BY JAKE BROOKS | "I like being in war zones. And
Hollywood is a kind of war zone," joked Sharon Waxman, the boisterous
reporter covering the film beat for The New York Times. A
former Middle East correspondent, Ms. Waxman has some basis for
comparison. "They’re both very challenging, but Hollywood is much more
treacherous for a reporter. Certainly, if you’re a human being trying
to stay alive in the Middle East, that’s a more treacherous place. But
as a reporter, [the Middle East is] much more straightforward."

Currently embedded in a Park City hotel, Ms. Waxman is covering the
Sundance Film Festival for the sixth time in her career. "It kind of
gets bigger and crazier—and more stupid—as the years go by," she said.
This time, however, Ms. Waxman will be adding to the hullabaloo with a
little noise of her own. The release of her first book, Rebels on the Backlot,
about the Gen-X directors who defined 90’s cinema—David O. Russell,
Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, to name a few—was timed to
hit the bookstores on Tuesday, Jan. 25, at the height of this year’s
festival.

"I wanted to know about who they were," she said. "We spend a lot of
time delving into the personal lives of all the movie stars. But
really, when you are talking about films that are so personal in their
vision, you can’t help but wonder from what mind or personality that
piece of work sprang."

  And of course, Ms. Waxman has peppered her ode to the "Wild Ones" behind Pulp Fiction (Mr. Tarantino), Magnolia (Mr. Anderson), Traffic (Steven Soderbergh), ThreeKings (Mr. Russell), BeingJohnMalkovich (Spike Jonze) and Fight Club (David Fincher) with some choice anecdotes and quasi-Freudian observations.

  For example, there’s this on Mr. Anderson: "Once Anderson went on to make Boogie Nights
he tended toward the hard-partying, woman-hopping life led by Quentin
Tarantino, his mentor," she writes. "Cocaine became his drug of choice
because it was better suited to his hard-charging, larger-than-thou ego
and the maw of his artistic need. Russell was strictly a marijuana man,
which was more suited to his neurotic, internal nature."

  Ms. Waxman also delves deep into the psyche of Mr. Fincher, the distorted mind behind Seven and Fight Club, and discovers that his favorite movie is All That Jazz.

"I saw All That Jazz a hundred times," he told Ms. Waxman. "Bob Fosse was one of my favorite filmmakers."

  Given the recent tiff between Ms. Waxman and Mr. Russell over an unflattering Sunday Times article about the making of I § Huckabees, she no longer knows what to expect from her subjects. And in this case, she was dealing with six oversized egos.

"I’ve long since given up trying to predict people’s reactions to
something that’s written about them," she said. "I would be happy to
see any of the directors [at Sundance]. Of course, I would be a little
apprehensive."

  But she does feel sorry about what happened with the Times
piece—sorry that Mr. Russell didn’t understand her intentions, that he
assumed all of her material would be used exclusively in the book.

"I suspect that David, at the end of the process, after having given me
lots and lots of time for the book, may have panicked and thought that
maybe I wasn’t coming from a place of good faith, which of course is
not the case," she said. "Even after I was hurt by him saying some
things in the wake of my writing the Huckabees
story, I didn’t change a word in the book—even though I never would,
obviously. I was disappointed that even in his own mind, after having
spent so much time with me, that he felt that I would have done
anything but give a fair rendering of who he was. He’s an artist ….
He’s a complicated person."

In the end, Ms. Waxman hopes not
to eat her own words. "The truth is that most Hollywood books are
unrepentantly lame," she wrote in a review of Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures.
The book was released several weeks before last year’s festival, and
the tome about the concurrent rise of Sundance and Miramax Pictures
created quite a stir. She explained that most Hollywood books have "a
few racy anecdotes strung together about strategically mentioned movie
stars, along with an explanation of
how-I-ended-up-here-from-my-humble-beginnings."

  Watch out, Ms. Waxman—it’s a battlefield out there. In Hollywood, everyone’s a critic.

You may reach Jake Brooks via email at: jbrooks@observer.com.

BY WENDY SMITH | Want to know which hot young
director prefers which recreational drug? Which one bathes and changes
his clothes so infrequently that he smells bad? Which one hates his
mother? New York Times Hollywood correspondent Sharon Waxman zestfully
provides the answers in her enjoyably dishy book, obviously modeled on
Peter Biskind's bestselling "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." Waxman boasts
the same journalistic chops and slightly nasty tone as Biskind, but
she's working much closer in time to her subject; a bunch of not
necessarily likable rebels and the industry they defied, then redefined
in the 1990s.

She focuses on six directors, also paying due attention to the handful of studio executives who made it
possible for them to play in the big leagues. Quentin Tarantino storms
onto the scene first, which is only fair. The huge commercial success
of "Pulp Fiction" --- 10th-highest grossing movie of 1994, most
profitable independent film ever --- announced that the mainstream was
ready for the fractured narrative structure, stinging satirical humor,
casual violence and obsessive immersion in pop culture that
characterized the work of many young directors.

Steven Soderbergh enters more quietly, although it was his "sex, lies, and
videotape" that put the indie world on Hollywood's corporate radar way
back in 1989. Soderbergh may be "a control maniac among control
maniacs," but he's also the cool, cerebral one who mostly gets along
with the suits and occasionally deigns to make more conventional films,
such as "Out of Sight"' and "Erin Brockovich."

David
O. Russell, who swaggers in next with the incest comedy "Spanking the
Monkey," has a more typical psychological profile. "Infuriatingly
unpredictable, " with "antisocial tendencies," "has many former
friends," Waxman avers. (At least his pals seem to have been jettisoned
for neurotic personal reasons; the author relates many incidents that
bolster longstanding rumors that Tarantino makes professional use of
his buddies, then drops them.)

Russell's dysfunctional relationship with Warner Bros. was more understandable --- the studio
foisted both its hidebound crew and a TV star on him for "Three Kings"
--- though a less confrontational director might have tried a little
harder not to alienate George Clooney.

Few people get to make movies for being nice, especially if they're trying to smash
genre restraints and capture the messiness of modern life, and Waxman
characterizes all of these directors as possessing a firm artistic
self-confidence that's often viewed as arrogance by their corporate
paymasters. But none of the others has quite the sublime hubris as Paul
Thomas Anderson. At 25, he turned his 92-page script for "Hard Eight"
into a 21/2-hour film and refused to change a frame. After "Boogie
Nights" put him and New Line on the map, he got final cut on "Magnolia"
at age 28, telling the executives, "You hired me to be cool. You didn't
hire me to make money." It must be hard to be humble when Brad Pitt
phones your agent and says, "Tell Paul I'll sweep the floors in his
next movie."

Pitt didn't have to sweep floors for David Fincher on "Fight Club," but having a bankable star did little to soothe Fox's anxiety over a brutally violent movie that blisteringly
satirized America's consumer culture. Fincher, an exacting
perfectionist who did things his way or not at all, wasn't about to
compromise. "The budget is what it is," he said to producer Arnon
Milchan when told he had to cut $ 5 million from it. Waxman seems to
admire such intransigence, although her depiction of Fincher as bitter
and demanding, "with a little bit of a mean streak," has the same edge
as the rest of her portraits.

The only one she seems to really like is Spike Jonze, who got off-the-wall films like "Being
John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" made by charming collaborators with
his "We Can Do This vibe" and the relaxed atmosphere he created on the
set. Mind you, the author suggests this sweetness is a ploy, via a
quote from Steve Golin, then of Propaganda Films: "Spike has a very
childlike manner. But he's clever as a fox. Some of it may be an act."

Tracing her subjects' occasionally intertwined odysseys through the 1990s,
Waxman finds some interesting similarities. None of them went to film
school, and few attended college; Tarantino dropped out of high school.
Jonze, "ignorant of all history before Generation X, and proud of it,"
is only the most openly unintellectual of a group too driven and
self-motivated to waste time on formal education. In marked contrast
with the visionary directors of the 1970s they self-consciously
emulated, they tried to keep their bad habits, if not their raging
egos, out of the newspapers. They had absolutely no interest in
tailoring their work to suit the demands of an industry that had only
grown more rigid and bottom-line focused since Coppola, Scorsese, et
al., butted heads with it in the '70s.

When Biskind profiled that earlier generation of mavericks, 20 years' distance gave
a book no better written or reported than this one greater historical
resonance and a stronger impact on the general public. Waxman's work
seems more tentative: despite her subtitle, she comes to no final
conclusions about whether any artist can survive the studio system's
interfering embrace. But against the widget-makers, she counterposes
the rebel directors' sense of belonging to the decades-long saga of
"the struggle for auteur filmmaking within the American cine-culture,"
as Soderbergh puts it.

The irony of this comment, coming from someone whose most recent movie was "Ocean's Twelve," is only appropriate.