Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (P.S.) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "On October 4, 2001, a Thursday, a banner headline in Variety caught my attention..." (more)
Key Phrases: rebel directors, rebel generation, fight club, New York, Los Angeles, Boogie Nights (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

New York Times Hollywood correspondent Waxman has written a gritty, truthful study of six boundary-breaking young directors who revolutionized 1990s filmmaking and still represent a refreshing alternative to "cookie cutter scripts and cheap MTV imagery." Her full-blooded profiles introduce Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), David Fincher (Fight Club), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), David O. Russell (Three Kings) and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich). Waxman shows these auteurs, who "wreaked havoc with traditional narrative form" and combined brutality with humor, as eccentric, frequently antisocial and hardheaded. Their stories make for compelling reading: Waxman dramatizes Russell's erratic, explosive nature in the book's most blistering episode, where the director loses his temper and has a fistfight with actor George Clooney on the set of Three Kings. Other chapters depict Tarantino's penchant for jettisoning close friends after achieving success and Soderbergh's unswerving loyalty to pals. These men possess a daring vision, which the author skillfully depicts, simultaneously offering an illuminating view of motion picture politics. Most of all, Waxman proffers assurance to artists with original voices that their ideas can reach the public if they maintain Fincher's attitude - "Take me or leave me. My way or the highway" - and possess a little luck. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

For a few golden years, a generation ago, Hollywood film directors preened as artists (also known as auteurs, the French word for authors). Then the movie moguls figured out how to make big bucks producing and marketing comic-book blockbusters, and the pretense was over. Most studio directors became faceless functionaries who shouted at actors, "Scream as loud as you can at the blue screen, and the computer guys will put in the monsters later."

Most, but not all, says Sharon Waxman in Rebels on the Backlot. A former entertainment reporter for The Washington Post, now with the New York Times, Waxman profiles half-a-dozen young male directors (yes, that gender thing again) who have kept the preening auteur alive even in the corporate kingdoms of contemporary Hollywood, where accountants ride with royalty and artists usually carry the brooms and pans. This Magnificent Six -- Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell and Spike Jonze (Adam Spiegel) -- indeed gave us some of the most thrilling and heartening American works of cinema art during the otherwise generally sour Hollywood movie decade of the '90s.

Waxman's approach is about halfway divided between her directors' private lives and professional demeanors, on the one hand, and the intricate bluffs and betrayals of movie deal-making, on the other. No one comes out looking good, as is usual in the Hollywood-behind-the-scenes genre. The directors, no matter how much we may admire their work, generally turn out to be raving egomaniacs or social misfits or both, perfectly willing to jettison any friend, wife, lover or family member to climb out of the primordial ooze of the American indie world and make it in the big time. What's sociologically (or perhaps psychoanalytically) interesting about this group is that several of them seem permanently to have ditched their mothers long before they had a foot up on the ladder of success.

That said, Waxman tells a fast-paced and always absorbing story of how some of the most significant American movies of the era -- "Boogie Nights," "Three Kings" and "Being John Malkovich," to name several -- got written, financed and made. Her book is a triumph of journeywoman legwork. In addition to cadging interviews with her sometimes recalcitrant principals, she has spoken with scores of exes: agents, managers, producers, studio heads, co-workers, all of the aforementioned relations, including the ex-mothers, to craft a rich and detailed if ultimately bleak portrait of the lives of young talent on the make and the games they play. A lot of publicity myths get shattered along the way, such as the oft-repeated story that Spike Jonze is heir to the Spiegel catalog fortune.

One of Waxman's most compelling accounts details the production of "Three Kings" (1999), a unique major studio film concerning Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, which took on added significance after the 2003 Iraq invasion. Moving from TV to film, George Clooney badly wanted the lead role, and Warner Brothers, which, she writes, "had signed a huge development deal with the actor," badly wanted him in it. But Russell, the director, "hated Clooney's style of acting, which he considered a lot of head-bobbing and mugging for the camera." Although Clooney got the part, the director and star denigrated each other throughout the shoot, and once, Waxman reports, came to physical blows.

A quarter-century ago Michael Pye and Lynda Myles published a book called The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, and Waxman might have considered calling her book, in Hollywood sequel fashion, "The Movie Brats II." Some commentators have blamed sex, drugs and rock-and-roll for the fall from grace of the '70s auteurs, rather than changes in movie distribution and marketing. Readers may be relieved (or appalled, or not care either way) to learn from Waxman that sex, drugs and rock-and-roll still play a prominent role in the lives of the '90s auteurs, not necessarily in that order. But the differences between the two generations are instructive.

The "film generation" of the '70s -- Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese and the rest -- went to film school and became steeped in film history watching Hollywood classics of the '30s and '40s in class and on late-night TV. The new generation of Tarantino and company not only didn't go to film school, they hardly set foot in secondary school. Their classics were '70s films like "Star Wars," which they watched over and over again, hundreds of times, on their VCRs. They made movies less out of some relation to a heritage (leaving aside Tarantino's kung fu legacy) than out of their private demons, which may be one reason, Waxman suggests, why they persevered for months and years in making the movies they wanted to make, rather than capitulating to the crushing weight of the system that she so extensively documents.

The status of her subjects, Waxman acknowledges, is no less precarious than was that of the original Movie Brats. The fabled "green light" to make a movie is as elusive as the Great Gatsby's at the end of a Long Island dock, and often depends on the intricate game of musical chairs played by corporate bosses seeking to make a name or a statement. But one can at least come away from her book with the satisfaction of knowing that disloyalty, duplicity and bad faith are as rife in the creative precincts of young Hollywood as they are in the fat-cat executive suites.

Reviewed by Robert Sklar
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (January 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060540184
• ISBN-13: 978-0060540180
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #310,536 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Down & Dirtier Pictures", January 25, 2005

By	Clare Quilty (a little pad in hawaii) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (Hardcover)

If you felt a little let down by Peter Biskind's recent look at 90's indie film, "Down & Dirty Pictures," this juicier but also more personal book might be closer to what you were hoping to find there.

Instead of focusing primarily on Sundance and Miramax, Waxman focuses on the six men responsible for some of the biggest movies of the past decade: Quentin Tarantino ("Pulp Fiction"), P.T. Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "Magnolia"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich"), David O. Russell ("Three Kings"), David Fincher ("Fight Club") and Steven Soderbergh ("Traffic").

They're a mixed bag of personalities and Waxman tells their stories with detail and relish, and also touches on other interesting filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Roger Avary, Charlie Kaufman, Alexander Payne and others (though some are conspicuously absent -- Spike Lee and especially Richard Linklater, who isn't even mentioned).

It's hard to miss with a collection of stories like this: Tarantino's rise to power; Hackman cursing Wes Anderson on the set of "Tenenbaums"; Avary's attempts to buy a famous French film studio; Russell headbutting George Clooney on the set of "Kings" and P.T. Anderson admitting that "Magnolia" was probably too long.

"Rebels" (very deliberately) rises to the same sordid, "print the legend" heights as Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." But it also suffers from some of the same weaknesses - occasionally questionable accounts; some poor copy editing and more than a few awkward sentences that feel like they were written the Sunday night before the term paper was due: "Traffic" screenwriter Stephen Gaghan's high school drug problems are introduced twice in three pages; Wes Anderson's debut was "Bottle Rocket" not "Rushmore"; and what can one say about lines such as, "Soderbergh questioned his own questioning" and "The director kept the obituary about his father printed in the local paper framed in his office in Los Angeles" ? Waxman also has a strange storytelling habit of explaining the results of a situation, then backtracking once or twice to tell the circumstances that led to the results.

Nevertheless, it is absolutely impossible to deny the appeal of this book, and it was equally impossible for me to put the damn thing down for the past week.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy, April 14, 2005

By	Indie filmmaker (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (Hardcover)

This book is a very quick read, but unfortunately shows all the signs of having been an equally quick write. I have never before stopped in the middle of reading a book to pull out a pen and write down all the glaring factual errors and omissions that I saw, but Rebels on the Backlot forced me to do just that. I see that many of the most egregious errors have already been noted by others, but here is some of what I wrote down as I read:

On page 231: "Texas preppie-geek Wes Anderson had made his first movie, Rushmore, based on his experience in prep school, with an utter unknown in the lead, Jason Schwartzman." Wes Anderson's first film, of course, was Bottle Rocket, not Rushmore. And, yes, Jason Schwartzman had no previous film acting experience before Rushmore, but was hardly an "utter unknown" to the film world- his family (both the Schwartzmans and the Coppolas) had done a little bit of film work in their past, both in front of and behind the cameras. Even Waxman might have recognized the mother of this "utter unknown" from all of the Rocky movies.

Traffic star Erika Christensen is identified on page 321 as "Erika Christenssen" and, most howlingly, on page 101 as "Julia Stiles." Yes, the two actresses do look alike, but that's just absurd.

On page 266, describing the marketing of Fight Club, Waxman writes that "Fincher insisted the studio hire a cutting-edge advertising firm, Weiden + Kennedy, based in Seattle." Weiden + Kennedy are based in Portland, home of Nike, their biggest client. They have offices in Portland, New York, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo and Shanghai, but not in Seattle.

On page 194, Waxman describes the profound influence of Aimee Mann's music in the creation of Magnolia, both at the script level, and in the soundtrack. On the very next page, she describes how writer/director PT Anderson got the idea for the film's rain of frogs, as well as its historical prologue, from "musician and friend Michael Penn, Sean's brother." Perhaps Waxman is the only person left in the film or music worlds who doesn't know that, besides being Sean's brother, Michael Penn is also Aimee Mann's husband.


This is a sloppy, poorly researched, poorly written, and incredibly poorly edited book. Reading it, one can easily imagine Waxman's interview subjects seeing how little she knew about her subject, and simply making up absurd lies just to see if she would ever catch them. Spike Jonze tells her that location scouting was conducted to find an actual half-floor building for Being John Malkovich, and she repeats this claim on page 205. I'm sure Jonze is enjoying a good laugh over that.

If you are looking for well-written book on this subject matter, I'd stick with Peter Biskind.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Eye for an Eye: Six Surviving the Hollywood Money Machine, March 7, 2005

By	Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (Hardcover)

I find it intriguing that New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman has pulled together a book on six film directors who seem to have little in common save for the fact that they were able to break through the hermetically sealed Hollywood studio system in the nineties to forge identities as visionary filmmakers. I suppose that's reason enough to group them together, though when one thinks of their predecessors in the seventies - Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese - this new brethren hardly seems to be at the same level of creative invention or business savvy, nor does one sense the professional bonding that propelled this former group toward critical and popular success. And unfortunately, Waxman chooses to bypass the current crop of minority filmmakers who have emerged in the past decade, such as Spike Lee, John Singleton, Robert Rodriguez and Alfonso Cuaron, whom one can argue have made as significant an impact as these six auteurs have had.

The six filmmakers under Waxman's microscope are Quentin Tarantino ("Pulp Fiction", "Kill Bill - Parts 1 and 2"), Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights", "Magnolia"), David Fincher ("Fight Club"), David O. Russell ("Flirting With Disaster", "Three Kings"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation") and Steven Soderbergh ("Traffic", "Erin Brockovich"). Waxman takes an investigative reporter's scalpel to provide a sometimes scathing expose of the directors' intersecting private and professional lives, but it's saved from total tabloid fodder by providing an incisive and rather disheartening look at Hollywood movie deal-making replete with cleverly maneuvered betrayals. What emerges are six men who, despite their obvious talent, come out as ego-driven, socially inept mercenaries, all willing to compromise their integrity and even their families to secure the deal that will make them the center of the independent film scene. Top of the heap despite his spotty box office track record is Tarantino, a one-time video-rental clerk who parlayed his in-depth film trivia knowledge of film into highly stylized films, the most successful being 1994's "Pulp Fiction", probably the touchstone for all other independent films that followed its over $100 million domestic take. But the others, despite critical acclaim and awards, have fared less well financially, proving that these men are not really the rebels who have conquered Hollywood, just survivors of a system that will always view artistic statement as a lower priority than profitability, a major accomplishment in itself if you are to believe the author. If you have any doubts about Hollywood's preoccupation for the bottom line, I suggest you read James Stewart's just released "Disney War" to get validation of the points Waxman raises here.

To her credit, she gives highly detailed, often compelling accounts of how some of their major films were made, in particular, "Boogie Nights", "Three Kings", "Being John Malkovich," and most interestingly, "Fight Club", a movie so desultory to the studio heads that it brought down Fox's Bill Mechanic, who green lighted the film in spite of performing the same task with a little film called "Titanic". In addition to interviews with the six, who are understandably wary of Waxman's book, she has spoken with plenty of colleagues and relations to paint an awfully bleak portrait of the current Hollywood scene. One is left to wonder if the business will allow them any sort of longevity comparable to their predecessors despite their talent.