The revolution that failed

Many readers may object to the presence of Fincher, who's something of a special case -- a master showman and provocateur working within the studio system, à la Paul Verhoeven, rather than an independent filmmaker. Others will of course want to argue that the true genius of the era is missing; I suppose Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Todd Haynes and Todd Solondz might be candidates. It's certainly telling that the six leading "maverick" directors of the '90s, according to Waxman, were white hetero males, but she didn't invent Hollywood sexism and racism, and beyond Coppola and Haynes, whom would you nominate for the sake of diversity? Nicole Holofcener ("Lovely & Amazing")? Lisa Cholodenko ("Laurel Canyon")? Robert Rodriguez ("Once Upon a Time in Mexico")? Those are interesting directors, at least to a modest constellations of film buffs, but none dramatizes the collision of art and money in Hollywood the way Waxman's six do.

What's striking about Waxman's sextet of directors, in fact, isn't just that they're all straight white guys, but that they so closely fit a pattern: They're loners, social misfits driven by private obsessions, educational underachievers with unresolved mommy issues and a record of failed romances and abandoned friendships. They essentially all grew up discontented in middle-class suburbia; Waxman has a good time puncturing the various media mythologies that have sprung up around these guys. Despite numerous accounts to the contrary, Quentin Tarantino never lived in a squalid Tennessee trailer park, and Spike Jonze is not the heir to the Spiegel catalog-merchandising fortune (his real name is Adam Spiegel, but he is only distantly related to that family).

Do you have to be a high school loser to become an important independent filmmaker, or are we drawn to that narrative because it embodies so many of our ingrained ideas about art and artists? There can be no definitive answer to that question, but it's striking that all six of these directors are essentially self-taught, or in any case got their education outside the increasingly formulaic film-school factories of USC, UCLA and NYU. Anderson went to film school at NYU for a couple of weeks but promptly dropped out; Fincher, Jonze and Soderbergh never attended college at all. (Soderbergh hung around the Louisiana State film program but was never enrolled.)

Tarantino's film school (in one famous legend that turns out to be true) was the movie-geek subculture of a video store in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where he and his friends spent endless stoned hours watching obscure exploitation and martial-arts flicks and dissecting them, constructing a film-centric worldview several degrees of separation away from reality. As Waxman astutely observes, he became the ultimate homage artist of our time; as much as he may want to present himself as an originator, his best ideas are all borrowed and synthesized from other movies. One hears the echoes of those THC-fueled conversations, surely, in Tarantino's legendary dialogue: the pop-culture arguments among gangsters in "Reservoir Dogs," or the immortal "Royale with cheese" discussion in "Pulp Fiction."

It was the smashing success of "Pulp Fiction" in 1994, of course, that launched the indie-film craze, for good and for ill. Tarantino's dizzying chronicle of urban misadventure, the product of a long collaboration with his friend Roger Avary -- the two, predictably, would become estranged over Tarantino's unwillingness to share credit -- became the sensation of the Cannes Film Festival and broke down the walls of the art-movie ghetto, grossing more than $200 million worldwide. That year's biggest hits included such immortal films as "The Santa Clause," "Dumb and Dumber" and "The Flintstones," but it was Tarantino's wisecracking hitmen, violent black humor, retro musical score and explosive lyricism that shook Hollywood to its foundations.

As Waxman recognizes, the phrase "independent film" itself rapidly became a sort of zeitgeist indicator or attitude; it didn't mean anything specific about the way a movie was financed or produced. (By the time "Pulp Fiction" was released, Miramax already belonged to Disney.) Agents and studios were barraged with scripts featuring snarky gunmen in hip sunglasses, and more than a few of them actually got made into movies. Consider, if you must, the entire career of Guy Ritchie (if the phrase "entire career" isn't essentially hilarious when applied to the guy who will be remembered longest as the source of Madonna's circa-2001 phony English accent). Every Big Ten frat boy, it seemed, was planning on moving to L.A. to produce or write or direct "independent" films, except for the ones who were moving to San Francisco to get in on something called the Internet.

Tarantino himself, as Waxman only incompletely realizes, seemed strikingly ambivalent about his own revolutionary role. He seized the opportunity to become the hippest media celebrity of the moment, and the avatar of a new film aesthetic -- and then disappeared for most of the next decade, releasing only the underappreciated "Jackie Brown" and one segment of the omnibus film "Four Rooms" between 1994 and 2003 (when he finally completed "Kill Bill"). Waxman suggests that he spent much of that time with his true loves, marijuana and television, which lends a special poignancy to Bridget Fonda's memorable stoner-philosophy line in "Jackie Brown." Scolded by Samuel L. Jackson's character that all that fine herb will rob her of ambition, she responds, "Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV."

Next Page: Waxman unearths juicy anecdotes that'll keep film fans cackling and turning the pages

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