by Spitz, Marc
Anderson wasn’t always a visual maximalist. His beginnings were as DIY and stark as Indie film gets. In its first incarnation, Bottle Rocket, a twelve-minute short cowritten with his University of Texas classmate Owen Wilson and shot in 16 mm, was a low-budget black-and-white caper. The soundtrack was cool jazz—Artie Shaw, Chet Baker, and selections from Vince Guaraldi’s score from A Charlie Brown Christmas—and the film was set in Austin, already a key Twee Tribe hub like New York, L.A., Chicago, Portland, and Seattle. But from the start, Anderson’s output swings with a sense of inspiration that lifts what is essentially a heist story.
Owen Wilson’s Dignan and his emotionally troubled friend Anthony (played by Wilson’s real-life younger brother, Luke) steal a coin collection from Anthony’s mom. But the attitude and the humor of the movie are as much at play as the unchecked love for filmmaking itself. The Bottle Rocket short caught the eye of Oscar-winning writer, director, and producer James L. Brooks via Polly Platt, ex-wife of Peter Bogdanovich. Brooks was known for Oscar-winning films such as Terms of Endearment and groundbreaking television like Taxi. Platt sensed that here were filmmakers who shared the spirit of the new-Hollywood insurgency she’d been a part of in the 1970s. These were the Beattys and Redfords of their generation: clean-cut, all-American, but troubled and sometimes dangerous.
Reshot as a feature under Brooks’s guidance, Bottle Rocket added a love story and a few more local, if improbable, heists (including a strip-mall bookstore), as well as James Caan. Stillman and Baumbach were independent filmmakers from the East Coast in the old tradition. Brooks and Caan signaled something else entirely. Anderson and Wilson were the new Hollywood. Bottle Rocket was not a hit, though Anderson’s current poise tends to overshadow his early false starts. In the mid-’90s, audiences did not want their criminals this inept, running around like little kids in jumpsuits, spewing code words into walkie-talkies. But rather than correct his course, Anderson doubled down and set about creating, with Owen Wilson again, an even more Twee universe, without a trace of self-consciousness.
Rushmore, Anderson and Wilson’s next script, opens with a sort of mission statement in the form of Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) daydreaming about solving an unsolvable math problem. Here is the can-do spirit of the young and contrary Gen Twee member, personified. Nothing is impossible. Max is haunted by the death of his mother and ashamed of his father, a simple but loving barber. Max is almost compulsive, an overachiever, founding clubs and societies, participating in lacrosse, debate, astronomy, trap and skeet, beekeeping—as well as the Max Fischer Players. This Twee theater troupe turns to Anderson’s beloved 1970s films like Lumet’s Serpico and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now for inspiration. The film itself might have been just a string of set pieces had it not been emotionally grounded by Schwartzman, who won the part after an extensive search. Olivia Williams’s Mrs. Cross, a comely widow—her dead husband haunting the academy—and Bill Murray as Herman Blume, the world-weary titan, also add relatable emotion.
Blume, Vietnam vet, unhappily married, with spoiled numbskull kids and a sense that life’s rewards are nothing more than a big swindle, is returned to his youth via Max’s spirit. Through Max, Blume experiences, albeit briefly, all the raw emotions of his past—joy, hope, amusement, lust, and rage. He is literally given a jolt of life by Max, whereas before he is flirting with drowning himself in his backyard swimming pool. With its 1960s pop soundtrack full of Donovan, the Kinks, and the Who, Rushmore is operatic but never bombastic. It’s a quiet film in its own way, talky but more concentrated than Bottle Rocket. Audiences left the theater in 1999 feeling restored and willing to pay for whatever the team of Anderson, Murray, and Schwartzman offered next.
Was Anderson the most talented of these new-school filmmakers or just the one with the most certainty of vision?
“I saw Rushmore, and I thought, He’s comfortable making his own genre,” Noah Baumbach said. Following Kicking and Screaming, Baumbach, the would-be wunderkind, hit a skid. His follow-up, Mr. Jealousy, released only a few months before Anderson’s Rushmore, cast Eric Stoltz as Lester Grimm, a New Yorker with trust issues bordering on the pathological. Annabella Sciorra was cast as his girlfriend, Ramona Ray, the source of much of his agony. Chris Eigeman plays Dashiell Frank, a famous novelist and one of Lester’s foes, whom he spies on in a group-therapy session, hoping that details of an affair will be revealed.
Critics who had praised Kicking and Screaming as a smart, new voice were now tepid. A Janet Maslin review in the New York Times, in particular, destroyed the momentum. “I’m not sure [why critics didn’t like it],” says Stoltz. “Perhaps they could sense that it was a bit more formulaic, perhaps they didn’t like Noah doing his own narration. Who can say? Perhaps the leads should have been a bit older—I’ve found that older men, say, in their forties, tend to have serious issues with jealousy much more than twenty-somethings, who tend to be less threatened by experience. I think it’s a very good film.”
“Baumbach has described his second film, Mr. Jealousy . . . with reference to the directorial pantheon,” Maslin wrote, “invoking filmmakers from Billy Wilder to Francois Truffaut to Ernst Lubitsch as inspirations for his own comic style. Without knowing that, it would be easier to cite the two most imitated contemporary influences on independent comedies, Woody Allen and Seinfeld (in that order).” She went on to describe Stoltz, Sciorra, and Eigeman as “strikingly miscast,” although she did concede that the film was “better written than staged.”
“The distributors became reticent about it,” the film’s producer, Kastelberg, now says. “There wasn’t a clamor to get this movie out, despite the critical success of Kicking and Screaming. They just pulled the plug. It was very hard for Noah to get a film made after that.”
Baumbach earned a deal with ABC and wrote several pilots for the network. He made good money doing so, but it wasn’t until he was imbued with the defiance of Rushmore that he had the nerve to shrug off his critics and continue pursuing his cinematic vision. “He was frustrated that he wasn’t making movies. Then Wes Anderson came along, and it was amazing for him. It enabled him to get going again,” Kastelberg says.
Anderson and Baumbach had met while their first films were traveling the country on the festival circuit. Baumbach now decided to up his game and take more risks. He began writing a story about his own Max Fischer, a boy—perhaps his alter ego—and the way he reacts to the divorce of his Brooklyn-intellectual parents in the 1980s.
“I read the script for The Squid and the Whale years before it was made,” says Dean Wareham, former front man for the band Luna, who contributed a song to the soundtrack of Mr. Jealousy. Wareham created the now-iconic score for The Squid and the Whale, finally released in 2005. “It was a long journey to get that film made.”
Meanwhile, Anderson had carte blanche. His production company, American Empirical, already stood for a certain level of quality. Following the success of Rushmore, an even more eager array of major movie stars like Gene Hackman, Danny Glover, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to join Murray and the Wilsons in the next Wes Anderson film.
If Rushmore is informed by The Catcher in the Rye, then The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s first true masterpiece, is saturated with Salinger’s Glass family from Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories. Even as it pushes all the Twee Tribe pleasure buttons (1960s soundtrack, smart humor, studious detail, children’s-book-drawn palette) it confirms their greatest fears: sic transit gloria.
The Tenenbaum siblings, former acclaimed playwright Margot (Paltrow), financier Chas (Stiller), and tennis pro Richie (Wilson) are all gifted children—geniuses even—turned pathetic adult messes. They are all dysfunctional to the point that they have become self-destructive and hurtful to those around them. They’re all bound for terrible things until their estranged father, the scoundrel patriarch Royal (Hackman), falls down on his luck and tries to reconnect with his wife, Etheline (Huston), as a last resort.
The now-iconic Futura-font c
redits bearing his “An American Empirical Picture” production-house credit, and the whimsical ice cream colors, animal-print wallpaper, Dalmatian mice, and butterscotch sundaes cannot erase the fact that this movie is a dark affair about trust and secrets, lies and how family both saves and ruins our souls. Royal falsely claims to have cancer, though Glover’s Henry Sherman, whose wife did die of stomach cancer, soon discovers the lie. Richie is secretly in love with Margot and is driven to a suicide attempt (set to Elliott Smith’s brutal junkie ballad “Needle in the Hay”). Margot is cheating on her husband (Bill Murray) with an overpraised and drug-addled would-be Cormac McCarthy (Owen Wilson’s Eli Cash). The marriage of pain and Peanuts freed a lot of filmmakers and gave Hollywood a new context, and the confidence that audiences everywhere now wanted complexity, singular vision, better detail, and a soundtrack that would send them to the newly ubiquitous search engine Google. More young auteurs were required.
Almost as improbable as the rise of Wes Anderson from outside Hollywood’s establishment was that of Sofia Coppola from inside. Coppola was as connected to the 1970s Indie revolution as someone of her generation can get, having grown up the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. Until the new millennium, however, she was known only for ruining The Godfather: Part III. Coppola was cast as Michael Corleone’s daughter, Mary, after Winona Ryder pulled out, instantly inspiring cries of nepotism. Were there no qualified, “serious” actresses available? Coppola’s only real film experience to that point had been observing the old man and cowriting his contribution to the anthology film New York Stories, “Life Without Zoe.” The short film features Zoe, a sort of Eloise figure who lives virtually alone in the opulent Sherry-Netherland Hotel. She’s the privileged daughter of a world-famous but absent flautist and a vapid shopaholic mother. Zoe is obnoxious. Her rich friends are even more obnoxious. “I’ve talked to Morgan Fairchild on the telephone for an hour in my room,” the wealthiest one, a boy named Abu, brags. Zoe’s servants (Don Novello, also known as Father Guido Sarducci, among them) smile through gritted teeth. Homeless people in boxes wearily accept her gifts of Hershey’s Kisses when they’d rather have a sandwich. It’s as tone-deaf as can be, and only worsened by the sharpness of the other two contributors, Woody Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” and Martin Scorsese’s “Life Lessons,” one of the director’s most satisfying “deep cuts.” Scripted by the great Richard Price, the latter captures the art and social scene of New York of the mid- to late 1980s as it really was.
Nobody finds other people’s offspring half as charming as their own. Most show-business veterans were aware that nobody tells Francis Ford Coppola what to do, but since the early 1970s there’s been an even stronger axiom: you don’t fuck with The Godfather.
The Godfather: Part III was probably the most anticipated film of all time. Only the late-’90s Star Wars prequels had more buzz. When Part III was released over the Christmas 1990 holiday, critics were mixed on the film, but nearly all of them (with the exception of the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman) agreed that Sofia Coppola’s “Am I getting my lines right?” performance, especially her death scene, was disastrous. When the hit man, dressed up like a priest, puts a bullet in the center of her chest, she doesn’t look particularly pained, just sort of confused—but overall it’s no worse a piece of overacting than Andy Garcia’s or Joe Mantegna’s. She took the hit for the film because she was the director’s daughter and she wasn’t Winona Ryder.
The controversy was so great that Sofia appeared on the cover of EW under the headline THE GODDAUGHTER and spent much of her twenties as a punch line. Even the inherently sweet Gilmore Girls made mean-girl jokes about the death scene. Twee cinema’s bête noire is always the slickie: the handsome, privileged foe. In Metropolitan, Eigeman is riled by Rick Von Sloneker, a womanizer with silky hair and a tan. In The Squid and the Whale, Jeff Daniels’s estranged wife (Laura Linney) takes up with a younger, impossibly handsome tennis pro (Billy Baldwin).
To many, Coppola, a hip model, Hollywood party thrower, and muse to fashion designer Marc Jacobs, was the slickie of her day, someone who was fun to hate on and as far from an underdog as possible. So when her adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides was released in 1999, nobody was expecting much, but even if the bar had been set high, the film would have cleared it. It’s among the first to establish a poetic and empathetic but almost anthropologically distant window on the gold-lit, twisted private world of girlhood. The doomed Lisbon sisters—Cecilia, Bonnie, Mary, and especially Kirsten Dunst’s lovely but mostly mute Lux—are locked away by their God-fearing mother (Kathleen Turner) and hapless father (James Woods). Dunst, like future Coppola hero Scarlett Johansson, acts intensely with her eyes, conveying lust, boredom, contempt, regret, terror, elation. Coppola’s scripts must be about thirty pages each. Only recently with her teen caper, an adaptation of writer Nancy Jo Sales’s The Bling Ring (2013), do her characters get coked up and verbose.
Outside the pink bedrooms of the Lisbon girls, with their scented makeup and teddy bears, there’s sin. Within, they are safe. Local boys circle the house like wolves. You can almost see hormones on the screen. Josh Hartnett’s Trip Fontaine, with his 1970s wig and polyester trousers, locks eyes with Dunst, and what might be John Waters– or Todd Haynes–like is treated with a deep and abiding understanding by Coppola.
As with Anderson and Baumbach’s films, Coppola routinely fills her soundtracks with retro music, but it’s not as obviously cool. The songs she chose for The Virgin Suicides soundtrack were more kitsch: “The Air That I Breathe” by the Hollies and “Magic Man” by Heart. The mid- and late ’90s was the time when the generation that grew up on The ABC Afterschool Special, Schoolhouse Rock, The Midnight Special, Sha Na Na, and The Muppet Show began choosing the songs to punctuate the emotional templates of their films, so music from the 1960s and ’70s reigned. Even The Ice Storm, directed by future Oscar-winning director Ang Lee and adapted from the Rick Moody novel (and a critical hit but a box-office bomb at the time of its 1997 release) uses a kind of knowing array of ’70s kitsch to lift certain key scenes. That film’s teens are, in typical Twee fashion, wiser than their parents. Fourteen-year-old Wendy, played by a young Christina Ricci, is following the Watergate scandal and the abduction of Patty Hearst by the SLA while her superficial parents sneak around, having affairs and kvetching about golf handicaps. Ricci calls her dad (played by Kevin Kline) fascist, and he calls her kiddo. The kids court each other with gifts of chewing gum and Devil Dogs or shout-outs to Dostoyevsky. Today the film is a Criterion-approved classic, with plenty of resonance among the Twee Tribe.
Wes Anderson is likely a factor in the second life of Sofia Coppola, as he reinvented Bill Murray as the go-to daddy figure in Indie film. Sofia Coppola chased Murray, who famously has no agent, only a telephone number and an answering machine. She vowed she wouldn’t make her next film, a self-penned romance set in Japan, if Murray didn’t play the part of Bob Harris, a faded movie star flown out to Japan to shoot a quick payday commercial.
Lost in Translation, the independent film hit of 2003, uses actual weariness as a metaphor for world-weariness. America had been on terror alert for two years since the attacks of 9/11. A second war was launched that year in Iraq, and increasingly intelligent mainstream movie audiences wanted their sweetness with a little nod to just how fucked up everything seemed, a sort of enlightened escapism. Scarlett Johansson was as blond and comely as the girlish Kirsten Dunst, but she had a huskier voice and an older-than-her-years quality (already demonstrated alongside Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi in Ghost World) that was squarely in the zeitgeist. Her “Is this it?” frown is the same as Murray’s in Rushmore. They are united in displeasure before they even share a frame of screen time.
Her Charlotte, newly married, stranded in a lonely hotel room while her vapid husband (Giovanni Ribisi) is off photographing a band, evokes the same sense of frightened, postcollege stasis that Baumbach’s men of Kicking and Scr
eaming are plagued by. She makes up for it by being snippy. “Why do you have to point out how stupid everybody is all the time?” Ribisi asks. He begs her not to smoke. She smokes. He leaves her alone in her hotel room, and when her self-help tapes don’t placate, she decides to have an affair—one of the mind and not necessarily the body. Bob Harris, Murray’s former movie star now riding on nostalgia and kitsch, is spirit-revived by a younger foil.
“I’m staging a prison break,” he confides to her over his cocktail. She’s in. Together they “make a run for it” into the blinking, chaotic neon of Tokyo by night, where grown men dress and act like children and strippers gyrate to bad dance music. It’s a series of sensory overload and comedown, arcades and house parties, hospitals and hotel rooms.
“I’m stuck. Does it get easier?”
Coppola, like Anderson and Baumbach, is a child of divorce. In 1986, when she was just fifteen, her brother was killed in a boating accident. She was briefly married to Spike Jonze, but by 2003 the marriage was ending. He is clearly referenced in Lost in Translation in the form of Ribisi, a skinny hipster earning a living filming bands. This film made Johansson a movie star. Like Baumbach, Coppola succeeded after a serious professional setback by facing the darkness and using it, rather than attempting to outrun and escape it.
Audiences and critics instinctively sensed the bravery in Lost in Translation, and, like Baumbach, Coppola was nominated for an Oscar (as was Murray). Baumbach and Murray lost. Coppola won.
When new-Hollywood directors like Bogdanovich, Hopper, DePalma, Friedkin, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola Senior became the establishment, they blew a lot of studio money—sometimes on ambitious flops, but occasionally to create an award-winning gem. On a smaller scale, the new new Hollywood, dubbed the millennials by some—or “the American Eccentrics,” by Armond White—followed a similar path as their careers carried on through the decade.
