think, really both in the book and, I suspect, in history as well, Shakespeare in Love [John Madden, 1998] really marks the absolute high point of Miramax, both financially, in terms of Oscars, but also, in some sense, in terms of the kind of film that Shakespeare in Love was, and perhaps we'll talk a little bit about that after we've seen this clip.

[Clip: Shakespeare in Love]

CM: There are several times in the book that you hint that you don't think that Shakespeare in Love is as interesting as, for example, the first two films we looked at. Would you say a bit why?

PB: I think that's true. I think it does mark a major turning point, and actually the end of a whole period, the 'high' Miramax, running from 1994, from Pulp Fiction, to culminating in Shakespeare in Love, when Harvey himself won an Oscar. There's a very funny story which is not exactly apropos of your question, but Harvey essentially took the film, pushed out Ed Zwick, who was the initial producer and one of the people who precipitated the project - and it's a long, complicated story - but Ed Zwick... Harvey came to hate Ed Zwick, and he was trying to get him off the movie entirely, threatening him and trying to bribe him and so forth, but Ed Zwick hung in, and so in the beginning of the film there's a credit for Ed Zwick's company: 'Presented by Bedford Falls' and when Harvey saw the credit, he said something like 'get rid of that fucker, I don't care what it costs, I don't want to see that credit.' And his lawyers told him he couldn't get rid of it, so if you watch the opening of the movie carefully, Geoffrey Rush is running across the screen, looking for Shakespeare, and he steps in horse manure, right as the Bedford Falls logo comes on screen [laughter]. Somebody told me that story, I actually rented the film and looked at it again just to make sure, in terms of accuracy whether that was in fact the case, and it is.

CM: But why do you not like the film as much?

PB: It's not a bad movie, it's not that I don't like it exactly, it's just that I don't like what it stands for in the development of Miramax, which is that Miramax made its reputation buying, acquiring and distributing edgy films that nobody else would take, like The Cook the Thief [His Wife & Her Lover, Peter Greenaway, 1989] and Reservoir Dogs [Quentin Tarantino, 1992] and other films like that, The Piano [Jane Campion, 1993] - although other companies were interested in The Piano. But in 1995 they distributed two films: Priest [Antonia Bird, 1994] and Kids [Larry Clark, 1995], and they got a tremendous amount of flak for each film, and up to that point I think Harvey felt that controversy sold films, but the furore over Priest was so intense and disturbing, and the hate mail was so disturbing - a lot of death threats, ugly anti-Semitism - and Disney was so upset by this that essentially Harvey backed away from those kinds of movies.

If you look at a film like Shakespeare in Love, Harvey probably thought 'why should I mess around with films like Kids and Priest which are just going to cause a raft of trouble, when I can make a very comfortable, pleasant costume drama, and not only that, but make $100 million and win an Oscar.' You know, it's a no-brainer. And from that point on, although he did occasionally still acquire so-called edgy movies - a Hollywood buzz-word - nevertheless he passed on a lot of movies and some projects weren't even brought to him because people knew that he wasn't interested, like he passed on American Beauty [Sam Mendes, 1999] among other films. And there's a whole raft of them. He just looked the other way. And that's what I don't like. In fact Quentin was quoted as saying... Quentin was critical... couldn't believe that he was doing films like Shakespeare in Love and gave him a hard time over it.

Miramax

Audience: What are your favourite top five movies at the moment?

PB: I stop seeing movies in the summer, because I can't deal with it. My favourite movie this summer was Fahrenheit 9/11 [Michael Moore, 2004].

Audience: What's your take on Fahrenheit 9/11... how it fits in with the whole Miramax thing.

PB: I think Harvey deserves credit for making that movie. It's not a movie that I think nobody else would have made. I think other people would have made it, but Harvey did make it and he deserves credit for that, and that's the kind of classic Miramax movie that Miramax is known for and that Miramax made its reputation on. I think it's great that they did it. If Miramax survives, which is in question, I think they will continue to make some of those movies and release some of those movies, and I think it's very important - has been historically very important for Miramax to maintain its reputation as an independent, even though it's the furthest thing from independent you can imagine, because, as Harvey said, after Pulp Fiction, he could acquire anything he wanted, and sign up any film-maker he wanted, just by saying that he was the company that made Pulp Fiction. And so that notion of Harvey making these scrappy, edgy, difficult films, was very important to the self-image of Miramax, and very important as a business marketing tool, because it meant that he could get film-makers to win Oscars and actors to cut their prices. I think he very cleverly used Michael Moore as a cat's paw in his war with Disney. Michael Moore is a perfect mouthpiece for Harvey - I'm not saying that Michael Moore didn't have his own scores to settle with Disney, but it dovetailed very nicely with Harvey's agenda. It was a very pretty move I thought.

Audience: What's been the personal effect of publishing these two books? Has it changed your own attitude to celebrity now that you've become one yourself?

PB: I don't think of myself as a celebrity. I'm certainly sitting here, but I'm no Tom Cruise. There are empty seats here. I got totally sick of celebrity journalism. I started in 1981 as editor-in-chief of American Film magazine and then went to Premiere, and my tenure at these magazines coincided with the rise of celebrity journalism. By the time I left Premiere I would have rather slit my throat than write another celebrity profile. And one of the reasons I started writing these books is because in the book format, which is not as dependent on the approval of the industry, and not as dependent on the power of the publicist, you can actually do reporting that you can't do in the magazine format, nor in the daily newspaper format. So for me it was a way of shedding that celebrity journalism skin that I had unconsciously, or without really realising it, assumed.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: Yes, his brother assumed the invisible dark twin. His brother is the business guy, the inside guy... he's much shyer of publicity than Harvey is and I didn't have the kind of access to Bob that I did with Harvey, although at the very end Bob wanted me to have access, but by that time it was a little bit... and I did have a little bit of interaction with him, and I would have liked more, but by that time it was kind of too late. But Bob is the numbers guy, he's very tough, he's as ruthless as Harvey, but he doesn't have that kind of bigger-than-life personality, it's quite the opposite, he has a kind of smaller-than-life personality.

CM: I'm going to butt in here. Just one of the things that's really very astonishing in the book is the number of times Miramax doesn't pay, and you go into considerable detail on that. Do you think they're qualitatively different from the other studios?

PB: A lot of the business practices that Miramax pursued are common to the studio system, but I guess what was different was that nobody in the independent world had pursued these kinds of practices. Independent film-makers are essentially indigent struggling kids, and not to pay them is not good. I mean it's not good in general - it's not good in the studio system either, but it was somehow worse and less ethical somehow in the independent film world. Now I should say that Harvey denies every single instance in the book where people have complained about not being paid, and he'll cite chapter and verse about how either their deals weren't the kind of deals where they earned any money, often they were net deals - one of the things about independent film-makers is that when you're dealing with young film-makers who are making their first or second films, they don't get very good deals, and Harvey took advantage of that, and sometimes people are so desperate to get distribution and get their films bought, they'll sign anything, and Harvey understands the psychology of film-makers and the gratitude... Somebody like Matt Damon, who wrote the script and came up with Good Will Hunting [Gus Van Sant, 1997], that film made something like $114 million, and Matt Damon was paid $300,000 to write and act in the movie. Harvey gave him a $500,000 bonus, but in terms of how much the movie made and how much Miramax made off that movie, he should have given a $5 million bonus, and Matt Damon actually went on strike and refused to appear in Dogma [Kevin Smith, 1999] until Harvey forked over a $1 million cheque to both Matt Damon and Ben Affleck - each... anyway...

CM: But it's also interesting... that's the unusual story, because Damon had the power to...

PB: ... to extract the money, but they had to fight for it.

Audience: I was watching a Nick Broomfield documentary, Kurt & Courtney [1998], and it shows how powerful publicists are and how they rally together, so that whenever anyone criticises one of them, they'll withhold all of them. Are you ever worried that with these two books you're probably stepping on quite a few toes that may harm your other career as a journalist.

PB: Yes, I've worried about it, but for me the pleasure in writing these books... you take a certain amount of risk and you become known as somebody who... once you do that to somebody - by somebody I mean one of the people in the book - once you ravage Paul Schrader for example, you're known as somebody who can do that, who's done it. Once you've stabbed somebody, even if you haven't done it in 56 instances, you have done it once and therefore you might do it again. So people treat you a little bit differently. So it's made some problems for me, but nothing that hasn't... nothing terminal to follow through with the murder metaphor.

Sources and screeners

Audience: You have a number of undisclosed sources. Are they in a box somewhere in case of a legal battle?

PB: The whole book is vetted, so probably nothing by an undisclosed source was singled out by the lawyers. You don't want to... if you're using blind sources in general, it's best not to use those sources for things that you have to worry about being sued over. And it's also not really fair. Harvey is always carrying on about blind sources but, for the most part, I don't agree with him but on the other hand it's true that I think it's not a good idea to have people whose names aren't disclosed, quoting them slagging people. If you're going to use that kind of material I think you need to use sources that are named.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: My next project I'm doing is a biography of Warren Beatty. The idea that I had, that I've been noodling around that he pretended to be interested in I'd just as soon not disclose because I might actually do it some day, not that anybody is going to run off to their publisher and do it, I'd just rather not mention what it is. It's not an entertainment book

Audience: The Beatty book - is it a co-operation?

PB: Well co-operation means a different thing to Beatty than it means to most people [laughter]. So I've written about Beatty a lot, and I know him pretty well, so I won't exactly say it's co-operation, but it's not not co-operation either, if you get my drift.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: I don't know. Harvey expects people to take an interest in his work, so I don't think he felt... I don't think he was particularly flattered by it. I never spoke to Harvey after the book came out, he never called me. I've heard second-hand, third-hand about his reaction to it, but don't think flattery was one of the things that came up.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: Well I don't know, I had my tape recorder on ready... I was waiting for the call, because I felt it might come in handy some time, but he never called, so... hard to say.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: I think Sundance... for all the ill you can say about Sundance, that the festival's become more of a market than a festival and that Redford has blown several opportunities to expand Sundance to a series of Sundance cinemas, which I think would have been really important, and he was going to do another production company that would have been really important... low-budget films, for all that he's sort of messed it up, I still think, yes, on the whole Sundance is definitely valuable. The festival, for all that it's become - a circus and a zoo - is still the foremost showcase for independent films in the world. So I don't think you can - critical as you can be of Sundance - I don't think you can take that away from them, and certainly the labs continue to do what the labs have always done, which is to nurture young film-makers, and they're still doing it.

Audience: [partially inaudible] ... Do you believe that in some ways we're getting back to the spirit of the 70s in terms of artistic merit?

PB: I'm not sure what the question is...

Audience: Do you think that the studios are... it's almost a trend... that they're just jumping on a bandwagon, working with these film-makers, or that they actually believe in them?

PB: Well I think the fact that they did the whole number with the 'screeners'. I don't know if everybody's familiar with that, where they... Screeners are videotapes or DVDs of the year's movies, or at least the year's movies that they're pushing for Oscars, which they would customarily send out to Academy members and critics and other interested parties. It was a way of levelling the playing field, because often independent companies didn't have the money and the facilities to arrange the kinds of screenings that the studios did for Academy members, to make sure they'd seen the movies. So this was a huge blow to the independent distributors and the independent film-makers. And the studios did it willy-nilly, without consulting... seemingly without a second thought, without even considering its effect on the independents, even though they were hurting their own independent divisions.

So in that sense I think that it would be hard to argue that they really believe in these divisions, or I think that you can't generalise across the studios, for example, Sony Classics has always had a special position, a lot of autonomy and independence within Sony, much more so than say, Focus Features has had at Universal, or certainly more than Paramount Classics has had at Paramount. It really depends on who's running the studio and what the philosophy is at that particular studio. So I think some studios actually do believe in it Sony really dragged its feet in going along with the other studios on the screener ban. Other studios I think don't even know they have independent divisions.

Future projects

Audience: Will you ever get to do a book about European cinema or World cinema?

PB: I'm not really... it's too big a subject, you have to narrow it down. I certainly think there are books to be made, to be written about various parts of World cinema. I think World cinema as a whole has a lot to... For the way I write these books, you have to choose a defined field and then you burrow deeply into it. World cinema per se is much too large a subject. I think there's a great book to be written about the French New Wave, along the lines of - in all due humility - along the lines of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, in the sense that there's six or seven major film-makers, all of whom were, on some level, crazy - Colin wrote a wonderful book about one of them...

CM: I think there would be a... there is an Easy Riders, Raging Bulls to write about the 1956-1966 in France, but you'd better get moving, before they all die!

PB: Before they all die, exactly... I certainly think other national cinemas are grist for the mill and certainly worthwhile writing about, and I wish more people would do it. And then there's the question of getting it published, because of course publishing is very ethno-American-centric, which dominates...

CM: I was just thinking, actually, about that period - it's also the case that a lot of the films are not just about, as it were the film-maker's life, but about one of the other film-maker's lives, so there's a constant criss-cross at that time.

Audience: [partially inaudible] Is there any sustainable future for independent film...

PB: Well that's an interesting question. Miramax is a really unique case, because it is owned, lock, stock and barrel by Disney. I don't think it's going to disappear. I think probably, on some... it's going to survive in some incarnation, one way or another. If it's a question of Bob Weinstein staying at Disney and running Miramax/Dimension, or Harvey starting... even the name Miramax belongs to Disney, and the library of Miramax belongs to Disney.

There has been an economic logic to these companies, which is that a lot of them are wrecked by success. When companies like Artisan have their Blair Witch Project, or October has its Life Is Sweet [Mike Leigh, 1990] and Breaking the Waves [Lars von Trier, 1996], both of which did very well, they start growing, and as these companies start growing they start hiring people, and they start moving into bigger spaces, and then they have to eventually either raise more cash or sell themselves to the studios, which is what happened to October. And as soon as October sold itself to Universal, then Universal changed hands.

There's a growth potential... a logic of growth which often ends up destroying the company. It's like the famous line from Annie Hall [Woody Allen, 1977], that a relationship has to move like a shark has to keep moving forward or it dies. And the same is true of a lot of independent distributors. Whether you can really maintain your purity and grow as a company... I guess Lion's Gate is the current best example of a company which is still independent and has grown. It bought the Artisan library and exploiting a library is certainly a way of generating income and cushioning yourself.

CM: We're getting close to the end, but before I take the last couple of questions, the one think which I actually found very odd about the book is that you barely mention the Independent Film Channel. There's a page or so of reference when Sundance is setting up its film channel, but otherwise it receives no attention at all. Why was that?

PB: I don't know. It never occurred to me. IFC is a little bit outside... I didn't deal with IFC at all, because again I had to limit the canvas, and obviously the Film Channel and the Sundance Channel are interesting in that they're new ways of distribution - a lot of films are now going to cable as opposed to getting theatrical distribution and are getting a bigger audience, and it's becoming a viable way to go, but I guess IFC started around 1996 or 97...

CM: No, I think it started much earlier than that actually, in the late 80s...

PB: It did?

CM: Yes.

PB: Well that shows how little I know about it. Well I didn't do it, and I don't know why I didn't do it, and I'm sorry... [laughter] What can I say?

CM: I wasn't asking it like that!

Quentin and Harvey

CM: Okay, final questions.

Audience: [inaudible]

PB: I just can't imagine, after Harvey's gone through the career trajectory that he has, that he's going to go back as a small independent and start acquiring films again. It's just going back to square one. I don't think that's going to be the way it's going to happen, and I'm not sure what the way it's going to happen is.

CM: One thing you don't... you do mention in passing, but the Weinsteins must be fabulously rich now.

PB: They are. I tried to figure out how many different ways they made money from Disney, and Disney was aware of the fact that they might just loot Disney, because they're very shrewd businessmen, and here they are running their own company, they're also producers, there's many many different ways... and then there are all these foreign deals where the film reaches a certain gross point, then Harvey and Bob get a bonus, and then they get bonuses from Disney. They are fabulously wealthy, and how much money they have is an interesting area of... next to genetic engineering it's probably one of the most interesting fields open to human inquiry.

CM: I remember the gossip when Disney bought Miramax, that Miramax was effectively broke. How bad was the... it's one of the few moments when you don't go into a lot of detail.

PB: I did go into some detail. People told me stories that they were sent... Miramax would say to a bunch of employees 'well you might as well work at home today, because they're turning the phones off... ' That's pretty broke... It's funny, it's an area that Miramax has never admitted, or copped how broke they were. For some reason it's an area of extreme sensitivity to them, but it did seem, in fact, as if they were very close to bankruptcy. One person in the book who ran Fine Line said he was in a position to have driven Miramax out of business, had he bought The Crying Game [Neil Jordan, 1992], which he came close to doing. One of the interesting 'what ifs' about this whole period is what would have happened had Miramax gone out of business in 1992. What would the independent world have been like?

CM: Final...

Audience: There's a very entertaining section of the book about Quentin Tarantino. What kind of relationship did Quentin have with Harvey?

PB: well, there's an anecdote in the book, from Quentin about Reservoir Dogs, where... Harvey has this way of... Harvey's very shrewd, he has good taste and he's very shrewd about identifying talented, promising film-makers, but he also has this little quirk, that once he identifies them, once he buys the film, he tries to cut out exactly the scene which is the signature scene of the film-maker. So in the case of Reservoir Dogs, he tried to cut out the torture scene, the ear-slicing scene, which is the Tarantino signature scene, and he said stuff like 'without that scene it's a twenty-million-dollar movie, with that scene it's a two-million-dollar movie.'

He put a lot of pressure on Quentin, and there's a very nice anecdote about it, and Quentin stood firm and drew a line in the sand and refused to cut it and said 'I don't care how much this movie makes, I made it for myself, not for you and not for your wife,' who had happened to walk out of the screening during that scene, and that is the admirable, quintessential, independent attitude, which is 'I made the film for myself, it's an expression of my artistic vision,' and Quentin fought for it, and ever since then... Quentin said it was a turning point in his relationship with Miramax, that he fought for that scene and ever since then... of course it didn't hurt that Pulp Fiction made $100 million, but ever since then Harvey's referred to Miramax as 'the house that Quentin built.' It's indicative of Quentin's stature at Miramax that Harvey broke up Kill Bill [2003/2004] into two movies, rather than touch a frame of it.

Audience: Can you tell us a little bit about the relationship between Martin Scorsese and Harvey?

PB: Well that's a much tougher question. It's a murky area. My understanding, I think... I was told... well here's a story - I don't know if it's true - it's from a second hand source, but somebody told me that on this new film, The Aviator... Harvey has an interest in that movie and I was told that Scorsese was appalled that Harvey, again, got a piece of the picture that he was working on, but Harvey was forbidden to come on the set, and when he did... there's such a thing as a 'call sheet' - most of you probably know what it was, and to alert Scorsese to Harvey's arrival on the set against his wishes, in small numerals at the bottom was written '666.' [laughter] It's a good story, true or false...

CM: Okay, a teller of many good stories, thank you very much indeed, Peter Biskind, thank you. [applause]

PB: Thank you very much.

CM: And Peter will now be signing copies of this book outside...