Consciously and unconsciously, I am a child of 1990s cinema. Even if I didn’t see many of the most iconic films of the ’90s until I was older, I am irrevocably shaped by the film and pop-culture sensibilities of my childhood. Specifically, I am a product of what Alisa Perren calls the “cinema of cool,” films that traffic in irony, nontraditional narrative structures, and an intertextual interest in other films, both the greatest works of film history and the worst. A disproportionate number of these “cinema of cool” films — Clerks, Pulp Fiction, and ironic genre films like Scream — were released by a single company: Miramax.
Perren’s Indie, Inc., a UT Press release subtitled “Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s,” is all about Miramax, from its inception in the 1980s to 2010, when it was shut down and sold off by Disney.
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