Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Success in the new corporate Hollywood was defined by the film that could become a franchise: make a ton of money at the box office, spawn a sequel, and produce a host of tie-ins, from plush toys to video games to soundtracks. As a result, by the middle of the 1990s movies were stale, insipid retreads aimed at the lowest common denominator. In 1994, for example, the top box office moneymakers included Dumb and Dumber, which made $127 million for New Line, The Santa Clause, which raked in $144 million for Disney, The Flintstones, which made $130 million for Universal, and Speed, which made $121 million for Fox. Every single one of these movies spawned a sequel. The sequels were mostly awful; the originals weren’t terrible, perhaps, but they certainly weren’t anything worth watching today.

  BUT THE SUCCESS OF INDEPENDENT FILM CREATED A CHINK in the armor of the studio mind-set. In 1994, the same year as Dumb and Dumber and The Flintstones, another movie came out that created a larger stir than any of the studios’ biggest releases. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction—his violent, funny, fractured three-part tale about a couple of hit men, a boxer, and a mob boss and his moll—became a pop culture phenomenon, as well as a huge box office hit. Taking in $107,921,755 at the U.S. box office, Pulp Fiction was the tenth highest grossing movie of 1994, becoming the most profitable independent film ever made. The film took in an additional $105 million overseas. For the first time, Hollywood’s major studios were forced to pay attention to the New York–centric world of independent film and could no longer ignore Miramax and its ringleader, Harvey Weinstein. The success of Pulp Fiction fueled a move to create art-house divisions on the studio lots—Fox Searchlight, Paramount Classics, October (later USA Films), and, though it took a decade, Warner Independent—that were aimed at breeding crossover indie hits and cultivating indie talent for the major studios.

  Something else happened: Movie stars saw opportunities to revive their careers by working in the independent, art-house world. They noticed that John Travolta had been given a second lease on a movie career thanks to Pulp Fiction. Some of these actors were underemployed, others yearned to practice their craft beside something more complicated than a green screen. By pushing to work with the young talent of their time, they drew the studios toward the rebel filmmakers. At the same time a new generation of executives was rising within the major studios, and a handful of them were aware of this new sensibility in filmmaking. It reawakened their excitement for movies that had something to say. Among them were Lorenzo di Bonaventura at Warner Brothers, who fought for The Matrix and Three Kings, and Mike De Luca at New Line, who fought for anything Paul Thomas Anderson wanted to do. Without Bill Mechanic’s stubbornness at Fox, Fight Club would not have happened. These executives managed to convince the ultimate powers at the major studios, in a few rare cases, to take a chance on movies by Hollywood’s young rebel directors.

  These movies, and these directors, are the subject of this book. Among the community of rebel directors, I have chosen six who fought their way through the Hollywood system to bring their signature films into the daylight of broader popular culture. They are: Quentin Tarantino, who made Pulp Fiction at Miramax, newly acquired by Disney; Paul Thomas Anderson, who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia at New Line; David Fincher, who made Fight Club at Fox; David O. Russell, who managed to make Three Kings at Warner Brothers; Spike Jonze, who made Being John Malkovich at Polygram and then USA Films; and Steven Soderbergh, who made Traffic at USA, newly owned by Universal.

  DESPITE THE DEADENING CRUSH OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM, their talent could not be denied, their visions could not be suppressed, and their efforts yielded movies that reflected our time and point to where we were headed. But the rebels did not submit peacefully to the studio process, and the formula-ready Hollywood system did not necessarily mesh well with the single-minded egotism of artists whose goals were not the same as their financiers’. Notably, none of these films emerged from the studio “development” process, in which novels or pitches are bought and turned into scripts by producers and creative executives. That process rarely leads to the making of a great movie. With each of the directors in this book, they brought their ideas to the studios and had to protect them from interference. Certainly the rebels’ movies fared poorly in the market research testing process. Boogie Nights would be a dismal failure, market research predicted; couldn’t Anderson make it a little more cheery? Research audiences never got Russell’s Three Kings or the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, and di Bonaventura kept the worst results from his bosses. Fincher’s Se7en, which turned out to be New Line’s biggest hit to date, was predicted to be a failure. Little wonder, then, that in many cases the auteur filmmakers viewed studio executives with open contempt. And in many cases the moguls confessed to cluelessness when it came to the rebels laboring on their backlots.

  ULTIMATELY THE REBELS COULD NOT MUSTER A UNITED front. The optimistic venture announced in Variety never materialized, never amounted to more than that single article, a statement of intent to declare independence from the Hollywood system, and a call for solidarity among artists that never quite panned out. As it happened, Soderbergh didn’t get along with Russell, who was good friends with Jonze and Payne. They wanted Russell in the group, but Soderbergh—a control maniac among control maniacs—had decided Russell “didn’t play well with others.” Fincher flitted from project to project, making The Panic Room in between raking in millions in commercials. Sofia Coppola, Jonze’s wife and a talented director in her own right (at the time she’d made The Virgin Suicides), was resentful that she wasn’t invited to join. And the directors discovered that founding the company created complications for the financial deals they’d already signed at other studios. The creative gesture never did materialize into movies for USA Films, owned by Barry Diller. Within the year Seagram sold Universal to the French multinational Vivendi, which bought USA Films in its entirey, renaming it Focus Features and repopulating the studio with a new set of executives. Soderbergh would create a production house at Warner Brothers with his pal George Clooney. Payne would fall in love with actress Sandra Oh and make About Schmidt for New Line. Jonze would press on with making Adaptation at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and he and Sofia Coppola would soon divorce. Mendes returned to London and the theater after making Road to Perdition for DreamWorks SKG.

  The story of their struggles through the studio system is the story of Hollywood and the movies in the last decade of the twentieth century. Some will argue with my choices of films or filmmakers; a valid case can be made for many others. I tried to choose movies that had broken through to a wide audience, that marked the culture in some indelible way, films that over time will be seen as emblematic of the brutal, surreal, confused sensibility that, to me, came to define the 1990s—a decade better known for consumer excess and Clintonian dysfunction—and presaged the far more serious world that awaited us beyond the millennium.

  This is the story of how those movies came to be.

  IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I WAS ASSISTED IMMEASURABLY BY the participation of the six principal directors featured in it: Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin Tarantino. Their cooperation was all the more generous for the fact that they did not have editorial control over the project, nor any kind of perusal or approval of the manuscript.

  In retrospect, this book might have been better undertaken when the rebel directors were in the sunset of their careers, rather than at the height of their creative powers. While I was chasing them down, they were all busy writing, directing, producing, and promoting their movies. Also, I will not pretend it was easy to woo a group of fiercely individualistic, rather control-conscious artists. David Fincher resisted my entreaties for months, insisting that he was not actually a rebel (he finally granted me many hours, for which I thank him). Paul Thomas Anderson held out until three weeks before the manuscript was due. Quentin Tarantino found time in between directing and promoting not one movie but two, his Kill Bill oeuvre. The directors also granted me entrée
into their world through the perspective of their close collaborators. Other young directors, who were not featured in as much detail, granted me interviews and their points of view were invaluable.

  I am deeply grateful for their help, as I am for the time and energy of the many dozens of people interviewed for this book. They include the current and former studio executives who presided over the making of the rebels’ movies.

  Where memories or accounts conflict, I have done my best to find multiple sources and indicate the differences of opinion. Any errors in the weaving of this narrative, whether in style or substance, are my own.

  Or, as Steven Soderbergh put it in our last conversation: “I’m the bird. You’re the ornithologist.”

  Chapter 1

  Quentin Tarantino Discovers Hollywood;

  Steven Soderbergh Gets Noticed

  1990–1992

  Memorial Day in 1990 dawned bright and hot in Hollywood, even for a maker of horror films. Scott Spiegel, a screenwriter and the horror filmmaker in question, wanted to celebrate. He had some cash in his pocket from selling his first big screenplay, The Rookie, to Warner Brothers with Clint Eastwood attached to star. With his neighbor, actor D. W. Moffett, Spiegel threw a barbeque bash and invited to his backyard every starving actor, screenwriter, director, and movie wannabe he could think of, including some dedicated fans of his horror genre work.

  Under leafy elm trees, behind a blue clapboard house on Mc-Cadden Place just off Sunset Boulevard, dozens of young wouldbes and could-bes in Hollywood gathered. Some of them would eventually make it. Director Sam Raimi was there along with actor/director Burr Steers and screenwriter Boaz Yakin. Others wouldn’t: One of the aspiring screenwriters present, Mark Carducei, would kill himself in 1997. The eighties still hung in the air; the cool guys had mullet haircuts and leather jackets; the hot women had long, permed hair fluffed out to there and bright red lipstick. While playing an electric keyboard, actor/screenwriter Ron Zwang belted out “Wild Thing” to a crowd slightly buzzed on beer and stuffed with Moffett’s burnt burgers and hot dogs. Inside the house a few people were slumped on a loveseat watching A Clockwork Orange.

  One of the restless young men hanging around the yard was Quentin Tarantino, a twenty-seven-year-old screenwriter who’d spent the previous night on Spiegel’s couch. He loped around the backyard like a habitué of this crowd. He came from Manhattan Beach, an aspiring young screenwriter who only lately had started spending more time in Hollywood than in the working-class neighborhood down the coast.

  Tarantino had reason to feel confident. After a decade of scraping by doing odd jobs, hanging with the other video geeks and movie dreamers at Video Archives, a video store in Manhattan Beach, Hollywood was beginning to show some interest. He had several scripts making the rounds, and a low-grade buzz had begun around his raw, clever screenplays: From Dusk Till Dawn, True Romance, Natural Born Killers. He was still penniless and unknown, but all of these scripts were on the verge of being sold. His moment was just off the horizon.

  On this particular day, Tarantino was his blabbermouth self. He looked rumpled, of course, his striped blue shirt slightly untucked, his brown hair overgrown and stringy. As Spiegel wielded his video camera, Tarantino regaled film editor Bob Murawski with his latest insight on the latest movie he’d seen for the umpteenth time. When it came to film arcana, no one out-triviaed Quentin Tarantino.

  “That movie—Motorcycle Gang—remember the goofy guy? His buddy? The goofy guy?” he asked, looming over his friend.

  Murawski nodded.

  “That’s Alfalfa!” Tarantino was psyched; he’d recognized one of the Our Gang actors in the B movie. “That’s Carl Switzer! I couldn’t believe it.”

  Marowski was slightly less enthused. “That makes me glad I saw it,” he deadpanned.

  Tarantino didn’t seem to notice. “It’s the same movie” (the same one as yet another B movie he’d seen, Dragstrip Girl.) “It’s the same lines. Yeah—I was reading about it last night.”

  IN THE 1990S QUENTIN TARANTINO WOULD TURN OUT TO BE the biggest thing to hit the movie industry since the high-concept film. He became an image, an icon, and inspired a genre, if not an entire generation, of hyper-violent, loud, youthful, angry, funny (though none as funny as Tarantino) movies. His Pulp Fiction was the first “independent” film to crack $100 million at the box office, though technically it was made at a studio that had just been bought by the Walt Disney Company. Cinematically he spoke in an entirely new vernacular, and he threw down the gauntlet to fellow writer-directors as if to say Top this, assholes.

  He also happened to come to prominence as the spinning, whizzing media machine began to be the central function of Hollywood rather than a mere by-product of its production line. In the 1990s the buzz machine, the sprawling, relentless entertainment media, became the very engine that made Hollywood run, a monstrous contraption that required constant feeding. And the Quentin Tarantino story was the perfect product to fill the cavernous maw.

  The only thing is, a lot of the story wasn’t true.

  THE MYTH THAT WORKED FOR THE LIKES OF ESQUIRE MAGAZINE and Entertainment Tonight went that Tarantino was a half-breed, white trash school dropout from rural Tennessee who went to work at a video store in Torrance, saw every movie known to mankind, and emerged, miraculously, a brilliant writer and director, a visionary autodidact with his finger on the pulse of his generation.

  The reality is something far more subtle and complicated. Quentin Tarantino was not raised in poverty, nor in a white trash environment, nor as a hillbilly. He was from a broken home, but his mother was unusually intelligent and ambitious, and she did all she could to associate her son with the bourgeois values of the upper-middle class: education, travel, material success. Which Quentin chose to utterly reject.

  After Quentin became a media star, his mother, Connie Zastoupil, was horrified to see a distorted view of his background spun into myth. After journalist Peter Biskind interviewed her for Premiere magazine, she was mortified by the first sentence that referred to Tarantino’s background as “half Cherokee, half hillbilly.” At the time, “I was the president of an accounting firm; my lawyer sent it to me,” she said in 2003. “You have no idea the humiliation that caused me. Nobody ever got beyond that one sentence.” She refused to talk to journalists for years after that.

  CONNIE MCHUGH WAS BORN IN TENNESSEE, AND SHE DID indeed come from a middle-class, redneck background, half-Cherokee and half-Irish. But she was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father, who was violent, owned a garage. Her mother, an alcoholic, was a housewife. From a young age she determined to get away from all of that. “I had a really bizarre childhood,” she explained. “I lied, schemed, and cheated to get out of that home.”

  Ahead of her age group in school, Connie moved to California at age twelve to live with an aunt. She stayed for a year until her parents moved to Southgate, a small town in southern California, and made her move back with them.

  When she was fourteen years old, Connie met would-be actor Tony Tarantino while horseback riding at the Buena Vista Stables, in Burbank. She looked older than her age and never told him she was fourteen. “Tony Tarantino fancied himself an actor. He had attended Pasadena Playhouse and taken classes there,” she said. “I married him to get away from that home. I had no desire to get married. I wasn’t really even into boys. I wasn’t sexually aware or precocious.” She got pregnant at fourteen but left Tarantino within four months. Connie has always told people that she got pregnant at sixteen, because “the minute a girl from the wrong kind of background gets into trouble, she’s trash. I had professional aspirations, class aspirations—I really wanted out. From the time I was a small child I knew there was something more in life for me; and education was going to be my way out of there.” Instead, she finished high school and moved back to Knoxville, Tennessee (her parents had left California and gone back to Tennessee), where she attended nursing school. Her mother cared for Quentin in the first two years, but Connie was in
a hurry to get out of the south.

  By age nineteen, she moved back to California “to get my life in order,” as she puts it. She got a job in a doctor’s office in Hacienda Heights, outside of Los Angeles, then met her second husband, Curt Zastoupil, at a local nightclub. He was twenty-five years old and worked as the pianist and guitarist in a family restaurant and bar. They married, and she sent for Quentin, aged three.

  It was the 1960s, and Connie Zastoupil began to climb the corporate ladder. The doctor’s office where she worked became a partnership and eventually morphed into Cigna, the giant medical insurer. She quickly became a manager there and eventually rose to become the vice president of Cigna health plans in California.

  “I was a little corporate geek wannabe,” she recalled. “When I was home with Quentin our life revolved around fun. We had hunting falcons, we fenced. We got kicked out of one apartment for our outrageous hobbies—fencing on a balcony. My husband was very eclectic; we had eclectic friends. We never left Quentin with a babysitter; if we went to an archery range, he’d come in the back of the car. We took him to every movie, regardless of whether it was appropriate, from the time he was three.”

  Quentin spent a lot of time with Curt Zastoupil, who became his father for a time, and whose extended family became, permanently, his extended family. “Curt did love him,” said Connie. “He was his caretaker when I was working, because I worked days; he worked nights. Curt provided a steady stream of musicians, actors, poets—all the creative stream. I was the corporate drudge. I loved movies. We lived at the movie theater. Movies were a part of our lives. We went often and would do double, triple features.”

  So Quentin Tarantino never lived in a trailer park. The closest he came to living a hillbilly life was at age eight, when his mother sent him to live in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a year when she was diagnosed—erroneously, it turned out—with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Quentin lived with Connie’s alcoholic mother, who was verbally abusive and went off on drunken benders. It was also about that time that Connie divorced Curt Zastoupil. The divorce was devastating to Quentin, depriving him of the one stable male figure he’d known.