Rebels on the Backlot (21 page)

Shaye had happened to meet Anderson at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, where he remembered him as “a waifish guy with an army windbreaker. I took to the guy,” Shaye said. But on that same trip, he ran into one of the producers of
Hard Eight
, and asked him his opinion of Anderson. “He’s very talented,” said the producer. “And very hard to work with.”

Despite the green light, Anderson never really felt the studio backed the film. He got the sense that Bob Shaye had a distaste for the subject matter, or at least an inability to understand it. Anderson said Shaye had a “What is this exactly?” look in his eye whenever he crossed paths with
Boogie Nights.

But De Luca was a true, die-hard fan. He climbed into Anderson’s battered car with actor John C. Reilly to drive to Vegas to attend the adult video Oscars. They sat in the back and roared hysterically during the earnest, heartfelt acceptance speeches of the top porno figures of the day. De Luca was convinced he’d found a new filmic genius. “I would do
Berlin Alexanderplatz
with Paul,” he said, referring to the eight-hour German epic. “He’s Orson Welles. I’m the blank check guy.” Still, there were conditions to the deal. Anderson could use the actors he wanted, but had to agree to keep the budget low, to $15 million; the movie had to come in with an R rating, not an NC-17, which would be impossible to market. And—not insignificant with a director like Anderson—the movie had to have a running time of under three hours.

Anderson didn’t hesitate, and agreed to all of Shaye’s conditions. New Line’s chief never really expected Anderson to be permitted to shoot the entire script as written. With the green-light committee leaning toward De Luca’s conviction and Anderson’s passion, Bob Shaye “crawled onto the train,” said marketing chief Mitch Goldman.

“Spent some time today thinking about drugs,” wrote Steven Soderbergh, who’d never touched them before his mid-twenties, in his diary on Sunday, April 7, 1996. “I’m somewhat fascinated by them despite my relative inexperience, and I wonder what their role is or might be in one’s life. That some drugs are legal and viewed as acceptable (cigarettes, alcohol) and others are not is strange to me. Also I’m not sure I know the difference between outlawing a pot plant and a beehive; it’s odd to me that something existing in nature can be outlawed. …The question of how much we should legislate against potential abuses is one I haven’t been able to answer for myself. If cocaine were suddenly legal, would a large majority of Americans suddenly become addicted? ‘Is cocaine’ “worse” than alcohol?

Interesting questions for a straight arrow like Steven Soderbergh. Either it was a coincidence, or Soderbergh had drugs on his
mind because he and his girlfriend, Laura Bickford, had been having long, late lunch conversations about addiction, about how the drug trade had corrupted American society and distorted the economies of Third World countries. For a couple of years Bickford, a producer, had been obsessed with the subject. She’d clipped every article she could find, talking virtually about nothing else. Everyone in Bickford’s orbit was sure to hear about her fixation and her attempts to get the British TV miniseries
Traffik
—about the drug wars—made in the United States for an American audience. Soderbergh was a sounding board for her frustrations.

Bickford was an undeniable presence, tall with limpid blue eyes and long, flowing blond hair, an amazon WASP who had brains, grace, and an aura of excitement about her. Those who disliked her in Hollywood—and there were some—considered her a spoiled brat. But Steven Soderbergh fell for Laura Bickford, hard. She was the product of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, her father a lawyer, her mother an investment banker, extremely well bred and a bit of a wild child: Bickford had been thrown out of boarding school for smoking with boys in her room; she survived the rejection to graduate from Sarah Lawrence College, where she combined her interest in dance with avant-garde filmmaking. Bickford studied French while living in Paris for a time and ended up in London at the age of twenty-three, smart, beautiful, rich, and cool. She worked her way up as a music producer with a young company called Vivid, spending five years in the heart of London’s hip music community until the company went bust in the early 1990s; she wanted to move on to making movies but had no prospects in London, so moved to Los Angeles in 1993.

Bickford found a job with a producer who had a deal at Disney. It was slow going. By 1995 she’d produced a movie called
Citizen X
for HBO, about a Russian detective hunting down a serial killer. She had a spec script called
Playing God
that she got made with David Duchovny, a painful Hollywood experience she vowed never to repeat. According to Bickford, producer Marc Abraham rewrote the script every day and basically cut her out of the project. “It made me never want to make a movie again,” Bickford recalled.

Meanwhile, her boss at Disney said he was interested in doing something about the battle against drugs. Bickford recalled a masterful piece of entertainment on the topic she’d seen while still living in Britain in 1989, a ten-hour miniseries on the drug wars and how they affected various strata of society. It was called
Traffik
, and had won a slew of awards in England. Her boss wasn’t interested. But suddenly Bickford was.

“I had never seen something that tied all the fragmented elements together and that by doing so made you feel differently about the pieces as a whole,” Bickford said. “I never understood where drugs came from, the way they connected kids partying at Oxford to a grower in Pakistan. It wasn’t how we’d thought about it.” In February 1996 Bickford contacted the British agent of the writer of
Traffik
to see about securing the rights to remake it as a film but was told that others had been trying for years to translate the series to American culture for years, and no one had succeeded. Bickford had no money to option the series anyway.

But she kept clipping articles and told the agent she was still interested. Other ideas about drugs emerged; there was an article in the paper to mark Valentine’s Day that traced the journey of a rose from Colombia to the flower shop. Bickford thought about doing the same with cocaine. She seemed to see nothing but this one issue everywhere. “The New
York Times
would report the price of cocaine had dropped because of a monsoon. Here would be the cartel, and a story about women in prison. It kept hitting me in the face,” she said.

But Bickford needed a writer, someone to translate this sprawling, multicharacter, ten-hour tale into something manageable that a Hollywood studio would consider. She had trouble finding a writer who would watch the ten-hour British series, much less consider adapting it. Those she found expressed interest, but never sat down to watch the series.

What had become clear to Bickford in her research was that the heart of the British series was on target. Drugs were indeed a global problem. To dramatize the issue, you really had to show the complexities of all the avenues they traveled. Western drug addiction
connected Latin American cartel dons with upper-class plastic surgeons, with American federal agents, with the White House and legislators in Congress, and with cops on the beat in Tijuana and Bogotá. You needed to show all of that if you wanted to convey the scope of the problem and the depth of the challenge in combating drugs.

Complexity was not Hollywood’s forte.

B
ICKFORD HAD FIRST MET
S
ODERBERGH AT A
H
OLLYWOOD
party through a screenwriter friend, Steve Brill, in the early 1990s. At the time, after
sex, lies, and videotape
, Soderbergh “was a famous phenomenon, but he was so down-to-earth, open. He was not snobby,” Bickford remembered. He was also tremendously unhappy, freshly divorced, and not feeling entirely comfortable in Hollywood. They began dating seriously. When Soderbergh went back to hibernate in Louisiana, Bickford visited him frequently in Baton Rouge while he worked on
The Underneath.
For the first time he directed a play,
Geniuses
, at his old stomping ground, Louisiana State University. Difficult in relationships, Soderbergh was no less so with Bickford. But she was less willing to put up with his emotional games and demanded that they go to analysis. Soderbergh agreed, and they attended therapy together, working particularly on Soderbergh’s tendency to shut down and run away. Bickford practically forced him to be more open than he had been in previous relationships, though ultimately she felt she couldn’t really change him. They remained together, on and off, for the next couple of years. “We were in love for a long time,” Bickford remembered.

Soderbergh remained in love with her for a very long time. What doomed this relationship was what seemed to doom Soderbergh’s marriage and other close emotional connections in his life: the intimacy thing. He couldn’t give it. “We tried to make it work,” said Bickford. “I couldn’t accept his capacity”—or perhaps lack thereof—for intimacy. Ultimately, she concluded, she had to walk away at some point. Staying, she felt in retrospect, was “way
too difficult. Too painful.” But in the first flush of romance, Soderbergh did move back to Los Angeles and in with Bickford. They were together, on and off, through the making of
Traffic
, and went as each other’s date to the Academy Awards. “It was great to have that sense of loyalty and trust and understanding. But we had different expectations we could never sort out. It was a very sad thing in my life,” said Bickford.

Some felt that Bickford used her relationship with Soderbergh and others to create a career in Hollywood, calling her privileged and grasping. Others didn’t mind her grasping a bit. She had briefly dated Benicio Del Toro, whom she recommended for
Traffic
, then met and married the actor Sam Bottoms. She invited Soderbergh to the wedding, of course; he was still a friend. The director called Bickford’s mother three days before the celebration to say he wouldn’t attend. He couldn’t bear to watch Bickford marry someone else.

T
RAFFIC
WAS THEIR ONE GREAT ENDEAVOR TOGETHER
. W
HEN
the agent who controlled the rights to
Traffik
came through New York in October 1997, she warned Bickford she’d have to start paying to option the property because someone else had made an offer for the rights. Bickford, panicked that all her efforts were about to slip away, offered $10,000 to hold the rights for two years. But she didn’t actually have $10,000. Over lunch with Soderbergh, who had returned to Hollywood to make
Out of Sight
, she commiserated about her lack of funding. He offered to loan her the money and said he might be interested in directing it. That was all Bickford needed to hear. She brought Soderbergh to her house, where they pored over the background materials she’d been collecting for two years. They sorted them by topic: Mexico, Colombia, prison, law, health. Through friends Bickford met the
New York Times
writer Tim Golden, who would win a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his work from Mexico, and began grilling him for ideas.

Soon Soderbergh became as taken with the idea as Bickford had been. Up to now he had been making films that were mainly
drawn from his personal experiences about family, sex, marriage, and art.
Out of Sight
had moved him in another direction, the first time he’d been a director for hire.
Erin Brockovich
allowed him to treat a topic of social significance, an environmental contamination and the righting of a wrong. “I had come to the end of anything that I had to say about myself that was compelling,” he decided.
Traffic
offered the possibility of taking on an even more challenging topic of social and political significance. As he educated himself, Soderbergh realized how little Americans talked about the drug problem. He wondered why. Perhaps because it was insoluble. “There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs,” he said later. “Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don’t. I know people who’ve had problems with drugs and I also know people who don’t, in that they are recreational users, and their lives for some reason haven’t seemed to fall apart. We know what the issue is with people who can’t turn off the switch. I know why we can’t have a frank discussion with our policymakers: If you’re in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.”

T
HE EXPERIENCE OF MAKING
O
UT OF
S
IGHT
AT
U
NIVERSAL
gave Soderbergh a more forgiving approach to working within the studio system and the Hollywood machine. “The division between the independent world and Hollywood-you-sold-out is stupid, meaningless,” he told Bickford. “Our goal is to make good films. A good film can be made for $2 million, $20 million, $60 million. Why should the best directors only have $2 million to make their films?”

And Hollywood was changing its approach to independent-style film, too. The shift was enough for the
Los Angeles Times
to announce in early 1997: “It’s once again in vogue either to own a distribution company that markets and releases independently made, sophisticated movies.” But the trend was going even further than that. The major studios themselves—the ones who made all the event pictures—were in some cases starting to look at “specialized
products” for their own slates, as the
Los Angeles Times
writer Claudia Eller referred to the auteur filmmakers. Casey Silver had made
Out of Sight
at Universal. At Disney, Joe Roth had green-lighted Wes Anderson’s
Rushmore
and Spike Lee’s
Summer of Sam
, released in 1999, a movie that seemed far more suited to Miramax’s sensibilities.

Even with Hollywood’s more open approach to so-called specialty films, there were limits. Some topics were not welcome at any studio, and Soderbergh had picked one of them. Studios weren’t interested in spending either $2 million or $20 million for a movie about drugs. Soderbergh and Bickford took their idea around to the various Hollywood studios and found that not a single studio was interested. Not that this was terribly surprising. Drugs are a taboo topic in American society, and they were taboo in Hollywood, too, like religion and politics. The entertainment industry generally liked to pretend that the drug problem didn’t exist—except as a convenient plot device—even though some of its members suffered more from the ravages of addiction than most other parts of American society.