Rebels on the Backlot (50 page)

And in smaller newspapers around the country, there were articles about the movie’s effect at a grassroots level. The
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
wrote about the local Findling family, who called their three children to the kitchen for a family meeting after seeing the film. “They were disturbed by the depiction of drug abuse by a privileged, high-achieving teen. They wanted to talk to their own kids right away…. The Findlings are not the only ones having such discussions.
Traffic
, already being talked about among movie aficionados as a likely Oscar nominee, has got parents and educators talking. At dinner parties. In coffee clatches. At teacher-parent meetings. In school newsletters.”

In the wake of September 11, the debate over the war on drugs disappeared into larger concerns over national security. Soderbergh, in 2004, was disappointed that his film did not seem to have a more lasting impact, but was philosophical. “Within months the dialogue was right back where it started,” he said. “Nothing’s changed. It got people talking for a little while. That’s all you can ask for.”

D
ESPITE THE ATTENTION AND THE CRITICAL ACCLAIM, IT
wasn’t a certainty that
Traffic
would be recognized at the Oscars. The Academy is quite conservative, and this was edgier fare than
they usually embraced (think
Driving Miss Daisy).
Russell Schwartz got a bad feeling when he sent videocassettes of the film to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Some two dozen tapes were sent back with a note from senior members: “You sent us the Spanish version.” Said Schwartz, “I thought, ‘We are screwed.’”

But on February 14, 2001, Steven Soderbergh had a very good day. His movie
Traffic
was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Supporting Actor for Benicio Del Toro. On the same day, his movie
Erin Brockovich
was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress (Julia Roberts), and Best Supporting Actor (Albert Finney). Not since 1938, when Michael Curtiz was nominated for directing both
Angels with Dirty Faces
and
Four Daughters
, had a director squared off against himself.

Soderbergh refused to lobby for either
Traffic
or
Erin Brockovich
, a strategic choice that most people in Hollywood thought was a mistake. The director said he couldn’t choose between his children, but many feared the vote would be split badly.

But the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture of Arts and Sciences gave a statue to Julia Roberts for
Erin Brockovich
, and then gave four Oscars to
Traffic:
Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Supporting Actor for Del Toro. Best Picture went to
Gladiator.
That wasn’t the half of the glory headed
Traffic’s
way. The movie also won the British Oscars, the BAFTA; Golden Globes; Screen Actors Guild; Writers Guild; the Latino ALMA award; and at least a dozen film critics’ awards.

T
RAFFIC
WAS ONE OF THOSE RARE, NEARLY EXTINCT CREATURES
in Hollywood, a serious movie that won a slew of awards and was a hit at the box office. It gave USA Films much needed credibility both in the media and on the home front with Barry Diller and Universal. Unfortunately, none of that seemed to help USA’s Scott Greenstein much (Russell Schwartz had already moved on).
His fate was tied up in the merger mania of the movie industry. In October 2001 Diller sold USA Networks to Vivendi for a 5.4 percent stake in the company (and another 1.5 percent personal equity stake), taking a titular job as chairman of the company. Vivendi was now a massive, international conglomerate, with everything from water salination plants to cell phones to theme parks to art-house movies under its ownership. Two months later Universal bought the highly regarded independent production company Good Machine International, and announced plans to merge it with USA Films, thus creating an entirely new specialty film unit, Focus. USA was over, and Greenstein was out of a job. Universal chairman Stacey Snider installed the Good Machine team of David Linde and James Schamus as copresidents in the new company. A headline-making alliance announced barely two months before, in which USA Films would be the home for a new company of rebel directors—Soderbergh, Fincher, Payne, Jonze, and Mendes—was dead in the water.

As for Soderbergh, by the turn of the millennium he had redeemed himself from his creative trough in the middle of the 1990s. He rose precipitously to be one of the most powerful directors in the industry and quickly extended his interests to being one of the most involved producers in the industry, too. “He’s a born-again filmmaker, at ease, as all the classic Hollywood directors were, with the notion that art and entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive terms. As he’s proved—twice in one year,” wrote David Ansen in
Newsweek.

And even the self-lacerating Soderbergh could recognize that he had hit an artistic peak. “That period of
Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich
, and
Traffic
all fell during a period when I was very energized and felt like it was a good time for me to be busy,” he said in 2004. “Those periods come and go, and it was another reason why I wanted
Traffic
to happen. I needed to cram as much work as I could into that period, because I felt good.”

Of course, he then turned around and sabotaged all of that in a swift move or two. One was called
Full Frontal.
The other was called
Solaris.
Both tanked. Even before that he had made a glossy,
star-studded, Las Vegas bauble called
Ocean’s Eleven.
But none of it came easy to him after
Traffic.
Since that film, “the process has gotten much harder,” he said. “I’ve always been in it for the long haul. I’ve gone way up and I’ve gone way down. But when I start feeling I can’t come up with something that I think is good, that’s really frustrating. It’s very, very conceivable that I could reach a point where I stop, and just go ‘I’m out. I’m dry.’”

O
N THE BRISK
M
ANHATTAN EVENING OF
A
PRIL 10, 2002
,
THE
Rising bourgeoisie of New York City filed excitedly into the theater of the Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street for a first-time, Hollywood event at the museum, a tribute to a young filmmaker.

Up on the stage nervously gulping water and wagging his foot was forty-three-year-old David O. Russell, dressed in his signature Brooks Brothers suit (he’d gotten it for free), with a white shirt and white sneakers. He was the first to be honored in a new series focusing on young directors who had already made their mark on cinema history.

The celebration was somewhat awkward, marked by the newness of the event. Lily Tomlin, who’d costarred in
Flirting with Disaster
, was doing a fairly miserable job of interviewing Russell up onstage. She fumbled nervously as she asked about
Spanking the Monkey
, his film about incest, stopping just short of asking Russell whether it was based on his own experiences. Then she skipped to
Three Kings
and finally confessed she couldn’t hear Russell’s replies. “I have to hang on your every word,” she explained apologetically. “Your words kind of roll.” Russell was barely smoother. “It is so surreal to be up here right now,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense in a lot of ways.”

But it did, really. Not only did Russell represent the best of the young generation that had emerged in the late 1990s, but there was a certain symmetry to his being there. He had once waited tables at
catered affairs at MoMA while still struggling as a filmmaker more than a decade before.

The evening was an experiment for the museum. The manager of the museum’s department of film and media, Natalie Herniak, had asked Spike Jonze to be the first honoree, but the socially introverted director had declined, saying he wasn’t ready for it. Instead she asked Russell, a decade older and with three films to his name.

Still, Jonze was there that evening, and so were Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, and Kimberly Peirce. They looked around at one another in the dimly lit hall and realized that, like the directors they revered from the 1970s, they too had formed a community of artists who were defining their era with their work. Along with other actors who had worked with Russell, Jonze was invited up onstage. Russell kept gesturing toward Payne, seated in the audience, and asking “Alexander? What do you think?” as if to signal solidarity. Russell’s agent, John Lesher, took a picture of them all lined up, beaming in the spotlight of official recognition. “That night felt like—this is what it must have been like when
Mean Streets
came out,” recalled Lesher.

Eventually the event was saved from imminent debacle when comedian Will Ferrell, a friend of Russell’s, tottered down the aisle dressed as James Lipton, the obsequious host of the Bravo network’s
Inside the Actor’s Studio
interview series, armed with a stack of blue notecards. “Tonight,” Ferrell-as-Lipton boomed in his slow, mock-stentorian tone, “we are in the presence of a genius. To my right,” (wave to Russell, who suppressed a smirk) “without argument, the greatest artist that has ever lived. The greatest human ever, fiction or nonfiction. A man who has taken the nothingness and shaped it with his naked hands until it is alive.” Finally, some comic relief. The actors from Russell’s movies assembled onstage—Mark Wahlberg, Patricia Arquette, Mary Tyler Moore, and others—and Ferrell-as-Lipton asked each of them questions while Russell shot snapshots from his seat onstage with what appeared to be a disposable camera. Then Ferrell turned his Q&A shtick on the director:

The following year it was Alexander Payne’s turn, and there was no such levity. Payne was questioned onstage by the equally inexperienced Bingham Ray, a veteran independent studio executive. At least a raucous party followed at a restaurant on Twenty-third Street, where Russell prompty lit a joint and confessed that he had concocted a plan with Payne to start a tradition for the MoMA works-in-progress event. He’d planned to streak across the stage naked in the middle of the interview. Payne had even given him the signal to go at the beginning of the event. Sadly, Russell backed out, not finding any space backstage to take off his clothes.

B
Y THE START OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, THE REBELS OF THE
1990s were well into their careers, established and recognized yet still eager to show that their first big successes were no coincidence, that they had staying power as artists working in the studio system.

But in truth the system had already begun to beat them down and to dilute their voices. It would continue to do so in subsequent years. Studio executives claimed to be enthusiastic supporters of the work of the rebels, but those who maintained the sharpest
edges in their work found it hard to find a home. Kimberly Peirce went from one project to another, not finding the support she had earned the right to expect with the success of
Boys Don’t Cry.
She turned down a host of offers as director-for-hire on studio movies. Darren Aronofsky, who’d made
Pi
, sent out a daring script about a harrowing descent into drug addiction. He was turned down everywhere, though eventually
Requiem for a Dream
was made and released at the independent studio Lions Gate (though not without a major fight over an NC-17 rating). It produced an Oscar nomination for Ellen Burstyn. “After
Pi
every person in the artsier arena said, ‘Send us your script, and we’ll make it,’” said Aronofsky. “We sent everyone
Requiem for a Dream
, and people didn’t call us back.”

But the rebels, in the main, kept working. By 2002 another whole crop of pictures were ready for release, and in a sense the year was an echo of the virtuoso explosion of 1999. Except this time the residue of overnight success, the hangover of newfound media celebrity, was noticeable in the work. Many of these films were less daring than the previous ones, and in many of them it felt like the studio’s siren song had crept into the consciousness of the young directors. Already in 2001 Wes Anderson had released
The Royal Tenenbaums
, a clever, inventive romp with a stellar ensemble cast including Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson; but it was clearly not yet the masterpiece that critics were expecting from the director who had written and directed
Rushmore.
Paul Thomas Anderson made
Punch-Drunk Love
, with Adam Sandler, and raged around the set like the diva he was, shooting for months and months without much of a script. The movie was weighed down by his overindulgent working style (his longtime collaborator Dylan Tichenor quit halfway through in frustration) and an overgenerous studio. The movie did only moderate business and got no major awards. With Soderbergh’s
Full Frontal
, the director required the actors (including Julia Roberts) to drive themselves to the set and do their own hair and makeup, but the film was in theaters for just a couple of weeks. The glacially paced and icily shot
Solaris
was a remake of an Andre Tarkovsky film that made all but the most dedicated art-house
movie-lovers fall asleep. (Fox couldn’t win on this one: a few weeks before being handed his walking papers, studio chief Bill Mechanic got a call from Soderbergh with what was supposed to be good news: “Here’s payback for
Traffic,”
said the director. “I’m going to make my next movie with you.” Fox spent close to $70 million making and releasing the film, though no amount of full-page ads in the
New York Times
could convince audiences the movie was good, and it took in just $15 million at the box office. “I don’t know that it was payback,” Mechanic later said, ruefully.) Soderbergh also finally remarried in 2003, to entertainment news personality Jules Asner. Sam Mendes seemed equally bound by the weight of his previous success. The ponderous
Road to Perdition
was painfully self-aware (though beautiful to look at) where
American Beauty
had been thoughtful and complex; the film, starring Tom Hanks and Jude Law, was a disappointment with critics and the box office. The two
Matrix
series that followed the first revolutionary film were pale shadows of the Wachowskis’ earlier brilliance. Fincher’s
Panic Room
, starring Jodie Foster, was a box office hit, but seemed much more like a mainstream Hollywood movie than
Fight Club
, almost as if he’d had the subversive beat out of him. He spent the next several years coming close to doing major Hollywood projects, but always seemed to find a reason to walk away. On the war-era
Fertig
, he insisted on shooting in black-and-white; the studio passed. On
The Lookout
, he asked for a $100 million budget for a relatively small film. On
Dogtown and Z-Boys
, he demanded the right to build a multimillion-dollar set of a skate park for a short sequence, was refused, and walked away. Fincher seemed to find a way to talk himself out of every movie offered him.