Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  The critical response to Traffic was wildly enthusiastic, almost dizzying with praise. Soderbergh knew he’d made a good movie, but he couldn’t know to what degree he’d taken a risk, and to what degree he’d succeeded. The critics told him. Traffic marked Soderbergh’s first true triumph, the maturing of a precocious talent finally directed to a subject worthy of his prodigious abilities, an epic story about a complex topic painted masterfully on a broad canvas.

  “You don’t have to be an artist to make a movie with a big colorful cast, but only in the rare great ensemble films, like Nashville or Dazed and Confused, do we get the delicious, vibratory feeling that every character on screen is worth a movie of his or her own,” wrote Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, in just one of many passionately supportive reviews. Among other comments, Gleiberman praised Soderbergh for using the camera as a “kind of psychological divining rod, ripping away each character’s illusions and the audience’s as well.”

  There were other reviews like it. In the New Yorker David Denby said, “Traffic offers an astoundingly vivid and wide-spanning view of the drug war—high and low, dealer and user, Mexican and American—and the ambiguity of its many encounters is a good part of its meaning…. In the drug world, no one is quite what he seems: greed and humor change human character as acid changes virgin soil. With intelligence and grim good humor, the movie threads its way through lies, put-ons, and betrayals; at the end, it settles at an uneasy point somewhere between resignation and hope.” Several critics noted the quiet inspiration of the final scene, Benicio Del Toro’s Xavier sitting in the stands to watch a baseball game, “a willingly anonymous Everyman who might easily end up the paunchy, quietly beaming patriarch of a large and loving family—or rotting in a ditch somewhere, a forgotten casualty of a war he didn’t start and couldn’t stop,” noted Ella Taylor in L.A. Weekly.

  Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune admitted that Traffic changed his mind about Soderbergh, having always considered him, he wrote, a snotty-nosed poser. It was the rare critic who found fault with the film. Oddly, the criticism was generally that the film was not ideological enough. Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times complained that Traffic didn’t take a strong point of view. “Given what this film shows, a clearer stand on decriminalization or even treatment in place of prison seems in order,” he wrote. “Without one, watching Traffic, artfully made though it is, feels a little like seeing a version of The Insider that thought it politic to waffle on whether cigarettes were a danger to your health.”

  SODERBERGH AND BICKFORD LEARNED ONLY AFTER HIRING Steve Gaghan that he had had a severe drug problem himself. Gaghan had been agitating to tell his story to the media throughout the production and hired his own publicist, the now infamous Bumble Ward, to make sure he got sufficient attention. This was the subject of some eye-rolling within USA Films and the production; not even Soderbergh had his own publicist. The studio had hired veteran Lois Smith to run and plan a strategic campaign. She and everyone else on the film—the producers, the studio—were against Gaghan’s need to confess to a reporter. Week after week they went through a media plan and rejected Gaghan’s urgent request to tell. Soderbergh and the producers didn’t want Gaghan’s confession to distract from the larger questions raised by the film or to prompt questions about the drug use of other writers, actors, directors, producers, or anyone else connected to the film. Finally Gaghan couldn’t contain himself any longer and came clean about his past in the middle of the 2001 Oscar season, as he vied for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. “People were asking me about where the movie came from, where I got the characters and situations for Traffic and I found myself starting to speak in code,” he said in a full confessional to Rick Lyman in the New York Times. “I began to feel that I was not being truthful.”

  Soderbergh was peeved, though it did score the movie ink in the largest paper in the country. Bickford too was nonplussed. “Where I come from people hire publicists to keep that kind of information out of the paper,” she later observed. Gaghan did not respond to requests for comment.

  Inevitably, perhaps, with all that praise pouring in, the cinema’s academic elite were unimpressed once they had a chance to think about it. In the magazine Cineaste, writer Richard Porton criticized the movie for falling back on stereotyped plotlines and for getting “bogged down by generic formulas and anemic political assumptions.” Porton writes, caustically, “The film ingeniously cuts from one plot line to another before viewers with short attention spans can recognize the ludicrousness of any one of its constituent parts.” He goes on to call the movie racist—worse, casually racist—because Caroline Wakefield ends up prostituting herself to her black drug dealer. “Soderbergh and Gaghan do not object to the drug war because of its devastating effect upon poor African Americans and Latinos or because inmates are languishing in jail as the result of draconian laws,” he writes. “Their credo, appropriately vague as well as vacuous, is summed up by Wakefield’s speech resigning his position: ‘The war on drugs is a war on our nation’s most precious resource—our children.’ … It is difficult not to view the film as a missed opportunity, a project that might have honestly explored the ravages of American drug policy without resorting to creaky generic contrivances of political obfuscation.”

  The criticism would have been easier to take if Hollywood did not churn out so many puerile, pandering movies all year long. It wasn’t easy to make any movie. But it was almost a miracle that a movie that was both substantive and engaging made it through the system.

  THERE WAS A WHOLE OTHER SET OF RESPONSES TO TRAFFIC as a political statement and they were oddly divergent. Opponents of the government’s drug policy saw Traffic as a brilliant statement about how the war on drugs had failed, and they took the film as a calling card for legalization of drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance, whose founder, Ethan Nadelmann, had been cut from the cocktail party scene, set up a state-of-the-art Web site, stopthewar.com, timed to Traffic’s release, that had a video game and prizes. The site called for the end of interdiction and highlighted scenes from the film.

  Meanwhile Soderbergh screened the film for officials from the DEA and U.S. Customs Service, people who had been key advisers both before and during production. Most thought it was a complimentary portrait of their efforts to stop drugs from penetrating the border, a salute to their success and their devotion to very difficult jobs. None of them saw it as a condemnation of the war on drugs. The Commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service, Ray Kelly, became a public proponent of the film, and praised it as the movie was rolling out on screens. “I thought it was sobering,” he told the New York Daily News. “It showed the complexity of the drug problem. The message I got was not that the drug war is unwinnable, but … we have to continue moving forward as far as interdiction is concerned. We also have to increase our resources devoted to prevention and treatment. I don’t think it’s an either-or situation.”

  Not everyone was similarly struck with that message. At a screening in Washington, D.C., in the fall, Bill Olson, the staff director of Senator Charles Grassley’s (R-Iowa) drug caucus, walked out on the heels of Michael Douglas’s final speech, hissing at Soderbergh, “Shame on you.” Grassley, who was not exactly an opponent of the drug war, had volunteered to be in the cocktail party scene and lived to regret it.

  Whatever one’s interpretation of the film, there was no question that Traffic started a broader debate on a subject that was previously largely absent from the sociopolitical landscape. In 2000 Americans were mostly consumed with millennial angst. All of a sudden the opinion pages and even—unbelievably—cable news television shows featured a lively discussion about drugs. The film coincided with a few developments in the real world. In November 2000 California voters had passed Proposition 36, which aimed to divert nonviolent drug users from state prison into treatment programs. Around the time of the movie’s release, Republican New Mexico governor Gary E. Johnson became an outspoken foe of the drug war, arguing forcefully for legalizatio
n. (The ensuing ruckus resulted in several of his cabinet members resigning.)

  The movie became a conduit for looking at those issues, a conversation piece that both pundits and the general public could notice. It wasn’t long before the editorial pages seized the topic. The Nation’s Michael Massing wrote a piece about the film, urging the new President Bush in the direction of treatment over interdiction. In Commentary, a journal of the Jewish neoconservative intelligentsia, writer Gary Rosen called to resist that path, pointing to statistics of declines in marijuana and cocaine usage compared to 1979. And not surprisingly, former drug czar and right-wing culture guru William Bennett warned that the film should not be taken as an invitation to put treatment ahead of sanctions. “Time in treatment is often a function of coercion,” he told the Washington Post.

  And in smaller newspapers around the country, there were articles about the movie’s effect at a grassroots level. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution wrote about the local Findling family, who called their three children to the kitchen for a family meeting after seeing the film. “They were disturbed by the depiction of drug abuse by a privileged, high-achieving teen. They wanted to talk to their own kids right away…. The Findlings are not the only ones having such discussions. Traffic, already being talked about among movie aficionados as a likely Oscar nominee, has got parents and educators talking. At dinner parties. In coffee clatches. At teacher-parent meetings. In school newsletters.”

  In the wake of September 11, the debate over the war on drugs disappeared into larger concerns over national security. Soderbergh, in 2004, was disappointed that his film did not seem to have a more lasting impact, but was philosophical. “Within months the dialogue was right back where it started,” he said. “Nothing’s changed. It got people talking for a little while. That’s all you can ask for.”

  DESPITE THE ATTENTION AND THE CRITICAL ACCLAIM, IT wasn’t a certainty that Traffic would be recognized at the Oscars. The Academy is quite conservative, and this was edgier fare than they usually embraced (think Driving Miss Daisy). Russell Schwartz got a bad feeling when he sent videocassettes of the film to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Some two dozen tapes were sent back with a note from senior members: “You sent us the Spanish version.” Said Schwartz, “I thought, ‘We are screwed.’”

  But on February 14, 2001, Steven Soderbergh had a very good day. His movie Traffic was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Supporting Actor for Benicio Del Toro. On the same day, his movie Erin Brockovich was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress (Julia Roberts), and Best Supporting Actor (Albert Finney). Not since 1938, when Michael Curtiz was nominated for directing both Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters, had a director squared off against himself.

  Soderbergh refused to lobby for either Traffic or Erin Brockovich, a strategic choice that most people in Hollywood thought was a mistake. The director said he couldn’t choose between his children, but many feared the vote would be split badly.

  But the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture of Arts and Sciences gave a statue to Julia Roberts for Erin Brockovich, and then gave four Oscars to Traffic: Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Supporting Actor for Del Toro. Best Picture went to Gladiator. That wasn’t the half of the glory headed Traffic’s way. The movie also won the British Oscars, the BAFTA; Golden Globes; Screen Actors Guild; Writers Guild; the Latino ALMA award; and at least a dozen film critics’ awards.

  TRAFFIC WAS ONE OF THOSE RARE, NEARLY EXTINCT CREATURES in Hollywood, a serious movie that won a slew of awards and was a hit at the box office. It gave USA Films much needed credibility both in the media and on the home front with Barry Diller and Universal. Unfortunately, none of that seemed to help USA’s Scott Greenstein much (Russell Schwartz had already moved on). His fate was tied up in the merger mania of the movie industry. In October 2001 Diller sold USA Networks to Vivendi for a 5.4 percent stake in the company (and another 1.5 percent personal equity stake), taking a titular job as chairman of the company. Vivendi was now a massive, international conglomerate, with everything from water salination plants to cell phones to theme parks to art-house movies under its ownership. Two months later Universal bought the highly regarded independent production company Good Machine International, and announced plans to merge it with USA Films, thus creating an entirely new specialty film unit, Focus. USA was over, and Greenstein was out of a job. Universal chairman Stacey Snider installed the Good Machine team of David Linde and James Schamus as copresidents in the new company. A headline-making alliance announced barely two months before, in which USA Films would be the home for a new company of rebel directors—Soderbergh, Fincher, Payne, Jonze, and Mendes—was dead in the water.

  As for Soderbergh, by the turn of the millennium he had redeemed himself from his creative trough in the middle of the 1990s. He rose precipitously to be one of the most powerful directors in the industry and quickly extended his interests to being one of the most involved producers in the industry, too. “He’s a born-again filmmaker, at ease, as all the classic Hollywood directors were, with the notion that art and entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive terms. As he’s proved—twice in one year,” wrote David Ansen in Newsweek.

  And even the self-lacerating Soderbergh could recognize that he had hit an artistic peak. “That period of Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, and Traffic all fell during a period when I was very energized and felt like it was a good time for me to be busy,” he said in 2004. “Those periods come and go, and it was another reason why I wanted Traffic to happen. I needed to cram as much work as I could into that period, because I felt good.”

  Of course, he then turned around and sabotaged all of that in a swift move or two. One was called Full Frontal. The other was called Solaris. Both tanked. Even before that he had made a glossy, star-studded, Las Vegas bauble called Ocean’s Eleven. But none of it came easy to him after Traffic. Since that film, “the process has gotten much harder,” he said. “I’ve always been in it for the long haul. I’ve gone way up and I’ve gone way down. But when I start feeling I can’t come up with something that I think is good, that’s really frustrating. It’s very, very conceivable that I could reach a point where I stop, and just go ‘I’m out. I’m dry.’”

  CONCLUSION

  ON THE BRISK MANHATTAN EVENING OF APRIL 10, 2002, THE Rising bourgeoisie of New York City filed excitedly into the theater of the Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street for a first-time, Hollywood event at the museum, a tribute to a young filmmaker.

  Up on the stage nervously gulping water and wagging his foot was forty-three-year-old David O. Russell, dressed in his signature Brooks Brothers suit (he’d gotten it for free), with a white shirt and white sneakers. He was the first to be honored in a new series focusing on young directors who had already made their mark on cinema history.

  The celebration was somewhat awkward, marked by the newness of the event. Lily Tomlin, who’d costarred in Flirting with Disaster, was doing a fairly miserable job of interviewing Russell up onstage. She fumbled nervously as she asked about Spanking the Monkey, his film about incest, stopping just short of asking Russell whether it was based on his own experiences. Then she skipped to Three Kings and finally confessed she couldn’t hear Russell’s replies. “I have to hang on your every word,” she explained apologetically. “Your words kind of roll.” Russell was barely smoother. “It is so surreal to be up here right now,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense in a lot of ways.”

  But it did, really. Not only did Russell represent the best of the young generation that had emerged in the late 1990s, but there was a certain symmetry to his being there. He had once waited tables at catered affairs at MoMA while still struggling as a filmmaker more than a decade before.

  The evening was an experiment for the museum. The manager of the museum’s department of film an
d media, Natalie Herniak, had asked Spike Jonze to be the first honoree, but the socially introverted director had declined, saying he wasn’t ready for it. Instead she asked Russell, a decade older and with three films to his name.

  Still, Jonze was there that evening, and so were Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, and Kimberly Peirce. They looked around at one another in the dimly lit hall and realized that, like the directors they revered from the 1970s, they too had formed a community of artists who were defining their era with their work. Along with other actors who had worked with Russell, Jonze was invited up onstage. Russell kept gesturing toward Payne, seated in the audience, and asking “Alexander? What do you think?” as if to signal solidarity. Russell’s agent, John Lesher, took a picture of them all lined up, beaming in the spotlight of official recognition. “That night felt like—this is what it must have been like when Mean Streets came out,” recalled Lesher.

  Eventually the event was saved from imminent debacle when comedian Will Ferrell, a friend of Russell’s, tottered down the aisle dressed as James Lipton, the obsequious host of the Bravo network’s Inside the Actor’s Studio interview series, armed with a stack of blue notecards. “Tonight,” Ferrell-as-Lipton boomed in his slow, mock-stentorian tone, “we are in the presence of a genius. To my right,” (wave to Russell, who suppressed a smirk) “without argument, the greatest artist that has ever lived. The greatest human ever, fiction or nonfiction. A man who has taken the nothingness and shaped it with his naked hands until it is alive.” Finally, some comic relief. The actors from Russell’s movies assembled onstage—Mark Wahlberg, Patricia Arquette, Mary Tyler Moore, and others—and Ferrell-as-Lipton asked each of them questions while Russell shot snapshots from his seat onstage with what appeared to be a disposable camera. Then Ferrell turned his Q&A shtick on the director: