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

Sharon Waxman delves into the lives of six men who have made headlines and redefined the way studios treat directors. Overall, what makes this book fascinating are the delicious details of personal lives and the on-the-set antics. However, what fail to shine is the actual writing. Waxman labors the half-baked introduction with lists of the directors' biographical landmarks that fail to make a point. The conclusion also feels rushed and bases her views of success on merely financial results (She dismisses "Punch-Drunk Love" as a failure for P.T. Anderson. He won Best Director for the film at both Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals.)I would still contest that this is a great read for those who have been captivated by these "rebels" and their extraordinary films, but if one is looking for any depth of analysis or crafted prose, look elsewhere.

This book is a must for every movie lover,buy it now before it's too late; A.

Rebels on the Backlot is a great book about 6 original directors. I especially liked the chapter on Quentin Tarantino.

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 Ho

If you felt a little let down by Peter Biskind's recent look at 90's indie film, "Down & Dirty Pictures," this juicier but also more personal book might be closer to what you were hoping to find there. Instead of focusing primarily on Sundance and Miramax, Waxman focuses on the six men responsible for some of the biggest movies of the past decade: Quentin Tarantino ("Pulp Fiction"), P.T. Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "Magnolia"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich"), David O. Russell ("Three Kings"), David Fincher ("Fight Club") and Steven Soderbergh ("Traffic"). They're a mixed bag of personalities and Waxman tells their stories with detail and relish, and also touches on other interesting filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Roger Avary, Charlie Kaufman, Alexander Payne and others (though some are conspicuously absent -- Spike Lee and especially Richard Linklater, who isn't even mentioned). It's hard to miss with a collection of stories like this: Tarantino's rise to power; Hackman cursing Wes Anderson on the set of "Tenenbaums"; Avary's attempts to buy a famous French film studio; Russell headbutting George Clooney on the set of "Kings" and P.T. Anderson admitting that "Magnolia" was probably too long. "Rebels" (very deliberately) rises to the same sordid, "print the legend" heights as Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." But it also suffers from some of the same weaknesses - occasionally questionable accounts; some poor copy editing and more than a few awkward sentences that feel like they were written the Sunday night before the term paper was due: "Traffic" screenwriter Stephen Gaghan's high school drug problems are introduced twice in three pages; Wes Anderson's debut was "Bottle Rocket" not "Rushmore"; and what can one say about lines such as, "Soderbergh questioned his own questioning" and "The director kept the obituary about his father printed in the local paper framed in his office in Los Angeles" ? Waxman also has a strange storytelling habit of explaining the results of a situation, then backtracking once or twice to tell the circumstances that led to the results. Nevertheless, it is absolutely impossible to deny the appeal of this book, and it was equally impossible for me to put the damn thing down for the past week.