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Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (P.S.) Paperback – Illustrated, January 3, 2006
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The 1990s saw a shock wave of dynamic new directing talent that took the Hollywood studio system by storm. At the forefront of that movement were six innovative and daring directors whose films pushed the boundaries of moviemaking and announced to the world that something exciting was happening in Hollywood. Sharon Waxman of the New York Times spent the decade covering these young filmmakers, and in Rebels on the Backlot she weaves together the lives and careers of Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction; Steven Soderbergh, Traffic; David Fincher, Fight Club; Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights; David O. Russell, Three Kings; and Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich.
- Print length386 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 3, 2006
- Dimensions8.08 x 5.32 x 1.07 inches
- ISBN-100060540184
- ISBN-13978-0060540180
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Admirably reported . . . Waxman unearths juicy anecdotes that’ll keep film fans cackling and turning the pages.” — Salon.com
“Riveting tales of Hollywood hubris . . . a fun read.” — Entertainment Weekly
“Vivid . . . fascinating . . . delightful . . . [Waxman’s] background as a hard news reporter serves her well.” — New York Times Book Review
“A behind-the-cameras fireball of wicked insider revelations . . . Love it!” — Liz Smith, syndicated columnist
“[Waxman’s] thorough reporting results in a compulsively readable chronicle of the decade’s auteurs and their work.” — Premiere
“Enjoyably dishy.” — Variety
“Addictively readable . . . fascinating” — Miami Herald
“A lively book with gossipy and readable stories about some obsessive guys who are as much rascals as rebels.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Terrific . . . wildly informative and readable about the plight of the biggest young talents in modern movies” — Buffalo News
“[Rebels on the Backlot] makes a case for creating a new film canon of this late ‘90s renaissance.” — Pittsburgh Tribune
“Waxman perceptively depicts the vocabulary of the new Hollywood . . . well-written . . . recommended.” — Library Journal
“Hums along on detail and gossip, adding up to a template for making it in contemporary Hollywood.” — men.style.com
“Up-close, often gossipy” — The Hollywood Reporter
“Fascinatingly candid” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
From the Back Cover
The 1990s saw a shock wave of dynamic new directing talent that took the Hollywood studio system by storm. At the forefront of that movement were six innovative and daring directors whose films pushed the boundaries of moviemaking and announced to the world that something exciting was happening in Hollywood. Sharon Waxman of the New York Times spent the decade covering these young filmmakers, and in Rebels on the Backlot she weaves together the lives and careers of Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction; Steven Soderbergh, Traffic; David Fincher, Fight Club; Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights; David O. Russell, Three Kings; and Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich.
About the Author
Sharon Waxman is a Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times and previously was a correspondent for the Washington Post covering the entertainment industry. She lives in southern California with her family.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Rebels on the Backlot
Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio SystemBy Sharon WaxmanHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2005 Sharon WaxmanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060540184
Chapter One
Quentin Tarantino Discovers Hollywood;
Steven Soderbergh Gets Noticed
1990-1992
Memorial Day in 1990 dawned bright and hot in Hollywood, even for a maker of horror films. Scott Spiegel, a screenwriter and the horror filmmaker in question, wanted to celebrate. He had some cash in his pocket from selling his first big screenplay, The Rookie, to Warner Brothers with Clint Eastwood attached to star. With his neighbor, actor D. W. Moffett, Spiegel threw a barbeque bash and invited to his backyard every starving actor, screenwriter, director, and movie wannabe he could think of, including some dedicated fans of his horror genre work.
Under leafy elm trees, behind a blue clapboard house on McCadden Place just off Sunset Boulevard, dozens of young wouldbes and could-bes in Hollywood gathered. Some of them would eventually make it. Director Sam Raimi was there along with actor/director Burr Steers and screenwriter Boaz Yakin. Others wouldn't: One of the aspiring screenwriters present, Mark Carducei, would kill himself in 1997. The eighties still hung in the air; the cool guys had mullet haircuts and leather jackets; the hot women had long, permed hair fluffed out to there and bright red lipstick. While playing an electric keyboard, actor/screenwriter Ron Zwang belted out "Wild Thing" to a crowd slightly buzzed on beer and stuffed with Moffett's burnt burgers and hot dogs. Inside the house a few people were slumped on a loveseat watching A Clockwork Orange.
One of the restless young men hanging around the yard was Quentin Tarantino, a twenty-seven-year-old screenwriter who'd spent the previous night on Spiegel's couch. He loped around the backyard like a habitué of this crowd. He came from Manhattan Beach, an aspiring young screenwriter who only lately had started spending more time in Hollywood than in the working-class neighborhood down the coast.
Tarantino had reason to feel confident. After a decade of scraping by doing odd jobs, hanging with the other video geeks and movie dreamers at Video Archives, a video store in Manhattan Beach, Hollywood was beginning to show some interest. He had several scripts making the rounds, and a low-grade buzz had begun around his raw, clever screenplays: From Dusk Till Dawn, True Romance, Natural Born Killers. He was still penniless and unknown, but all of these scripts were on the verge of being sold. His moment was just off the horizon.
On this particular day, Tarantino was his blabbermouth self. He looked rumpled, of course, his striped blue shirt slightly untucked, his brown hair overgrown and stringy. As Spiegel wielded his video camera, Tarantino regaled film editor Bob Murawski with his latest insight on the latest movie he'd seen for the umpteenth time. When it came to film arcana, no one out-triviaed Quentin Tarantino.
"That movie -- Motorcycle Gang -- remember the goofy guy? His buddy? The goofy guy?" he asked, looming over his friend.
Murawski nodded.
"That's Alfalfa!" Tarantino was psyched; he'd recognized one of the Our Gang actors in the B movie. "That's Carl Switzer! I couldn't believe it."
Marowski was slightly less enthused. "That makes me glad I saw it," he deadpanned.
Tarantino didn't seem to notice. "It's the same movie" (the same one as yet another B movie he'd seen, Dragstrip Girl.) "It's the same lines. Yeah -- I was reading about it last night."
In the 1990s Quentin Tarantino would turn out to be the biggest thing to hit the movie industry since the high-concept film. He became an image, an icon, and inspired a genre, if not an entire generation, of hyper-violent, loud, youthful, angry, funny (though none as funny as Tarantino) movies. His Pulp Fiction was the first "independent" film to crack $100 million at the box office, though technically it was made at a studio that had just been bought by the Walt Disney Company. Cinematically he spoke in an entirely new vernacular, and he threw down the gauntlet to fellow writer-directors as if to say Top this, assholes.
He also happened to come to prominence as the spinning, whizzing media machine began to be the central function of Hollywood rather than a mere by-product of its production line. In the 1990s the buzz machine, the sprawling, relentless entertainment media, became the very engine that made Hollywood run, a monstrous contraption that required constant feeding. And the Quentin Tarantino story was the perfect product to fill the cavernous maw.
The only thing is, a lot of the story wasn't true.
The myth that worked for the likes of Esquire magazine and Entertainment Tonight went that Tarantino was a half-breed, white trash school dropout from rural Tennessee who went to work at a video store in Torrance, saw every movie known to mankind, and emerged, miraculously, a brilliant writer and director, a visionary autodidact with his finger on the pulse of his generation.
The reality is something far more subtle and complicated. Quentin Tarantino was not raised in poverty, nor in a white trash environment, nor as a hillbilly. He was from a broken home, but his mother was unusually intelligent and ambitious, and she did all she could to associate her son with the bourgeois values of the upper-middle class: education, travel, material success. Which Quentin chose to utterly reject.
After Quentin became a media star, his mother, Connie Zastoupil, was horrified to see a distorted view of his background spun into myth. After journalist Peter Biskind interviewed her for Premiere magazine, she was mortified by the first sentence that referred to Tarantino's background as "half Cherokee, half hillbilly." At the time, "I was the president of an accounting firm; my lawyer sent it to me," she said in 2003. "You have no idea the humiliation that caused me. Nobody ever got beyond that one sentence." She refused to talk to journalists for years after that.
Continues...
Excerpted from Rebels on the Backlotby Sharon Waxman Copyright © 2005 by Sharon Waxman. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 3, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 386 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060540184
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060540180
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.08 x 5.32 x 1.07 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #935,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #713 in Video Direction & Production (Books)
- #857 in Movie Direction & Production
- #1,768 in Movie History & Criticism
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great stories about the behind-the-scenes, of getting these films made, of the struggles of the directors.
but too much about parents, girlfriends, small stuff.
so 2 1/2 stars actually, for the interesting stories.
A.
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