I met Harvey Weinstein at Sundance

I’d been in Park City less than 24 hours when I spotted the man himself. I was standing on Main Street talking to one of American television’s most distinguished comedy directors when Mr Sundance happened to walk past.

‘Would you like to meet him?’ asked the director.

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Follow me.’

Unfortunately, as soon as we’d taken a step towards this Hollywood legend, his mobile phone rang. I was ready to give up at this point, but the director insisted we follow him down the street. Provided we kept a discreet distance, he’d be none the wiser and when he ended his call we’d be in a position to pounce.

Needless to say, I’m not talking about Robert Redford, the man who started the world’s largest independent film festival. I’m talking about Harvey Weinstein.

For better or worse, it is Weinstein, not Redford, who embodies the true spirit of Sundance. Back when the festival began in 1981, the definition of an ‘independent film’ was pretty straightforward. It meant a picture that wasn’t funded or distributed by one of the big Hollywood studios. Typically, an ‘independent film’ would be a low-budget feature starring non-name actors and which didn’t have any big commercial ambitions.

Nowadays, thanks to Weinstein, it’s primarily a marketing term, a way of branding a film as edgy and artistic in the hope that it will find favour with upmarket audiences. Take Pulp Fiction, for instance, the most famous ‘independent film’ of the 1990s. While it was made by Miramax, a company that was then run by Harvey and his brother, it was actually financed by Disney, which acquired Miramax in 1993.

After the box office success of Pulp Fiction, the other studios decided that they, too, wanted to produce ‘independent films’ and some of the biggest companies in the marketplace today — Working Title, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage — are wholly owned subsidiaries of the six major studios.