Biting tale sells in Redford country

At Dolly’s Bookstore on Main Street in Park City, Utah, one of the hottest titles is Peter Biskind’s “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film” -- a book whose 75,000 copies in print are selling at a “national best-seller level,” Simon & Schuster reports.

All five copies ordered last summer by manager Sarah Ray have flown off the shelves at Dolly’s since their Jan. 5 arrival. And to accommodate the Hollywood contingent attending the Sundance Film Festival, 60 more are on order.

“I’m bringing in 60 this time around -- two or three times the amount of an Oprah book selection but less than the 400 we had of Harry Potter,” says Ray, who upped her film-related fare to about 100 books in anticipation of the out-of-towners. “Once the books arrive on Wednesday, I expect to sell five to 10 a day. And since locals are also interested in the subject, I plan to keep it in stock.”

No, says Ray, she doesn’t know Robert Redford, the movie star and Sundance benefactor who’s a subject of Biskind’s barbs. In his blistering critique, the author concedes that cinema’s Sundance Kid cultivated talent and promoted unconventional filmmaking. But he’s a paranoid filmmaker and a heavy-handed editor, Biskind charges -- passive-aggressive and intellectually insecure.

Ray had a sense that the local hero didn’t come off well after a customer’s passing remark. “I was standing in front of a poster for the book, telling a salesperson we were expecting some in,” she recalls, “when a man called out, ‘That’s the book that trashes Redford.’ He was very defensive, like he was protecting a man whose contribution, he felt, should be respected.”

In nearby Heber, Books & Beyond isn’t carrying a title so “industry-specific,” owner Karen Dallett says. Nor has she read it. But, as organizer of an “author series” that will bring William F. Buckley, Tom Brokaw and Molly Ivins, among others, to Redford’s Sundance Village and resort this year, she challenges Biskind’s perceptions.

“In his late 60s, Redford is still the most gorgeous man I’ve ever met ... you can sense his presence around the corner,” she says. “I’m not star-struck but ‘intelligence’-struck -- he’s very smart and spiritual, with a vision that must be met. If someone doesn’t meet his expectations, they’re gone. His underwriting enabled us to bring literary opportunity to our community, which is not on the usual tour. You have to take the bad with the good, I guess.”