Certainly, a handful of Miramax loyalists have jumped into print to defend Harvey and Bob for their willingness to take risks on less than obvious commercial propositions and spin them into box-office gold. Especially after its absorption by Disney in 1993, Miramax went from the edginess of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, say, to the pure syrup of Chocolat and Cider House Rules; from the rock-bottom budgets and star-free productions of the early acquisitions to the bloated budgets of Miramax original productions such as Gangs of New York and Cold Mountain.The argument is fine as far as it goes, but one senses that Biskind is more interested in demonising the Weinsteins personally than he is in assessing their full impact on the movies. Some of the bile, at least, seems to be personal, since Redford refused to cooperate with Biskind in any way. Redford, he says, “has a long memory and holds on to grudges like a drowning man”.Biskind does have a serious line of argument behind the eye-popping stories which is, in a nutshell, to accuse both Miramax and Sundance of betraying the independent cause by allowing big Hollywood thinking – and big Hollywood money – to co-opt the movement and take much of the spice and originality out of it.

He is chronicled making promises to Steven Soderbergh that he doesn’t keep, failing to make key business decisions while he is off on location to act or direct, routinely showing up hours late for appointments and missing several key opportunities to expand his Sundance empire into cinema exhibition or television. He was spooky,” Miramax’s acquisitions chief in the late 1980s, Alison Brantley.Redford’s alleged shortcomings are altogether less spectacular, but Biskind’s dislike of him is still palpable. “I’ve never walked down death row, but that’s the feeling I got around Bob. His quieter brother Bob, whose Dimension division specialises in deliberately lowbrow fare, from the Scream spoof-horror film series to the Spy Kids films, takes a back seat, although there are occasional hints that he may be even worse.

“He’s like a little Saddam Hussein of cinema.”In the book as in life, Harvey Weinstein sucks most of the air out of the room and leaves little space for anyone else – a propensity his admirers would say is simply the result of being such a forceful, irresistibly fascinating personality. Biskind has some spectacular examples, chronicling how Todd Field developed a bleeding ulcer during the nine agonising months between acquisition and release of his intimate 2002 drama In the Bedroom, or how Billy Bob Thornton’s adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel All The Pretty Horses was slashed to near- incoherence and box-office death. Although Biskind concedes that Harvey’s cutting was sometimes justified, he also quotes Bernardo Bertolucci, burned over his expensive flop Little Buddha, saying he – like a long list of other film-makers – would never work for Miramax again “I wouldn’t offer a cup of coffee to Miramax I wouldn’t trust Harvey,” he is quoted saying. The time period of the new book stretches from 1989 – when Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape became the sensation of both Sundance and Cannes – until the present, so his protagonists are still very much in the game.You have to admire his sheer chutzpah.

Within a few pages he is likening Harvey Weinstein and his brother and partner Bob to the Krays. He goes on to describe Harvey variously as a mini-Mussolini, a real-world Don Corleone from The Godfather, and as a psycho with “a neck like a fireplug, and hands as big as lamb chops”. In anecdote after anecdote, Harvey pulls phones out of walls, hurls ashtrays, overturns furniture, breaks glass, grabs one hapless journalist in an arm-lock, screams abuse at anyone who dares to disagree with him, tells distinguished directors they are pretentious, arrogant know-nothings, and routinely terrorises his subordinates by telling them they are fired, which they sometimes are and sometimes aren’t.Harvey has a nickname in the industry – Harvey Scissorhands – earned for his habit of recutting films, whether or not the director has a contractual right to final cut, and having few qualms about dumping a film or witholding it from distribution altogether if the film-maker objects. The information may be exaggerated or unsubstantiated in places, but as a reader you can’t help being swept along by the sheer mind-boggling detail.Last time out, Biskind was writing largely about directors and producers whose glory days were behind them.