Rebels on the Backlot (19 page)

Silver was one of those movie executives who had been watching out for Soderbergh for years. He’d first met him when Silver was a vice president of production at TriStar and Soderbergh came in to pitch doing a musical. It was 1985 or 1986, and Soderbergh, still in his early twenties, had just come to town, a tall skinny kid with hightop red Converse sneakers and a black leather jacket. Silver, who was struck by the young writer’s smarts and drive, hired him to write the musical, which was set in a high school. (It was never made.) After
sex, lies, and videotape
, Silver, by then an executive at Universal, hired Soderbergh to direct
King of the Hill.
After that, they maintained a friendship and tried to get a few things going. It was with Silver that Soderbergh tried to develop the screwball sports comedy
Leatherheads
, but they could never find a star who wanted to do the film.

By 1996, Silver had been promoted to chairman of the studio, one of the rarified jobs that never last very long in Hollywood. (Silver was no exception, but he’d have a few good years.) George Clooney was looking to transition into movies from his career as resident heartthrob on the hit NBC series
ER.
He was slated to play the Green Hornet for Universal, but for reasons unknown to Silver, he balked at the last moment (though he ended up playing Batman later). Then Clooney heard about
Out of Sight
, which was being developed at Jersey Films, Danny DeVito and Michael Shamberg’s company, which was on the Universal lot. The movie was about a con man just sprung from jail who is chased by a female FBI agent, with whom sparks fly.

In meetings with the Jersey executives, Silver threw out Soderbergh’s name as a possible director. “I remember people looking at me and saying, ‘Are you sure? That’s an odd call,’” Silver remembered. At the time Soderbergh was best known for his post–sex,
lies
duds. Silver persisted; he was a fan of
King of the Hill.
Reluctantly, the people at Jersey agreed.

Silver made the call to Baton Rouge and sent the script. Soderbergh wrote in his diary, “I said sure, I’d read it right away, and I did. It’s a terrific script, and all the people involved are good, so of course I called Casey the next day and turned it down.”

Late that next night Silver and Soderbergh spoke by phone, and the movie executive gave the young director some tough love. “Steven, I may be out of line, but I’m going to be honest here. You’re insane. You are a fucking idiot. You love the script. I’m running the studio. This script is a go. You don’t have to worry that the big bad studio is going to come in and fuck up your movie. If you’re ever going to do it, do it now.”

The next day Soderbergh relented. He called back and asked, “Do you still want me to do it?” (Later Soderbergh had a selective memory of this process; he told a
Film Comment
interviewer in 2001 that “when I got sent
Out of Sight
, one of the reasons I was so aggressive about pursuing it was I felt, ‘This is the movie where I can now put to use what I’ve just been through in the last two years.’”)

In fact, Jersey wasn’t sure at all they wanted him to. Soderbergh was competing for
Out of Sight
with Cameron Crowe
(Jerry Maguire)
and Mike Newell (
Four Weddings and a Funeral)
. Crowe passed, and finally Newell did, too, saying it was too much like
Donnie Brasco
, the film he’d just finished. Soderbergh interviewed for the job, once, twice, but still the Jersey Film producers and George Clooney weren’t convinced. Soderbergh was no idiot; he was well aware of his reputation in Hollywood and knew that the movies he’d been making were hardly the calling card he needed. Jersey’s Michael Shamberg asked to see
Schizopolis.
Soderbergh stalled endlessly. Shamberg later asked the director why, and Soderbergh said, “I thought you wouldn’t want to hire me if you saw it.” He was probably right. Jersey met with Ted Demme, then gave the script to
Sydney Pollack. Meanwhile Soderbergh was still pushing to get
Human Nature
made, soliciting New Line, Fox, TriStar. No go. (Eventually the movie was made with French director Michel Gondry, starring Patricia Arquette and Rhys Ifans as the Nature Children. It was not a success, lacking the light, humanist touches that Jonze brought to Kaufman’s self-conscious oddness.)

On Valentine’s Day 1997, Jersey was out of options. They needed a director, and Soderbergh got
Out of Sight.

T
HE MOVIE, WHICH CAME OUT IN 1997, WAS A MINOR
landmark in many respects, the kind of film Hollywood hardly made anymore—a mid-budget, engaging romantic comedy. It was the first warm, lighthearted movie that Soderbergh had ever made, and it showed a side of him few knew existed. Also for the first time Clooney, playing a raffish ex-con, showed movie star chops, connecting in the sexiest way possible with then acting novice Jennifer Lopez, who played an FBI agent. She gave what some believe is her best performance ever in the film. Unfortunately,
Out of Sight
was completely ignored by audiences. Universal’s marketing department came under fire for ignoring this small gem on their release slate. The movie, which cost $48 million to make, closed after a few weeks with a dismal box office take of $37 million.

But the film didn’t go completely unnoticed. Those who saw
Out of Sight
loved it, among them many Hollywood insiders. The film instantly put Soderbergh back on the industry map and gave him a strong reference for the most popular genre in moviemaking, the romantic comedy. In this case, Soderbergh had given it a wry and intelligent twist. There weren’t many who could accomplish that. And in terms of his own quest for artistry in Hollywood, “I think Steven felt, ‘I can be myself as an artist, have integrity, and stand by my work,’” even within the system, said Silver.

Significantly, the movie also launched Soderbergh’s friendship with George Clooney, and the two of them became practically inseparable partners in producing, directing, and acting projects. Clooney and Soderbergh eventually started the Section 8 production
company together, with Clooney costarring in the big-budget romp
Ocean’s Eleven
, and Soderbergh giving Clooney tips on his first directing effort,
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
, which he executive-produced. They ended up becoming a powerful bloc on the Hollywood landscape.

Meanwhile Casey Silver was developing
Erin Brockovich
, a story that was unusual in 1990s Hollywood because it starred a woman in the lead. (The quest for teen, male audiences had left Hollywood’s actresses with fewer and fewer opportunities.) Erin Brockovich was a legal assistant who had pushed for a class-action lawsuit against a chemical company that was polluting the local water and giving cancer to the residents around its remote factory. It seemed like a good, solid picture for any Hollywood production slate, an uplifting story about a tough cookie, an underdog who took on the big, bad corporations and won. The best part of all was that the story was true. Again, DeVito’s Jersey Films had the script, and initially sent it out to several other directors, including David Fincher.

Fincher told Jersey executive Stacey Sher he had no idea how to make the movie. She said, “Okay, then I have to go to Steven Soderbergh.” While she did, the studio began negotiating with Julia Roberts, the one female star who could reliably open a movie. Soderbergh, who was making one of his quick, small, nonlinear projects at the time—
The Limey
, with Terence Stamp—initially demurred. In the middle of
The Limey
edit he read the
Brockovich
script again and decided he knew what to do. Universal gave him the job. Eventually Soderbergh directed, Roberts starred, the movie was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, and Roberts won the Oscar for Best Actress. Soderbergh was back in the Hollywood mainstream, rising as a new kind of superstar.

N
ineteen ninety-six was the year from hell for Mike De Luca, the thirty-one-year-old boy wonder president of production at New Line. The tousle-haired executive, who drove a motorcyle to his job on the eighth floor of New Line’s dark, modernist building on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, had had a good run up to that point. In 1994
The Mask
had taken in $120 million for the studio, and
Dumb and Dumber
had brought in an additional $127 million. Both of these films had budgets well below $20 million, which made them huge hits for a relatively small company. De Luca had gotten Jim Carrey to star in The
Mask
for just $450,000; he snagged him for the second by offering him $5 million to do
Dumb and Dumber
(a then unheard-of sum), one of many fortuitous decisions. Nineteen ninety-five brought David Fincher’s
Se7en
, a massive, unexpected hit with the rising star Brad Pitt, which took in $300 million at the worldwide box office, and
Mortal Kombat
, a successful movie based on the video shooter game. New Line had developed a strong
African-American niche with movies like
House Party
and
Menace II Society.
The mini-majors reigned: Miramax had
Pulp
, and New Line’s profit margins were the envy of Hollywood’s larger studios.

But 1996 dawned, and suddenly De Luca found himself under a black cloud. The new corporate bosses at Time-Warner (the publishing giant had bought Turner Broadcasting, which had bought New Line, the previous year) had rejected New Line’s business plan. And De Luca, the executive with the golden touch, found that everything he made turned to sludge. One big budget flop followed another:
Last Man Standing
, a Prohibition-era shoot-’em-up action film starring Bruce Willis, cost $60 million and made just $18 million at the domestic box office. The catastrophic
The Long Kiss Goodnight
was hotshot director Renny Harlin’s bloated attempt to make an action star vehicle for his then wife Geena Davis. It cost $65 million to make and grossed $33 million. Finally there was the disastrous
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, both a public relations and production bomb, based on an H. G. Wells book, in which Marlon Brando played a mad scientist who combined human and animal DNA to create humanlike animals.

The year, said De Luca later, “was a nightmare I couldn’t get away from.”

Dr. Moreau
was a particular headache. New Line had had a good experience with Brando the previous year, casting him as a therapist trying to cure Johnny Depp of the delusion that he was a masked lover in the romantic comedy
Don Juan DeMarco.
Depp had wanted Brando for the role, though the studio had first insisted on trying to get Gene Hackman or Sean Connery, both of whom turned it down. It was De Luca who was charged with wooing and assessing the legendary actor, whose weight sometimes rose to alarming levels. “I was chosen to go to the house, see what shape he was in,” De Luca recalled. He rode his bike up to Brando’s house on Mulholland Drive, the ridge straddling the Valley and Hollywood. At first the housekeeper refused to let him in, thinking he was a delivery boy. Luckily Francis Ford Coppola, a producer on the project, was there and recognized the executive.

Brando scowled. “So you’re the guy who’s here to audition me.”

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.

O
NE GOOD THING DID HAPPEN TO
D
E
L
UCA 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.