Scoundrels and salesmen

There have always been directors who have been able to push personal movies through Hollywood. Typically, someone would make an interesting small movie that got some attention. The studios would then hire him -- or, in recent years, her. Often the studios were confused by the results. Orson Welles, who came from the theater and radio, made “Citizen Kane” for RKO, which didn’t know what to do with it.

In the 1990s, several young American directors emerged from the world of low-budget films and landed at the studios -- with similar results. In “Rebels on the Backlot,” Sharon Waxman, the Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times, has tried to figure out just who is in this recent crop and how permanent a mark they have made. She says, “[T]he rebel community emerged from the shadows and became recognizable as a group defining the cutting edge of movie culture.”

Quentin Tarantino came to prominence with “Reservoir Dogs” and then “Pulp Fiction,” which put Miramax at the center of Hollywood. His background has become part of his legend -- a slacker who dropped out of high school and worked in a video store. Stories of his rudeness and personal hygiene, his casual cruelty to friends, colleagues and even his mother, and his troubles with the French language abound in this telling.

Here’s one story: When Tarantino was broke and unknown, he was casting about for a title for a script and talking with future screenwriter and director Roger Avary. Tarantino mentioned “Au Revoir Les Enfants.” It came out something like “Aresvoir lezenf.” “That sounds like ‘reservoir dogs,’ ” Avary said. “You should name your movie that.” There’s a lot of gossip about the man here, but Waxman catches Tarantino’s voice when she describes his movies as having “the common vocabulary of casual, brutal violence and a raging intensity to the story line.”

David O. Russell, whose best film is “Three Kings,” can, in Waxman’s telling, sound pathological. He had made “Spanking the Monkey” and “Flirting With Disaster,” good small movies, before “Three Kings,” which Waxman calls a “$60 million auteur movie for Warner Brothers.” What he delivered was startling and fresh, but the battles along the way were epic. Russell and George Clooney got into a fistfight and traded insults that made the two of them sound like schoolyard morons.

Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies and videotape” was a sensation at Cannes in 1989. He later made movies that were personal to the point of obscurity. More recently, he’s made a mixture of good studio films -- “Erin Brockovich” and “Ocean’s Eleven,” the latter, which is well crafted, doesn’t have much in the way of rebellion about it. Soderbergh comes across as literate and thoughtful. He gets in disputes, but it’s hard to imagine him taking a poke at an actor on a film set. Waxman talks about the problems Soderbergh had making “Traffic,” about the ins and outs of the casting and financing. All movies go through this sort of thing. Each one has different particulars, but they’re all tales of dashed hopes and odious compromises.

Paul Thomas Anderson first came to public notice with “Hard Eight,” a promising small movie that featured a memorable performance by Philip Baker Hall. Waxman traces the difficulties in making the film -- the battles over the edit, the director locked out of the cutting room and other treats. Anderson’s later films, particularly “Boogie Nights” (set in the San Fernando Valley world of pornography) and “Magnolia” (also set in the Valley) are mature works no matter how young the director was. Both owe a structural debt to Robert Altman. Anderson’s personality as outlined here seems, well, not exactly overloaded with charm and grace. When that bratty attitude produces small movies of promise, he’s barely worth our time. His bigger pictures forgive a lot of dopey behavior.

David Fincher, who made a bundle in advertising and music videos, eventually made “Fight Club.” Fincher is quoted here as having said that Fox executives were “idiots” for making a “$75-million experimental movie.” It was a trial for all concerned, much of it caused by a mean streak in Fincher that he seemed to confuse with artistic purity. I don’t think the initial failure of “Fight Club” can be attributed to Fincher’s rudeness. It wasn’t an easy movie to sell; the task was to let people know what they were in for in a way that made it seem enticing. It’s a perverse movie and the key to watching it is to know that it’s a comedy without jokes. Eventually it found an audience on DVD, but not before the head of production at Fox had been fired.

And that brings us to Spike Jonze, the maker of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” -- both written by Charlie Kaufman. Waxman describes Jonze as “shockingly uneducated.” She tells a story about the actual John Malkovich making reference to Blanche DuBois. When he got no response from Jonze, he tried “Streetcar.” Tennessee Williams? Nothing. Jonze seems to have spent his youth playing with dirt bikes.

Does it matter? Art makes its own way, and it doesn’t always need traditional grounding. Jonze certainly knew how to make the eccentric “Malkovich” script come alive. And yet one can imagine another director making that movie, though only Kaufman could have written it. Waxman reports that during the production, “Everyone got to weigh in on the process, including Charlie Kaufman.” Maybe they were just humoring him. No wonder screenwriters are nuts.

Waxman has chosen six directors who are likely to be around for a long time. All of them have a tendency to emphasize style over character. A self-conscious knowingness creeps into some of their movies and seems to suggest that if you don’t get it, you’re just not hip enough. It can wear thin. Another thing they have in common has little to do with a rebel aesthetic: an ability to persuade normally cautious executives to put up huge sums of money for what to many of them must seem harebrained schemes.

Still, no matter how loony these guys get, they aren’t so different from those who came before and very likely the ones who will come after. You can see it in the scripts that studios develop and then hire a director to shoot. Something like, oh, let’s call it “Bad Date II” is unlikely to be a movie someone fought for, but rather a job somebody got. No matter what you might think of, say, “Fight Club,” it’s not a routine programmer.

This is a reporter’s book. It’s filled with facts but not much in the way of context, and Waxman uses terms like “back lot” and “studio system” too loosely to inspire confidence. She’s sometimes on shaky ground when writing about how things work in Hollywood. One example among several: The writing credits for “Three Kings” were contentious -- as in many studio films. She seems to suggest that the studio decided the credits. A production company proposes a credit, usually pleasing one party and infuriating another. The Writers Guild arbitrates and makes a determination -- someone is still unhappy, but the authority rests with the guild.

Still, for all that, and more, this is a lively book with gossipy and readable stories about some obsessive guys who are as much rascals as rebels. And reader, it was ever thus. *