Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Bickford was an undeniable presence, tall with limpid blue eyes and long, flowing blond hair, an amazon WASP who had brains, grace, and an aura of excitement about her. Those who disliked her in Hollywood—and there were some—considered her a spoiled brat. But Steven Soderbergh fell for Laura Bickford, hard. She was the product of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, her father a lawyer, her mother an investment banker, extremely well bred and a bit of a wild child: Bickford had been thrown out of boarding school for smoking with boys in her room; she survived the rejection to graduate from Sarah Lawrence College, where she combined her interest in dance with avant-garde filmmaking. Bickford studied French while living in Paris for a time and ended up in London at the age of twenty-three, smart, beautiful, rich, and cool. She worked her way up as a music producer with a young company called Vivid, spending five years in the heart of London’s hip music community until the company went bust in the early 1990s; she wanted to move on to making movies but had no prospects in London, so moved to Los Angeles in 1993.

  Bickford found a job with a producer who had a deal at Disney. It was slow going. By 1995 she’d produced a movie called Citizen X for HBO, about a Russian detective hunting down a serial killer. She had a spec script called Playing God that she got made with David Duchovny, a painful Hollywood experience she vowed never to repeat. According to Bickford, producer Marc Abraham rewrote the script every day and basically cut her out of the project. “It made me never want to make a movie again,” Bickford recalled.

  Meanwhile, her boss at Disney said he was interested in doing something about the battle against drugs. Bickford recalled a masterful piece of entertainment on the topic she’d seen while still living in Britain in 1989, a ten-hour miniseries on the drug wars and how they affected various strata of society. It was called Traffik, and had won a slew of awards in England. Her boss wasn’t interested. But suddenly Bickford was.

  “I had never seen something that tied all the fragmented elements together and that by doing so made you feel differently about the pieces as a whole,” Bickford said. “I never understood where drugs came from, the way they connected kids partying at Oxford to a grower in Pakistan. It wasn’t how we’d thought about it.” In February 1996 Bickford contacted the British agent of the writer of Traffik to see about securing the rights to remake it as a film but was told that others had been trying for years to translate the series to American culture for years, and no one had succeeded. Bickford had no money to option the series anyway.

  But she kept clipping articles and told the agent she was still interested. Other ideas about drugs emerged; there was an article in the paper to mark Valentine’s Day that traced the journey of a rose from Colombia to the flower shop. Bickford thought about doing the same with cocaine. She seemed to see nothing but this one issue everywhere. “The New York Times would report the price of cocaine had dropped because of a monsoon. Here would be the cartel, and a story about women in prison. It kept hitting me in the face,” she said.

  But Bickford needed a writer, someone to translate this sprawling, multicharacter, ten-hour tale into something manageable that a Hollywood studio would consider. She had trouble finding a writer who would watch the ten-hour British series, much less consider adapting it. Those she found expressed interest, but never sat down to watch the series.

  What had become clear to Bickford in her research was that the heart of the British series was on target. Drugs were indeed a global problem. To dramatize the issue, you really had to show the complexities of all the avenues they traveled. Western drug addiction connected Latin American cartel dons with upper-class plastic surgeons, with American federal agents, with the White House and legislators in Congress, and with cops on the beat in Tijuana and Bogotá. You needed to show all of that if you wanted to convey the scope of the problem and the depth of the challenge in combating drugs.

  Complexity was not Hollywood’s forte.

  BICKFORD HAD FIRST MET SODERBERGH AT A HOLLYWOOD party through a screenwriter friend, Steve Brill, in the early 1990s. At the time, after sex, lies, and videotape, Soderbergh “was a famous phenomenon, but he was so down-to-earth, open. He was not snobby,” Bickford remembered. He was also tremendously unhappy, freshly divorced, and not feeling entirely comfortable in Hollywood. They began dating seriously. When Soderbergh went back to hibernate in Louisiana, Bickford visited him frequently in Baton Rouge while he worked on The Underneath. For the first time he directed a play, Geniuses, at his old stomping ground, Louisiana State University. Difficult in relationships, Soderbergh was no less so with Bickford. But she was less willing to put up with his emotional games and demanded that they go to analysis. Soderbergh agreed, and they attended therapy together, working particularly on Soderbergh’s tendency to shut down and run away. Bickford practically forced him to be more open than he had been in previous relationships, though ultimately she felt she couldn’t really change him. They remained together, on and off, for the next couple of years. “We were in love for a long time,” Bickford remembered.

  Soderbergh remained in love with her for a very long time. What doomed this relationship was what seemed to doom Soderbergh’s marriage and other close emotional connections in his life: the intimacy thing. He couldn’t give it. “We tried to make it work,” said Bickford. “I couldn’t accept his capacity”—or perhaps lack thereof—for intimacy. Ultimately, she concluded, she had to walk away at some point. Staying, she felt in retrospect, was “way too difficult. Too painful.” But in the first flush of romance, Soderbergh did move back to Los Angeles and in with Bickford. They were together, on and off, through the making of Traffic, and went as each other’s date to the Academy Awards. “It was great to have that sense of loyalty and trust and understanding. But we had different expectations we could never sort out. It was a very sad thing in my life,” said Bickford.

  Some felt that Bickford used her relationship with Soderbergh and others to create a career in Hollywood, calling her privileged and grasping. Others didn’t mind her grasping a bit. She had briefly dated Benicio Del Toro, whom she recommended for Traffic, then met and married the actor Sam Bottoms. She invited Soderbergh to the wedding, of course; he was still a friend. The director called Bickford’s mother three days before the celebration to say he wouldn’t attend. He couldn’t bear to watch Bickford marry someone else.

  TRAFFIC WAS THEIR ONE GREAT ENDEAVOR TOGETHER. WHEN the agent who controlled the rights to Traffik came through New York in October 1997, she warned Bickford she’d have to start paying to option the property because someone else had made an offer for the rights. Bickford, panicked that all her efforts were about to slip away, offered $10,000 to hold the rights for two years. But she didn’t actually have $10,000. Over lunch with Soderbergh, who had returned to Hollywood to make Out of Sight, she commiserated about her lack of funding. He offered to loan her the money and said he might be interested in directing it. That was all Bickford needed to hear. She brought Soderbergh to her house, where they pored over the background materials she’d been collecting for two years. They sorted them by topic: Mexico, Colombia, prison, law, health. Through friends Bickford met the New York Times writer Tim Golden, who would win a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his work from Mexico, and began grilling him for ideas.

  Soon Soderbergh became as taken with the idea as Bickford had been. Up to now he had been making films that were mainly drawn from his personal experiences about family, sex, marriage, and art. Out of Sight had moved him in another direction, the first time he’d been a director for hire. Erin Brockovich allowed him to treat a topic of social significance, an environmental contamination and the righting of a wrong. “I had come to the end of anything that I had to say about myself that was compelling,” he decided. Traffic offered the possibility of taking on an even more challenging topic of social and political significance. As he educated himself, Soderbergh realized how little Americans talked about the drug problem. He wondered why. Perhaps because it was insoluble. “There are three major so
cial issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs,” he said later. “Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don’t. I know people who’ve had problems with drugs and I also know people who don’t, in that they are recreational users, and their lives for some reason haven’t seemed to fall apart. We know what the issue is with people who can’t turn off the switch. I know why we can’t have a frank discussion with our policymakers: If you’re in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.”

  THE EXPERIENCE OF MAKING OUT OF SIGHT AT UNIVERSAL gave Soderbergh a more forgiving approach to working within the studio system and the Hollywood machine. “The division between the independent world and Hollywood-you-sold-out is stupid, meaningless,” he told Bickford. “Our goal is to make good films. A good film can be made for $2 million, $20 million, $60 million. Why should the best directors only have $2 million to make their films?”

  And Hollywood was changing its approach to independent-style film, too. The shift was enough for the Los Angeles Times to announce in early 1997: “It’s once again in vogue either to own a distribution company that markets and releases independently made, sophisticated movies.” But the trend was going even further than that. The major studios themselves—the ones who made all the event pictures—were in some cases starting to look at “specialized products” for their own slates, as the Los Angeles Times writer Claudia Eller referred to the auteur filmmakers. Casey Silver had made Out of Sight at Universal. At Disney, Joe Roth had green-lighted Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, released in 1999, a movie that seemed far more suited to Miramax’s sensibilities.

  Even with Hollywood’s more open approach to so-called specialty films, there were limits. Some topics were not welcome at any studio, and Soderbergh had picked one of them. Studios weren’t interested in spending either $2 million or $20 million for a movie about drugs. Soderbergh and Bickford took their idea around to the various Hollywood studios and found that not a single studio was interested. Not that this was terribly surprising. Drugs are a taboo topic in American society, and they were taboo in Hollywood, too, like religion and politics. The entertainment industry generally liked to pretend that the drug problem didn’t exist—except as a convenient plot device—even though some of its members suffered more from the ravages of addiction than most other parts of American society.

  Drugs did not dominate Hollywood in the nineties like they had in previous decades, when you commonly saw lines of cocaine set out at parties and restaurants equipped with private booths for snorting. Still, throughout the decade, every so often, the news headlines would peel away the veneer of Hollywood glamour to reveal another ugly celebrity overdose, whether actor River Phoenix, in 1993, or producer Don Simpson, in 1996. There were drug-induced acts of public paranoia (Martin Lawrence in 1996, raving with a loaded gun) and mug-shot humiliation (Robert Downey, Jr., arrested for possession more times than anyone could follow). Drugs were still prevalent, and they were embarrassing. Most of all, nothing about drugs offered an easy marketing hook. Violence was fine, comic book characters and sci-fi fantasy were all good. Even mafia stories were welcome. But drugs were one very sensitive subject.

  Soderbergh took meetings at all the major studios to pitch the project while working on Erin Brockovich.

  “Who’s the audience?” was the inevitable question at each meeting. Warner Brothers. Disney. Sony. Paramount. Miramax. No one would bite. “Bring us a package,” they’d say (a script with a director, a movie star). They wanted to know what Traffic might compare to. What had been the last drug movie? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Johnny Depp? Soderbergh had a tough time coming up with a movie about drugs that had been a commercial hit. They were even turned down by those rare Hollywood executives who were interested in finding risky new material. At New Line, Mike De Luca said he had just started working on Blow, a movie set in the 1970s about a drug dealer (it eventually starred Johnny Depp) and couldn’t sign on to another drug movie. Steve Golin, the film executive at Propaganda, which was owned by PolyGram, couldn’t do anything; PolyGram was being bought out by Universal Studios through its independent arm, October Films. Bingham Ray at October passed. “It was scary to have those two places say no,” said Bickford. (Ironically, October would disappear into the newly formed USA Films, which eventually made Traffic.)

  Around town, at meeting after meeting with studio executives, Soderbergh talked about The French Connection, the classic Billy Friedkin movie that had made Gene Hackman a star and won a bunch of Oscars. He talked about Z, the documentary-style, award-winning Costa-Gavras film about a conspiracy to overthrow a democratic Greek government. Both those movies dated back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. “You couldn’t point to another film of its type to relax people,” Soderbergh recalled. It was a bit awkward. Drugs, Soderbergh was reminded repeatedly, did not have “commercial potential.”

  AS THE 1990S WORE ON, QUENTIN TARANTINO FOUND HIMSELF a prisoner of his own success. For some time after Pulp Fiction, he continued to live in his tiny Hollywood apartment, driving the same dirty red Geo, watching the checks roll in. His phone rang off the hook; everyone wanted Quentertainment. He reveled not in the money but in his long longed-for pop icon status at the tender age of thirty. He insisted on acting and did a guest stint on The Simpsons. He appeared on endless numbers of talk shows and dated endless numbers of sexy women (he’d walk into his office and announce to an assistant, “I’ve always wanted to screw Anna Nicole Smith. Get me Anna Nicole Smith.” And an hour later she’d come walking in). He was a serial dater. After Uma Thurman and a vast number of others, he began dating actress Mira Sorvino and eventually moved in with her. It was an unlikely pairing: She was a demure Harvard graduate and a daddy’s girl to papa actor Paul Sorvino. Still, it was one of the longest relationships Tarantino managed to sustain. But he was distracted. Tarantino had created such a monumental film in Pulp Fiction that it was impossible to live up to the expectations that followed. He collaborated on an abysmal bit of whimsy, Four Rooms, with three other director friends—Robert Rodriguez, Alexandre Rockwell, and Allison Anders—acting in and directing one segment of the film. It was entirely forgettable. Fame was going to his head, and quickly. Rockwell found he could no longer get his old buddy on the phone. Anders observed that Tarantino’s set on the movie was several times larger than all the others. It wasn’t that his story demanded a huge set, she said, “it was that his head demanded a huge set. All of our rooms could have fit inside his. It was a metaphor for what was going on.”

  “It was getting hard to do a lot of the things that I liked to do,” Tarantino told Peter Biskind in 2003. “I would think, ‘If I was Neil Jordan, I could have twelve hookers and no one would know who the fuck I was. It was getting hard to just take walks. Everybody was a homeless person. I had to avoid eye contact. Because to make eye contact was to invite them to approach me. My regular guy shit, going to a used record store and spending two hours on the floor, yanking [stuff] out of the boxes, looking through everything they have—all of a sudden I’m getting jacked and pimped by these people. I’d say, ‘Dude, it’s my day off, man, I just want to look through the fuckin’ records. Like you.’”

  Finally in 1997 Tarantino got around to making Jackie Brown, a modest hit that seemed to suffer in comparison to Pulp Fiction, with people saying there wasn’t enough violence, perhaps, and there was too much sentiment. Even Tarantino’s own agent, Mike Simpson, walked out of the premiere screening and muttered to a Miramax executive, “That thing went thirty-five minutes too long.” The executive replied, “Yes, it did.” Simpson said, “There’s the ultimate case for not giving the director final cut.” Whatever the assessment inside Miramax, the public stance was that the film was underappreciated. The reality was that Jackie Brown was perfectly fine but broke no new ground, other than resuscitating a still sexy Pam Grier.

  After that Tarantino hibernated,
retreating to his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He built a lavish screening room and began collecting hundreds and eventually thousands of old movie prints, which he screened every night. There was plenty of talk about drug problems; friends knew Tarantino to disappear for days at a time. But mostly he just sat on the couch, smoked pot, and watched the boob tube. “This was not Martin Scorsese watching Michael Powell’s movies, where there’s a reason to get excited about it,” said one friend, who declined to be named, in Biskind’s Vanity Fair piece in 2003. “I’m not even talking about something that’s kitschy or trashy—an A.I.P. picture. These were lousy made-for-TV movies. Flat, one-dimensional. And still his eyes would be glued to the tube. After a while, I realized you could literally be showing him anything—a white screen, even—and he’d be watching it like a kid with a pacifier, a lonely little boy in his living room, where he was safe. It was sad and beautiful at the same time.” Another view was that Tarantino was essentially a lazy guy who loved to enjoy what fame and money could buy. And who knew what demons kept him from getting tied down? His friends concluded he was married to his greatest passion, cinema.

  Within three years of Pulp Fiction’s release, Tarantino went from being his generation’s most influential creative force in filmmaking to an irrelevant slacker with a gift for gab who had nothing more to say. Eventually he wore out his welcome even on the air. He was overexposed. He tried to act and humiliated himself on Broadway in 1998 in Wait Until Dark.

  This would more or less stay the case until 2003 when Tarantino made Kill Bill, his martial arts opus that was so big that it broke in half, and was released in two parts. Yet even his greatest fan, Harvey Weinstein, told the New York Times he considered Kill Bill “just a fun B movie.” But the critics couldn’t deny that the rebel generation’s greatest video child, greatest synthesizer of all things pop culture, had triumphed again.