Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (P.S.)

A good read if you're interested in 'current' film. Some of 1999's most brilliant films, including The Matrix, Three Kings and Being John Malkovich are examined as well as what it took to get them made. Pulp Fiction was also included - so not limited to just 1999. Material on individual films is scattered around the book and are sometimes repetitive, which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. For film buffs only.

Yea OK there are some mistakes in the book. But I don't get the criticisms of the writing. It's journalism style -- not histrionic. A book like this, I'm just looking for more depth than I can expect from surfing the interwebs or reading a magazine. And this book definitely delivers. These are still some of the most influential directors working today and it's good to get some background on how they got their first big movies made. If you're interested in the movie business, don't hesitate. Good book to read to learn about dealmaking and how crucial scripts still are in the Hollywood/indie pipeline. I'm inspired to get back to work on mine. Enjoy!

Some fact checking needed to be more thorough. Overall a good read.

a little too much gossip, not enough real info.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.

Great inside dope, you really need to get this book, a great book with awesome inside info., makes a great gift too.

Anyone with a dream better read this...if they want their dreams to come true.

Cool!!!

The 1970's are now considered to be a Golden Age for American cinema, a time when directors, screenwriters and other creative personal called the shots on how studio films were made, a time when films challenged audiences, acutely reflected the darkness of modern culture. Hollywood's "auteur-era" imploded at the tail end of the decade, with its rebels - Scorsese, Coppola, Altman et al - lost in a black hole of cocaine synapse-burn, egoism and uncontrolled expenditure, a disastrous event-horizon that peaked with the 1980 release of *Heaven's Gate*, Michael Cimino's wildly over-budgeted mess that nearly bankrupted United Artists. This, along with the advent of the summer blockbuster as epitomized by *Jaws* and *Star Wars*, signaled a bottom-line-oriented revolution in the studio system. Number-crunching executives emerged to regain the mantel of power, dictating the method of the entertainment business as profit-margin first, artistic expression a distant second. The calculated blockbusters of the 1980's reflect this transition, the emphasis on big stars, big explosions, feel-good vibes and/or tear-jerking manipulation dominating nearly all of the flagship titles of the decade.Eventually this profit-margin formula became stale, toothless in its demographic estimations; and beneath the stagnant scum-crust of the "mainstream" there began to thrive a new, angry generation of filmmakers, auteur-initiates pushing the envelope. These films reveled in violence, sex, drugs and other taboo subjects; they criticized the mentality of capitalist America, exposing the contradictions and deep hypocrisies fueling its consumer-ethic. Typically, the same studio executives responsible for propagating the 80's attitudes instantly sought to benefit from this disruptive new voice of cinema, making superstars of the auteur, capturing their caustic visions on celluloid while keeping the keys of ~carte blanche~ firmly above reach: the lessons of the 1970's had not been forgotten.Susan Waxman's chronicles this turbulent era in *Rebels on the Backlot,* a tale of six maverick directors gleefully subverting the Hollywood paradigm, of the suits struggling to maintain the blockbuster status-quo, and of the resultant art that came about, by hook or by crook. In tone and style this book resembles Peter Biskind's classic deconstruction of 70's cinema, *Easy Riders, Raging Bulls*, consisting of equal part in-depth examination and tabloid-level gossip.The directors:TARANTINO: Pop-culture synthesist, blatant plagiarist, hygienically challenged: cinema autodidact Quentin Tarantino kick-started the new renaissance with his 1994 neo-noir masterpiece *Pulp Fiction.* A man-child motor-mouth and television addict, Tarantino combined his instincts for drama - and his serial theft of other people's work - to shape the gunshot heard around the world, muffled (barely) between Biblical quotes and McDonalds musings. Quick to drop his old collaborators for the star-shine of Hollywood, Tarantino then regressed into a pot-hazed period of unproductive ambivalence, secretly tormented by his inability to come up with a single original idea.SODERBERGH: The Yin to Tarantino's Yang, Steven Soderbergh exploded with 1989's *sex, lies and videotape*, then spent many years afterward on a downward trajectory, yearning for the free-wheeling spirit of the independent sphere, making a host of obtuse 'personal' films before successfully combining his independent streak with the mainstream in 1999's drug war epic *Traffic*. Soderbergh's story is that of the truly gifted auteur trapped in a cycle of self-sabotage, emerging victorious only after a long, bitter fight.PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: Porn-lover PTA put his heart (and everything else) on the screen with his San Fernando Valley epics *Boogie Nights* and *Magnolia.* Evoking comparisons to Scorsese and Altman, Anderson certainly had something to say - the fact that he took so long to say it, and did so in such a bombastic way, had New Line executives tearing out their hair trying to make his message palatable to a wide audience. No luck so far...O'RUSSEL: Idiosyncratic and controlling, David O'Russel mined darkly comical material from the trauma of his wealthy east-coast childhood, and eventually came to make Hollywood's first critical take on the Gulf War with *Three Kings.* Tensions flared between the director and George Clooney, climaxing with fisticuffs in the Arizona desert and a long-standing feud after the film's release. Waxman obviously thinks highly of O'Russel's talent (more than I do, certainly), and a large part of the book is devoted to this socially-inept director.FINCHER: The heart of darkness over at Fox Studios, David Fincher took Chuck Palahniuk's *Fight Club* and, for once in a blue moon, managed to make a film superior to the source text. A biting satire of consumerism/fascism, *Fight Club* was despised by Fox's suits and marketers and infuriated conservative honcho Rupert Murdoch; the press, just as clueless as to the film's intentions, savaged it upon release. And yet *Fight Club* is now one of the great DVD successes, having found its audience among the young and restless whom identify with Tyler Durden, or at least with what he had to say...JONZE: A self-taught upstart from MTV, Spike Jonze slipped through the cracks to make one of Hollywood's strangest marquee flicks: the brilliant *Being John Malcovitz*, a film that would have never seen the light of day if not for the perseverance of Jonze and a studio hand-over.As in *Easy Riders, Raging Bulls*, Waxman ends her thesis with a recount of "where are they now" - a conclusion marred by the fact that this book is only five years down the road from the peak-year of 1999. In fact, *Rebels on the Backlot* is basically a much slighter version of that chronicle: for though it is written and sequenced in the same way, the narrow focus hardly paints an adequate picture of 90's cinema. Spike Lee, Richard Linkleter and Peter Jackson are hardly mentioned; Gus Van Zant is totally missing; the Wachoski Bros, Wes Anderson, David Aronofsky, Sam Mendes and Alexander Payne and are given sketchy-at-best accounts. Several of the above listed created far more influential and brain-bending films, IMO, than O'Russel or PTA. Still, for an amusing, gossipy, and occasionally insightful glimpse into the better cinema of mid-to-late 90's, *Rebels on the Backlot* serves its purpose.

Really enjoyed it and worth a read, especially if you're a fan of the Directors the book features. Pick it up

Good

If you're interested in directing or producing, looking at the innovative and rebellious works of these 90's directors and they're films and how they got made with be extremely informative. Highly recommended.

I wanted the book to keep going. So interesting