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

by Sharon Waxman (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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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