Rebels on the Backlot (5 page)

Like many former friends, Vossler is oddly forgiving. “The things he did to hurt me were out of carelessness,” he said. “I have nothing but love and respect for the man.” He recognized a Machiavellian streak in the striving Tarantino. “I’ve always known this about him,” said Vossler in the mid-nineties. “Quentin and I have always talked about the theories of success: always be the weakest link in the chain, don’t hang out with your pals from Torrance when you can hang out with John Travolta and Uma Thurman…. That’s what Quentin did. He cut as many ties as he could to isolate himself. He finally got an apartment out in Hollywood, some rattrap apartment with mounds of dirty clothes, a VCR, a bed. That’s where he chose to be. He was in Hollywood, and that was important to him, cutting ties with his go-nowhere friends to get out of a stagnant pond.”

The flip side to Tarantino’s apparently unthinking ability to drop his friends was an unshakeable loyalty to the celluloid characters he knew so well and loved for so long. When the time came to cast his movies, Tarantino would often reach out to long forgotten, washed-up actors who he believed had talent and deserved to work. This has been true throughout his career, from casting John Travolta in
Pulp Fiction
over Miramax’s objections to single-handedly resuscitating the careers of seventies actors Robert Forster and Pam Grier in
Jackie Brown.
“Regardless of his fractured sense of loyalty at times, his determination to revive the careers of well-deserving artists and people who had been left by the wayside, trashed by the fickle Hollywood machine—he would fight to the finish,” said
Cathryn Jaymes, his longtime manager. “Hollywood is fickle, but Quentin is not, when it comes to talent. He’ll continue to support it.” Not every former star was smart enough to take the chance Tarantino offered them. Early on the director offered Michael Parks, an action star from the 1960s with a brooding James Dean style, the lead role in
Reservoir Dogs.
Parks wanted a different role in the film, and passed on the film twice. But Tarantino persisted, and eventually Parks was cast in
From Dusk Till Dawn
and the sequel
From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter
(later he also had a role in
Kill Bill).
Tarantino’s friend Scott Spiegel remembered when Tarantino got a phone call from a grateful Parks one day in the mid-nineties, thanking the director for casting him in from
Dusk Till Dawn.
Parks had just received a residual check from the movie, which allowed him to make his mortgage payment that month.

N
OT 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.

B
ETSY
B
RANTLEY WAS A
S
OUTHERNER, 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 walked 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:

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.