SIX MAVERICK DIRECTORS DEFY HOLLYWOOD CONVENTION TO DO THINGS THEIR OWN WAY
BY RENE RODRIGUEZ | Most any film buff will concur that the 1970s marked the last great era of
American movies, thanks to the sheer number of talented filmmakers --
Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman,
William Friedkin and Brian De Palma, among others -- who either began
their careers or established a position of power within Hollywood at
that time.
It's too early to tell whether the surge oficonoclastic filmmakers who invaded the studio system in the 1990s will
go down as another golden chapter in Hollywood history. But Sharon
Waxman's book Rebels on the Backlot, which focuses on six directors who
rose to prominence during that decade, argues that the battle between
unbridled creativity and the business end of Hollywood remains as
heated today as it did when Coppola narrowly avoided getting fired by
Paramount Pictures during the filming of The Godfather.
Waxman, a former entertainment reporter for The Washington Post now writing for
The New York Times, is known for her tough, skeptical view of Hollywood
and her thorough, scrupulously researched stories. Both qualities are
abundant in this addictively readable book, which alternates between
less-than-fawning profiles of Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh,
David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell and Spike Jonze,
and the stories behind the making of their best-known films.
To varying degrees, all were battles of one sort or another, and Waxman's
blow-by-blow accounts are filled with the sort of gossipy tidbits that
have become a requisite of insider-Hollywood books, whether she's
writing about Russell and George Clooney coming to blows on the set of
Three Kings, Tarantino threatening collaborator Roger Avary to give him
sole screenwriting credit on Pulp Fiction, or Anderson pitching temper
tantrums when New Line Cinema executives asked him to trim his three
hour-plus drama Magnolia.
Perhaps the most momentous struggle of all was Fincher's attempt to make the deeply subversive
Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, at a mainstream
studio for a budget of $62 million. Waxman's fascinating account of how
and why the movie got made is an excellent primer on the uneasy
relationship between art and commerce within the studio system.
There were times during Fight Club's production that Fincher seemed to be
embodying the anarchist spirit of Tyler Durden, the character played in
the film by Brad Pitt. When executives complained about the movie's
violence, Fincher gave them more, not less. When his producer begged
him to change a potentially offensive dialogue spoken by co-star Helena
Bonham Carter, Fincher replaced it with even more disturbing lines.
And even as the shockwaves of the Columbine High School shootings forced
20th Century Fox to postpone the film's release, Fincher not only
persevered in staying true to his apocalyptic vision, but also
succeeded in getting a wide theatrical release for the aggressively
uncommercial movie.
