Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Hardly. Before long, De Luca was cowed and wowed and reduced to putty before the great Brando, who did impersonations of himself from The Godfather, and even reenacted his iconic scene from On the Waterfront—“I coulda been a contender.” By the end of the day, said De Luca, “I would’ve married him if he’d asked.”

  After the success of Don Juan DeMarco, New Line was favorably disposed when producer Ed Pressman walked in with The Island of Dr. Moreau, which he pitched as a remake of a Planet of the Apes movie. But it turned out to be one of those projects where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Val Kilmer was slated to play the lead, but decided at the eleventh hour he wanted only a supporting role. With a budget of $40 million, De Luca had to fire the writer-director, Richard Stanley, three days into the shoot with the cast and crew on an island in southeast Asia. The new lead, Rob Morrow, called De Luca in L.A., nearly crying. “Get me off this movie. Get me off this island.” De Luca hesitated, but decided to go ahead with the movie. “At that point I should have pulled the plug,” said De Luca later. John Frankenheimer was hired as replacement director; British actor David Thewlis took over from Rob Morrow. The movie opened to $9 million and some of the worst reviews in memory. It was gone in two weeks.

  ONE GOOD THING DID HAPPEN TO DE LUCA IN 1996, HOWEVER: AGENT John Lesher sent De Luca a script called Boogie Nights by a young writer-director named Paul Thomas Anderson.

  The script was like nothing De Luca had ever seen before. It was set in the 1970s in the San Fernando Valley world of pornographic filmmaking. But the movie wasn’t really about sex. Instead, it was about a group of misfit friends and their porn-world peers, among them a young man with an especially large penis who aspired to X-rated stardom, a porn producer, a porn starlet, a hanger-on in roller skates, and the film crew. The script was based on a short film, The Dirk Diggler Story, that Anderson had made as a teenager. He had worked on it some more at the Filmmakers Lab at Sundance, where he would stay up late at night watching porn films with the projectionist in Robert Redford’s mentoring program. They raided Redford’s private vault to find original movie prints, including a porn film that featured a roller-skating girl, the origin for Anderson’s character Rollergirl. The film featured a menagerie of flawed characters, but treated them compassionately and without judgment. At the same time it was extremely ambitious, Altmanesque, with many fully realized story lines and characters. It managed to have sex and love and violence and human connection all at once. It was an art film, but it was about porn.

  Boogie Nights “caught people by the balls,” recalled Dylan Tichenor, Anderson’s longtime friend and editor. “You read that movie and you think, What is this?”

  It wasn’t hard to make the connection between the fractured family in Anderson’s story and the community he encountered as he made his way in the real movie world. Producer John Lyons called the story “the cracked mirror you hold up to Hollywood. These characters were, like Paul, in a completely different world but utterly committed. They had ideas—grandiose, crazy ideas—of being the best they could be.” But the movie was also a more personal distillation of Anderson’s inner life, including his cool relationship with his mother and his search for connection and validation in an artistic sphere separate from the one he grew up in. In an early scene in the film, Dirk Diggler sits at the breakfast table with his parents, while his mother exhorts him to get a better job than the one at the car wash. Later, there is a lacerating exchange between a bitter mother and a sensitive boy.

  Mother: You can’t do anything. You’re a loser. You’ll always be a loser. You couldn’t even finish high school because you were too stupid. So what are you gonna do?

  Dirk: I’ll do something…. I’ll do it. I’ll go somewhere and do something. I’ll run away where you can never find me.

  And later in the same scene:

  Dirk: Why are you so mean to me? You’re my mother.

  Mother: Not by choice.

  Dirk: Don’t. Don’t be mean to me.

  Mother: You little fucker. I’m not being mean to you. You’re just too stupid to see.

  Dirk: You don’t know what I can do, or what I’m gonna do, or what I’m gonna be. You don’t know. I’m good. I have good things that you don’t know. And I’m gonna be something. You, you don’t know, and you’ll see.

  It’s hard not to read that exchange as Anderson’s heartfelt challenge to his own parents.

  As important, Anderson’s father, Ernie—a towering figure of moral support and the object of Anderson’s adulation—died in February 1997 of cancer. (He gave Paul his vintage 1964 white Studebaker just before he died; Paul was still driving it in 2004.) For Anderson, who was estranged from his mother, it was a definitive blow.

  In every way, Anderson wrote the central character of Dirk Diggler as a version of himself. A vulnerable kid, a romantic, a naif. “He’s the Dirk Diggler of directing,” says his agent, John Lesher. The movie was all about being really good at one thing and one thing only. It’s about running off and making a success of your life. That, many of those close to him believed, was how Anderson saw himself.

  And obviously, he was fascinated by the sex.

  Anderson had been obsessed with pornography since his early adolescence, since finding his father’s collection of porn in the basement while still in elementary school. As he told interviewers many times, his father was one of the first guys on the block to have a VCR and lots of tapes. Anderson would rummage through them and find the porno on the top shelf. Depending on the interview he would say he began watching at ten, or eleven, or nine. But he certainly watched at every opportunity until his late teens. “Not that it twisted me into some maniac or anything,” he said. “I had an interest in it.” Anderson didn’t stop watching at seventeen. Tichenor remembers the first time he went to Anderson’s tiny apartment on Tujunga—it had practically no furniture but a sixty-inch rear-projection television, a huge stack of laser disks, videos, and a couch—where the director suggested they watch a former porn actress’s documentary on porn star John Holmes, whom she called “a love god.” The name of the film was Exhausted. Dirk Diggler’s character was based loosely on Holmes, and Anderson had Julianne Moore’s character make a similar documentary in Boogie Nights.

  “He studied porn. He was fascinated with the filmmaking aspects of it,” said Tichenor. “And he’s fascinated by sex, to some staggering degree.” He told friends that he liked to deconstruct how porn stories were told, and dragged them along to events like the annual porn industry awards in Las Vegas, even long after this might be considered “research” for Boogie Nights.

  Still, Anderson always insisted that Boogie Nights was never really about porn. According to him, it was a vehicle for telling a story about a reconstructed family, devolving from the height of the 1970s party into the hangover of drug addiction and broken lives. In the film, Diggler ends up at the bottom of the sex industry Ferris wheel, turning gay tricks for tens dollars a pop. “I love pornography just as much as it completely disgusts and completely depresses me,” Anderson told one interviewer when the movie was released. “The back half of the movie is a sort of punishment for those fun and games. It’s my own guilty feelings about pornography.”

  IN THE YEARS WHEN NEW LINE HAD BEEN BUSY CHURNING out reliable moneymakers like the third installment of Nightmare on Elm Street, Mike De Luca quietly noted a reemergence of the writer-director, a departure from the director-for-hire system that reigned on most Hollywood films. Reservoir Dogs and sex, lies, and videotape were the most potent examples, but De Luca had also noticed Larry Clark, who made the controversial film Kids, about teen sexuality, in the early nineties. “I liked it, and I’d turned it down three times,” said De Luca. “I turned it down for commercial reasons.” But he told agent John Lesher that if he came across any other filmmakers with different, artistic projects to let him know. Kids was no great loss, perhaps, but De Luca had also passed on Pulp Fiction, a decision that haunted him. At the time the powers that
were at New Line dismissed it as “an anthology film.” New Line chief Bob Shaye and his number-two, Michael Lynne, both liked Pulp Fiction but decided not to overrule skeptics like Ira Deutchman and foreign sales chief Rolf Mittweg, who both thought it was too violent. Mittweg thought it would spark a backlash overseas. Shaye recalled that Deutchman was appalled by the signature scene of the syringe stabbed into the heart of an overdose victim. Shaye recalled his saying “That scene is so violent, so awful, audiences will be storming out.” As for De Luca, “I liked it, but I didn’t jump up and down,” he said. “The green-light committee turned it down. We’d all scratched our heads. I felt personally like I’d missed Pulp Fiction.”

  De Luca didn’t tell his superiors that he was quietly nurturing a dream of building a stable of visionary filmmakers who would make New Line the address of young, hip talent, like Paramount had become in the 1970s when Robert Evans smoothed the path for Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and others. That strategy was directly at odds with the “Not a loser in the bunch” credo of his bosses Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne. And with the purchase by Time-Warner, Shaye had been taking more financial risks, green-lighting movies with big stars. Making artistically daring movies involved taking risks, and that meant you couldn’t chart the audience’s likely reaction and budget accordingly. Thus De Luca was being stymied with one project after another that he couldn’t get past the green-light committee. He argued with Shaye, “You don’t get young people of today.” Shaye argued back, “The numbers don’t add up.”

  Tarantino wasn’t the only hot filmmaker New Line missed. De Luca had seen and loved Bottle Rocket, a black comedy made by the offbeat duo of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, two unknowns from Texas who had been roommates at the University of Texas. Anderson went everywhere dressed in expensive, hand-tailored blazers and trousers that were deliberately sized too small for him. This made him look look like a prep school teen outgrowing his clothing. Owen was a wacky talent with blond hair, a crooked nose, and a tendency to go from utter, withdrawn silence to manic comic jags. New Line gave the pair a small deal to develop their next script, Rushmore, an unusual comedy based on Wes Anderson’s experience at a boarding school. But when it came to making the film, the studio passed. De Luca still remembers the pitch meeting at his office, when Wilson tried to sell the movie as a stage version of the 1970s cop movie Serpico, set in a prep school. De Luca loved it but couldn’t convince anyone else at New Line. Rushmore was finally made at the home of Mickey Mouse, Disney, under the stewardship of Joe Roth. After Roth left the studio a year or two later, his successor, Peter Schneider, continued the relationship with Wes Anderson, financing his star-studded satire The Royal Tenenbaums.

  De Luca also tried and failed to land Spike Jonze, who ended up at David Fincher’s production company, Propaganda. And he passed on the bizarre Charlie Kaufman script Being John Malkovich with Jonze attached as director, which he was shown because he had a deal with producer Michael Stipe, of the band R.E.M. De Luca even declined to meet with Jonze on the project and later regretted it. “It was totally my fault,” he said. “I didn’t get it. I thought it was small. I wanted New Line to be that roof for these guys really bad, and I couldn’t get my ducks in a row.”

  Feeling left out of the creative stream he wanted to attract to New Line, De Luca was determined not to let Paul Thomas Anderson slip through his grasp. And this time New Line owed De Luca his shot. “They’d already fucked me on Rushmore,” he thought. “They’re not going to want to do this. I knew what the response would be.”

  He met Paul Thomas Anderson at Chaya Brasserie, a restaurant that served as New Line’s local commissary, on Robertson just downstairs. The self-absorbed Anderson’s pitch was typically grand: It’s a four-hour movie with a disco intermission, he said. De Luca liked that. They talked about the memorable opening scene of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: just a black screen with a low humming sound effect, then the black dissolves into the Mojave Desert. De Luca had seen it as a kid at the Ziegfeld in New York. Anderson wanted to open with something similar: a black screen and the boomboomboom of disco, dissolving into a disco marquee in Reseda with the words on the marquee: Boogie Nights. Anderson described the long, opening tracking shot, an aerial shot above the Valley that swooped down into the disco, past the bouncers and down the hallway lined by the characters in the film, a magnificent opening noted by most of the critics once the film was released. “It was hard not to be taken in by that,” said De Luca. He was reminded of a movie he loved, Lawrence of Arabia; its epic quality, with an intermission. “I thought of that, with disco music.” The two felt they spoke the same language. De Luca said, “I thought it was genius.”

  But De Luca had to convince his bosses, Lynne and Shaye and the rest of the New Line green-light committee. As always, they were skeptical.

  “I was flummoxed,” Shaye recalled. “De Luca gave me a 185-page script. I thought this must be a joke. He told me, ‘No, no, he [Anderson] will bring it down.’”

  Mitch Goldman, who headed marketing at New Line, argued to get the movie made. “I remember having arguments with Bob Shaye over making the movie at all. I’d seen Hard Eight, I’d read the script. I thought it could be sold, even though a movie about the porno business probably couldn’t be sold,” Goldman said. “I thought that with a great music track, the era of the seventies, I could sell it that way, as a worst-case scenario.”

  Another New Line executive, Karen Hermelin, didn’t know what to make of this massive script. “I remember Mike De Luca asking me to read it and I thought, Who would watch this? You can’t make this. But De Luca was totally passionate, he believed in Paul. And Paul believed in himself.” Hermelin—one of a handful of women in the senior staff meetings—was eventually won over. Anderson, she concluded, “was a pisher. And he was completely uncompromising. He had this five-thousand-page script which was completely misogynistic. I loved it.” (By utter coincidence, Hermelin later played one of Adam Sandler’s sisters in Anderson’s 2002 movie Punch-Drunk Love for Joe Roth’s Revolution studio; Anderson, who was sure he’d hired off-the-street amateurs for these bit parts, never recognized the woman he’d had a half-dozen meetings with during Boogie Nights.)

  There were pragmatic reasons to give De Luca his shot. Shaye and Lynne had already denied their young executive repeatedly, and they were trying to give their own people more creative leeway: “If it was not below some moral threshold, we should entertain it,” Shaye said. “The company was growing up.” And uppermost in everyone’s mind was the fact that Pulp Fiction had turned out to be one of the most successful films of all time, a $100 million hit out of a film that had cost less than one-tenth that amount; that was a formula that New Line liked. Maybe, they thought, Boogie Nights could be the start of a relationship with a filmmaker who would hit that kind of jackpot.

  Shaye had happened to meet Anderson at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, where he remembered him as “a waifish guy with an army windbreaker. I took to the guy,” Shaye said. But on that same trip, he ran into one of the producers of Hard Eight, and asked him his opinion of Anderson. “He’s very talented,” said the producer. “And very hard to work with.”

  Despite the green light, Anderson never really felt the studio backed the film. He got the sense that Bob Shaye had a distaste for the subject matter, or at least an inability to understand it. Anderson said Shaye had a “What is this exactly?” look in his eye whenever he crossed paths with Boogie Nights.

  But De Luca was a true, die-hard fan. He climbed into Anderson’s battered car with actor John C. Reilly to drive to Vegas to attend the adult video Oscars. They sat in the back and roared hysterically during the earnest, heartfelt acceptance speeches of the top porno figures of the day. De Luca was convinced he’d found a new filmic genius. “I would do Berlin Alexanderplatz with Paul,” he said, referring to the eight-hour German epic. “He’s Orson Welles. I’m the blank check guy.” Still, there were conditions to the deal. Anderson could use the acto
rs he wanted, but had to agree to keep the budget low, to $15 million; the movie had to come in with an R rating, not an NC-17, which would be impossible to market. And—not insignificant with a director like Anderson—the movie had to have a running time of under three hours.

  Anderson didn’t hesitate, and agreed to all of Shaye’s conditions. New Line’s chief never really expected Anderson to be permitted to shoot the entire script as written. With the green-light committee leaning toward De Luca’s conviction and Anderson’s passion, Bob Shaye “crawled onto the train,” said marketing chief Mitch Goldman.

  Traffic

  “Spent some time today thinking about drugs,” wrote Steven Soderbergh, who’d never touched them before his mid-twenties, in his diary on Sunday, April 7, 1996. “I’m somewhat fascinated by them despite my relative inexperience, and I wonder what their role is or might be in one’s life. That some drugs are legal and viewed as acceptable (cigarettes, alcohol) and others are not is strange to me. Also I’m not sure I know the difference between outlawing a pot plant and a beehive; it’s odd to me that something existing in nature can be outlawed. …The question of how much we should legislate against potential abuses is one I haven’t been able to answer for myself. If cocaine were suddenly legal, would a large majority of Americans suddenly become addicted? ‘Is cocaine’ “worse” than alcohol?

  Interesting questions for a straight arrow like Steven Soderbergh. Either it was a coincidence, or Soderbergh had drugs on his mind because he and his girlfriend, Laura Bickford, had been having long, late lunch conversations about addiction, about how the drug trade had corrupted American society and distorted the economies of Third World countries. For a couple of years Bickford, a producer, had been obsessed with the subject. She’d clipped every article she could find, talking virtually about nothing else. Everyone in Bickford’s orbit was sure to hear about her fixation and her attempts to get the British TV miniseries Traffik—about the drug wars—made in the United States for an American audience. Soderbergh was a sounding board for her frustrations.