Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Without question, this relationship traumatized Soderbergh in some deep way. It is a subject the filmmaker does not much like to talk about. His ex-wife, Betsy Brantley, has told friends that Soderbergh’s mother “is the skeleton in his closet. She’s just insane.”

  When asked about his mom, Soderbergh says this: “The funny thing is even though I spent a lot of time with my dad and got a lot of attention from my dad, I have a lot of my mother in me as well. My dad could work a nine-to-five job that would drive me nuts. I have half my mom’s sort of free-form, I-don’t-care-what-other-people-think attitude.” And when critiquing his work in the wake of sex, lies, and videotape and his general dissatisfaction with his craft, Soderbergh observed, “The movies needed more of my mom in them, frankly.” Clearly he associated her with emotional looseness, which was always a struggle to achieve, and his father with his more dominant, cerebral side, which came to him more naturally. But these two very different forces clearly did not mesh well in the Soderbergh household. The filmmaker’s memory of his parents’ marriage is very acrimonious. Soderbergh recalled, “I saw two beings who clearly did not get along but continued to live together, stay together. I would ask myself, If they are together, they must love each other. But it doesn’t look like they love each other.” Because of that, he says, “I didn’t know how to behave in a normal relationship. I didn’t know how to be considerate. I didn’t know how to be compassionate. I didn’t know how to be empathetic. I didn’t know how to be stable.” The two apparently could not coexist indefinitely. Soderbergh’s parents separated and divorced when he was sixteen. By that time the young man was well on the path to his destiny as a filmmaker.

  Soderbergh was a baseball devotee as a child, a talented player who briefly dreamed of a career playing the game. That came to an abrupt end when he was twelve. “I woke up one morning and I didn’t have it. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get it back. Whatever the thing was, it was just gone.” But another life choice was just around the corner. Soderbergh was also a gifted draftsman, and at age thirteen, his father enrolled him in an animation course at Louisiana State. It was 1977. Soderbergh ended up auditing a Super 8 moviemaking class instead, which turned out to be his only formal film education.

  But it was also entrée into the most intense film education he could have had. He fell in with a group of college-age cinephiles who idolized a charismatic film professor named Michael McCallum, a dashing, Robert Redford–esque former producer of Monday Night Football, a ladies’ man who had turned to making a documentary about prison reform and who incidentally taught at LSU. McCallum inspired his students to think big, to embrace the passion of filmmaking, to learn every aspect of the craft that they could. His students, more like his fans, adopted his credo enthusiastically. They met every day in Coates Hall, where the film class was held in an old chemistry lab, to talk about film. Among what became a devoted clique was Paul Ledford, getting a degree in animal science; Joseph Wilkins, a hippie-style student studying art; Jim and Randy Zeitz; Chuck Barrier; Afshin Chamasmany, who Soderbergh called “the most purely talented filmmaker I’d ever seen.” And Soderbergh, the gawky, bespectacled skinny kid with a great sense of humor—a kid “who you want to be around,” said Jensen.

  Ledford recalled how amazed he was that Soderbergh fit into this oddball group. “There was this kid who was an excellent illustrator, a funny stand-up comic, witty and quick, very confident, telling jokes. He could not only recite lines of dialogue from films perfectly, but he knew who all the DPs were, screenwriters, directors. I was like, ‘Well, that’s different.’”

  Said Soderbergh, “We were all jammed in Coates Hall every day for almost four years. That was our meeting place. We had a couple of rooms, and we would just collect there every day, every day.”

  They—especially Soderbergh, Ledford, and Wilkins—would go see movies four and five nights a week together; one time they watched twelve films in five days. They watched Robert Altman movies such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, The Third Man, All That Jazz, all the Antonioni they could find, and Catch-22. Ledford said they saw Jaws constantly: “I stopped counting at twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven times seeing Jaws.” Soderbergh first saw Jaws in 1975. It “was the first time I started thinking about how movies get made,” Soderbergh recalled. Jensen recalled seeing Soderbergh, Ledford, and Wilkins sitting in the front row of the student union screening room, which showed movies Saturdays, Sundays, and Wednesdays. “Every one of those nights you’d see Steven, Paul, and Joseph sitting in the front row ten minutes before the movie started,” recalled Jensen. They all remained close friends, and several became Soderbergh’s permanent collaborators.

  Inevitably, given their passion and McCallum’s encouragement, Soderbergh, Ledford, and Wilkins began making Super 8 films together, mainly shorts about twenty minutes long, fifteen to twenty in all. One was called Michael Comes Home, Kills a Pig and Leaves. That one was about the uniquely Cajun tradition of butchering a three-hundred-pound pig on the Louisiana bayou, called a “bouchere,” and the film chronicled their doing so. Soderbergh recalled, “You hang it upside down and then there’s a very specific way that you’re supposed to use the knife.” Ledford’s degree in veterinary medicine came in handy here.

  Then in 1981, at the age of eighteen, the precocious Soderbergh took a chance and headed to Los Angeles. He stayed with McCallum, who had left the university and had gone to Los Angeles to work on an NBC show called Games People Play. McCallum gave Soderbergh a job as an editor on the show, but it was canceled six months later, and Soderbergh had to take odd jobs—as a cue card holder, among other things. He finally gave up and moved back to Baton Rouge, where he worked as a coin changer in a video arcade, getting paid sixty-six dollars per week. He would fly back to Los Angeles intermittently when he got film editing jobs with another LSU alum, Brad Johnson, who was working at Showtime. In Baton Rouge he worked at a video production company called Video Park, Inc., editing TV commercials. That was how he met John Hardy, who soon found Soderbergh could cut commercials for the company. “He was this brilliant little editor,” said Hardy, who was later Soderbergh’s producer of choice on most of his films. “Usually we’d get someone to shoot it and cut it ourselves. He was the editor but he was faster than everyone else, and had better ideas.” Soderbergh did a spot for the Lockworks hair salon, featuring a model named Campbell Brown, who went on to be a correspondent for NBC News. Soderbergh figured out how to shoot a light into a mirror in the bottom of a pool to create flashes of light on camera.

  Soderbergh also embarked on a short called Rapid Eye Movement, about his obsession over moving to Los Angeles. Finally in the spring of 1984 he got a break. A friend at Showtime recommended him to the rock group Yes, who wanted a concert tour movie. The half-hour video, shot on a ten-day tour with Larry Blake, another LSU film friend from back home, was called 9021LIVE. It was nominated for a Grammy.

  After completing the Yes concert tour video, Soderbergh was introduced to Anne Dollard, a magnetic young agent seven years his senior. They hit it off immediately, and she helped get him screenwriting jobs, including a musical for TriStar (which was never made), and Disney Sunday night movies. But Soderbergh still could not afford to live in Los Angeles. Finally it was desperation that inspired him to write sex, lies, and videotape, which came pouring out in eight days, half of them spent driving from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles.

  “It came out so fast. I just wanted it dealt with,” he said. It was based on Soderbergh’s own encounters with the opposite sex, at a time when he found himself sleeping with several women at the same time; in light of his feelings toward women and marriage, it seems clear that the detached James Spader character was Steven Soderbergh. (The two were so in synch that there were days they showed up to the set wearing the same outfits.) In interviews for this book, Soderbergh downplayed stories of his own multiple sexual escapades—which he had repeated many times in other published interviews—to s
ay that he told those stories to pique interest in the film. Generally, though, he observed that at the time, “I was not in control of my emotional life, and I couldn’t figure out why. It was me asking myself a series of questions.”

  The film, as has been documented elsewhere, was an immediate sensation. It won the Audience Award at Sundance in 1989 (then the U.S. Film Festival) and the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Acquired by Miramax, the film made $25 million in the United States and millions more abroad. It made a superstar of the skinny, bespectacled, self-deprecating young turk.

  At the moment of that triumph, however, Soderbergh was dealt a devastating personal blow. On the Fourth of July 1989, his friend and agent Anne Dollard was thrown from a horse and died when her brain stem was crushed. “I just didn’t understand,” Soderbergh said in 2003. “I still don’t. I mean, it was just—where do you put that? I still don’t know where you put events like that. I feel like I don’t have a shelf big enough to put it in. …She was one of those people that was kind of the unifying force for her family. She just had incredible presence, positive presence.”

  Typical of his loyalty to his friends, Soderbergh took on Anne’s younger brother Pat as his agent, and stuck with him. But it was Anne who was the star of the family.

  The Dollards were worthy of a screenplay all by themselves. They came from Yonkers, New York, a traditional Catholic family with a few traditional problems. Dad was a traveling jewelry salesman who came home at night and drank himself into a stupor. Mom finally had enough and, when Pat was four and Annie was twelve, took all four kids and ran away to California, stealing from the house at four in the morning and taking a plane to the Coast.

  They moved to Paramount, California, a small town north of Los Angeles, near Downey. Eva Dollard got a job answering phones on the graveyard shift at the local hospital. Pat Dollard remembers “abject poverty”—food stamps, Christmas presents donated by kind colleagues at the hospital, driving longingly past Disneyland to see what it looked like from the outside. Dad died from excess of drink soon after that.

  But Annie, the oldest, was different. She not only helped raise her three siblings, but at age nineteen she was helping organize No Nukes concerts in Los Angeles; she volunteered for Cesar Chavez and the farm workers’ union. Through those connections she met and dated Robert Kennedy, Jr. She was a dazzler. Dollard got involved in Hollywood working as an assistant to Ralph Waite, the actor who played Pa on The Waltons, and helped him produce a movie about Skid Row. After she died in 1989 her ashes were scattered at the home of Robert Kennedy on Cape Cod.

  Pat was hardly like his sister. He was a rebel, a punk-rocking troublemaker at a prestigious prep school where his parish priest had won him a scholarship, and a victim of the family scourge, substance addiction. He spent his teen years taking drugs, drinking beer, and crashing at friends’ pads all over Los Angeles, from Hancock Park to downtown Los Angeles to Palos Verdes. He cracked his skull stage-diving on LSD at a punk rock concert in Santa Monica at sixteen. At seventeen he ran away from home and dropped out of high school, moving in with some sorority girls he knew from USC. He had a plan to write pornographic novels while working on becoming a rock star.

  It was a painful irony that Dollard, one of the key figures in getting Traffic made many years later, was never able to kick his habit for any length of time. Indeed, watching Traffic, particularly the scenes where Erika Christensen goes with a prep school friend looking to buy drugs in the ghetto, Dollard felt a familiar chill. He recalled that he and his own teenaged girlfriend “were like a scene out of Traffic, heading into the barrio downtown near MacArthur Park to buy LSD from Salvadoran refugees on the street.” He’d open the window to their Camaro and yell “Acidos!” and someone would come running.

  Sex, lies, and videotape, made Soderbergh the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Returning triumphantly to Los Angeles from Cannes, he found his little movie getting almost embarrassingly glowing reviews in every publication, from the Los Angeles Times to the high-toned American Film. Before Miramax bought the film, there were eleven companies bidding for the rights to distribution. Within a month Pat Dollard had logged five hundred calls from people who wanted to meet Soderbergh, see the movie. One studio, having never met Soderbergh, had called and offered a blind deal—money for anything he wanted to do. Typically pessimistic, Soderbergh kept reminding himself of the Hollywood flavors-of-the-month who had been sizzling hot then sank without a trace: Phil Joanou, a protégé of Steven Spielberg; Michael Dinner, the young director of Miss Lonelyhearts.

  But after all this died down, Soderbergh began to feel the sting of Hollywood rejection. He’d been attached to direct Quiz Show, a drama about the rigged game show Twenty-One. But when Robert Redford showed interest in the movie, Soderbergh was summarily dismissed. (An earlier fallout with Redford had also resulted in the Sundance Kid’s removing his executive producer credit from Soderbergh’s 1993 film King of the Hill.)

  Discouraged by Hollywood, Soderbergh moved back to Baton Rouge and kept plugging away on his own small projects. In a dismal state of mind, he turned to The Underneath, a crime film about an armored car heist. Halfway through making the film in 1995, Soderbergh knew he was going through a real crisis. He realized he was miserable. “I was just drifting off course,” he recalled later. “I’m sure there are tons of reasons, some personal and some professional. The bottom line was I sort of woke up in the middle of The Underneath and felt I was making a movie I wasn’t interested in.” Soderbergh asked himself whether he even wanted to make movies anymore. “I realized that what I needed to do was change what I was doing.” The epiphany led him to question his entire approach to filmmaking. Soderbergh had never considered himself a Hollywood filmmaker, but the lousy reception of his last several films made him wonder if he even had an art-house audience. The box office was rewarding movies like Pocahontas and Crimson Tide and even David Fincher’s Se7en. At the Oscars it was Braveheart that was winning kudos, and he certainly wasn’t making any Pulp Fiction. Little wonder that Soderbergh felt isolated and alone.

  In April 1996—after making yet another obscure film, Gray’s Anatomy, a monologue by actor Spalding Gray about his eye disease—and with The Underneath opening to miserable business in France, Soderbergh told the French review Positif, “The times do not favor a filmmaker like me. The proof of this is in the films that are popular. I don’t know where the spectators for my films are. Maybe they are home reading or watching films on video. Before we made The Underneath the head of Universal told me he thought there wasn’t an audience for this kind of film in the States. He was probably right.”

  He was definitely right. The Underneath made a grand total of $336,023 at the domestic box office.

  Soderbergh was less charitable toward his work in hindsight. “It’s the coldest of the films I’ve made,” he said of The Underneath (he did say this, however, before making Solaris). “There’s something somnambulant about it. I was sleepwalking in my life and my work and it shows.”

  There’s perhaps a deeper level to what Soderbergh was choosing to do in the wake of his unexpected success with sex, lies, and videotape. He seemed to have a penchant for self-sabotage that was not too far beneath his conscious choices, as if he was not quite sure he wanted such fame and fortune, or not sure if he deserved it. “I think Steven is reluctant to be a successful director, and that’s why he stayed independent so long,” remarked his friend George Clooney when asked about it. “There’s a part of him that still wants to be Steven Soderbergh from Baton Rouge who does what he wants and doesn’t have to answer to anybody. But it’s a fear any independent director has: that early on they’re edgy, but when they get fat and happy, the edge goes away.”

  In 2001 Soderbergh had this to say about his relationship to success: “I’m very comfortable with failure. I’m very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people. It played right into my idea of myself. I find comfort in how not upsetting it was to have people go, ‘Wow what happened to that guy, w
hat is he doing? Why is he making that shit?’ I really like not being watched.”

  SODERBERGH KNEW HE NEEDED TO CHANGE DIRECTION RADICALLY if he was going to continue to be a filmmaker, but he seemed unable to help himself. He decided to move into even more obscure terrain, announcing to a French interviewer in 1995, “I would like to make small-budget films that are experimental, that may not draw a large audience, or no audience at all.”

  No audience at all? Now that was a breakthrough. There was, however, a grain of genius in this apparently suicidal leap. Soderbergh had decided to liberate himself from the constraints of script and production, and just shoot. He needed to remember why he wanted to be a filmmaker. Whether or not anyone saw the finished product would be beside the point.

  The result was Schizopolis, which was shot over a ten-month period in Soderbergh’s hometown of Baton Rouge. He was seeking to re-create the freedom he had felt when making Super 8s with Paul Ledford and Larry Blake back at Louisana State University. The whole film cost $250,000; friends who worked on it deferred their salaries and doubled as both crew and cast. A friend, Michael Corrente, donated raw stock from Kodak, which he’d won as a prize for his first film, Federal Hill. This was guerrilla filmmaking pushed to the edge. Soderbergh wrote it, directed it, was cinematographer and—a first—played at least two of the two lead characters, a dentist and an oddball husband (it was kind of hard to tell who was who in the final product). The whole experience seemed to unlock something in the director. He felt a freedom and spontaneity that was long missing from his work. The crew of five people would get up in the morning and shoot a scene. If it didn’t work, they’d head off for lunch to talk about it, then they would drive around and find another location and try the shot there. Actors would be cast the night before, with members of the crew calling up their friends to see if they were available. Soderbergh would write a scene on the spot. One day the woman playing the wife of a character, motivational guru T. Azimuth Schwitters, didn’t show up. The actress had left town and not bothered to tell anyone. Soderbergh shouted to the crew, “Anybody know a girl in her early twenties who we could use to play the assistant?” Someone went off to look. He sat down to write the scene. Soderbergh was exhilarated by the process. “I just felt in the zone all the time,” he later said.