The revolution that failed

But beyond such blatant Tarantino rip-offs as "2 Days in the Valley" and "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead," the success of "Pulp Fiction" opened the door for a new wave of talented directors who might otherwise have been stuck maxing out their parents' credit cards and making $10,000 movies for the film festival circuit indefinitely. As Waxman knows well, it's almost always a fluke when a good movie gets made in Hollywood, and most of "Rebels on the Backlot" tells the story of six such flukes: Anderson's "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia"; Russell's "Three Kings"; Jonze's "Being John Malkovich"; Fincher's "Fight Club"; and Soderbergh's "Traffic."

Each of these movies had at least one near-death experience in production, and Waxman unearths juicy anecdotes that'll keep film fans cackling and turning the pages. Production and marketing executives were generally befuddled by these films; but these were the same geniuses, Waxman points out, who had been convinced that Fincher's "Seven" and Andy and Larry Wachowski's "The Matrix" would be bombs. When he was pitched Charlie Kaufman's now-legendary screenplay, for example, New Line Cinema honcho Bob Shaye said, "'Being John Malkovich'? Why can't it be 'Being Tom Cruise'?"

That film would surely never have been completed or released if the studio producing it hadn't been sold partway through production, leaving Jonze, Kaufman and their crew virtually unsupervised. "Fight Club" would surely have been killed without the presence of superstar actor Brad Pitt, and the fact that Art Linson, the production executive assigned to keep Fincher under control, turned out to share his desire to shock the bigwigs at Fox. Similarly, the fact that Tom Cruise wanted to appear in Anderson's "Magnolia" meant that Anderson could make a deal demanding final cut (and he refused to edit his meandering masterpiece below 198 minutes) and control over the marketing campaign, to the producers' eventual chagrin.

Even Russell's "Three Kings," a relatively successful film and critics' darling that has acquired a special resonance in the wake of George W. Bush's Gulf War sequel, was plagued by a bitter feud between the director and his neophyte star, George Clooney (then known primarily as a TV actor). The two disliked each other from the start; Russell apparently thought he'd gotten stuck with a pretty boy who couldn't act, while Clooney found the director arrogant, disorganized and mean-spirited. They nearly came to blows on the set; Waxman has actual copies of the letters Clooney wrote to Russell, first to get the part, and then to offer a rather reluctant "olive branch" as their disagreements worsened. Waxman thinks that the feud poisoned Russell's reputation in Hollywood, and cost the film any chance of winning Oscars.

Of these six movies, only "Traffic" -- which, as I've said, I see as the weakest of the bunch -- made a significant profit. Most either made or lost small sums of money; "Magnolia" and "Fight Club" were box-office disasters (at least until "Fight Club" became a huge cult hit on DVD). But all became occasions for widespread discussion and critical debate, on a scale American film hadn't seen since the rise of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg and the other major directors of the mid-'70s. Was "Magnolia" an overcooked, symbolist mishmash or a haunting, poetic allegory of American existence? (Probably both.) Was "Fight Club" -- which was derided by critics but embraced by college-age male moviegoers -- a blistering critique of consumerism or a hypocritical horror show? (Again, both).

In 1999, the indie wave crashed onto the beach of American culture with tremendous force; we couldn't have realized at the time that we'd probably never see anything like it again. That year not only saw the release of "Magnolia," "Three Kings," "Being John Malkovich" and "Fight Club," but also "The Matrix," Sam Mendes' Oscar-sweeping "American Beauty," Alexander Payne's "Election," Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry." (True confessions: Waxman quotes me prominently near the beginning of her 1999 chapter, which is certainly flattering. She also misspells my name and attributes my Salon review of "Fight Club" to the Vancouver Sun. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

It's hard to explain what happens when the zeitgeist shifts subtly; maybe what has happened to independent film since 2000 is the result of a 9/11 hangover, or the massive success of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, or the sluggish economy of the last few years. It's not like good young American filmmakers aren't still making movies; Coppola's "Lost in Translation," Cholodenko's "Laurel Canyon" and Haynes' "Far From Heaven" suggest that geeky white boys don't possess all the mojo. But the indie-film balloon has gradually but distinctly deflated. It's basically another business niche now; a label for productions that won't top the weekend grosses but might provide a tidy return on a modest investment. (Payne's "Sideways" being this year's case in point.)

Most of the six filmmakers Waxman profiles have, at least arguably, retreated from their artistic peak in the years since 2000. Fincher and Soderbergh have become Hollywood directors who take on mildly intriguing projects, as was always their destiny. Anderson and Russell have turned out lower-key, introspective works ("Punch-Drunk Love" and "I Heart Huckabees," respectively) that failed to find much of an audience or generate much buzz. Jonze and Kaufman's 2002 "Adaptation" was giddily enjoyable, a self-referential shtick classic, but also something of a dead end: How much further can the Kaufman meta-movie gambit go? (Jonze is reportedly making another film with Kaufman, but he's also supposed to be working on an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are.")

Film directors' careers are full of second and third acts. I'm sure we haven't heard the last of any of these guys, and I'm grateful we'll have Sharon Waxman on hand to fill us in. By basically sitting out the second half of the '90s -- deliberately allowing himself to go from white-hot hepcat to late-night talk-show weirdo -- and then returning with a two-part martial-arts pastiche classic that owed little to the so-called indie sensibility, Quentin Tarantino may once again have lit the way forward for the stranded mavericks of the '90s. He now looks less like a rebel firebrand or a flavor of the month than like a permanent outsider, a Scorsese or Altman or Kubrick figure who resurfaces every few years with a spiny and unexpected work, the kind of thing that challenges movie-biz insiders to remember that some small and unpredictable part of their manufacturing business is actually the half-accidental creation of art.

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