About book Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors And How They Conquered The Hollywood Studio System (2006)
Late in the summer of '99 I was dumped by my first girlfriend in a cabin somewhere in the mountains of Montana. Earlier that spring, RUSHMORE hit local screens. I fell in love with it. Actually love is too weak a word for what I felt, I was in lurve with RUSHMORE. I ended up seeing the film five times during its run, and bought the soundtrack the day it was available. Between RUSHMORE and the cabin in Montana: MATRIX, EXISTENZ, ELECTION, THE WINSLOW BOY, SOUTH PARK, LIMBO, AMERICAN PIE, EYES WIDE SHUT, similarly made a lasting impression on me. Additionally, even though the anticipation was inversely proportionate to the quality of the film, I can't deny that the excitement of THE PHANTOM MENACE was a large thread woven into my cinematic tapestry of '99. All this is to say that B.C. (Before Cabin) I had that tapestry hanging on the wall, and was enraptured by its beauty. A.D. (After Dumped) I ripped that tapestry down and wrapped myself up in it. I had no friends or family to turn to, so while sitting in that cabin, dumped, far away from the nearest theater, I listened to the RUSHMORE soundtrack on repeat. The movies were there for me when no one else could be. When I got home the cinema, the only God I've ever truly believed in, came through for me. She rewarded my life long devotion with THREE KINGS, AMERICAN BEAUTY, FIGHT CLUB,COOKIE'S FORTUNE, THE INSIDER, BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, THE LIMEY, THE STRAIGHT STORY, RUN LOLA RUN, SLEEPY HOLLOW, PRINCESS MONONOKE THE IRON GIANT, TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, CRADLE WILL ROCK, TOPSY TURVY, TOY STORY 2, and MAGNOLIA. While I can now look at each of these films with a more critical eye, at the time, I embraced them all as great, most as transcendent, and a few as revolutionary. In REBELS ON THE BACKLOT, Sharon Waxman captures the dizzying sense of enthusiasm I felt at the dusk of the 20th century. The century of cinema. Her exploration of 90's auteurs was like reading a biography of my best friend, to the point of wincing at the revealed flaws because I KNOW the meaning and reasons of those flaws. While it is certainly not deserving of the four stars I'm giving it, the perspective and memories it engendered made it feel intimately personal. And, just as I was far too forgiving of some of the aforementioned A.D. films' flaws, I can't help but extend the same courtesy to REBELS ON THE BACKLOT. (I won't even get started on how seminal to my cinephilia Tarantino was. That's an even longer, more personal narrative than this has been.)
I just finished this book, loaned to me by a friend, thanks primarily to last weekend's "icepocalypse." It's about six "rebel" film directors from the worlds of indy movies, music videos, and advertising, all of whom got a chance to make movies for Hollywood studios eager to capitalize on those directors' edginess back in the 1990s. The result, unsurprisingly, was culture clash. The spotlighted directors are Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, and Spike Jonze. The first third of the book moves very quickly through the first half of the '90s, with a heavy emphasis on Tarantino, before shifting focus to the making of the movies Boogie Nights, Traffic, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, and Three Kings. The author does a good job of profiling the directors, some of whom are very idiosyncratic and some of whom are just jerks, and of providing a look at how movies get green-lighted and made. The writing is serviceable, but the book was obviously written out of order and stitched together afterward, and the seams sometimes show. I'm sure this was due to the fact that she had to rely so heavily on interviews with her six subjects and others in the movie business, which were not always easy to get. But the book sometimes felt disjointed, and I had more than a few deja vu moments where I read something I knew she had already written about elsewhere. Still, as someone who saw most of these movies when they came out and remembers the decade very well, I appreciated how the book brought the era into sharper focus and made me realize how these directors and these movies were part of a trend or movement, more so than I did at the time. The title is a bit of a misnomer, though. These directors did get the movies they wanted made from within the system, but her conclusion gives the impression that after these movies came out, the studios "conquered" the directors, not the other way around.
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I felt the scope of this was too broad for any sort of real depth or insight. It's worth a look for anyone interested in the work of Fincher, Jonze, Russell, Tarantino, Soderbergh, or Anderson. I found the sections of Fincher and Anderson to be the most illuminating. The Tarantino stuff certainly had a negative spin to it and told me nothing I didn't already know from other books. A book that takes a similar approach to a different period (the seventies) and is far more effective is Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls."
—John Leach
