But by the end of the 1980s, distributors had hit a wall. None of the indie hits had been able to crack the $25 million ceiling. They had reached, apparently, the limit of their audience. Enter Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who transformed the indie landscape. As Harvey himself—never one to hide his light under a bushel—put it, “If I didn’t exist, they’d have to invent me—I’m the only interesting thing around.” Perhaps. Had the Weinsteins never existed, others might have been invented to fill their shoes, but on the other hand, perhaps not, and the 1990s might have been more like the 1980s, with art films still prisoners of the art houses.
Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise is a logical place to begin a book like this because, shot in basic black and white with barely a nod toward a plot, it looked deceptively easy to make, almost a home movie—just get hold of a camera and shoot your friends. Like John Cassavetes’s Shadows in 1959, it was one of those “I can do that” films that inspired a decade of filmmakers, convincing them that they, too, could make movies. But under the pressure of the frantic quest for the Next Big Thing, the American film scene changes so quickly that to the second wave of indies, the 1980s already seemed like ancient history; it might as well have been the silent era, with Jarmusch its D. W. Griffith, so irrelevant had it become. In the go-go climate of the 1990s, the refusal of many of that generation’s filmmakers to accept the rules of the game as laid down not only by the studios, but seemingly by audiences as well, made them look like fools and losers. Of course, endorsing this view is bad history and does the pioneers an enormous injustice, but it is true that the indie explosion of the 1990s was so dramatic and so distinctive that it deserves a book of its own. And if this story is as much about the indie business as it is about films and filmmakers, it makes sense to start a few years later, and take 1989—the sex, lies, and videotape year at the Sundance Film Festival—as the big bang of the modern indie film movement. Sex, lies not only marked the arrival of Soderbergh, one of the brightest stars in this new galaxy of filmmakers, but it also signaled the emergence of the Sundance Film Festival (then officially still the U.S. Film Festival), which showcased the film, and Miramax, which distributed it. On the face of it, Redford and the Weinsteins would seem to be poles apart—class versus trash, to put it crudely, with Sundance the finishing school that teaches young filmmakers how to dress for success, and Miramax the reform school where they are cuffed and cudgeled into shape. Sundance and Miramax are the yin and yang of the indie universe, the high road and the low, the sun and the moon, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. But the two had more in common than appeared at first blush. Sundance never would be able to shed its baleful twin, and eventually it would go over to the dark side. That may or may not have been a good thing, but either way, it is the story of this decade.
One
Made in USA
1989
• How Robert Redford hatched his institute but drove his chicks crazy, until sex, lies, and videotape saved the festival he never wanted and launched Miramax on the road to world conquest.
“In the ’80s, the studios could predict what worked and what didn’t. And that’s what the ’80s were—one movie you’d already seen after another. Suddenly, that’s not working anymore. . . . When the audience is fed up with the standard stuff and crying out for something different is when exciting things happen in Hollywood.”
—QUENTIN TARANTINO
When Steven Soderbergh stepped off the plane at the Salt Lake City International Airport headed for the U.S. Film Festival, thirty miles to the northeast in Park City, it was January 21, 1989, a Saturday afternoon, and he was just seven days past his twenty-sixth birthday. He was hand-carrying the print of his film sex, lies, and videotape, which he had just picked up from the lab in Hollywood that morning. The weather was cloudy, with occasional snow flurries, and the thin mountain air cut like a blade, but he was feeling good. The sutures in his gums had finally healed after painful surgery to correct his exaggerated overbite, the Soderbergh family curse. And having grown up in the oppressive heat and dampness of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he liked cold weather. He was looking forward to screening his film for the first time in front of real people.
In those days Park City was a struggling, sub-Aspen ski resort, a huddle of drab buildings ringed by a dark necklace of high-priced condos splayed across the snow-covered hills around it. A mining town in the previous century, it was well on its way to becoming a theme park, with faux Wild West wooden facades jammed together like teeth up and down both sides of Main Street. The restaurants bore names like the Grubstake, the Eating Establishment, and so on, spelled out in Gold Rush signage that featured the faces of scowling men in bowler hats and stringy handlebar mustaches staring down from wooden shingles hanging out front. It looked like the set of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, directed by Walt Disney instead of Robert Altman. The town’s tarnished crown jewel was the Egyptian Theater, located at the top of Main Street and the festival’s screening venue of choice, built in 1926 apparently as a replica of the old Warner’s Egyptian in Pasadena. Everywhere the young director turned were puffy, down-clad filmmakers looking like so many Pillsbury Doughboys flogging their films.
Sundance had taken over the ailing U.S. Film Festival in 1985, despite Redford’s publicly stated objection to festivals. They involved too much hype, they were too competitive, and so on. But he was finally persauded by the logic of the argument: so far, the institute had only addressed the development part of the filmmaking equation. By ignoring marketing, distribution, and exhibition, it was virtually relegating itself to irrelevance. “There was a real fear that Sundance would be perceived as this utopian thing in the mountains, without making any impact on independent filmmaking in the United States,” explains former Sundance executive director Sterling Van Wagenen. And, wonders director Sydney Pollack, “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a noise? There is no noise with a movie unless somebody watches it.”
Wearing several layers of sweaters, jeans, scuffed leather boots, and a threadbare black cotton duster so long the hem flirted with his ankles, Soderbergh made his way carefully down the icy streets banked with mounds of filthy snow. His hair was long, his prominent ears nestled in the nimbus of auburn ringlets that surrounded his face like an aureole of cotton candy. Soderbergh wore glasses with thick lenses that sat like a saddle on an aquiline nose cantilevered over a thin mouth. He was tall, about six feet, and skinny, with long graceless limbs. He looked, as one journalist un-flatteringly described him, like a “stork with red hair.” He always thought he was unattractive. Once, watching a scene from his own picture, he ran his fingers over his face, plucking at his cheeks. “Look at Jimmy [Spader] and Andie [MacDowell],” he exclaimed. “I mean, they have cheekbones. You could plane doors with my face.” Still, despite a certain lack of harmony among the parts, the overall effect was not displeasing. His eyes radiated intelligence. He had a quick, disarming smile, and a dark, self-deprecating sense of humor.
The festival was one of the few devoted exclusively to American indies, which in those days existed well beneath the radar of all but a small band of dedicated enthusiasts. It was a sleepy gathering, not yet the make-or-break event for filmmakers that it would soon become. Few of the films that played the festival got distributed; even fewer scripts that went through the labs got produced, and when by some fluke one did, it was hardly likely to set the world on fire. No agents showed up, few publicists, and fewer press. There was no reason to; the films, with a few exceptions, were eminently forgettable. Even the critics, who dutifully approached each festival like an obligatory visit to a sick friend, were running out of patience. John Powers, writing in Film Comment, had dismissed the 1987 festival as more interesting for “the skiing and the parties” than the movies, and charged that independent film had “settled into a complacent mediocrity whose axiom is ‘Play it safe.’ ”
Soderbergh’s film, which had cost $1.2 million, a hefty budget for an indie feature in those days, had been a tough
sell to the festival. Outside of the fact that it had been shot in Baton Rouge, and might therefore qualify as regional, it didn’t fit the profile. By design as well as default, Sundance had become wedded to the kind of watered-down populism that was still hanging around from the 1960s, the kind that animated, if that’s the right word, Northern Lights and Heartland. The politically correct, regional Americana ran thinly through the veins of the “granola” films, Sundance warhorses like Gal Young ’Un, El Norte, and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, what Lory Smith, one of the programmers, admiringly described as “feel-good, socially responsible” pictures. They were content-driven, not director-driven, often about less-than-pressing social issues. They were like Anne of Green Gables for adults, often featuring Colleen Dewhurst, Richard Farnsworth, Wilford Brimley, or equivalents. Occasionally, if a filmmaker got lucky, he might land a weathered Sam Shepard squinting into the sun while spitting tabakky through his crooked teeth and kicking cow patties at the lens with his boot.
The Grand Jury Prize rarely went to the best film, but rather to the most worthy film, and was therefore regarded as the kiss of death. In 1987, the dramatic award went to Jill Godmilow’s paralytic Waiting for the Moon, and the following year to Rob Nilsson’s Heat and Sunlight. That same year, the festival had reached a nadir of mediocrity unprecedented even in its history of mediocrity, featuring films where you needed a magnifying glass to find the plot, like Rachel River, or The Silence at Bethany, set among Mennonites, which concerned itself with a crisis set off by milk delivery on Sunday. The festival was regarded by many distributors as toxic. If Cinecom, say, or the Samuel Goldwyn Company had a film it thought might cross over, they would withhold it from Sundance lest it be stigmatized as an “art” film. (It was a sign of things to come that, even by 1989, to be known as an “art” film was to have been kissed by death. Soderbergh had been admonished to refer to sex, lies as a “specialty” film.)
But nobody in sex, lies wore bib overalls. Rather, the film was set among urban yuppies in Baton Rouge. The picture had been pushed by Marjorie Skouras, director of acquisitions for Skouras Pictures, whose breakthrough release had been Lasse Hallström’s My Life as a Dog in 1985, a film that grossed a very healthy $9.1 million. In the 1980s, the few indie distributors who sank money into production, like Cinecom, went bankrupt; the rest bought the rights to finished films financed by others that they discovered at festivals. Acquisitions was a relaxed, gentleman’s business, and veterans look back on that era fondly. Skouras loved her job. She recalls, “People were passionate for the right reasons. It was about the art and the filmmakers and the excitement of reaching a community. We acquired interesting films at a very low cost. The business wasn’t driven by the big money.”
Skouras was a member of the festival selection committee. Nancy Tenenbaum, a friend and one of sex, lies’s producers, asked her to take a look. The film was still in rough shape and boasted of no actors of any renown. Not expecting much, Skouras popped the tape into her VCR at 11:30 one night before she went to sleep, and she wasn’t disappointed. There was not much in the way of plot or action, and no sex to speak of, despite the provocative title—just people sitting around talking about sex. She went, Huh?
Tenenbaum understood. She too had passed when she first scanned the script. “It read like a first draft,” she says, “long speeches, tons of monologues.” But then Soderbergh called her, convinced her to meet him. She remembers him as an Elvis Costello look-alike, wearing shirts buttoned all the way up to the Adam’s apple, geeky or maybe retro if you were inclined to be generous. His mouth was sewn up, courtesy of the dental surgeon, and he talked through clenched teeth. He lived like the single guy he was, ate out of cans, Dinty Moore, franks and beans. But Tenenbaum liked him. He told her exactly what he thought, and he was very serious about making movies, a diamond in the rough. “He doesn’t hedge his words, is extremely rational,” she says. “Doesn’t gush sentimentality. Doesn’t like to dumb things down or explain them ad nauseam.” She agreed to help him. But Tenenbaum had a lot of trouble raising money for a movie about an impotent guy who videotapes women talking about their sexual experiences and then gets off watching the tapes. “Sex, lies was passed on by just about everyone out there,” she recalls. “A lot of people thought it was perverted. One friend of mine who isn’t prudish found it vile. She said to me, ‘It’s pretty disgusting, Nancy, what are you doing getting involved in a movie like that?’ I felt self-conscious, thinking, Maybe I’m doing something wrong.”
In any event, a few days later, Skouras had lunch with Larry Estes, the senior vice president for feature film acquisitions at RCA/Columbia Home Video, which had put up the biggest chunk of cash for sex, lies, and hence numbered, along with Bobby Newmyer and Nick Wechsler, as another of the five producers the picture had accumulated—like the sticky trail left by a snail—in the course of its slow and tortuous journey to the screen. Although Soderbergh’s backers were politely encouraging, nobody had said, “I think you’ve made a great film.” It was more like, “Well, it’s okay,” or, “You haven’t embarrassed yourself—and it’s still too long.” None of them thought his film had much commercial potential. Estes, who retained what he assumed was the film’s most valuable asset—the video rights—was just looking to break even, especially since he felt Soderbergh had welched on his promise to include some skin. Months before, when Estes looked at Laura San Giacomo’s audition tape, he had asked Soderbergh, “Is she going to have a problem with the nudity?” Without hesitation, Soderbergh assured him that she wouldn’t, saying, “No. She’s in this play called Beirut where she is naked on the stage most of the time.” But Estes was watching the dailies, and hadn’t seen what he was looking for. He called Soderbergh, asked him, “Are you sure I’ve gotten all the footage? Because I’m not seeing any flesh. Why is that?”
“Because there isn’t any.”
“Why not?”
“Because I decided it wasn’t necessary. It will be more erotic if it’s not so explicit.”
“You have a commitment to shoot what’s written in the script. We may have a problem.” Soderbergh was annoyed that Estes wasn’t congratulating him on his great-looking footage instead of saying, “What happened to the tits?”
Estes asked Skouras to distribute it, even offered her a service deal.2 Says Jeff Lipsky, who was head of distribution at Skouras Pictures, “That’s how confident RCA/Columbia was that this film was a bomb.” Margie was dubious, but she discovered that the more she thought about Soderbergh’s film, the more she liked it. Lipsky, who was given to powerful enthusiasms, also saw a tape and was wild about it, thought, This is the best American indie film ever made. I’m completely blown away. He went to Tom Skouras, and said: “I would bet the company on this film.” But his boss wouldn’t give him the green light to buy it. Tom, Margie’s step-father, was the nephew of the legendary Spyros Skouras, who made his fortune in exhibition and controlled Twentieth Century Fox well into the 1960s. Some thought Tom was more passionate about restoring classic racing cars than distributing pictures. Says Lipsky, “He was so risk-averse that Margie knew it was a Sisyphean task to persuade him to buy a film where the home video rights weren’t even available, when it was like pulling hair out of her head to get him to put up a whopping $45,000 advance three years earlier for My Life as a Dog.”
Margie thought the film was good enough to go into the festival, told Tony Safford, the festival director, “You should really see it, something new.” Safford, who was smart, confident in his taste, and just short of arrogant, agreed to look at it. Although he hated the regional films that Sundance loved, and boasted of an eclectic, quirky taste, sex, lies left him cold. Still, Margie pressed him, said, “As a favor to me, take this film, I really feel that strongly about it.” Safford gave in, and sex, lies, and videotape became the last entry accepted into the sixteen-film competition of the 1989 U.S. Film Festival.
This would prove to be a banner year in the short, lusterless history of the festival. A
mong the other films in competition were Nancy Savoca’s True Love, with Annabella Sciorra; Martin Donovan’s Apartment Zero, with Colin Firth and Hart Bochner; Jonathan Wacks’s Powwow Highway, executive-produced by George Harrison; Jeffrey Noyes Scher’s Prisoners of Inertia, with Amanda Plummer; and Michael Lehmann’s Heathers, with Winona Ryder, Shannen Doherty, and Christian Slater, a truly questionable choice, given its Hollywood pedigree. Even in that relatively innocent, pre-cell-phone era, most of the films featured entry-level Hollywood stars or star-wannabes. The budgets ranged from $15,000 for Rick Schmidt’s Morgan’s Cake to $3 million for Heathers. Safford honored John Cassavetes—regarded by many as the godfather of the American indie film—with a retrospective.
Sex, lies premiered on Sunday night, January 22, at ten o’clock at Prospector Square, a small, cramped theater a couple of miles out of town. Before the lights went down, Soderbergh stood up, cleared his throat, and made the usual disclaimers: the film was still long, he was using a temp mix, and the titles were Xeroxed. Personal encounters always made him nervous and uncomfortable, but public occasions like this one didn’t seem to faze him. He was fatalistic. The picture was what it was. As the opening scenes unreeled, with Andie MacDowell’s character Ann talking to her shrink (Ron Vawter), at least one person in the audience thought, Oh, no, another droning indie film, and promptly dozed off. But after the first twenty minutes, the pace picked up, and by the end, the audience seemed to be with it. Soderbergh made his way to the front of the theater and answered questions. He was still uncertain about the title, a matter of contention between him and RCA/Columbia Home Video, which worried that it was too generic, and reeked of straight-to-video. He recalled, “It got to the point where they were saying, ‘You know, we can keep the first two words, sex, lies—that’s fine. But the third word—maybe we could change the third word.’ And I’m like, ‘What—sex, lies, and magnetic oxide?’ ” Soderbergh had fooled around with other titles, facetiously coming up with Hair and Plants (the actors all had great hair and continually exchanged plants as gifts), but nothing seemed right. About half the audience voted to change it. It was too early in the festival to have much basis for comparison, but Soderbergh was relieved. At least he hadn’t been hooted off the stage. In fact, two young producers, Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, impressed with his film, took him to lunch two days later and asked him if there was anything he wanted to do. Soderbergh gave them a novel, King of the Hill, a coming-of-age story set in depression-era St. Louis, by A. E. Hotchner.
Down and Dirty Pictures Page 5
