When Sharon Waxman set out to write “Rebels on the Backlot,” a look at maverick Hollywood film directors of the 1990s, she armed herself with certain criteria in order to narrow her focus to six filmmakers. First, she pinpointed films she felt really marked the decade. “Twenty years from now, when your kid asks ‘What did the ’90s feel like?,’ you’ll say ‘Let’s watch ‘Being John Malkovich’ or ‘Pulp Fiction,'” says Waxman, who readily chose Spike Jonze and Quentin Tarantino, the respective directors, as leading members of the new radical pack. Also making the cut were Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”), David Fincher (“Fight Club”), Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia”) and David O. Russell (“Three Kings”). “They all had to set new standards in filmmaking,” Waxman adds, referring to how this new generation boldly plays with form and narrative, shockingly juxtaposes violence and sex with humor and often employs fast music video-style cutting and editing. However, the overriding commonality is that all these groundbreaking movies were made by the major studios. “The whole idea was to show how these guys were being brought into the studios,” notes Waxman, who has covered the entertainment industry for the past 10 years, first as a reporter for the Washington Post and since 2003 as a correspondent for the New York Times. She came to Hollywood after nearly a decade of reporting abroad, covering European politics and culture and before that the Middle East. Waxman, a resident of Santa Monica where she lives with her husband and three children, will discuss and sign copies of “Rebels on the Backlot” (Harper Collins, 2005) at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore, at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 22. “I was going to write the book with or without them [the directors],” says Waxman, whose research did indeed include the cooperation of all six directors as well as interviews with more than 100 actors, producers and movie executives. The result is a book that weaves together in-depth, sometimes juicy portraits of each director and analysis of their films along with a behind-the-scenes look at how the bottom line-driven studio system came to embrace more artistically daring movies. In many ways, it all began with Tarantino’s 1994 “Pulp Fiction,” the first independent film to earn over $100 million, recasting conventional wisdom about what the public would pay to see. “It completely changed the way young filmmakers looked at what they could do,” Waxman notes. It also sent Hollywood’s major studios on the hunt for the next edgy auteur, with many setting up new divisions specifically for indie-style movies. Of all the directors, David Fincher, best known for the violent, nihilistic movie “Fight Club,” was the biggest surprise to Waxman, who didn’t expect to be charmed by the director’s keen sense of humor. “He was a complete cipher to me,” she says of her pre-interview impression. “He really doesn’t give interviews, so there’s very little out there about him. “All of them are really different, interesting and complicated guys,” she continues. “There are points of divergence and points in common.” One thing all share is their self-taught, non-film-school-degree status. “They were in a big hurry,” Waxman says. “They saw films in their heads they wanted to make and weren’t going to wait around.” The book delves deeply into each director’s life, dispelling such myths as Tarantino being a half-breed, white trash school dropout from Tennessee who miraculously emerged as the voice of his generation. “The reality is something far more subtle and complicated,” writes Waxman. “Quentin Tarantino was not raised in poverty, nor in a white trash environment, nor as a hillbilly.” She goes on to tell how, despite being from a broken home, Tarantino had a mother who was “unusually intelligent and ambitious” and did all she could to associate her son with an upper middle-class lifestyle. We learn how Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” about the rise and fall of a group of 1970’s porn stars, is rooted in the director’s own childhood growing up in the San Fernando Valley, where porn movie production was part of the landscape. “All the kids in the neighborhood knew that the white van that pulled up to a house down the street was shooting porn,” writes Waxman. Waxman vividly captures the tensions and dynamic of being on set with each director, devoting several pages to the feud that arose between director David O. Russell and his star, George Clooney, during the filming of “Three Kings,” with Clooney’s handwritten notes of discontent reproduced. According to Waxman, Hollywood is in a real state of flux, struggling with ways to adapt to shifting technology and distribution models which are not working in terms of the amount that needs to be spent to get people into the theaters. “It’s an interesting time to be observing the industry,” she says. “It’s this generation of people I wrote about who will need to sort out these issues of how people are going to consume entertainment.”
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