Rebels on the Backlot (22 page)

Drugs did not dominate Hollywood in the nineties like they had in previous decades, when you commonly saw lines of cocaine set out at parties and restaurants equipped with private booths for snorting. Still, throughout the decade, every so often, the news headlines would peel away the veneer of Hollywood glamour to reveal another ugly celebrity overdose, whether actor River Phoenix, in 1993, or producer Don Simpson, in 1996. There were drug-induced acts of public paranoia (Martin Lawrence in 1996, raving with a loaded gun) and mug-shot humiliation (Robert Downey, Jr., arrested for possession more times than anyone could follow). Drugs were still prevalent, and they were embarrassing. Most of all, nothing about drugs offered an easy marketing hook. Violence was fine, comic book characters and sci-fi fantasy were all good. Even mafia stories were welcome. But drugs were one very sensitive subject.

Soderbergh took meetings at all the major studios to pitch the project while working on
Erin Brockovich.

“Who’s the audience?” was the inevitable question at each meeting. Warner Brothers. Disney. Sony. Paramount. Miramax. No one would bite. “Bring us a package,” they’d say (a script with a director, a movie star). They wanted to know what
Traffic
might compare to. What had been the last drug movie?
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, with Johnny Depp? Soderbergh had a tough time coming up with a movie about drugs that had been a commercial hit. They were even turned down by those rare Hollywood executives who were interested in finding risky new material. At New Line, Mike De Luca said he had just started working on
Blow
, a movie set in the 1970s about a drug dealer (it eventually starred Johnny Depp) and couldn’t sign on to another drug movie. Steve Golin, the film executive at Propaganda, which was owned by PolyGram, couldn’t do anything; PolyGram was being bought out by Universal Studios through its independent arm, October Films. Bingham Ray at October passed. “It was scary to have those two places say no,” said Bickford. (Ironically, October would disappear into the newly formed USA Films, which eventually made
Traffic.)

Around town, at meeting after meeting with studio executives, Soderbergh talked about
The French Connection
, the classic Billy Friedkin movie that had made Gene Hackman a star and won a bunch of Oscars. He talked about
Z
, the documentary-style, award-winning Costa-Gavras film about a conspiracy to overthrow a democratic Greek government. Both those movies dated back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. “You couldn’t point to another film of its type to relax people,” Soderbergh recalled. It was a bit awkward. Drugs, Soderbergh was reminded repeatedly, did not have “commercial potential.”

A
S THE 1990S WORE ON
, Q
UENTIN
T
ARANTINO FOUND HIMSELF
a prisoner of his own success. For some time after
Pulp Fiction
, he continued to live in his tiny Hollywood apartment, driving the same dirty red Geo, watching the checks roll in. His phone rang off the hook; everyone wanted Quentertainment. He reveled not in the money but in his long longed-for pop icon status at the tender
age of thirty. He insisted on acting and did a guest stint on
The Simpsons.
He appeared on endless numbers of talk shows and dated endless numbers of sexy women (he’d walk into his office and announce to an assistant, “I’ve always wanted to screw Anna Nicole Smith. Get me Anna Nicole Smith.” And an hour later she’d come walking in). He was a serial dater. After Uma Thurman and a vast number of others, he began dating actress Mira Sorvino and eventually moved in with her. It was an unlikely pairing: She was a demure Harvard graduate and a daddy’s girl to papa actor Paul Sorvino. Still, it was one of the longest relationships Tarantino managed to sustain. But he was distracted. Tarantino had created such a monumental film in
Pulp Fiction
that it was impossible to live up to the expectations that followed. He collaborated on an abysmal bit of whimsy,
Four Rooms
, with three other director friends—Robert Rodriguez, Alexandre Rockwell, and Allison Anders—acting in and directing one segment of the film. It was entirely forgettable. Fame was going to his head, and quickly. Rockwell found he could no longer get his old buddy on the phone. Anders observed that Tarantino’s set on the movie was several times larger than all the others. It wasn’t that his story demanded a huge set, she said, “it was that his head demanded a huge set. All of our rooms could have fit inside his. It was a metaphor for what was going on.”

“It was getting hard to do a lot of the things that I liked to do,” Tarantino told Peter Biskind in 2003. “I would think, ‘If I was Neil Jordan, I could have twelve hookers and no one would know who the fuck I was. It was getting hard to just take walks. Everybody was a homeless person. I had to avoid eye contact. Because to make eye contact was to invite them to approach me. My regular guy shit, going to a used record store and spending two hours on the floor, yanking [stuff] out of the boxes, looking through everything they have—all of a sudden I’m getting jacked and pimped by these people. I’d say, ‘Dude, it’s my day off, man, I just want to look through the fuckin’ records. Like you.’”

Finally in 1997 Tarantino got around to making
Jackie Brown
, a modest hit that seemed to suffer in comparison to
Pulp Fiction
, with people saying there wasn’t enough violence, perhaps, and
there was too much sentiment. Even Tarantino’s own agent, Mike Simpson, walked out of the premiere screening and muttered to a Miramax executive, “That thing went thirty-five minutes too long.” The executive replied, “Yes, it did.” Simpson said, “There’s the ultimate case for not giving the director final cut.” Whatever the assessment inside Miramax, the public stance was that the film was underappreciated. The reality was that
Jackie Brown
was perfectly fine but broke no new ground, other than resuscitating a still sexy Pam Grier.

After that Tarantino hibernated, retreating to his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He built a lavish screening room and began collecting hundreds and eventually thousands of old movie prints, which he screened every night. There was plenty of talk about drug problems; friends knew Tarantino to disappear for days at a time. But mostly he just sat on the couch, smoked pot, and watched the boob tube. “This was not Martin Scorsese watching Michael Powell’s movies, where there’s a reason to get excited about it,” said one friend, who declined to be named, in Biskind’s
Vanity Fair
piece in 2003. “I’m not even talking about something that’s kitschy or trashy—an A.I.P. picture. These were lousy made-for-TV movies. Flat, one-dimensional. And still his eyes would be glued to the tube. After a while, I realized you could literally be showing him anything—a white screen, even—and he’d be watching it like a kid with a pacifier, a lonely little boy in his living room, where he was safe. It was sad and beautiful at the same time.” Another view was that Tarantino was essentially a lazy guy who loved to enjoy what fame and money could buy. And who knew what demons kept him from getting tied down? His friends concluded he was married to his greatest passion, cinema.

Within three years of
Pulp Fiction’s
release, Tarantino went from being his generation’s most influential creative force in filmmaking to an irrelevant slacker with a gift for gab who had nothing more to say. Eventually he wore out his welcome even on the air. He was overexposed. He tried to act and humiliated himself on Broadway in 1998 in
Wait Until Dark.

This would more or less stay the case until 2003 when Tarantino made
Kill Bill
, his martial arts opus that was so big that it broke in half, and was released in two parts. Yet even his greatest fan, Harvey Weinstein, told the
New York Times
he considered
Kill Bill
“just a fun B movie.” But the critics couldn’t deny that the rebel generation’s greatest video child, greatest synthesizer of all things pop culture, had triumphed again.

After
Pulp Fiction
Lawrence Bender cashed in more quickly, buying an elegant stone mansion in Brentwood, where he lived by himself, often hosting Democratic political events.

Roger Avary decided a change of scenery would do him good. His experiences with
Pulp Fiction
and his former best friend had left him bitter—but also with plenty of cash. He moved to Cap d’Antibes in the south of France and tried to raise money to buy the historic La Victorine Studio in Nice, now in mothballs. This was where François Truffaut had worked, and where Jacques Tati had filmed
Mon Oncle
in 1958. Avary dreamed of reviving the studio to make his kind of movies there. “I had romantic ideals of forging a film community, especially in Nice, with such an intense history.”

A small problem arose in that the studio was right below the flight path of planes landing and taking off from Nice Airport. Avary and the minister of culture Jacques Lang joined forces to try to convince the transportation authorities to reroute the planes so the studio could be reopened—only in France,
n’est ce pas?
—but ultimately they were unsuccessful.

He then wrote
Fantasme’s End
, his rewrite of an old horror film, calling the original director and offering to do the film for no money. He wrote a lot of scripts, one about the famous Hotel Lutecia in Paris, which the Gestapo used as their headquarters during World War Two. He became obsessed with Salvador Dali—he even growing a Dali-style mustache—and moved into the Hotel St. Regis, where Dali lived, to write a screenplay about him in 1997. He spent a couple of years adapting
Beowulf
, the gothic English tale. But mostly he made lots and lots of money doing script polishes and rewrites for the Hollywood studio machine.

Ten years passed before Avary made another film, eventually writing and directing
Rules of Attraction
, an adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis book, released in 2002. Avary had been offered to direct
American Psycho
, Ellis’s signature 1980s book about a psychopathic investment banker on a killing spree through New York City. Avary considered the project until he read the book and got to the part where the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, guts a dog. “I can handle a lot on screen,” said the man who cowrote a screenplay with torture scenes. “My threshold for anything is high, except animal cruelty.” He never finished the book and wrote the producers a letter imploring them not to make the film. (They did anyway, with director Mary Harron.)

As for his relationship with Tarantino, Avary barely spoke to his once best friend again until they ran into each other on the red carpet in early 2000 and slapped one another on the back as if nothing nasty had ever passed between them. By 2003, Avary was again referring to Tarantino as “the best friend I ever had.”

R
upert Murdoch was not in the habit of dictating movie choices to his film executives. He sat in his office on the top floor of the five-story, modernist office building that overlooked a small piece of his sprawling media empire, the Fox lot in Century City, with its murals of Luke Skywalker and Marilyn Monroe, and its gritty re-creation of New York City streets that was the set
of
NYPD Blue.
The executives who ran Twentieth Century Fox were far below in the older, bungalow-style buildings across the way.

Murdoch did not need to get involved in the decisions of his movie executives; his media empire was, after all, one of the largest in the world, including newspapers, magazines, a book publisher, a television network, a baseball team (the Dodgers), and a television production company in addition to the movie studio. Those who worked for him didn’t necessarily follow his political convictions, though there was no avoiding the certain knowledge that the boss was a decidedly conservative individual, a man who had famously broken the unions in England with the support of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and who gleefully used his daily paper the
New York Post
to flatten every liberal political idea that came along.

But Twentieth Century Fox didn’t make conservative films. It made great, big Hollywood films like
Titanic
and
Independence Day
and
Braveheart.
Still, there were limits. When Rupert Murdoch saw an early version of
Fight Club
at a private screening in Australia—his son Lachlan was there, and so was Tom Cruise—he was livid. Never mind that both Lachlan and Cruise thought the film was brilliant and daring. Murdoch was outraged.

When he got back to Los Angeles he made a surprise appearance at a meeting of senior executives at Fox and confronted his studio chief, Bill Mechanic, in front of his staff. “I finally saw
Fight Club,”
Murdoch growled in his gravelly Aussie timbre. “I thought it was too violent. We shouldn’t have made it. We shouldn’t be making movies like that.” He went on. “You aren’t the one who gets called up on Capitol Hill and on Wall Street to answer for these movies, it’s me,” he said. “I take the flak for this.”

Mechanic, recently promoted from president to chairman, rose to the bait and defended the movie. “Yes, it’s violent,” he agreed, “but it’s a brilliant film, brilliant. We should be proud of it.” He went on to offer a ringing endorsement of Fincher’s vision and the lasting commentary the movie made on twentieth-century society. A few weeks later
Fight Club
opened to mostly scandalized reviews and lousy box office.

How the most conservative media mogul in the country ended up making one of the most graphically violent films of its time, excoriated by social critics and politicians as a prime example of the moral decay in Hollywood, is one of the many ironies in the making of
Fight Club.
In green-lighting the film, starring heartthrob Brad Pitt and intellectual Ed Norton, Fox made an abrupt detour from the kinds of films that usually filled its slate. As with other films, it was a single executive, in this case Bill Mechanic, who protected
Fight Club
through the perils of the studio bureaucracy for better or worse. And he seemed one of the least likely types to defend such a film: Mechanic was a strict vegetarian and animal rights activist to whom the idea of butchering an animal was repugnant. Yet he put his reputation on the line to defend a movie that reveled in violence. Within two years of the release he’d be out of a job.