REBELS
on the Backlot
SIX MAVERICK DIRECTORS
AND HOW THEY CONQUERED THE
HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM
SHARON WAXMAN
To Claude, with Love
and to
Alexandra, Jeremy, and Daniel, My Gems
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1. Quentin Tarantino Discovers Hollywood;
Steven Soderbergh Gets Noticed, 1990–1992
2. Spanking and Flirting; Chewing
on Pulp Fiction, 1992–1995
3. Hard Times on Hard Eight; Flirting with the
Indies; Schizopolis, The Experiment, 1994–1995
4. New Line Hits a Bump in the Road;
Paul Thomas Anderson Starts to Boogie;
Steven Soderbergh Hits Traffic, 1996
5. David Fincher Takes on Fight Club, 1996
6. The Essence of Malkovich;
Making Boogie Nights, 1996
7. Pulling Punches on Fight Club;
Pulling Strings for Malkovich;
Magnolia Blooms, 1997
8. Shooting the Real Malkovich;
Warner Brothers Anoints Three Kings;
Getting Traffic Out of a Jam, 1998
9. Casting Three Kings—George Clooney Tries
Harder; The Shoot—War Breaks Out, 1998
10. 1999: A Banner Year; Fight Club Agonies,
Fox Passes on Traffic
11. Releasing John Malkovich;
Testing Three Kings; Trimming Magnolia, 1999
12. Fight Club Fallout; The Fruits of Violence, 1999
13. Casting Harrison Ford; Movie Stars Rule;
Making Traffic the Schizopolis Way, 2000
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Rebels on the Backlot
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
On October 4, 2001, a Thursday, a banner headline in Variety caught my attention. “Helmers the Reel Deal,” it read, bold type marching across the top of the tabloid-sized trade paper. The sub-headline followed: “Young directors will run own shingle at USA Films.” The story announced that a group of Hollywood’s most talented, most exciting young directors—Steven Soderbergh, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Alexander Payne, and Sam Mendes—young artists who, between them, had created some of the most original and important movies of the previous few years, were banding together to create a “major film venture.” The article said: “They will direct films and enjoy complete creative control, along with the opportunity to own the titles in five to seven years.” It added: “In the new venture, each partner has pledged to direct three movies over the first five years, and the venture will exist only for the production and distribution of their films.” The article evoked memories of the halcyon years of the late 1960s and 1970s, when “then-powerhouse helmers Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin” created a director’s studio within Paramount Pictures.
THE REFERENCE TO THE GREAT DIRECTORS OF EARLIER DECADES was not a coincidence. The young generation that emerged in the 1990s—and these young men were chief among them—were nothing if not self-conscious heirs to the mantle of directors such as Coppola, Bogdanovich, and Friedkin, along with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, George Lucas, and a long list of others. In the 1970s, these older visionaries created the movies that defined their era with groundbreaking, challenging, and ultimately enduring films including The French Connection, Nashville, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, and Midnight Cowboy. By now, most of those talents had retired, burned out, or become hacks in the Hollywood studio system. Some of them, like Scorsese, still struggled to make movies that rose to the level of their youthful artistry, with mixed results. Only one, Spielberg, still seemed to succeed at his craft with any degree of regularity.
Their time was past. Moviemaking is a young man’s game, as more than one of them had told fawning interviewers over the years. Now a new generation of visionary talents had emerged, marking the movies of their time with their own distinctive stamp. By 2001 a true community of young film artists had emerged from the final decade of the twentieth century. Many were friends, others were rivals, and some were enemies. Embracing the spirit of the filmmakers of the 1970s, the new generation avoided their excesses and instead focused their energies on their work. As a group, their sensibility was utterly new, and they shared a collective disdain for a studio system designed to strip them of their voices and dull their jagged edges.
WITH THEIR FILMS, THE REBELS OF THE 1990S SHATTERED the status quo, set new boundaries in the art of moviemaking, and managed to bend the risk-averse studio structure to their will. They created a new cinematic language, recast audience expectations, and surprised us—and one another. They included not only the five from the Variety story and their films, from Traffic to Election to American Beauty, but also David O. Russell, who wrote and directed such comic gems as Flirting with Disaster and the satiric drama Three Kings; Wes Anderson, who had made Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums; Sofia Coppola, who conjured up The Virgin Suicides like a tone poem; and Darren Aronofsky, who had made Pi and the piercing Requiem for a Dream. They included Kimberly Peirce, who had made Boys Don’t Cry, which won an Oscar for Hilary Swank, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who had made two sweeping masterpieces before the age of thirty, Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Baz Luhrmann revived the musical with his delirious genius in Moulin Rouge, Atom Egoyan wrought delicate emotion in The Sweet Hereafter, and Cameron Crowe penned the path into postmodern romance with Say Anything, and Singles, and Jerry Maguire. They included the sci-fi surrealism of taciturn brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski with the blockbuster The Matrix, and the painterly lyricism of taciturn twins Mark and Michael Polish in the miniscule Twin Falls Idaho.
Quite possibly none of these directors who bucked the Hollywood system of cookie-cutter scripts and cheap MTV imagery could have succeeded without Quentin Tarantino, the rabble-rousing writer-director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, who very early in the decade broke every rule in moviedom to the roaring acclaim of critics, audiences, and (finally) the Hollywood establishment, then brought his irony-tinged violence and retro-cool ethos into mainstream culture.
The movies of the new rebel auteurs shared many things. They played with structure, wreaked havoc with traditional narrative form, fiddled with the film stock, and ushered in the whiplash editing style true to a generation of video game children. Their movies were often shockingly violent and combined their brutality with humor. Paul Anderson’s scene in Boogie Nights when William H. Macy shoots his wife as she publicly fornicates with a member of the porn film industry vibrated on the same cultural wavelength as Tarantino’s deadpan discussion of the state of European fast food by his assassin-philosophers in Pulp Fiction. David O. Russell’s Iraqi torturer in Three Kings, who asks his torture victim about Michael Jackson before applying electric prods, was cosmically related to the very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones snarling to a hit man, “Shoot him in the head”—referring to a witness against her narcolord husband—in Soderbergh’s Traffic.
Their stories engaged the viewer in the possibility of parallel realities, whether in the mind of a movie star like John Malkovich, or the subjugation of the human species in The Matrix. David O. Russell questioned the place of the American superpower in the world with uncanny prescience. Paul Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Sam Mendes went inside daily human experience to explore the small tragedies and the cracks of humanity in daily, suburban American life.
The filmmakers o
wed a debt not only to the filmmakers of the 1970s but to the handful of auteurs of the 1980s who struggled through a mostly New York–based indie system: Joel and Ethan Coen with the brilliance of their early Blood Simple and later work from Barton Fink to Fargo; the dark humor and sinister absurdity of David Lynch in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart; and the take-no-prisoners politics of Spike Lee, starting with She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing to Jungle Fever and beyond. The style, the tone, the visual and thematic edge of these auteurs of the eighties set the stage for the filmmakers of the next decade.
These nineties filmmakers were—almost all of them—self-taught, having avoided the strictures of film schools that produced Lucas, Scorsese, and many others of the seventies. A notable number of them had strong, iconic fathers who loomed large in their childhoods (Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher) or tended to ignore them entirely (David O. Russell, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze). Several seem to have disliked their mothers (Tarantino, Soderbergh, Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson). They came from all over the country, in a hurry, most of them, to remake cinema in their own image. Paul Thomas Anderson dropped out of New York University Film School after a couple of days, deciding he had nothing to learn from the process. Fincher, Soderbergh, and Jonze never made it to college at all; Fincher’s prickly personality belied the insecurity of a loner that came partly from missing the shared experience of school (which he mostly hated) and university. Tarantino, dubbed an attention-deficit child, never made it out of high school, much less to college. Jonze was slapped with a label of “learning disabled.” Payne was from Nebraska; Soderbergh, from Louisiana; Fincher, from Northern California; Jonze, from Maryland; Paul Thomas Anderson, from the San Fernando Valley; Wes Anderson, from Texas; and Russell, from the monied suburbs north of Manhattan. Some came from the indie world (Russell, Soderbergh), some worked their way up through the burgeoning outlet of music videos and the talent-hungry system of commercial-making, where their anger and their edge first emerged (Fincher, Jonze). Their arrivals were never subtle: Fincher made his name early on with an antismoking commercial that showed a fetus smoking in the womb.
For years the directors shared similar sensibilities without knowing one another. But as the 1990s wore on, they began to meet and form friendships. Eventually many collaborated, and even those who had not met recognized kindred spirits in the work of their peers. Tarantino remembered meeting Fincher at a party for Fincher’s dark thriller Se7en, the movie in which Kevin Spacey plays a killer with a biblical sense of drama, and Brad Pitt the detective who gets handed his wife’s head in a box in the last scene. “If ever a movie didn’t need a party afterward, it’s Seven,” Tarantino remembered. “You had all these celebrities who looked like they just got hit in the head with a two by four, all right. They’re just sitting there in a daze.” Tarantino was an immediate fan of Fincher’s. He later said he considered Fight Club to be “a diamond bullet in my brain.” Tarantino met Paul Thomas Anderson after the Cannes Film Festival when their mutual publicist, Bumble Ward, introduced them, with the idea that Tarantino could mentor the younger filmmaker in the byways of fame. David O. Russell met and befriended Spike Jonze when he was hired to do a rewrite on Harold and the Purple Crayon, a project that Jonze was supposed to direct but which never came to be. Fincher met Spike Jonze when he and his colleagues gave the young director a production deal at his Propaganda production house. They became friends, and Jonze invited Fincher to his bachelor party (he was marrying Sofia Coppola) at a bowling alley; that’s where Fincher and Russell met. Alexander Payne first crossed paths with Steven Soderbergh in 1989, when the Louisiana filmmaker had an overnight hit in sex, lies, and videotape and was remixing it for general release. Payne was working on mixing his student film, The Passion of Martin, acclaimed in its time, but they did not become friends until years later, when their work was in the public eye. Many of these directors met at the podiums of award ceremonies in 1999, the banner year of the rebel directors’ emergence. After that, they all swapped favorite actors—Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney, Bill Murray—and pitched in on one another’s films (Fincher appears in both Soderbergh’s Full Frontal and Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, uncredited) and polished one another’s scripts.
If the rebel generation of the 1990s mostly avoided the personal excesses that doomed the generation of the 1970s—which collapsed in a miasma of celebrity, drugs, and sex—it’s because their energy was focused elsewhere. “I do feel an obligation not to be a jackass in my life only because that will infringe on the view of the movie,” said Paul Thomas Anderson near the end of the decade (ironic, since he was among the leading prima donnas, not to mention the more excessive of his peers). He said, “I remember when Husbands and Wives came out, and Woody Allen was going through that whole thing [the break-up with Mia Farrow], and it was so terrible, because that was one of his best movies. But everybody would look at it and see all the parallels of his life and mistakes he was making. It polluted the movie. I guess my goal is to do everything I can to not pollute the view of my movie.” Soderbergh consciously tried to avoid the missteps of those who came before. “I’d read everything I could about all those filmmakers,” he said. “Their personal lives were bound to their work in a different way, I think, than our generation. Whether it’s in a literal sense, or whether it’s been through some sort of subconscious understanding that we need to be in control of ourselves, we need to understand the business better, I’ve literally tried to learn the lessons that came out of the end of the American New Wave.”
They needed their energy for a more daunting effort: getting their films made.
“I think the nineties are by far the worst decade in Hollywood history.”
—WILLIAM GOLDMAN, “WHICH LIE
DID I TELL: MORE ADVENTURES
IN THE SCREEN TRADE”
The rebels emerged at a time when Hollywood had become more of a widget factory than ever before. In the 1980s the merger mania that gripped Wall Street began to spill into Hollywood, and by the 1990s every major studio had been successively gobbled up by huge multinational corporations that were focused brutally on the bottom line. In 1982 Coca-Cola bought Columbia-Tristar, which it sold in 1989 to the sprawling Japanese monolith, the Sony Corporation. In 1986 Australian media titan Rupert Murdoch added Twentieth Century Fox to his ever-growing media multinational NewsCorp. In 1990 Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti bought the once towering MGM with money put up by the French government. The following year the Matsushita corporation bought MCA/Universal, which the Japanese company sold to Seagram in 1995; Seagram in turn sold it to Vivendi in 2001. And two years later Vivendi sold the studio to General Electric. In 1993 Viacom bought Paramount, one of many media-oriented properties, while the Walt Disney Company bought the independent studio Miramax, and two years later added the television network ABC to its stable of properties. In 1990 Time Inc. and Warner Brothers merged, creating the largest media giant of its time. Then in 1996 media mogul Ted Turner joined Time-Warner, bringing with him Bob Shaye’s studio, New Line, which he had bought two years earlier. In 2000 the then Internet giant AOL swallowed Time-Warner. By that point, the once towering Warner Brothers was merely a division of a huge media corporation.
The corporate takeover of Hollywood had an immediate and palpable effect on its movies. The studios were now run by business professionals who were expected to provide shareholders with regular, reliable profits. The tastes of the moguls at the top of these media pyramids ran to the middlebrow and the feel-good ending. The tastes of the people who worked for them ran to keeping their jobs, and the best way to do that was to avoid risk whenever possible. When NewsCorp chief Rupert Murdoch saw Titanic, the wildly overbudget, wildly ambitious epic action film by James Cameron that went on to be the most successful film of all time, he called his studio chairman, Bill Mechanic, and commented: “Well, I see why you like it, but it’s no Air Force One,” referring to the Harrison Ford action movie that had netted the studio $30
0 million that previous summer. In the 1990s, the movies that received a green light were those deemed most likely to guarantee a profit and the least likely to pose a risk. If you lived through the decade, you probably noticed: the movies were dominated by clattering action films headlined by movie stars and larded with special effects. Green lights were given to remakes from decades past, live-action comic strips, formulaic romantic comedies, formulaic gross-out teen comedies, and formulaic African-American comedies.
At an earlier time, Hollywood’s major studios left room on their slates for movies of moderate budgets that appealed to serious moviegoers, movies that relied on character and plot. Even in the 1980s era of high-concept movies, that mentality allowed Milos Forman to make a movie like Amadeus, or Sydney Pollack to make Out of Africa. In the 1990s such movies became endangered species; the trend was toward big stars, bigger budgets, bigger payoffs. Market research testing became a virtual obsession of the studios, in an attempt to minimize their risk and predict financial successes. By the middle of the decade the studios had become strangers to the annual Academy Award ceremonies; for the most part they no longer even tried to make serious, quality films, leaving that to the independent world, to small art-house distributors who created their own niche as the 1990s progressed. Risky movies—scripts that pushed the envelope and directors who demanded control over their work—became nearly impossible to make at the studios. Paramount Pictures made Alexander Payne’s black comedy Election by accident; they considered it a high school comedy, which was the rage of the moment. But the finished movie tested terribly with research audiences, and despite raves from critics, Paramount dumped Election in the spring of 1999, when it opened against The Matrix. Months later, agent John Lesher ran into John Goldwyn, Paramount’s head of production. Goldwyn told him: “Election is the best movie we’ve made in our studio in the past ten years. And it’s a movie we have no interest in repeating.”
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