Rebels on the Backlot (53 page)

103 “when they get fat and happy, the edge goes away.” Jamie Diamond, “Seems the Oh-So-Serious Phase is Over,”
New York Times
, June 21, 1998.

103 “I really like not being watched”: Smith, “Hired Gun.”

103 “…no audience at all”:
Soderbergh Interviews
, 76.

104 “I just felt in the zone all the time”: Ibid., 91.

105 “the work’s gotta bust out, and I’ve gotta bust out”: Soderbergh, author interview.

105 “crossed the line from personal into private filmmaking”:
Soderbergh Interviews
, 152.

105 “should the public ever get a chance to see it”: Steven Soderbergh,
Getting Away With It
(London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 53.

106 Northern Arts showed some interest, but the deal fell through: Ibid., 88.

106 “Nobody has any fucking vision”: Ibid., 71.

106 “My head’s just not there now”: Bobby Newmyer, author interview.

106 “disdain for mainstream Hollywood movies”: Newmyer, author interview.

107 “hot action director to make some blastfest?”: Soderbergh,
Getting Away With It
, 88–89.

107 “… it was already set up at New Line …” Ibid., 167.

107 with Marisa Tomei as the Nature Girl: Ibid., 183.

108 “That’s an odd call”: Casey Silver, author interview.

109 “I called Casey the next day and turned it down”: Soderbergh,
Getting Away With It
, 190.

109 “If you’re ever going to do it, do it now”: Silver, author interview.

109 “what I’ve just been through in the last two years”: Smith, “Hired Gun.”

109 “I thought you wouldn’t want to hire me if you saw it”:
Soderbergh Interviews
, 112.

110 Soderbergh got
Out of Sight:
Soderbergh,
Getting Away With It
, 201.

110 “I can … have integrity, and stand by my work”: Silver, author interview.

111 “Okay, then I have to go to Steven Soderbergh”: David Fincher, author interview.

115 “At that point I should have pulled the plug”: Mike De Luca, author interview.

116 “You read that movie and you think: What is this?”: Dylan Tichenor, author interview.

116 “grandiose, crazy ideas—of being the best they could be”: John Lyons, author interview.

117 white Studebaker: Paul Thomas Anderson, author interview.

117 “He’s the Dirk Diggler of directing”: John Lesher, author interview.

118 “I had an interest in it”: Anderson, author interview; David Konow, “PTA Meeting,”
Creative Screenwriting
7, no. 1 (January 2000); Lisa Y. Garibay, “Anderson’s Valley,” IFP/West Calendar, December 1999.

118 sixty-inch rear-projection television: Dylan Tichenor, author interview.

118 “he’s fascinated by sex, to some staggering degree”: Tichenor, author interview.

118 “It’s my own guilty feelings about pornography”: David Konow, “PTA Meeting.”

119 “audiences will be storming out”: Shaye, author interview.

119 “I felt personally like I’d missed
Pulp Fiction”:
Mike De Luca, author interview.

120 “I couldn’t get my ducks in a row”: De Luca, author interview.

121 “I knew what the response would be”: De Luca, author interview.

121 “I thought it was genius”: De Luca, author interview.

121 “No, no he will bring it down”: Shaye, author interview.

121 “I could sell it that way, as a worst-case scenario”: Mitch Goldman, author interview.

122 “He had this five-thousand-page script which was completely misogynistic. I loved it”: Karen Hermelin, author interview.

122 “The company was growing up”: Shaye, author interview.

122 “He’s very talented. And very hard to work with”: Shaye, author interview.

122 “What is this exactly?”: De Luca, Anderson, author interviews.

123 “I’m the blank-check guy”: De Luca, author interview.

123 Shaye “crawled onto the train”: Goldman, author interview.

123 never touched drugs before his mid-twenties: Steven Soderbergh, author interview.

123 “Is cocaine worse than alcohol?”: Stevey Soderbergh,
Getting Away With It
(London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 23.

124 “It made me never want to make a movie again”: Laura Bickford, author interview.

125 “It wasn’t how we’d thought about it”: Bickford, author interview.

125 “It kept hitting me in the face”: Bickford, author interview.

126 “He was not snobby”: Bickford, author interview.

126 “We were in love for a long time”: Bickford, author interview.

126 “We tried to make it work …”: Bickford, author interview.

127 “It was a very sad thing in my life”: Bickford, author interview.

127 privileged and grasping: Confidential source, author interview.

127 He couldn’t bear to watch Bickford marry someone else: Confidential source, author interview.

128 “I had come to the end of anything that I had to say about myself”:
Steven Soderbergh Interviews
, edited by Anthony Kaufman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 151.

128 “inherently evil and morally wrong”: Gavin Smith, “Hired Gun,”
Film Comment
, January 2001.

128 “Why should the best directors only have $2 million to make their films?”: Bickford, author interview.

128 “It’s once again in vogue …”: Claudia Eller, “The Economics of Independents; Specialized Movies Are All the Rage These Days for Major Studios,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 31, 1997.

130 “It was scary to have those two places say no”: Bickford, author interview.

130 “You couldn’t point to another film of its type”: Steven Soderbergh, author interview.

131 About an hour later she’d come walking in: Confidential source, author interview.

131 “It was a metaphor for what was going on”: Biskind,
Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 219.

131 “It was getting hard … I just want to look through the fuckin’ records”: Biskind, 216–217.

132 “There’s the ultimate case for not giving the director final cut”: Confidential source, author interview.

132 friends knew Tarantino to disappear for days at a time: Confidential source, author interview.

132 “This was not Martin Scorsese …”: Peter Biskind, “The Return of Quentin Tarantino.”
Vanity Fair
, October 2003.

133 “just a fun B movie”: Laura Holson, “New Tarantino Film to Be Released in 2 Parts,”
New York Times
, July 16, 2003.

133 “I had romantic ideals …”: Roger Avary, author interview.

134 “My threshold for anything is high, except animal cruelty”: Avary, author interview.

134 ran into each other on the red carpet: Sylvia Desrochers, author interview.

134 “the best friend I ever had”: Avary, author interview (via e-mail).

136 “We shouldn’t be making movies like that. …I take the flak for this”: Tom Sherak, Ross Bell, author interviews.

136 “it’s a brilliant film …”: Sherak, Bill Mechanic, author interviews.

137 “Those idiots just green-lit a $75 million experimental movie”: Confidential source, author interview.

137 It will make people squirm: Bell, author interview.

139 “Everything I read had to be reassessed”: Bell, author interview.

139 On Monday she ponied up $10,000: Laura Ziskin, author interview.

140 “I should have read the book sooner”: Bell, author interview.

141 Bell got both of Fincher’s assistants to read it first: Bell, author interview.

141 “I know why he looks up to Tyler”: David Fincher, author interview.

141 “If Fox buys it, I’ll never have anything to do with it”: Fincher, author interview.

142 “it was always sort of about getting to make movies”: Fincher, author interview.

143 “big movies—were being made by a guy down the street”: Fincher, author interview.

144 “There’s a whole group of guys like him …with a little bit of a mean streak”: Steve Golin, author interview.

144 “from that moment on that’s all I ever wanted to do”: Fincher, author interview.

145 “Bob Fosse was one of my favorite moviemakers”: Fincher, author interview.

145 “a fucking drag”: Fincher, author interview.

145 “When I wasn’t doing that I was making movies with a Super 8”: Fincher, author interview.

146 “My whole thing was, ‘Just keep busy and eventually you’ll get out of this place’”: Fincher, author interview.

146 “…. to make assets for the USC Film School”: Fincher, author interview.

146 “That movie sucked shit through a straw”: Fincher, author interview.

148 a place with “intense contempt for creativity”: Fincher, author interview.

148 “he’s very drawn to things that reveal the lie”: Edward Norton, author interview.

148 the director insisted that the movie didn’t work without it: Mike De Luca, author interview.

149 “This is a seditious movie about blowing up people like Rupert Murdoch”: Bell, author interview.

149 “To me it was a new form of existentialism: Your life is what you make it”: Mechanic, author interview.

149 “It’s violent, but nothing you haven’t seen before”: Sherak, author interview.

150 “He’s like from the Dark Side, but he is a visionary filmmaker”: Sherak, author interview.

150 “everyone felt we could get guys …”: Sherak, author interview.

150 the “shock of truth”: Ziskin, author interview.

151 “It was naïve of me”: Ziskin, author interview.

154 “at least it won’t be derivative”: Steve Golin, author interview.

155 “It doesn’t pitch well”: Tom Pollock, author interview.

155 “I don’t think we need more people learning to write that way”: Interview with
New Times
, October 29, 1999.

156 “certain things that I am anxious about, and they wind up in my script”: “I’m in you.”
Filmmaker Magazine
, Fall 1999.

156 “nobody was interested in producing it”: Claudia Eller, “Quirky
Being John Malkovich
May Have the Last, Best Laugh,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 30, 1999.

156 Golin would look sheepish, then go away for a month before bringing it up again: Pollock, author interview.

156 “I did everything I possibly could to prevent the movie from happening”: Michael Kuhn, author interview.

157 “I was laughing my ass off”: Holly Sorenson, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Marty Bowen,”
Premiere
, April 2004.

157 hack television show; Ibid.

157 “I want to meet Charlie Kaufman”: Sandy Stern, author interview.

158 Drew Barrymore attached to star: Stern, author interview.

158 “if I could write as well as Charlie could”: Spike Jonze, author interview.

159 served in city government under Mayor John Lindsay: Jonze, author interview.

160 pulled the plug: Girl Skateboard Company magazine, August 1995.

160 …worried that the skaters had actually been killed: Evan Wright interview with Spike Jonze (unpublished).

160 “I didn’t know that wasn’t his fake name”: Evan Wright interview with Rudy Johnson (unpublished).

160 “before we got anything”: Wright interview with Jonze.

160 Jonze’s joining Propaganda in 1993: Jonze, author interview.

161 “If it can be small, I try to keep it small …”: Wright interview with Jonze.

161 “I spent another 20 minutes trying to finish it”: Peter Kobel, “The Fun and Games of Living a Virtual Life,”
New York Times
, October 24, 1999.

162 “He’ll totally get this script”: Stern, author interview.

162 “He sat there with his arms crossed …”: Stern, author interview.

162 his attempts to make a feature film: Vince Landay, author interview.

162 Sony, going through one of its periodic executive reshuffles: Jonze, author interview.

163 “I just didn’t get it”: Bob Shaye, author interview.

163 “I just couldn’t get it throught the system”:
Los Angeles Times
, November 30, 1999.

163 the script was put into turnaround, and handed back to Stern and Stipe: Stern, author interview.

163 “I don’t think there’s a movie there …”: Golin, author interview.

164 “What is Spike seeing in this?”: Landay, author interview.

164 “He’s got a golden touch”: Landay, author interview.

164 “Some of it may be an act”: Golin, author interview.

164 “I thought it was a piss-take …”: Kuhn, author interview.

165 “I’m the guy who will get in his underwear”: Paul Thomas Anderson interview on
The Charlie Rose Show
, October 30, 1997.

166 “I was unsure about the subject matter …”: Sydney Pollack, author interview.

166 “I was a dope for not doing this”: Pollack, author interview.

166 saw the “moral center” clearly: Anderson interview with Charlie Rose, 1997.

166 Lyons was able to reel him in: John Lyons, author interview.

167 “He struck me immediately as having a huge amount of talent …”: Joanne Sellar, author interview.

167 “Paul needed someone all the time”: Lyons, author interview.

167 “He could be very angry, abusive, thoroughly insulting …”: Confidential source, author interview.

168 This is the greatest movie we’ve ever made at New Line: De Luca, Mitch Goldman, et al., author interviews.

168 “I was led to believe it would be a normal motion picture length”: Shaye, author interview.

168 “I drank the Kool-Aid with Paul”: De Luca, author interview.

168 “I really don’t want to mess with that scene” De Luca, Tichenor, author interviews.

168 “I’m not going to force you”: Dylan Tichenor, author interview.

168 violated and hurt: Shaye, author interview.

169 got a lower score: Tichenor, author interview.

169 Anderson’s cut tested about as bad as any movie could: Goldman, and confidential source, author interviews.

169 “I remember being confused …the math doesn’t say what you were feeling”: Paul Thomas Anderson, author interview.

170 “The truth was—people didn’t want to say they liked it”: Goldman, author interview.