Rebels With a Cause

Quentin Tarantino directs a scene from Kill Bill. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood System
Sharon Waxman
386 pp.
Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.
$36.95
Review by Katrina Onstad

As anyone who attended high school can attest, it’s a thin line between rebel and jerk. According to Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood System, the uppity young directors who revitalized American film in the ’90s – Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, P.T. Anderson, Spike Jonze and, least deserving of a spot on the list, David Fincher – possess a kind of anti-cool often shared by oddballs and outsiders who finally find success. On the jerk side of cool, most are egomaniacs with explosive tempers and a long list of bitter, stomped-upon former friends (Jonze comes off as too spacey to be cruel, and Soderbergh too neurotic). Perhaps not surprisingly, Quentin Tarantino recently dismissed Waxman’s new book in the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column with a surly: “I don’t give a [bleep] about her.”

Perhaps he should. Waxman has been an entertainment reporter for both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and she researches like a rabid documentarian. She is not, by any means, a critic; the business angle is always favoured over the artistic one in Rebels. Waxman devotes several chapters to Soderbergh’s mainstream Traffic, and writes off his far superior film The Limey in one paragraph. Historical context is provided with a cursory nod to independent film hero Jim Jarmusch, but earlier pioneer John Cassavetes doesn’t warrant a mention. Waxman skims over black directors Spike Lee and John Singleton, while women Kimberly Peirce and Nicole Holofcener (whose respective films, Boys Don’t Cry and Walking and Talking, are both more interesting than Fincher’s Fight Club) are excised almost completely.

But including lesser-known films would require artistic judgment, and Waxman is much better unearthing the big story. She includes the kind of fly-on-the-wall (and in the studios, cars and restaurants) details that will thrill anyone interested in how movies get made. Rebels jumps between directors and films, almost seamlessly sewing six unwieldy subjects into one (is this chronology-hopping a tribute to the quick-cutting Tarantino style?). Those without an industry fetish may find it all a little confusing, but for any film fan who wants to know just how much Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson loves porn – he grew up in a San Fernando Valley neighbourhood where “adult” movies were shot in garages on his block – this is the book (answer: loves it much).

According to Rebels, creative movies are made in Hollywood only through stubbornness and chance by companies that are either oblivious or indifferent to the richness of the work they back; the titular word “conquered” might better be replaced by the word “endured.” In 1989, 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh, a southerner professionally and personally ravaged by self-doubt, brought a film about a guy a lot like him to the Sundance Film Festival. The shoestring labour of love sex, lies and videotape – with James Spader as a loner truth-teller who relates to the world, and women, only through the camera – made such a big noise with audiences and critics that, in a surprise move, a small distributor named Miramax outbid all other companies for rights. Sex, lies and videotape became Miramax’s first cash cow, earning $25 million US at the box office.

Waxman portrays the chaotic company, run by the thuggish brothers Weinstein, as abysmally managed and on the cusp of crisis before Soderbergh stepped in. But a few years later, Miramax caught a second stroke of good fortune when, as Waxman puts it with her inelegant prose, “Harvey Weinstein hitched his wagon to the wild ride that was Quentin Tarantino.” From Reservoir Dogs to Kill Bill 2, former Miramax head Harvey Weinstein and Tarantino have nauseatingly cheered one another in public.

By now, Tarantino’s Cinderella story – trailer-park film addict/video clerk storms the Hollywood dream – is legend, though perhaps of his own making. Waxman tracks down Tarantino’s mother, Connie Zastoupil, a hard-working professional forlorn over her son’s version of events. She agrees that his fatherless childhood was sometimes difficult, but claims her efforts at creating a middle-class home for the boy were thwarted at every turn by a thankless, brooding kid with bad b.o. who shunned every opportunity, educational and otherwise.

Maybe the b.o. detail is part of Tarantino’s beef with Waxman (his bad hygiene gets several references over the course of this 386-page book), or perhaps it’s that she meets his greatest criticism head on: those who deem the films of Quentin Tarantino trite and derivative will find oodles of evidence that he’s a brilliant plagiarist who regularly steals from cinema, and maybe his friends. Long-time collaborator Roger Avary felt Tarantino stiffed him on the credit for Pulp Fiction, a mercenary act on Tarantino’s part that helped establish the singular brand “Quentertainment.” As fellow video clerks and tight friends, Tarantino and Avary wrote several scripts together, but later, when his star ascended, Tarantino seemed incapable of writing by himself. His manager refused to send out the script for From Dusk Till Dawn because she thought it was terrible. Writes Waxman: “When she finally did, angry producers and agents called back and said, ‘What is this piece of crap? Quentin didn’t write this, did he?’”

Quentin Tarantino and Daryl Hannah on the set of Kill Bill. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Raw ambition is hardly exceptional in Hollywood – indeed, it’s the one quality shared by all the directors profiled in Rebels – and Waxman isn’t disgusted by her subjects. She is actually quite generous towards Tarantino, writing: “This is not to say Tarantino’s is not a towering talent, only that his gift is more in synthesis and adaptation rather than in creating stories from nothing.” It’s a fair statement; how odd that the director’s massive ego can’t handle it.

For better or worse, Tarantino’s emphatic style – dusting his films with pop culture references, glamourizing violence through wicked soundtracks – influenced everyone who came after. Paul Thomas Anderson remembers being blown away by Pulp Fiction. Like Tarantino, he fought for final cut on his multilayered films Boogie Nights and Magnolia, something few had been granted since the last round of mavericks in the ’70s, directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich.

Anderson, too, had a complicated relationship with his family. His TV executive father was his hero and his mother was distant – templates for many of his characters. Like most of Waxman’s Rebels, Anderson rejected formal education, dropping out of NYU film school after a few days because “they had nothing to teach [me].” The arrogance is almost comical, but to my mind, Anderson remains the most inventive of the directors Waxman investigates. His work never feels borrowed; he makes extraordinary films about average people beating their heads against futility, movies that function on an emotional level Tarantino never attempts to reach. What’s fascinating is that these sensitive films are made, at least in Waxman’s version, by a brute and a prima donna. Says one unnamed colleague: “He could be very angry, abusive, thoroughly insulting to people.”

Diva behaviour seems a requisite of getting a good film made in Hollywood; it is a director’s best armour against the commercial impulses of the studio system. When David O. Russell left the indie world to make Three Kings at monolithic Warner Brothers, the studio had no idea how to handle the odd director known for doing yoga on his sets. To Russell’s chagrin, Warner Brothers pressured him to cast George Clooney, who was starring at the time in a Warner’s TV show, E.R. Clooney, impressed with Russell’s independent comedy Flirting With Disaster, sent hand-written notes to the director, charmingly mocking his Batman image (Waxman includes copies of Clooney’s notes, written in the all-caps scrawl of a teenager). But once on set, Russell thought Clooney sucked up to the crew and couldn’t act, and Clooney found Russell an emotional tyrant apt to humiliate powerless employees. The two finally came to fisticuffs on set in the Arizona desert – Russell head-butted Clooney first – in a well-described scene where they both come across as silly little boys.

After sending suits to interfere throughout filming, Warner Brothers had no idea how to market Russell’s electrified film about the Gulf War. In spite of gushing reviews, the company feared the film’s leftist politics and failed to lobby for any Oscar attention. Consequently, Three Kings was shut out of the Academy Awards. Rival studio head Harvey Weinstein commiserated with Russell: “I thought it was the best picture of the year.”

Again and again, Waxman depicts the over-merged studios of the ’90s as dysfunctional homes for filmmakers, patchwork multinationals owned by liquor and soda companies and run by clueless businesspeople that confused films for widgets. The few executives who took risks on new talent were often fired or quit. The best way for a studio to make a film was to disappear.

Charlie Kaufman’s script for Being John Malkovich had been floating around Hollywood for years, but a movie about a secret portal into the head of art-house actor Malkovich seemed unmakeable. Waxman quotes one unimpressed executive saying: “Being John Malkovich? Why the f---- can’t it be Tom Cruise?” Soon after PolyGram finally agreed to make the film in 1999, headed by Spike Jonze, a young California skate punk from the rock video world, the company was bought up, becoming a neglected wing of Universal. Suddenly, the handwringers who had been harassing Jonze with their inane notes vanished. The filmmaker had the bizarre, and liberating, experience of being left entirely alone as he shot and edited.

Alone suited Jonze just fine. His real name is Adam Spiegel, a very distant relation to the Spiegel catalogue fortune, though for years in interviews, Jonze liked to say he was an heir as a lark (does that make him a rebel or a jerk? As a journalist, I go with the latter). Waxman wades through the muck to come up with an image of Jonze as a nervous, extremely creative young man hiding behind invented personas. Educated on comic books and pop music, he has a hard time reading, and is high-culturally illiterate. Shooting Malkovich, he asked his erudite star to “do less.” Recounts Waxman in one of the book’s great anecdotes:

Malkovich looked at him and nodded. “I was getting a little Blanche there, wasn’t I?”
Jonze stared back. “What?”
Malkovich said, “Blanche Dubois.”
“Who?”
“Tennessee Williams? A Streetcar Named Desire? Blanche Dubois?”
Jonze just stared, a blank.
Malkovich sighed deeply and glanced at producer Steve Golin, helpless. “What did you get me into?”
Golin laughed. “Well, at least it won’t be derivative,” he said.

Being John Malkovich wasn’t derivative. Working calmly, with a tight group of friends, Jonze demonstrated a gift for wringing comic beauty from normalcy. Waxman, almost accidentally, elucidates what it is that makes Jonze so good: an obsession with keeping all the details of a surreal story as real as possible, thereby emphasizing the absurdity of the premise. To create the famous “half-floor” where one character searches out the portal, Jonze located an old office building with a vacant floor and lowered the ceiling (everyone got back aches filming hunched over), resisting studio pressure to build a set. Jonze’s idiosyncratic touch helped make Malkovich a critical sensation.

In an age where most film reporting consists of celebrity puff pieces in Vanity Fair magazine, Waxman is measured and never star-struck; she paints her subjects with refreshing strokes of grey. While she exposes some ugly traits you may wish you’d never encountered (why did Tarantino have to say to his assistant: “I’ve always wanted to screw Anna Nicole Smith. Get me Anna Nicole Smith.” And why did she have to walk in an hour later? Ick.), Waxman also allows these artists a certain grace. David Fincher, director of Fight Club and by far the least interesting in the sextet, comes off as gruff and self-important, but also admirably unflagging in his defence of a film some consider one of the most violent movies in history. Russell isn’t so much a bully as an eccentric, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s manic swearing and bossiness is actually respected by many of his peers as a form of focus; he’s seen as a funny kid genius.

Will these filmmakers live up to their great promise? Waxman doesn’t speculate, but as the mergers continue, and independent distributors like Miramax fall by the wayside, the fight to make interesting films quietly rages on. It will take the next generation of rebels, or jerks, to save cinema again.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.