The revolution that failed

Quentin Tarantino and the indie rebels who followed him changed Hollywood in the '90s -- but in the end, Hollywood also changed them.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Jan. 26, 2005 | Talent isn't democratic and doesn't play fair. That's one of the things we already know about human existence -- after all, van Gogh was an insufferable pill and Picasso an egomaniacal womanizer -- but we keep trying to convince ourselves it isn't true. Certainly the lesson is driven home again and again in "Rebels on the Backlot," Sharon Waxman's admirably reported chronicle of the 1990s' indie-film wars that changed the culture of Hollywood, at least temporarily.

The more talented the young (or youngish) directors Waxman profiles are, it seems, the more obnoxious they are. Quentin Tarantino comes off as a ruthless social climber who has dropped all the friends who helped him when he was a struggling nobody, and won't take calls from his own mother. David O. Russell has infamously poor social skills, picks meaningless fights and is gratuitously mean to crew members on his shoots. Paul Thomas Anderson is a fathead control freak who treats any suggestion or criticism as an insult to his masterly creative vision.

Spike Jonze, while not as cantankerous as those three, comes off as an immature, insecure skate-punk prankster with little intellectual curiosity and a blissful ignorance of pre-"Star Wars" culture. This may be why his movies, "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," seem so original -- he isn't imitating classic films of the past because he's never even seen them. Waxman reports that one day on the set of the former film Jonze took Malkovich aside to tell him he was overacting a scene. "I was getting a little Blanche there, wasn't I?" the star agreed. Jonze looked puzzled. "Blanche Dubois," responded Malkovich. "Tennessee Williams? 'A Streetcar Named Desire'? Blanche Dubois?" Jonze could only shrug; he had no idea what Malkovich was talking about. "What did you get me into?" Malkovich moaned to producer Steve Golin, who could only respond, "At least it won't be derivative."

The only filmmaker in Waxman's book who seems to be a truly smart and likable guy (and yes, they're all guys) is Steven Soderbergh. Is it an accident that Soderbergh (to my way of thinking) never had half the raw visionary talent of those other three, and looks more and more, at this point in his career, like an amiable, slightly eccentric Hollywood craftsman in the vein of Sydney Pollack or John Schlesinger? Soderbergh's unlikely rise-and-fall-and-rise saga -- from the early indie hit "sex, lies, and videotape" in 1989 to the total obscurity of "Kafka" and "Schizopolis" to his resurrection with "Out of Sight" and "Erin Brockovich" -- is a heartwarming tale set in a realm of ruthlessness, and he's stayed commendably loyal to his old film-student pals from Baton Rouge, La., several of whom still work for him. Furthermore, he's used his success to help produce breakthrough films by others, especially Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven" and George Clooney's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind."

None of that, sadly, makes me want to rush out and see the earnest, turgid "Traffic" again. Soderbergh's movies, with rare exceptions (I was one of the six people who actually liked his remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris"), are exactly what they appear to be on the surface; they're the late-night TV wallpaper of the future. Whereas I feel confident that the next time I see "Jackie Brown" or "Magnolia" or "Three Kings," I'll notice something I didn't see before, and my sense of the movie and its meaning and exactly where it sits in my head will shift at least a little.

These ruminations are outside the scope of Waxman's book, and I suspect she wouldn't agree with me anyway. Her blow-by-blow account of the making of "Traffic" suggests that she sees that movie, as many Hollywood people did at the time, as a worthy attempt to bring the indie-film aesthetic into the mainstream and to engage thorny social issues in a pop-culture context. (To which I'd say, sure, but HBO's "The Wire" has engaged the drug war in a vastly more interesting way.) But while Waxman never conceals her own tastes and sympathies, she's a reporter to the core, and like all good reporting "Rebels on the Backlot" ultimately opens up its subject for debate and leaves the final verdict to the reader.

In addition to the six directors she focuses on -- the one I haven't mentioned, half-deliberately, is David Fincher -- Waxman has interviewed dozens of friends, family members, actors, crew members, production executives and so on. Her goal is an almost archaeological reconstruction of the independent film boom of 1994 to 2000, beginning with Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and culminating, more or less, with Fincher's "Fight Club" and Soderbergh's "Traffic."

It's an era that, for better or worse, is now in the past: The once-rebellious indie spirit seems almost as remote from the mainstream movie biz today as it did 15 years ago. (Consider the two "independent" films up for Oscars this year, "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland"; whatever their merits may be, they're about as threatening and confrontational as a glass of milk before bedtime.) Despite her book's subtitle (which to any indie-film fan sounds suspiciously like a post-production decision by the marketing department), "Rebels on the Backlot" is less the story of how Tarantino and those who followed him conquered Hollywood than of how Hollywood conquered them, or, perhaps more accurately, how the two forces fought each other to a stalemate.

Waxman isn't a film critic or a film scholar; she's an exceptionally well-connected Hollywood reporter for the New York Times (and, earlier, for the Washington Post). So some hardcore movie geeks may be driven mad by her perceived oversights. She gives only the briefest of nods to the first-wave indie filmmakers of the '80s, most notably Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch, without whom (as Tarantino, et al., would gratefully acknowledge) none of this would have been possible. She has a tendency to pile up forensic detail in her eagerness to reconstruct the precise dimensions of a movie deal; one tense negotiation over a star's reduced salary in the backroom of a Melrose Avenue bistro tends to blend into the next.

Next page: Tarantino himself, as Waxman only incompletely realizes, seemed strikingly ambivalent about his own revolutionary role