Rebels on the Backlot
Page 36
The next day Graham King wrote a check for $50 million. Soderbergh could finally stop financing Traffic from his own bank account.
THE SHOOT WAS A FRENZIED AFFAIR. SODERBERGH AND HIS team had three weeks to finish casting 163 speaking parts, and to prepare to shoot in ten cities over three months.
Despite all that, Soderbergh was determined to shoot Traffic with the spontaneity and freedom he gleaned from his previous, self-financed efforts. He took to calling Traffic “a $49 million Dogma film,” referring to the experimental Danish films that use no artifical light, costumes, makeup, or set design. But the kid from Baton Rouge was very far from Schizopolis. Soderbergh was firmly back in Hollywood.
USA Films was nervous about some of Soderbergh’s choices. The director announced he intended to “flash” the negative of daily footage—expose it briefly to bright light—in order to achieve a specific haloed look to some scenes. It was a very risky technique, one used in the seventies on a classic Robert Altman film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but a procedure that if done improperly would result in the day’s footage being lost. In fact Soderbergh wanted to achieve three different looks with each of the film’s three distinct story lines: the Wakefield drug czar, the Tijuana cartel, and the San Diego suburban drug trafficker. At one point Soderbergh considered using silent-era “vignette” insignias around the San Diego portion. The flashing of the San Diego scenes gave them a desaturated, bright look. The scenes on the East Coast were shot in bright daylight and had a cold, monochromatic feel. The Mexican portion in particular was shot with extreme overexposure and “tobacco” filters and then printed on specific Ektachrome film to get a grainy, washed-out image. (He may also have been influenced by the washed-out look of David O. Russell’s Three Kings, which he loved.) The Mexico scenes were seven generations down from the original negative. Greenstein decided to let Soderbergh use the flashing technique, with trepidation. Said Schwartz, “It’s the kind of question where you see yourself sinking into the abyss.”
Greenstein drew the line at having nearly half of the film be in Spanish, with English subtitles. Subtitles, as everyone in the industry knew, were death for American audiences. Soderbergh threatened to drop the project if he couldn’t have the characters speak in Spanish. Greenstein had to relent, though Russell Schwartz denies it was an actual threat. “He said it very strongly,” he said.
Greenstein’s reservations about Soderbergh’s decision to use filters and flash the negative were on target. Had he known what happened on the second day of shooting, he might have canceled the whole effect. But Soderbergh and Bickford told no one that when they screened the scenes between Catherine Zeta-Jones as a suburban housewife and her drug lord husband’s lawyer, played by Dennis Quaid, there was nothing on the film.
“The first day’s footage was fine. The third day’s footage was fine. But the second day of shooting in San Diego was completely unusable,” said Soderbergh.
“It was white. Blank,” recalled Bickford.
It was very hard to know what had gone wrong. Soderbergh was pushing the limits of exposure using different filters on the camera, and had flashed the negative. He had conducted a series of tests before beginning filming, and the process seemed to work.
“We called the lab, freaking out,” said Bickford. “We assumed they had overexposed the negative.” But the next day’s footage was fine. “We never did figure out what happened,” said Bickford. “And we never told anybody.” But the day after that Soderbergh made sure a small test piece of the daily footage was processed before sending in the rest of the negative, a step that delayed the dailies by a day through the shoot.
The sheer logistics of the shoot were overwhelming, combining the demands of a big Hollywood movie with the style of an indie. The producers ended up chartering a plane for a month to keep the filming moving between different cities, including Los Angeles and Nogales, Mexico. They steered clear of Tijuana, where they learned it cost only $3,000 to order a hit on someone. In a movie that portrayed drug lords in the town as villains, it seemed prudent to stay away. To keep in sync with the guerrilla-style filmmaking that Soderbergh sought to achieve, everybody traveled light. The camera fit in a van. They brought the wardrobe truck with them. The original vision was even more spare: just Soderbergh and a camera, and he would have shot it digitally if the studio had permitted. Bickford drew the line at that. “Can you imagine if you showed up on the set with Michael Douglas with a digital camera?” she asked him.
Soderbergh tried not to let anyone see how panicked he was inside. He’d never tried anything this ambitious, this improvised, before. “I’d shoot any fucking thing and just think, you know, we’ll sort it out later,” he confessed to the Village Voice. “On the early films, I’d be figuring it out in my head, like exactly how it was going to go together and I wouldn’t leave the set until I knew, and that’s a boring way to work. I’m more of a gearhead anyway.”
Far from confusing the actors, they seemed to thrive on the chaos. “It’s exciting. I loved working like that,” said Del Toro. “There’s no fat. …We’d go into a town. Be there two weeks. One day of moving, the weekend, then we’d be shooting in El Paso, Arizona. Then fly, land, check into a hotel. We were like some weird band traveling from San Diego to Arizona and the border of Texas. Like the Grateful Dead,” he said. “I remember getting to hotel in Socorro, Texas, at 4:00 A.M., checking into this little hotel, the next day by 11:00 A.M. sitting there in the car with [costar] Jacob Vargas doing an opening scene. There was a sense of community happening, from the actors to the grips. We’d have barbecues every day we finished, free meals for everybody at the hotel.”
SODERBERGH WAS ON THE SET BEFORE ANYBODY ELSE, USUALLY BY 6:00 A.M. He was there pacing back and forth as his crew showed up; most figured he was already editing it in his mind. There was no “video village,” the monitor where the script girl, the producer, and all of the director’s buddies watched the scenes. Some directors stand on sets like an emperor, surveying the activity around them. On this film, Soderbergh was lugging equipment like everybody else, usually the camera, because he was the cinematographer. The casualness was a little scary. Del Toro didn’t like the white T-shirt he was wearing in one scene and said he wanted to wear something darker, like what the assistant director was wearing. Soderbergh had the A.D. take his black T-shirt off and handed it to Del Toro, who ripped off the pocket and wore it in the scene.
THOUGH HE WAS MAKING A STUDIO PICTURE, SODERBERGH couldn’t resist poking fun at the pomp and ceremony that comes with most mainstream productions. On The Last Samurai, for example, crew members were forbidden to look star Tom Cruise in the eye on set. Soderbergh issued a ten-page “Maniphesto” that included instructions such as:
Steven’s ass’t: Ass’t. always present at meetings. Smile when Steven speaks, frown when others speak. Be prepared to finish Steven’s sentences/ideas when he drifts into incoherence and/or sleep. Remember that “obsequious sycophant” is an accurate description of Steven’s favorite people.
Crew: Should not talk to Steven unless he is about to be crushed by a falling object.
Casting: Make sure all actors can open their eyes, smile, and create expressions.
Steven’s therapist: Do not speak. If you have questions, write them down beforehand and fax them to Steven’s ass’t.
Always remember: Steven is a genius. Everything he says, does, ingests, and secretes is Art. Trying to make him conform to standard ideas of behavior will only harm his Art and result in police intervention. The degrading humiliation and diminished sense of self you will experience is part of Steven’s desire to break you out of your stagnant uninspired existence, which is not Art. Get off yourself. Get onto Steven.
A week after the flashing debacle Bickford got a call from the bond company that was insuring the picture. They wanted to know why the production was repeating scenes from the second day of the shoot. Bickford invented some excuse. Then Greenstein called, nervous: “You’re sure you can’t get
a director of photography?” Soderbergh wasn’t interested; the studio would probably fire a D.P. who was trying to do what he wanted. Greenstein reverted to form. He called five times in a day to say, “Get a D.P.!”
Bickford: “Scott, no. Steven is going to be the D.P.”
Greenstein would call back. “But you need a D.P.!”
Bickford: “Scott, it’s not going to happen.”
A couple of hours later he’d call again. “A D.P.!”
Bickford, who normally spoke in a sexy half whisper, finally shouted back: “Scott! Fuck you! We’re not going to get a D.P.!” She later observed, “Scott has an aggressive, get-in-your-face manner. So I had to speak to him in a way I wouldn’t speak to other people.”
The insurance man visited the set. “Is Steven going to keep flashing the negative?” It was Bickford’s job to keep these hounds at bay, but she agreed to a deal with the bond company and Greenstein. If they lost another day of footage as a result of flashing the negative, Soderbergh and Bickford would be responsible for the cost.
Other elements were contributed from the Schizopolis effect. Soderbergh stole some images guerrilla style and used his contacts to scare up extras. Most of the shooting was done on location, but it was of course impossible to shoot in the White House, even with a commander in chief as starstruck as Bill Clinton. Soderbergh managed to steal a couple of shots by arranging a tour of the building for five people, including himself and Michael Douglas. He tried to get a shot of Douglas coming out of the press conference room by getting NBC’s Claire Shipman, a friend of Bickford’s, to invite Douglas into the press room. But Soderbergh couldn’t get permission to shoot it. Instead he had to use a tiny handheld camera to shoot Douglas from outside the White House grounds, on the street. He was able to shoot it just twice, and used a shot of Douglas from behind, walking off the White House lawn in the film. Out on the street Soderbergh had even more trouble getting a shot of Douglas hailing a cab and riding away. Every time the movie star got a cab, some passing tourist would run into the shot, screaming.
Casting became a full-time occupation during the shoot. There were literally dozens of small parts that had to be filled. The production crew used whatever contacts they had to assemble real-life politicians and journalists for a Georgetown cocktail party in Wakefield’s honor. They rented out the home of C. Boyden Gray, a staunch Republican lawyer for Ronald Reagan and George Bush and a Washington fixture. The guests included California senator Barabara Boxer, Oklahoma senator Don Nickles, Utah senator Orrin Hatch; all answered written invitations to attend. One of the most important people on the drug policy issue was cut from this scene. Ethan Nadelmann, the country’s leading advocate for legalization of drugs and the founder of a groundbreaking group called the Drug Policy Alliance, was at the cocktail party, but got cut from the scene when the Screen Actors Guild complained that he was not famous enough to play himself.
For a scene at the White House Soderbergh needed someone with appropriate gravitas to play the president’s chief of staff, who would greet Michael Douglas as the drug czar. It was two scenes, and the production staff agreed to offer it to Sidney Poitier. When Poitier passed, Soderbergh suggested Albert Finney, the British actor who had just played Ed Masry in Erin Brockovich. Finney agreed, on two conditions: that he be credited under a pseudonym; and that no one tell Michael Douglas it was Finney. The whole enterprise became a mini-cloak-and-dagger operation; Soderbergh gave Finney the code name of “Maltese;” and they told Douglas he’d play the scene with a Chicago theater actor he’d never heard of. Meanwhile, Finney did not have a work visa, and the scene was about to be filmed on the last day of the shoot. Bickford got Jesse Helms, the ultra-conservative North Carolina senator, to push the visa through in a day, thanks to a contact they’d made with U.S. Customs during research on the film. Finney arrived the last day of the shoot and was kept hidden in a trailer all day. Douglas was called to the set first and had to cool his heels. With Soderbergh shooting it on videotape, Finney was brought out and introduced as “Nigel.” Douglas shook his hand and then was hit with a shock of recognition: “Oh my God!” Soderbergh clapped his hands gleefully and shouted, “Okay, let’s go!”
Despite the pranks and breakneck pace, it wasn’t long before a feeling grew among those working on the film that Traffic could turn out to be a uniquely powerful film. The daily footage was intense, everything from the pregnant Zeta-Jones’s steely calculation to watching eighteen-year-old Erika Christensen, as Caroline Wakefield, shed a tear the first time she tries crack.
THE ENDING OF TRAFFIC WENT THROUGH MANY PERMUTATIONS. The original showed Caroline, who had been through rehab, crawling out the window of her bedroom to go buy drugs, as her parents were downstairs in their study. “I had a lot of conversations with Gaghan about it,” Soderbergh said. “I felt like after two and a half hours that wasn’t how I wanted to leave people.” He wanted to suggest that treatment for addiction worked; Gaghan resisted, saying he didn’t want a neat ending to such a messy problem. Treatment usually doesn’t work, he said. Soderbergh replied, “But you stopped.” The ending was cut, as was a scene earlier in the film in which Wakefield lit up a crack pipe out of sympathy with his daughter.
Instead, Douglas had a long, emotional speech near the end of the movie, after Wakefield decides to resign his post to devote himself to helping his daughter. The speech went back and forth from being grand to more modest, from being political to antipolitical. Gaghan worked on it, and Soderbergh did, too. The screenwriter came to the set on the day the scene was to be shot in the White House press room set on the Warner Brothers lot, which they were renting from the hit TV series, The West Wing. He and Soderbergh sat around cutting and pasting the various pieces of the speech. The speech was a delicate balance, meant to sum up Wakefield’s disgust with the government’s approach to interdicting drugs, its lack of empathy for drug users, and a lack of taking responsibility for the failures to date. At the end of the speech, Wakefield resigns. By lunch they had a version and Gaghan went home. Bickford had called a friend, Lawrence O’Donnell, a political commentator and writer on staff of The West Wing, to come by and watch the speech.
“We were doing the first take,” said Bickford. “Lawrence hears the speech. He says, ‘You should tweak this line.’ I said, ‘We can’t, the writer just went home.’” O’Donnell offered to work on the line. Soderbergh agreed. O’Donnell offered a change. Michael Douglas preferred it; so did Soderbergh, and they did another take.
O’Donnell again had a thought. “‘I bet the script says that the press stands in stunned silence at the end,’” he said to Bickford.
“It does,” she replied.
“That would never happen. The press would be screaming and yelling and running after him,” said O’Donnell, who had worked in Washington for years.
The reaction shot was changed. But the line that resonated, that resurfaced in countless reviews, television debates, and hallway discussions, was Wakefield concluding, “If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don’t know how you wage war on your own family.”
RUSSELL SCHWARTZ KNEW THAT HE HAD TO MAKE THIS RISKY movie work. His boss, Barry Diller, was beginning to lose interest in USA Films, and he had to make this release count. The marketing department cut a trailer that made Traffic look more like a conventional thriller than the daring, complex, political movie it was, and the market research showed audiences that had seen the trailer wanted to see the film, or would at least try it. The goal always was to reach beyond the art-house audience. “My argument was, if we believe in this movie, we’re not cheating with this trailer. If it gets the reviews it will help middle America see it,” said Schwartz. The studio, together with Soderbergh, Bickford, Zwick, and Herskovitz, decided to go for it, to release Traffic on a lot of screens at once, not to slowly platform and build word of mouth. “We thought Barry Diller was getting bored with us, he was going to fire us—we had to go for it,” said Schwartz.
“It was like they’d been waiting for someone to ask them about this issue,” Soderbergh remembered. “I’ve done a lot of these previews and it’s never been that intense. They wanted to talk about this.”
It was a positive sign. A few weeks later on December 27, 2000, under the tagline “Nobody gets away clean,” Traffic was released on four screens in time to qualify for that year’s Academy Awards. A week later it moved up to one thousand five hundred screens. Tracking had shown the movie would make between $6 and $8 million. It made $15 million. It wasn’t a blockbuster number, but it was a sign of life in a movie that had strong reviews. It was the second weekend that mattered more; attendance dropped just five percent. That box office number would hold steady, and then decline slowly over the next several weeks, unlike most Hollywood releases, which are released with a big bang, then quickly disappear. Traffic stayed on almost the same number of screens for weeks and weeks, getting another big bump at the box office after the mid-February Oscar nominations were announced. Traffic was nominated in five categories, including Best Picture. The film continued to climb at the box office, all the way, eventually, to $124 million. It was a pattern that tracked in the opposite direction of most Hollywood studio movies, which opened to a big box office number riding a wave of television ads and junket interviews, then quickly disappeared.