Customer Reviews

Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

I was going to write exactly what reviewer Howard Lamp has already commented on, so I encourage anyone planning on reading this book to consider Lamp's comments. If we can catch these rather larger errors in Waxman's book, why couldn't the people who were paid to catch them? And what about the author?

For what it's worth, the book also features many grammatical errors.

Ahhh the 90's...Going to the movies became a whole other experience. Just as directors of the 70's and 80's left their mark as groundbreaking filmmakers with new and innovative techniques, so these rebels of the 90's gave us new experiences on the big screen to awe us to delight. Although there were many that could be talked about for decades to come, "Rebels On The Backlot" by Sharon Waxman tells us the story of six of the most rebellious of the bunch. Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, David Fincher, and Spike Jonze. What a group!

The subtitle of this book, 'Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered Hollywood Studio System' is the focus of this book, and the story is not always pretty. Waxman goes into some depth into the making of such films as "Boogie Nights", "Pulp Fiction", "Traffic", "Three Kings", "Fight Club", and "Being John Malkovich" among some others by these now famous, but once struggling filmmakers. They were not always likable lads, often more like spoiled and thoughtless prima donnas alienating many around them, but one thing is for sure, they were geniuses with great visions, visions they wanted done their own way not chopped and edited or rewritten by those who thought they knew better. The big studios often scoffed at their ideas, saying audiences just couldn't handle the films these artists envisioned, the independents caught on but couldn't always afford the high price it would take to create their masterpieces. So these six were often left to deal with the big studios, which was often like a war.

Waxman begins at the beginning. Each director's life from childhood and the effects it had on their filmmaking is delved into. Their early beginnings in the industry,trying to get a script noticed, attending the film festivals, the fights on and off the set(Russsell and George Clooney actually duked it out on the set of Three Kings),the frustration of not being understood,the long road to seeing their visions completed(often asking for things in their contracts that the biggest of the big didn't even get, like final cut), their rise to fame and reactions from both the critics and the filmgoers. She leaves no stone unturned, often revealing some very personal information, all very well researched and with the cooperation of the directors themselves, and including lots of great quotes as well.

It's a well written, extremely detailed, and enthralling read for fans. Told in chronological order so that each chapter records the progress of each film. Also included is a picture section, a P.S. section with insights, interviews and even letters written to Russell by George Clooney, and a nice time line. Although there were a couple of times where I felt the Author injected her own very opinionated points - and not always agreeing, it kind of put me off at first - I still found this book to be a fascinating page-turner and a must read for fans and aspiring filmmakers alike. One that gives a truly up close, behind the scenes, and very personal look at some of our favorites that moved filmmaking into the 21st century.

4.5 stars for making me want to view these films all over again(and again)...enjoy the read...Laurie

also recommended:
Kieslowski on Kieslowski
Hitchcock's Notebooks: An Authorized And Illustrated Look Inside The Creative Mind Of Alfred Hitchcock

While, by my definition, the directors here can hardly be considered rebellious, in Hollywood terms they certainly are. All fought the Hollywood machine. A machine that retreats from creativity, controversy and originality, always seeking the middle ground and, ultimately (all they really care about), profit. I was by no means an admirer of all the films here, but so fascinating are the accounts of their journey from idea to screen that I watched the films again in order to view them in a new light. This is an exhaustively researched and entertaining book. It's also full of juicy anecdotes and gossip (probably scurrilous). I think anyone interested in films and their tortuous journey to the cinema will enjoy it.

Sharon Waxman delves into the lives of six men who have made headlines and redefined the way studios treat directors. Overall, what makes this book fascinating are the delicious details of personal lives and the on-the-set antics. However, what fail to shine is the actual writing. Waxman labors the half-baked introduction with lists of the directors' biographical landmarks that fail to make a point. The conclusion also feels rushed and bases her views of success on merely financial results (She dismisses "Punch-Drunk Love" as a failure for P.T. Anderson. He won Best Director for the film at both Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals.)I would still contest that this is a great read for those who have been captivated by these "rebels" and their extraordinary films, but if one is looking for any depth of analysis or crafted prose, look elsewhere.

Waxman's book makes one wonder if she really writes for the New York Times. Any amateur film geek who's actually seen the films she writes about will find multiple errors, strange, unsupported statements, poorly written and edited sentences, and could probably write a better book themselves in short order.

That said, Waxman's interviews do give her a point of view on her six main subjects which is interesting, and some of the gossip is compelling. Waxman badly needs an editor. She thanks one in the acknowledgments, so apparently someone held the title, but no one much seems to have performed the function. Had a good editor got hold of this manuscript, it might seem less like it was written in crayon in a big hurry. Which is a shame, because it does have its moments, a few revelations, and a driving narrative. But too much takes away from these strengths to recommend the book highly.

I tore through this book, enjoying it thoroughly. It's a quick entertaining read, and seems to reveal a lot about the craziness of trying to manage a directing career.

However, there's also a really shoddy first-draft feel to the book. The irony is Waxman is a New York Times writer, and the book is filled with passages that would embarrass the paper. Example- "The question of Tarantino's ability to write without the support of a partner became a real question over the years." Oy vey!

The factual errors also make me wonder how much of these stories I can take at face value. She briefly mentions Wes Anderson's first film, Bottle Rocket, early in the book and then later calls Rushmore his first film. She misidentifies Erika Christensen as Julia Stiles in Traffic. She reports that David Russell used a real corpse for a shot of a bullet entering a body in Three Kings when it's been reported widely that this story was a misunderstanding of a joke that Russell had made and a dummy was actually used. These are just the ones that I (not a film industry person) caught.

That said, I recommend it to wannabe film directors as a fun set of stories that may inspire you or may revulse you to the business altogether.

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.

The 1970's are now considered to be a Golden Age for American cinema, a time when directors, screenwriters and other creative personal called the shots on how studio films were made, a time when films challenged audiences, acutely reflected the darkness of modern culture. Hollywood's "auteur-era" imploded at the tail end of the decade, with its rebels - Scorsese, Coppola, Altman et al - lost in a black hole of cocaine synapse-burn, egoism and uncontrolled expenditure, a disastrous event-horizon that peaked with the 1980 release of *Heaven's Gate*, Michael Cimino's wildly over-budgeted mess that nearly bankrupted United Artists. This, along with the advent of the summer blockbuster as epitomized by *Jaws* and *Star Wars*, signaled a bottom-line-oriented revolution in the studio system. Number-crunching executives emerged to regain the mantel of power, dictating the method of the entertainment business as profit-margin first, artistic expression a distant second. The calculated blockbusters of the 1980's reflect this transition, the emphasis on big stars, big explosions, feel-good vibes and/or tear-jerking manipulation dominating nearly all of the flagship titles of the decade.

Eventually this profit-margin formula became stale, toothless in its demographic estimations; and beneath the stagnant scum-crust of the "mainstream" there began to thrive a new, angry generation of filmmakers, auteur-initiates pushing the envelope. These films reveled in violence, sex, drugs and other taboo subjects; they criticized the mentality of capitalist America, exposing the contradictions and deep hypocrisies fueling its consumer-ethic. Typically, the same studio executives responsible for propagating the 80's attitudes instantly sought to benefit from this disruptive new voice of cinema, making superstars of the auteur, capturing their caustic visions on celluloid while keeping the keys of ~carte blanche~ firmly above reach: the lessons of the 1970's had not been forgotten.

Susan Waxman's chronicles this turbulent era in *Rebels on the Backlot,* a tale of six maverick directors gleefully subverting the Hollywood paradigm, of the suits struggling to maintain the blockbuster status-quo, and of the resultant art that came about, by hook or by crook. In tone and style this book resembles Peter Biskind's classic deconstruction of 70's cinema, *Easy Riders, Raging Bulls*, consisting of equal part in-depth examination and tabloid-level gossip.

The directors:

TARANTINO: Pop-culture synthesist, blatant plagiarist, hygienically challenged: cinema autodidact Quentin Tarantino kick-started the new renaissance with his 1994 neo-noir masterpiece *Pulp Fiction.* A man-child motor-mouth and television addict, Tarantino combined his instincts for drama - and his serial theft of other people's work - to shape the gunshot heard around the world, muffled (barely) between Biblical quotes and McDonalds musings. Quick to drop his old collaborators for the star-shine of Hollywood, Tarantino then regressed into a pot-hazed period of unproductive ambivalence, secretly tormented by his inability to come up with a single original idea.

SODERBERGH: The Yin to Tarantino's Yang, Steven Soderbergh exploded with 1989's *sex, lies and videotape*, then spent many years afterward on a downward trajectory, yearning for the free-wheeling spirit of the independent sphere, making a host of obtuse 'personal' films before successfully combining his independent streak with the mainstream in 1999's drug war epic *Traffic*. Soderbergh's story is that of the truly gifted auteur trapped in a cycle of self-sabotage, emerging victorious only after a long, bitter fight.

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: Porn-lover PTA put his heart (and everything else) on the screen with his San Fernando Valley epics *Boogie Nights* and *Magnolia.* Evoking comparisons to Scorsese and Altman, Anderson certainly had something to say - the fact that he took so long to say it, and did so in such a bombastic way, had New Line executives tearing out their hair trying to make his message palatable to a wide audience. No luck so far...

O'RUSSEL: Idiosyncratic and controlling, David O'Russel mined darkly comical material from the trauma of his wealthy east-coast childhood, and eventually came to make Hollywood's first critical take on the Gulf War with *Three Kings.* Tensions flared between the director and George Clooney, climaxing with fisticuffs in the Arizona desert and a long-standing feud after the film's release. Waxman obviously thinks highly of O'Russel's talent (more than I do, certainly), and a large part of the book is devoted to this socially-inept director.

FINCHER: The heart of darkness over at Fox Studios, David Fincher took Chuck Palahniuk's *Fight Club* and, for once in a blue moon, managed to make a film superior to the source text. A biting satire of consumerism/fascism, *Fight Club* was despised by Fox's suits and marketers and infuriated conservative honcho Rupert Murdoch; the press, just as clueless as to the film's intentions, savaged it upon release. And yet *Fight Club* is now one of the great DVD successes, having found its audience among the young and restless whom identify with Tyler Durden, or at least with what he had to say...

JONZE: A self-taught upstart from MTV, Spike Jonze slipped through the cracks to make one of Hollywood's strangest marquee flicks: the brilliant *Being John Malcovitz*, a film that would have never seen the light of day if not for the perseverance of Jonze and a studio hand-over.

As in *Easy Riders, Raging Bulls*, Waxman ends her thesis with a recount of "where are they now" - a conclusion marred by the fact that this book is only five years down the road from the peak-year of 1999. In fact, *Rebels on the Backlot* is basically a much slighter version of that chronicle: for though it is written and sequenced in the same way, the narrow focus hardly paints an adequate picture of 90's cinema. Spike Lee, Richard Linkleter and Peter Jackson are hardly mentioned; Gus Van Zant is totally missing; the Wachoski Bros, Wes Anderson, David Aronofsky, Sam Mendes and Alexander Payne and are given sketchy-at-best accounts. Several of the above listed created far more influential and brain-bending films, IMO, than O'Russel or PTA. Still, for an amusing, gossipy, and occasionally insightful glimpse into the better cinema of mid-to-late 90's, *Rebels on the Backlot* serves its purpose.