Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  “I thought he was particularly smart and one of the most interesting directors who came through there,” recalled Lyons. “He had an unusual amount of confidence, even for a director, especially for someone his age. He was very savvy, utterly self-confident.”

  Anderson often had that effect on people. “There was something different about him,” said Michelle Satter, who has run the Sundance Feature Film Program since its inception. “Occasionally you meet somebody who just jumps out at you, with an incredible spark, imagination, with incredible originality and confidence…. He was almost like this kid who loved movies, yet a wise soul.”

  Satter wasn’t the only one who remarked on the fact that Anderson, barely twenty-three years old, had chosen as his central character a washed-up gambler in his sixties. Lyons was immediately won over by Anderson’s gift for creating humane, believable characters. “He never wrote with any condescension or sense of brittleness or falseness. He has an incredible ear,” he said.

  Another producer who had seen Cigarettes and Coffee met Anderson at Sundance and was similarly dazzled. British producer Robert Jones contacted Anderson about making his short into a feature with an $800,000 budget. But problems with casting—mainly because Anderson insisted on the unknown Philip Baker Hall for the lead—slowed things down enough that Jones got busy making The Usual Suspects, a savvy criminal thriller by another young talent, Bryan Singer, whom he’d met at Sundance that year, too.

  In 1995 Jones picked up the project again, with Lyons still working on casting. Samuel L. Jackson had signed on, as had John C. Reilly and Gwyneth Paltrow, a pale, blue-eyed newcomer who’d attracted attention from a small role in Flesh and Bone. Eventually they raised $3 million from a small television production company looking to move into film, Rysher Entertainment, owned by Cox Communications. Anderson never met anyone at Rysher Entertainment before filming, a decision he later came to regret. He admitted that he had bribed his way into directing the movie by refusing to sell them the script unless they let him direct it.

  But the immediate problems lay elsewhere. Communication between the opinionated Jones and the cocky young Anderson was troubled from the start. Jones thought some very long scenes could be trimmed ahead of the shoot, and Anderson refused to cut them. This was the beginning of a pattern that would repeat itself in Anderson’s career as an auteur. He knew exactly what kind of film he wanted to make in Sydney and neither expected nor wanted any interference from a producer, a studio executive, or financier. Jones, on the other hand, had a decade’s more experience than Anderson, had found the financing for the film, and wanted his point of view to be taken into account. “I’m not a stand-in-the-background producer,” he later said.

  Lyons took Anderson’s side, though he agreed that the film had problems that would need solving in the editing room. “We had different philosophies,” Lyons said. “I truly felt that Paul had an incredibly clear sense of what he wanted to do, did an amazing job shooting, and would find the film in postproduction.”

  During the shoot in Reno, Anderson shut Jones out of the process. According to Jones, Anderson “classed anything as interference,” and “he instructed the editor not to show me anything.” Once when Jones walked into the editing room to ask a question, the editor immediately shut off the monitor. Jones fumed. “I wasn’t to see anything. When that kind of thing happens in other films, he’d be fucking fired. He was under contract. He wasn’t a final-cut director.”

  That Anderson didn’t have final cut would be made painfully clear in short order, as would Anderson’s ability to inflame an already tense situation. When the film was finished, Anderson showed the two-and-a-half-hour version to forty of his close friends in Los Angeles, rather than to his producers. This neatly communicated what Anderson thought of Jones’s opinion. Jones finally saw the film and thought what every executive involved in every Anderson film would say after seeing the first cut of one of his opus magni: It was too long. “Interminable,” said Jones. “There were great things in it, but it was obvious he was so close to the film he couldn’t see the woods for the trees.”

  At a meeting the day after the screening, Anderson said—actually they mostly shouted by this point—“This is my cut. I’m not touching a frame.”

  Within days a hysterical Paul Thomas Anderson was calling John Lyons. “They locked me out of the editing room!” he shrieked. He had been thrown off his own film. Jones, together with executive producers Hans Brockmann and François Duplat, was making a shorter version of the film on video, with an ending that did not kill off the Philip Baker Hall character. According to Jones, Anderson made the changes on video himself, but refused to do so on film; it was then the keys were taken away.

  Asked about this in 2004, Anderson was contrite. “I’m sure Robert Jones was right. I’m sure I was throwing the rattle from the cage constantly. It was a mess of egos, with silly behavior for the most part.” Did he consider Jones’s input to be interference? “Sure,” Anderson said. “He’s a total fucking asshole. But I’d talk to him today. I’m different now. We’d have a laugh.”

  There were other matters. Rysher wanted the movie title changed to Hard Eight, which Anderson detested. And Rysher agreed with Jones that the lead character should not get killed at the end. Both versions were shown to Keith Samples, the head of Rysher Entertainment. According to Jones, he preferred the producers’ version. According to Lyons, “Rysher sided with us.”

  Either way, Samples asked Jones and his colleagues to step aside; he decided to work directly with Anderson. “Beware of what you wish for,” Jones warned the executive. “You’ll find out what I’m going through.”

  The words were prophetic. Within two weeks Samples had fired Anderson, Lyons, and the editor. He cut his own version of the film that was shorter, snappier, and had a different sound track. It was a more conventional noir thriller than Anderson’s meditation on a defeated man’s life. “It was the Showtime version,” said Lyons sardonically. “If you’d been flipping Channel 98 and 99 at 2:00 A.M. you wouldn’t have noticed it.”

  Near the end of 1995 officials at Sundance received two different prints of Hard Eight for the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. One was Rysher Entertaiment’s; the other was Anderson’s. (Anderson refused to refer to the film by anything but Sydney, but the title change was permanent.) The film was accepted, and Michelle Satter made sure they showed Paul’s version.

  AT THE SUNDANCE SCREENING IN EARLY 1996, ROBERT JONES ran into Anderson’s agent, John Lesher, in the hallway. Lesher hissed in his ear, “Get out of America. We don’t want you here. Go back to Europe.”

  He did. Jones came to believe that Anderson had turned the actors against him, and that Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly were snubbing him at every encounter. He told friends that Lesher had bad-mouthed him to directors who wanted to work with him. Realizing that his reputation in Hollywood was probably permanently damaged, he returned to England, where he eventually headed up the prestigious British Film Council. “Hard Eight was pretty fucking traumatic,” he said. “It took me a long time to get over the experience.”

  The drama was undoubtedly even more disturbing for Anderson. When Jones’s partner Hans Brockmann happened to attend a general-release screening for Hard Eight in Westwood, Anderson screeched up to the curb in a seventies-era car, jumped out, and began shrieking at Brockmann on the street, telling him to get lost.

  “I’ve only learned a lot of lessons because I got incredibly fucked,” Anderson later reflected. “I went through a movie being taken away from me, a movie being recut behind my back, I went through all of that, and it created a sort of paranoia and guardedness in me that I’m glad I have, because that will never, ever happen to me again.”

  Hard Eight also screened at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. Once again, Rysher Entertainment sent their version. Lyons called the festival director, Gilles Jacob, and said that this was not Anderson’s cut. Jacob replied, “I would never not show the director’s version.” It screened
in the “Un Certain Regard” section, and the critical response was so positive that Rysher Entertainment was finally convinced to stick with Anderson’s version. When the film failed repeatedly to find a distributor, Anderson recut the film. Satter—like many of Anderson’s mentors—fought for him. She called her many contacts in the independent film world. “This guy is the real thing,” she urged. “You’ve got to see this film.” Ultimately Goldwyn Films, Inc., distributed Hard Eight in the United States.

  This was the same year that David O. Russell’s second film, Flirting with Disaster, debuted as the closing night film at Cannes. He and Anderson shared the same agent, John Lesher, and hung out together in the sweet, limpid evenings on the Mediterranean shore. But the two auteurs never really forged a lasting friendship. Once Anderson went on to make Boogie Nights he tended toward the hard-partying, woman-hopping life led by Quentin Tarantino, his mentor. 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.

  Lyons later recalled that the saga of Sydney “was excruciating for Paul. It was as rocky a beginning as I could imagine for a filmmaker. He really got it from all sides. What people couldn’t stand was that Paul was never humble. He would never acquiesce, and he just fought back. People like Robert Jones and Hans Brockmann hated that. They wanted him to roll over.”

  Paul Thomas Anderson would never trust a studio executive again.

  Flirting with Disaster

  After Spanking, Russell started work on his next movie, Flirting with Disaster, about a young man, played by Ben Stiller, who searches for his birth parents and finds himself near the Mexican border with his wife, new baby, adopted parents, a federal agent, and his gay boyfriend in tow. LSD plays a key role. It was another odd subject, though more of an overt comedy than its dark predecessor. If Flirting didn’t read as traditional comedy on the page, it had the same distinctively off-center Russellian take on the world that was funny and discomfiting at the same time. New Line’s Ira Deutchman had the script, but he dallied in pursuing a deal with Russell. Studio chief Bob Shaye had read it, liked this one better than Spanking, and told him to make the deal. In fact, said Shaye, “I thought we had made the deal.”

  By the middle of 1994, Russell was a hot new talent. This time two other studios, the Goldwyn Company and Miramax, were both interested in the director’s new script. Pulp Fiction had a decided influence on this. The indie landscape was changing precipitously. Suddenly, actors were interested in indie films; suddenly, agents were interested in seeing the scripts. When it came to casting Flirting, Tom Cruise’s name was thrown about. Rob Morrow, of the hit TV show Northern Exposure, wanted the main role.

  With Deutchman dragging his feet, Harvey Weinstein jumped in with both of his. He called a meeting with Russell, producer Dean Silvers, and agent John Lesher and made them a two-picture offer, with Flirting with Disaster as the first picture. It was August, and when the call came through, Russell was at his family house on Martha’s Vineyard. He panicked, because he was still in mid-negotiation with New Line, the studio where his wife worked. But the Miramax deal seemed like a dream offer to Russell, except that it was a Harvey two-in-one special. If the mogul liked one script, he’d pay for two, knowing that if the first movie became a hit, he had the director’s next film at a bargain basement price. And even if the first film tanked, he would never green-light the second picture. It was a win-win, Harvey style.

  He negotiated Harvey style, too. The offer was good for one hour only, and even that held only if Russell agreed not to call any competing bidders with a chance to match the offer. (Otherwise the next call would have gone to Ira Deutchman.)

  Another insider to the negotiations said there was more duplicity here than met the eye. “We did have a firm offer from Ira,” said the insider. “But Harvey made a better offer and said you can’t go back to Ira.” Weinstein’s offer was $250,000 for Flirting and $375,000 for Russell’s next project, though with a lower production budget than New Line. And Weinstein was also dangling the irresistible: final cut.

  Russell put down the phone and turned to his wife, Janet Grillo, whose face had turned stark white. She realized that if Russell made the deal with Weinstein, Bob Shaye would regard it as a betrayal of New Line. But, she recalled, “Harvey was offering $500,000 to someone who’d made $40,000 in his whole life. It was a lot of money.” Grillo told Russell the decision was his.

  He didn’t dally. He told Harvey yes.

  Bob Shaye was furious that the Flirting with Disaster script slipped through his fingers. He didn’t realize that Russell was nursing a bruised ego over the Spanking deal. “I didn’t know there was bad blood,” he later admitted. Grillo left the company shortly before the end of the month, ostensibly to care for the couple’s five-month-old baby. But the tension over Russell’s decision was undeniable. “I told her I thought it was wrong,” said Shaye, referring to Russell’s taking the Miramax deal. “She was quite contrite.”

  Not long after that, in early 1995, Deutchman parted ways with Fine Line, too. The whole affair aggravated him so much that he never went to see Flirting with Disaster, a minor hit once it was released. Flirting helped cement Russell’s reputation; the film was nominated for four Independent Spirit awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay, and acting nominations for Lily Tomlin, who played Stiller’s birth mother, and Richard Jenkins, who played the federal agent on LSD. But after this success, Russell decided he wanted to work on a bigger canvas, to play with a big budget. He decided he was annoyed that Miramax gave Flirting short shrift on its video release. And he ran straight into the arms of Warner Brothers.

  Schizopolis

  By 1993 Steven Soderbergh’s marriage to Elizabeth Brantley had fallen apart, and his once lustrous Hollywood career had faded into obscurity. He continued to make movies, but they were seen by fewer and fewer viewers. First he made Kafka and then King of the Hill, two films that seemed deliberately low-key. Kafka was shot in black-and-white, in Prague, with Jeremy Irons; eviscerated by the critics, it was a box office bomb. King of the Hill was about a boy and baseball in the 1940s, and in retrospect is considered one of Soderbergh’s warmer and least-appreciated films. At the time, though, it was entirely underwhelming. The shift from overnight Hollywood success to obscurity took less time than one might have imagined. But it had a lot to do with who he was as a person.

  Steven Soderbergh was born in Atlanta on January 14, 1963, the second of six children. Steven was closest to another younger brother, Charlie, who had inherited the personal warmth of Soderbergh’s father. One of his siblings was a mentally retarded older brother, who went to live in a special home when he was three years old.

  Soderbergh’s father loomed large in his life. Peter Andrews Soderbergh, of Swedish heritage (the paternal grandfather was born in Stockholm), was a former marine from New Jersey who had served in Korea in the 1950s and was wounded there. When he returned to the United States, Peter Soderbergh studied at Amherst, Harvard, and the University of Texas, becoming a professor of education. He married Midge Bernard, whom he met at a military social on the East Coast. The family lived in various places—Austin, Pittsburgh, Charlottesville—until settling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when Soderbergh was thirteen years old. There, Peter Soderbergh became the dean of the College of Education at Louisiana State University, a much-beloved faculty member who was sought after by students as a mentor and adviser, not just as an educator. He was known for his sense of humor, his academic prowess, and his empathy. He published continually, writing books on women in the marines and on big band music.

  “He was the nicest person I’d ever run across,” said actor David Jensen, one of Soderbergh’s oldest friends. Jensen was a student at Louisiana State and sought career advice from Peter Soderbergh, who listened lengthily before saying he didn’t think Jensen was suited best for teaching, saying he was
more likely to discover that he was an artist. “He was an amazing, wonderful character,” said Jensen. “He had a warmth that Steven doesn’t always show.”

  Once esconced in Baton Rouge, all of Steven Soderbergh’s friends called his father “Dad.” His father combined military discipline with intellectual curiosity and personal charisma, and yet he was never intimidating. “He never presented [his accomplishments] as anything but something that he loved to do,” explained Soderbergh. “And that was because his relationship with his father was very cold—he was an only child—and he decided he wasn’t going to re-create that.” Without question, Peter Soderbergh was the monumental figure in his son’s life.

  The director’s relationship with his mother was much more complicated. Midge Bernard Soderbergh, from a Pittsburgh family of Italian origin, was a psychic and a Gestalt therapist who interpreted dreams on the air for a local radio station. Soderbergh never quite understood his mother. A rationalist by nature, he was embarrassed by her fixation on the paranormal, her at-home tarot card readings, and her quirkiness. But, by some accounts, his mother was brilliant at her profession. “She can be written off as a nut, but she was incredibly gifted,” said Jensen. “Steven would make jokes that if she found two bricks stacked on top of each other she’d think it was Atlantis. But she was on retainer at Exxon for her psychic abilities.”

  Jensen and other longtime friends believe that Soderbergh felt abandoned by his mother in some sense. He has told interviewers that he and his siblings had to do their own laundry and were often left to their own devices for meals. “She wasn’t there for him. And I think he never forgave her for that,” said Jensen. It affected his relationships with women in later life. “His whole attitude with women for so long, as soon as they committed, as soon as it was realized that they had affection for him—that’s when he left.”