NOT ALL OF THE MAVERICK DIRECTORS WHO SUCCEEDED IN the 1990s were as quick to cast off their old friends. Steven Soderbergh, who rose to fame precipitously in 1989 with his indie hit sex, lies, and videotape, remained tight with the same small group he met as a teenager at Louisiana State University. He first started taking classes when he was thirteen years old because his father was a professor there and Soderbergh had a precocious mind. Larry Blake, one of the handful of friends who made Super 8 films with Soderbergh and worshipped film teacher Michael McCallum, became the sound editor on almost every film Soderbergh has made. Paul Ledford, another member of the group, has been the sound mixer on most of Soderbergh’s movies. John Hardy, who first employed Soderbergh to shoot commercials for his agency in Baton Rouge, was repaid for his efforts by producing most of Soderbergh’s movies, from sex, lies, and videotape through Ocean’s Twelve.
This kind of loyalty was not that simple when working within Hollywood’s huge studio system, which Soderbergh did by the latter part of the nineties. The studios had habits, unions, and crew members they liked to use, and often it would have been easier to choose the path of least resistance and sign on with the studio’s crews. But Soderbergh didn’t; he worked with the tight group that knew him best. Oddly, he was the youngest of his friends by far, and the only star among them. But his rise to success never seemed to change the way he approached those he knew longest, nor did it bother his longtime friends who to this day are unswervingly loyal to him.
That said, Soderbergh had more in common with Tarantino when it came to women. Neither seemed to be able to sustain relationships with the opposite sex. Though two men could not be more different—with Soderbergh the articulate intellectual dealing with emotions in distant, muted ways, versus Tarantino, the raucous motormouth who carelessly spilled his life and his emotions into the public domain—they both had trouble with intimacy. Tarantino fell in love with a quiet young woman, Grace Lovelace, who he met at Video Archives, and where he got her a job. She was studying to be an English teacher and she remains—according to many who know him—the true love of his life. The relationship lasted just a couple of years before Lovelace left him. She came back into his life later, but she was not suited to Hollywood, and Tarantino was not suited to long-term commitment. Tarantino went on to be a serial dater of his leading ladies or his producer or the starlet of the moment. Lovelace got her doctorate in English from UC Irvine, ending up a professor and married to someone else.
Soderbergh tried repeatedly but seemed similarly unable to commit. In 1989 he married Betsy Brantley, an actress seven years his senior. It didn’t last, nor had most of his other attempts at intimacy with a female partner. Even so, they had broken up twice during their courtship. Some women felt Soderbergh was married to his work. Others saw him as James Spader’s character in sex, lies, and videotape, who could enjoy sex with women only through the distance of the camera’s eye. That seemed to tell women all they needed to know about Soderbergh’s capacity for intimacy.
BETSY BRANTLEY WAS A SOUTHERNER, BORN AND RAISED IN traditional North Carolina. After college in North Carolina she headed to England, where she studied drama at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and then stayed for eleven years. She married a British actor briefly, divorced after a year, and at age thirty-two decided to head back home to build an acting career.
She met fellow Southerner Steven Soderbergh in Los Angeles through a fluke. Soderbergh was attracted to Brantley’s twin sister who had been driving a bus at the Sundance Film Festival; she told him she wasn’t available but that she had a twin sister. Before Brantley Soderbergh had had a couple of other girlfriends, including one in New York while he was shooting Super 8 films and shorts. She was from Baton Rouge and had gone to Manhattan to become an opera singer. Despite the age difference, Soderbergh and Brantley connected on many levels, including their love for drama and their Southern discomfort in Los Angeles. In the space of a year they married and the following year had a daughter, named Sarah. This was in the middle of Soderbergh’s overnight rise to media stardom.
But the marriage was stormy from the start. Soderbergh, even by his own account, was not ready for anything close to a deep commitment. In his own words, “I didn’t know how to behave in a normal relationship. How to be considerate, compassionate, empathetic, stable. I hid. I was hiding what I was really thinking.”
They’d argue, and Brantley would say, “Is anything wrong?”
Soderbergh would say, “No.” Heavy pause. “Why do you ask?”
“We had ten thousand of those conversations. And then one day you go: ‘I’m leaving.’ That’s how I dealt with problems. I always left. Before they left.” It’s how he’d handled relationships before, but now he was married and had a child. “My way was to withdraw when I began to start feeling weird or out of sync or upset. Now I make a point of saying something about it.” But in his marriage, “I didn’t talk. I can’t even accurately judge the relative merits of the relationship in any objective way, because I did not communicate with my wife.”
He later said: “I was not in control of my emotional life. And I didn’t know why.”
Soderbergh would leave, then return. Then he’d run away again. He was fleeing Hollywood, too. “My work was suffering from the same problem,” he acknowledged. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of the Hollywood system—in fact he was pretty sure he didn’t. At the same time, fame beckoned in the wake of sex, lies, and videotape. He could do anything he pleased.
But Soderbergh was fairly certain that staying in Hollywood would poison his artistry. And he was certain he did not have to live in Los Angeles to make his movies. He’d constantly say, “With a phone, a fax, and FedEx we can live anywhere,” Brantley recalled. The couple bought an old farmhouse in horse country in Somerset, Virginia, when Soderbergh briefly planned to make Charlottesville his filmmaking base. He kept a flatbed editing suite in the smokehouse, looking to become a gentleman filmmaker.
Why Charlottesville? It was the place where the director had the most happy memories. As a child, his father was the head of the university writing department here, while the young Steven pitched no-hitters for a local baseball team. Moving to Charlottesville was a conscious—or maybe subconscious—attempt to recapture a happy moment of his youth. “The whole idea at the time was that Hollywood was the last thing he wanted to be,” said David Jensen, who has known Soderbergh since Louisiana State University. “He wanted to be an independent filmmaker. If Steve hadn’t hit that wave with sex, lies and videotape, he would have been a great filmmaker doing something else.” Ultimately, though, Soderbergh spent very little time at the farm.
In the meantime, he and Brantley were unhappy in Los Angeles, with Sarah attending an upscale private school on the West Side of town.
Brantley chose not to act in Soderbergh’s films during their marriage but continued to pursue her acting career, landing a small part in Robert Redford’s calamitous flop Havana. At the time, Redford was producing Soderbergh’s next film, Kafka, which did not turn out any happier. Brantley, who does not suffer fools or movie stars gladly, had chilly relations with the charismatic Redford. He would come to the set and feign humility, telling her, “Have Steven call me.” Brantley finally snapped back: “Here’s his phone number. He’s home writing. Call him.” Redford avoided her after that.
But back home with Soderbergh, tensions continued. Recalls Brantley: “I’d done all my traveling, I’d done enough work. I was happy to have a family, live on a farm.” She was thirty-five years old when she married Soderbergh, and she’d been divorced once before. Soderbergh, then twenty-eight, wasn’t willing to settle down; his career was just taking off—and it was a good excuse for him to avoid his crumbling marriage. He left a lot.
Not that Soderbergh denied his inability to open up. He told one interviewer about a later relationship that wasn’t working: “I tried to go into therapy, and it was a mess. I lied to my therapist. I went to three sessions and wa
lked in one day and said, ‘Look, I’ve got a handle on this. I’m making real progress, and I feel really good about myself.’ I mean, I just lied my ass off.”
In his revealing book, Getting Away with It, Soderbergh makes this introspective outline of his approach to the opposite sex:
The author’s “relationships” follow this pattern: 1. Extreme infatuaton with a person the author has no current relationship with, or better yet, used to have a relationship with; 2. Relentless pursuit of object of infatuation…; 3. Sexual intercourse with object of infatuation (this occurs in approx 3 percent of the cases studied); 4. Two or three weeks pass, during which the author may or may not continue to have intercourse with the object of infatuation…; 5. Heartfelt “confession” by the author to object of infatuation that he is attempting to fill an infinite space with a finite element (in this case, a human being), which is futile, since the space to be filled was created by the author for his sole amusement…;6. Relationship with object of infatuation terminates, with the author, in between expressions of extreme remorse, trying to squeeze in a Good-bye Fuck.
After they split up, Brantley fled back to London, where she felt comfortable. They finally divorced in 1993. But by the mid-1990s, she had to make a decision: either return to the farm or sell it. She couldn’t afford to maintain her life in England and keep the Somerset property. So she came home, and stayed.
The last gasp of Soderbergh’s marriage to Brantley was on the bizarrely personal Schizopolis, the only time Brantley acted in front of Soderbergh’s camera. She played the wife and he played the husband. Sarah, aged five and Soderbergh’s spitting image, played the daughter. Soderbergh said the purpose of the film was to find closure to their painful episode. Brantley had another motive. “When we split up, I thought it would be interesting to see if he had a different personality as a director than as a husband,” she said. “I read later where he said he made the movie to see if there was still something there, but that had nothing to do with my motivation.”
For Brantley, acting was about uncovering what was underneath the surface. Soderbergh was still struggling, ever struggling, to get to that place. He was so good at the glib, surface-level matters of filmmaking that it was hard—as he had in sex, lies, and videotape—to make it deeper, and personal.
As for whether anything was different in the two Soderberghs, she said, “Ultimately no. But it gave me closure.”
Au Revoir Les Enfants
Tarantino did have one early friendship that seemed to last. His bond with Roger Avary seemed sacrosanct. For a time, they had friendship, partnership, synchronicity, a unique collaboration. In the late 1980s they starved together. Scraping around for movie jobs, Tarantino and Avary took all kinds of odd Hollywood work in addition to their gig at the video store and trying to get a movie going. In 1987 they were were hired as production assistants on such low-rent fare as the Dolph Lundgren: Maximum Potential exercise video. Tarantino so annoyed the producers by knocking over nightstands and constantly babbling that he nearly got fired. Avary quit after the producer recommended that he follow his dream to write and direct.
Mostly, though, they worked in tandem on movies; Avary might give Tarantino a script, and Tarantino would return with it a month later, having created his own version of it, scrawled on bits of paper. Many ideas that started in early experimental scripts would turn up in their later work, Avary’s Killing Zoe and Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers. At one point Avary and Tarantino took out an ad in the National Enquirer. “Invest in Motion Pictures,” complete with a profit-projecting pie chart, that failed to lure investors to True Romance.
Often it was hard to tell where Avary started and Tarantino ended.
“When I met Roger, it was very weird; it was as if he and Quentin were twins, just one blond and one with dark hair,” said Scott Spiegel, who befriended Tarantino in the early nineties. “The same staccato way of talking, same cannonball energy, the same mannerisms. It was really strange.”
According to Avary, Tarantino’s True Romance is based on an eighty-page script he wrote called The Open Road. Tarantino took that script and synthesized it with his own material, Avary says. According to Tarantino, Avary was the first person to ever read True Romance, which he described as “handwritten, five hundred pages, held together by a rubber band in a folder.” When the script ran into trouble, Avary did several rewrites. Said Tarantino. “He gave me little notes on it he wrote in red pen. It was like, you know, Roger got me. He was invigorated by my writing, and I was invigorated by his. I was very excited and inspired by his writing, because we seemed to be similar. We were kind of coming from the same place.” Then there was the ending. Tony Scott, who directed the film, called Tarantino to rewrite the ending. Scott told him. “You can’t shoot a $50 million movie and have everyone die at the end.”
Tarantino told him: “Go fuck yourself, you paid for it, you rewrite it.”
Avary rewrote the ending to True Romance, by using the same ending of The Open Road, which he would do again with Killing Zoe. (Open Road has apparently been cannibalized throughout the Avary and Tarantino canon.) For his efforts, Avary got no more than a “special thanks” in the end credits of True Romance. This was the beginning of tensions between the two friends that would worsen with time.
Cathryn Jaymes, manager for both Tarantino and Avary, believes Tarantino’s talent has never been in originating ideas; instead it resides in his ability to refine and synthesize the ideas of others.
“Quentin is extraordinary at homage,” she observed years later. “He pays homage to other people’s words and visions. He can retool other words, put it to his own pentameter, bring his own voice. Quentin can take the material on the page, or on the screen, and pump a whole new perspective into it. He can tell it in a new way. He doesn’t mimic people.” For Jaymes, like for critics and fans, Tarantino’s ability to synthesize the culture was entirely unique, and more than enough to be thankful for in a movie world dominated by studio pap. But it wasn’t enough for Tarantino. He didn’t want his audience to know that it didn’t all flow seamlessly from his own pen.
Cathryn Jaymes had taken Hamann on as an actor client after he worked in her office as a secretarial assistant, among his other jobs. One day in the mid-1980s he brought his friend Tarantino around to her office.
At the time, Tarantino didn’t have much to recommend him; he was an aspiring actor but not exactly a kid at age twenty-five. He had no credits, no acting reel.
But he definitely had something. He walked into Jaymes’s live-in office in a ripped T-shirt and jeans, with his hangdog shuffle, and he did the quintessential Quentin performance, spouting stream-of-consciousness movie ideas, holding forth passionately about his favorite movies, about his plans to act and make movies himself. He was funny, gregarious, charming—and engagingly manic. Jaymes, then thirty-four years old, loved him immediately and at the end of the meeting said simply: “I have no doubt you will become a major force in the industry.” She signed him.
Later she recalled, “I wasn’t sure what he had but he was so charming. He was this compelling oddball.”
Tarantino was determined to act, so at first Jaymes got him jobs doing just that. She called up a friend, a casting agent over at the television show The Golden Girls. They needed an Elvis impersonator for one episode, and Jaymes touted her new client as “Elvis meets Charlie Manson.” He got the walk-on, his first real job in show business.
By the second half of the 1980s, Jaymes represented all three of the us-against-the-world clique—Tarantino, Avary, and Hamann—and played den mother to them all. They became like family, and even began to speak in the same stream-of-consciousness rhythm, a sort of Quentinese. Jaymes particularly took care of Tarantino, who seemed oblivious to the needs of taking care of himself. She fed him, made sure he got to his appointments, and paid his expenses when he was utterly broke. But in these same years he began churning out a number of screenplays: True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and Reservoir Do
gs, all with the common vocabulary of casual, brutal violence and a raging intensity to the story line.
From the start, the combination of Jaymes and Tarantino seemed odd. Jaymes was a corn-fed Midwesterner and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, a petite, beautiful blond who had spent years surfing off the coast of Mexico and Central America before drifting into Hollywood. She had a heart of gold and seemed to lack the killer instinct required for Hollywood. She never cared. “When I go,” she once said, “I know I’ll have done my best to be kind to people and to be fair and honest in my business.” This was not a formula for getting ahead in Hollywood. On the other hand, Jaymes was passionate about her clients and was not easily put off when she believed in someone. That was certainly the case with Tarantino, and yet it still seemed strange; Jaymes was single, took in housefuls of stray cats, and used words like “Jiminy Christmas” and “goldarn” instead of the foul language spouted by Tarantino and his friends. She found herself fighting for a client who—apart from bathing only rarely—seemed to use the word fuck in every other sentence. The bathing part was a real problem. Tarantino was, by all accounts, challenged in the personal hygiene department. He often smelled awful, his T-shirts were usually torn, and he’d wear the same pair of ratty jeans over and over to his business meetings. “You look like a hobo,” Jaymes would complain. “Why?” Tarantino would reply. “This is my favorite shirt.” Others thought Tarantino believed the look made him resemble the young Marlon Brando.
Rebels on the Backlot Page 4