Rebels on the Backlot (2 page)

If the rebel generation of the 1990s mostly avoided the personal excesses that doomed the generation of the 1970s—which collapsed in a miasma of celebrity, drugs, and sex—it’s because their energy was focused elsewhere. “I do feel an obligation not to be a jackass in my life only because that will infringe on the view of the movie,” said Paul Thomas Anderson near the end of the decade (ironic, since he was among the leading prima donnas, not to mention the more excessive of his peers). He said, “I remember when
Husbands and Wives
came out, and Woody Allen was going through that whole thing [the break-up with Mia Farrow], and it was so terrible, because that was one of his best movies. But everybody would look at it and see all the parallels of his life and mistakes he was making. It polluted the movie. I guess my goal is to do everything I can to not pollute the view of my movie.” Soderbergh consciously tried to avoid the missteps of those who came before. “I’d read everything I could about all those filmmakers,” he said. “Their personal lives were bound to their work in a different way, I think, than our generation. Whether it’s in a literal sense, or whether it’s been through some sort of subconscious understanding that we need to be in control of ourselves, we need to understand the business better, I’ve literally tried to learn the lessons that came out of the end of the American New Wave.”

They needed their energy for a more daunting effort: getting their films made.

The rebels emerged at a time when Hollywood had become more of a widget factory than ever before. In the 1980s the merger mania that gripped Wall Street began to spill into Hollywood, and by the 1990s every major studio had been successively gobbled up by huge multinational corporations that were focused brutally on the bottom line. In 1982 Coca-Cola bought Columbia-Tristar, which it sold in 1989 to the sprawling Japanese monolith, the Sony Corporation. In 1986 Australian media titan Rupert Murdoch added Twentieth Century Fox to his ever-growing media multinational NewsCorp. In 1990 Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti bought the once towering MGM with money put up by the French government. The following year the Matsushita corporation bought MCA/Universal, which the Japanese company sold to Seagram in 1995; Seagram in turn sold it to Vivendi in 2001. And two years later Vivendi sold the studio to General Electric. In 1993 Viacom bought Paramount, one of many media-oriented properties, while the Walt Disney Company bought the independent studio Miramax, and two years later added the television network ABC to its stable of properties. In 1990 Time Inc. and Warner Brothers merged, creating the largest media giant of its time. Then in 1996 media mogul Ted Turner joined Time-Warner, bringing with him Bob Shaye’s studio, New Line, which he had bought two years earlier. In 2000 the then Internet giant AOL swallowed Time-Warner. By that point, the once towering Warner Brothers was merely a division of a huge media corporation.

The corporate takeover of Hollywood had an immediate and palpable effect on its movies. The studios were now run by business professionals who were expected to provide shareholders with regular, reliable profits. The tastes of the moguls at the top of these media pyramids ran to the middlebrow and the feel-good
ending. The tastes of the people who worked for them ran to keeping their jobs, and the best way to do that was to avoid risk whenever possible. When NewsCorp chief Rupert Murdoch saw
Titanic
, the wildly overbudget, wildly ambitious epic action film by James Cameron that went on to be the most successful film of all time, he called his studio chairman, Bill Mechanic, and commented: “Well, I see why you like it, but it’s no
Air Force One,”
referring to the Harrison Ford action movie that had netted the studio $300 million that previous summer. In the 1990s, the movies that received a green light were those deemed most likely to guarantee a profit and the least likely to pose a risk. If you lived through the decade, you probably noticed: the movies were dominated by clattering action films headlined by movie stars and larded with special effects. Green lights were given to remakes from decades past, live-action comic strips, formulaic romantic comedies, formulaic gross-out teen comedies, and formulaic African-American comedies.

At an earlier time, Hollywood’s major studios left room on their slates for movies of moderate budgets that appealed to serious moviegoers, movies that relied on character and plot. Even in the 1980s era of high-concept movies, that mentality allowed Milos Forman to make a movie like
Amadeus
, or Sydney Pollack to make
Out of Africa.
In the 1990s such movies became endangered species; the trend was toward big stars, bigger budgets, bigger payoffs. Market research testing became a virtual obsession of the studios, in an attempt to minimize their risk and predict financial successes. By the middle of the decade the studios had become strangers to the annual Academy Award ceremonies; for the most part they no longer even tried to make serious, quality films, leaving that to the independent world, to small art-house distributors who created their own niche as the 1990s progressed. Risky movies—scripts that pushed the envelope and directors who demanded control over their work—became nearly impossible to make at the studios. Paramount Pictures made Alexander Payne’s black comedy
Election
by accident; they considered it a high school comedy, which was the rage of the moment. But the finished movie tested terribly with research audiences, and despite raves from critics, Paramount
dumped
Election
in the spring of 1999, when it opened against
The Matrix.
Months later, agent John Lesher ran into John Goldwyn, Paramount’s head of production. Goldwyn told him:
“Election
is the best movie we’ve made in our studio in the past ten years. And it’s a movie we have no interest in repeating.”

Success in the new corporate Hollywood was defined by the film that could become a franchise: make a ton of money at the box office, spawn a sequel, and produce a host of tie-ins, from plush toys to video games to soundtracks. As a result, by the middle of the 1990s movies were stale, insipid retreads aimed at the lowest common denominator. In 1994, for example, the top box office moneymakers included
Dumb and Dumber
, which made $127 million for New Line,
The Santa Clause
, which raked in $144 million for Disney,
The Flintstones
, which made $130 million for Universal, and
Speed
, which made $121 million for Fox. Every single one of these movies spawned a sequel. The sequels were mostly awful; the originals weren’t terrible, perhaps, but they certainly weren’t anything worth watching today.

B
UT THE SUCCESS OF INDEPENDENT FILM CREATED A CHINK
in the armor of the studio mind-set. In 1994, the same year as
Dumb and Dumber
and
The Flintstones
, another movie came out that created a larger stir than any of the studios’ biggest releases. Quentin Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
—his violent, funny, fractured three-part tale about a couple of hit men, a boxer, and a mob boss and his moll—became a pop culture phenomenon, as well as a huge box office hit. Taking in $107,921,755 at the U.S. box office,
Pulp Fiction
was the tenth highest grossing movie of 1994, becoming the most profitable independent film ever made. The film took in an additional $105 million overseas. For the first time, Hollywood’s major studios were forced to pay attention to the New York–centric world of independent film and could no longer ignore Miramax and its ringleader, Harvey Weinstein. The success of
Pulp Fiction
fueled a move to create art-house divisions on the studio lots—Fox Searchlight, Paramount Classics, October (later USA Films), and, though
it took a decade, Warner Independent—that were aimed at breeding crossover indie hits and cultivating indie talent for the major studios.

Something else happened: Movie stars saw opportunities to revive their careers by working in the independent, art-house world. They noticed that John Travolta had been given a second lease on a movie career thanks to
Pulp Fiction.
Some of these actors were underemployed, others yearned to practice their craft beside something more complicated than a green screen. By pushing to work with the young talent of their time, they drew the studios toward the rebel filmmakers. At the same time a new generation of executives was rising within the major studios, and a handful of them were aware of this new sensibility in filmmaking. It reawakened their excitement for movies that had something to say. Among them were Lorenzo di Bonaventura at Warner Brothers, who fought for
The Matrix
and
Three Kings
, and Mike De Luca at New Line, who fought for anything Paul Thomas Anderson wanted to do. Without Bill Mechanic’s stubbornness at Fox,
Fight Club
would not have happened. These executives managed to convince the ultimate powers at the major studios, in a few rare cases, to take a chance on movies by Hollywood’s young rebel directors.

These movies, and these directors, are the subject of this book. Among the community of rebel directors, I have chosen six who fought their way through the Hollywood system to bring their signature films into the daylight of broader popular culture. They are: Quentin Tarantino, who made
Pulp Fiction
at Miramax, newly acquired by Disney; Paul Thomas Anderson, who made
Boogie Nights
and
Magnolia
at New Line; David Fincher, who made
Fight Club
at Fox; David O. Russell, who managed to make
Three Kings
at Warner Brothers; Spike Jonze, who made
Being John Malkovich
at Polygram and then USA Films; and Steven Soderbergh, who made
Traffic
at USA, newly owned by Universal.

D
ESPITE THE DEADENING CRUSH OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM
, their talent could not be denied, their visions could not be suppressed,
and their efforts yielded movies that reflected our time and point to where we were headed. But the rebels did not submit peacefully to the studio process, and the formula-ready Hollywood system did not necessarily mesh well with the single-minded egotism of artists whose goals were not the same as their financiers’. Notably, none of these films emerged from the studio “development” process, in which novels or pitches are bought and turned into scripts by producers and creative executives. That process rarely leads to the making of a great movie. With each of the directors in this book, they brought their ideas to the studios and had to protect them from interference. Certainly the rebels’ movies fared poorly in the market research testing process.
Boogie Nights
would be a dismal failure, market research predicted; couldn’t Anderson make it a little more cheery? Research audiences never got Russell’s
Three Kings
or the Wachowskis’
The Matrix
, and di Bonaventura kept the worst results from his bosses. Fincher’s
Se7en
, which turned out to be New Line’s biggest hit to date, was predicted to be a failure. Little wonder, then, that in many cases the auteur filmmakers viewed studio executives with open contempt. And in many cases the moguls confessed to cluelessness when it came to the rebels laboring on their backlots.

U
LTIMATELY THE REBELS COULD NOT MUSTER A UNITED
front. The optimistic venture announced in
Variety
never materialized, never amounted to more than that single article, a statement of intent to declare independence from the Hollywood system, and a call for solidarity among artists that never quite panned out. As it happened, Soderbergh didn’t get along with Russell, who was good friends with Jonze and Payne. They wanted Russell in the group, but Soderbergh—a control maniac among control maniacs—had decided Russell “didn’t play well with others.” Fincher flitted from project to project, making
The Panic Room
in between raking in millions in commercials. Sofia Coppola, Jonze’s wife and a talented director in her own right (at the time she’d made
The Virgin Suicides)
, was resentful that she wasn’t invited to join. And
the directors discovered that founding the company created complications for the financial deals they’d already signed at other studios. The creative gesture never did materialize into movies for USA Films, owned by Barry Diller. Within the year Seagram sold Universal to the French multinational Vivendi, which bought USA Films in its entirey, renaming it Focus Features and repopulating the studio with a new set of executives. Soderbergh would create a production house at Warner Brothers with his pal George Clooney. Payne would fall in love with actress Sandra Oh and make
About Schmidt
for New Line. Jonze would press on with making
Adaptation
at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and he and Sofia Coppola would soon divorce. Mendes returned to London and the theater after making
Road to Perdition
for DreamWorks SKG.

The story of their struggles through the studio system is the story of Hollywood and the movies in the last decade of the twentieth century. Some will argue with my choices of films or filmmakers; a valid case can be made for many others. I tried to choose movies that had broken through to a wide audience, that marked the culture in some indelible way, films that over time will be seen as emblematic of the brutal, surreal, confused sensibility that, to me, came to define the 1990s—a decade better known for consumer excess and Clintonian dysfunction—and presaged the far more serious world that awaited us beyond the millennium.

This is the story of how those movies came to be.

I
N WRITING THIS BOOK
, I
WAS ASSISTED IMMEASURABLY BY
the participation of the six principal directors featured in it: Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin Tarantino. Their cooperation was all the more generous for the fact that they did not have editorial control over the project, nor any kind of perusal or approval of the manuscript.