42 Eve Weinstein and Tarantino: Weinstein, author interview.
42 $40,000 for Reservoir Dogs: Bender, author interview.
42 “What choice is there?”: Confidential source, author interview.
Chapter Two
43 New Line as chairman Bob Shaye looked on: Bob Shaye, author interview.
45 “audience we’re targeting will provide”: William Grimes, “A Film Company’s Success Story: Low Costs, Narrow Focus, Profits,” New York Times, December 2, 1991.
46 “Nobody was doing that in the early nineties”: Karen Hermelin, author interview.
46 “pretty debauched place”: Confidential source, author interview.
46 “Oh my God, I’m not in Kansas anymore.” Confidential source, author interview
46 “almost a fistfight”: Confidential source, author interview.
47 it would mean the end of her career in Hollywood: Confidential source, author interview.
47 how other successful women executives left: John Connolly, “Flirting with Disaster,” Premiere, July 1998.
48 Originally called Swelter: George Larkin, author interview.
48 written during jury duty: Janet Grillo, author interview.
49 “charismatic, smart, warm funny …”: Grillo, author interview.
49 “David’s mother was abused …”: Matt Muzio, author interview.
50 a moment of manipulation: David O. Russell, author interview.
50 “swim with sharks …”: Russell, author interview.
50 “arguably dangerous”: Shaye, author interview.
51 “that was really arduous”: Russell, in Christine Spines, “Who Let the Underdogs Out?,” Premiere, October 2002.
52 “making your own point”: Russell, in Premiere, October 2002.
52 “I expected a twisted drama”: Shaye, author interview.
52 “We didn’t see what the hook was”: Ira Deutchman, author interview.
52 Harvey Weinstein got up and left: Larkin, author interview.
52 “Over my dead body”: Deutchman, author interview.
52 Russell felt like New Line had held him up: Deutchman, George Larkin, author interviews.
53 “when exciting things happen in Hollywood”: Peter McAlevey, “All’s Well That Ends Gruesomely,” New York Times Magazine, December 6, 1992.
54 “I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t seen Dogs”: Lynn Hirschberg, “Tarantino Bravo,” Vanity Fair, July 1994.
54 “made me want to make movies again”: Ibid.
54 $25,000 for Pandemonium Reigned: Confidential source, author interview.
54 embellishing them in longhand: Lawrence Bender, Stacey Sher, author interviews.
55 “up to the gold watch”: Sher, author interview.
55 “what he wrote are almost indefinable”: Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 167.
55 “went to make Killing Zoe”: Ibid., 167.
55 “Roger Avary’s writing in Pulp Fiction”: Quentin Tarantino, author interview.
56 “There’s not a catty bone in Quentin’s body”: Sher, author interview.
57 “to take a ‘story by’ credit?”: Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 170.
57 “you don’t want people to be confused as to who the star is”: Ibid.
58 needed the financial security: Ibid.
58 the agreement had a confidentiality clause: Confidential source, author interview.
58 “Get me out of it. I can’t do it”: Confidential source, author interview.
59 $5,000 debt: Scott Spiegel, author interview.
59 “What’s so bad about being Paul Schrader?”: Spiegel, author interview.
59 “taking that idealism, and just shattering it”: Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, 171.
59 a list of everything he wanted on his next movie deal: Mike Simpson, author interview.
61 “I wasn’t a young guy anymore”: Mike Medavoy, author interview.
61 “And we had the screenplay free and clear”: Simpson, author interview.
61 “I’ve always regretted passing on it”: Mike De Luca, author interview.
62 “We’ve got to make this”: Richard Gladstein, Harvey Weinstein, author interviews.
62 “It’s a breakthrough”: Weinstein, author interview.
62 “Here was a chance for us to see if we could make movies”: Weinstein, author interview.
62 “She made a great proposal”: Simpson, author interview.
63 a signed release from TriStar: Weinstein, author interview.
64 Simpson had counted to four: Simpson, Weinstein, author interviews.
65 leaving the very different cultures of the two companies intact: Jeffrey Katzenberg, author interview.
65 “Neither of us thought it would be possible”: Chris McGurk, author interview.
66 autonomy appeared on every page of the contract: Weinstein, author interview.
66 “The bench strength at Disney” was amazing: Weinstein, author interview.
67 “and shoot a couple of them”: Weinstein, author interview.
67 “Jeffrey laughed, and to his credit, said, ‘Go ahead’”: Weinstein, author interview.
68 more popular in Great Britain: Gladstein, author interview.
68 Travolta had lived there: Jaymes, author interview.
68 He was almost right, of course: Simpson, author interview.
68 “I didn’t see how he’d play a hood”: Weinstein, author interview.
69 He was soon cast as the boxer: Bender, author interview.
69 “gave the worst audition in the world”: Weinstein, author interview. 69 “you’re gonna have to blow his balls off”: Weinstein, author interview.
69 too late to call Moloney … without insulting him: Bender, author interview.
+70 “We had a child together, it’s called Pulp Fiction”: Sher, author interview.
70 “Gentiles didn’t get it right.” Connie Zastoupil, author interview.
70 “His excitement was contagious”: Gladstein, author interview.
70 “as if he hasn’t shaved or bathed in days …”: Lynn Hirschberg, “Tarantino Bravo,” Vanity Fair, July 1994.
71 “I masturbated in that bathrobe”: Ibid.
71 “not the back of your fucking head …”: Ibid.
71 “You’re destroying my concentration”: Jami Bernard, Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 208.
71 two-picture development deal: Bender, author interview.
71 Hamann counseled Thurman and Travolta: Craig Hamann, author interview.
71 “‘… they go berserk before they calm down’”: Eric Stoltz, in Premiere, March 2003.
72 “I wasn’t exactly reassured”: Bernard, Quentin Tarantino, 2.
73 “Nobody has to keep their promises”: Confidential source, author interview.
73 “I didn’t betray Cathryn. I like Cathryn.” Tarantino through Bumble Ward, author interview.
74 “a poet of violence”: David Wild, Interview with Quentin Tarantino, Rolling Stone, November 3, 1994.
74 “…cocktail of rampage and meditation”: Richard Corliss, “A Blast to the Heart,” Time, October 10, 1994.
74 They talked, they bonded: Cynthia Swartz, author interview.
74 “Cap’n Crunch … is the crème de la crème”: Margy Rochlin, Quentin Tarantino Interview.” Playboy, November 1994.
75 it was too late to do anything about it: Bender, author interview.
75 “This is what it’s like to be a rock star”: Bender, author interview.
75 “It was like New Cinema had arrived”: Weinstein, author interview.
76 “The storytelling is solid and the time flies”: Janet Maslin, New York Times, May 20, 1994.
76 Maslin’s review under their doors just before they went to vote: Gladstein, author interview.
77 Anderson was enamored of the hot young director: Mark Borm
an, author interview.
78 take the movie into a wide release: Weinstein, author interview.
78 “it was scary beyond belief …”: Mark Gill, author interview.
79 “Warner Bros and the other studios would have been scared of it”: Ken Auletta, “Beauty and the Beast: Harvey Weinstein Has Made Some Great Movies and a Lot of Enemies,” New Yorker, December 16, 2002.
80 “‘Let’s take something from the art house and possibly make it explode’”: Gill, author interview.
81 “I felt an explosion of how creative that movie was”: Paul Thomas Anderson, author interview.
81 with the volume turned down: Bernard, Quentin Tarantino, 239.
82 prompted Avary’s wife, Gretchen, to curse him out: Ibid., 238.
82 a night of triumph: Ibid., 244.
Chapter Three
83 nine children from two marriages: Paul Thomas Anderson, author interview.
83 “My dad was an amazing, creative, lovable guy”: Anderson, author interview.
84 Edwina Gough: Anderson, author interview.
84 “we all fought all the time”: Anderson, author interview.
85 “It wasn’t that dark and dirty”: Anderson, author interview.
85 “there’s a lot of my dad in these movies”: George Thomas, “Boogie Nights Director Paul Thomas Anderson Is Back with Another Impossible-to-Ignore Movie,” Akron Beacon Journal, January 7, 2000.
85 “We get along all right”: Anderson, author interview.
85 “I loved to write as a kid”: Anderson, author interview.
85 “My name is Paul Anderson …”: Lynn Hirschberg, “His Way,” New York Times, December 19, 1999.
85 started eating five eggs a day: Patrick Goldstein, “The New New Wave,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1999.
86 adding music to the background: Anderson, author interview.
86 complications from diabetes: Anderson, author interview.
86 “I responded terribly to that”: Anderson, author interview.
86 “there were a lot of drugs”: Anderson, author interview.
86 deciding they had nothing to teach him: Hirschberg, “His Way.”
87 “He was very savvy, utterly self-confident”: John Lyons, author interview.
87 “There was something different about him …”: Michelle Satter, author interview.
87 “He has an incredible ear”: Lyons, author interview.
87 $800,000 budget: Robert Jones, author interview.
88 “I’m not a stand-in-the-background producer”: Jones, author interview.
88 “would find the film in postproduction”: Lyons, author interview.
88 “He wasn’t a final-cut director”: Jones, author interview.
89 “he couldn’t see the woods for the trees”: Jones, author interview.
89 “I’m not touching a frame”: Jones, author interview.
89 did not kill off the Philip Baker Hall character: Lyons, author interview.
89 it was then the keys were taken away: Jones, author interview.
89 “I’m different now”: Anderson, author interview.
90 “You’ll find out what I’m going through”: Jones, author interview.
90 “flipping Channel 98 and 99 at 2:00 A.M….”: Lyons, author interview.
90 Satter made sure they showed Paul’s version: Satter, author interview.
90 “Go back to Europe”: Jones, author interview.
90 “It took me a long time to get over the experience”: Jones, author interview.
90 telling him to get lost: Jones, author interview.
91 “that will never, ever happen to me again”: David Konow, “PTA Meeting,” Creative Screenwriting 7, no. 1 (January 2000).
91 Anderson recut the film: Satter, author interview.
91 “You’ve got to see this film”: Satter, author interview.
91 Russell was strictly a marijuana man: David O. Russell, author interview.
91 “They wanted him to roll over”: Lyons, author interview.
92 “I thought we had made the deal”: Bob Shaye, author interview.
92 Rob Morrow … wanted the main role: George Larkin, author interview.
92 Flirting negotiation with Miramax: Russell, George Larkin, Janet Grillo, author interviews.
93 “Another insider to the negotiations …”: Confidential source, author interview.
93 “I didn’t know there was bad blood”: Shaye, author interview.
93 “She was quite contrite”: Shaye, author interview. 93 he never went to see Flirting with Disaster: Ira Deutchman, author interview.
93 he wanted to work on a bigger canvas …short shrift on its video release: Russell, author interview.
95 “He was the nicest person I’d ever run across”: David Jensen, author interview.
95 “He had a warmth that Steven doesn’t always show”: Jensen, author interview.
95 “he decided he wasn’t going to re-create that”: Steven Soderbergh, author interview.
95 “she was on retainer at Exxon for her psychic abilities”: Jensen, author interview.
95 left to their own devices for meals: Scott Collins, “The Funk of Steven Soderbergh,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1997.
95 “as soon as they committed … that’s when he left”: Jensen, author interview.
96 “She’s just insane”: Confidential source, author interview.
96 “it doesn’t look like they love each other”: Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, Interview with Steven Soderbergh, Positif, 1993; reprinted in Steven Soderbergh Interviews, edited by Anthony Kaufman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 59.
96 “I didn’t know how to be stable”: Soderbergh, author interview.
96 “Whatever the thing was, it was just gone”: Jess Cagle, “Soderbergh’s Choice,” Time, January 8, 2001.
97 McCallum inspired his students: Jensen, Soderbergh, author interviews.
97 “the most purely talented filmmaker I’d ever seen”: Soderbergh, author interview.
97 a kid “who you want to be around”: Jensen, author interview.
97 “I was like, ‘Well, that’s different’”: Paul Ledford, author interview.
97 “… we would just collect there every day”: Soderbergh, author interview.
97 seeing Jaws “twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven times …”: Ledford, author interview.
97 “the first time I started thinking about how movies get made”: Soderbergh, author interview.
98 “in the front row ten minutes before the movie started”: Jensen, author interview.
98 “a very specific way that you’re supposed to use the knife”: Soderbergh, author interview.
98 editing jobs with another LSU alum, Brad Johnson: Soderbergh, author interview.
98 “he was faster than everyone else, and had better ideas”: John Hardy, author interview.
99 to create flashes of light on camera: Hardy, author interview.
99 “I just wanted it dealt with”: Soderbergh Interviews, 9.
92 wearing the same outfits: Soderbergh, author interview.
92 “It was me asking myself a series of questions”: Soderbergh, author interview.
100 “She just had incredible presence …”: Soderbergh, author interview.
100 Dollard family history: Pat Dollard, author interview.
101 “Acidos!” and someone would come running: Dollard, author interview.
101 Pat Dollard had logged five hundred calls: Dollard, author interview.
102 earlier fallout with Redford: Gavin Smith, “Hired Gun.” Film Comment, January 2001.
102 “what I needed to do was change what I was doing”: Soderbergh Interviews, 91.
103 He was probably right: Ibid., 76.
103 “I was sleepwalking in my life and my work and it shows”: Ibid., 152.
103 “when they get fat and happy, the edge goes away.” Jamie Diamond, “Seems the Oh-So-Serious Phase is Over,” New York
Times, June 21, 1998.
103 “I really like not being watched”: Smith, “Hired Gun.”
103 “…no audience at all”: Soderbergh Interviews, 76.
104 “I just felt in the zone all the time”: Ibid., 91.
105 “the work’s gotta bust out, and I’ve gotta bust out”: Soderbergh, author interview.
105 “crossed the line from personal into private filmmaking”: Soderbergh Interviews, 152.
105 “should the public ever get a chance to see it”: Steven Soderbergh, Getting Away With It (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 53.
106 Northern Arts showed some interest, but the deal fell through: Ibid., 88.
106 “Nobody has any fucking vision”: Ibid., 71.
106 “My head’s just not there now”: Bobby Newmyer, author interview.
106 “disdain for mainstream Hollywood movies”: Newmyer, author interview.
107 “hot action director to make some blastfest?”: Soderbergh, Getting Away With It, 88–89.
107 “… it was already set up at New Line …” Ibid., 167.
107 with Marisa Tomei as the Nature Girl: Ibid., 183.
108 “That’s an odd call”: Casey Silver, author interview.
109 “I called Casey the next day and turned it down”: Soderbergh, Getting Away With It, 190.
109 “If you’re ever going to do it, do it now”: Silver, author interview.
109 “what I’ve just been through in the last two years”: Smith, “Hired Gun.”
109 “I thought you wouldn’t want to hire me if you saw it”: Soderbergh Interviews, 112.
110 Soderbergh got Out of Sight: Soderbergh, Getting Away With It, 201.
110 “I can … have integrity, and stand by my work”: Silver, author interview.
111 “Okay, then I have to go to Steven Soderbergh”: David Fincher, author interview.
Chapter Four
115 “At that point I should have pulled the plug”: Mike De Luca, author interview.
116 “You read that movie and you think: What is this?”: Dylan Tichenor, author interview.
116 “grandiose, crazy ideas—of being the best they could be”: John Lyons, author interview.
117 white Studebaker: Paul Thomas Anderson, author interview.
117 “He’s the Dirk Diggler of directing”: John Lesher, author interview.
Rebels on the Backlot Page 39
