6. Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman

(NOTE: This is a book, not a bar in Austin. I understand that all this list-making will becoming confusing should I decide to have a drink at Catcher in the Rye or Finnegans Wake, or if I end up reading the Dickens classic Ginny’s Little Longhorn or Melville’s Carousel Lounge. But that’s the chance I have to take.)



Anyway, this book pretty much stinks. I’m guessing Waxman hoped to do for the late 90s what Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls did for the 70s, but a) Biskind beat her to it with Down and Dirty Pictures, which covers much of the same ground, and b) this book pretty much stinks. It covers too much familiar territory in the first half, and does so on such a rudimentary level, I have to believe her target audience is someone who hasn’t been to the movies or picked up a magazine in at least a decade. Her writing is flavorless hack-work and her grasp of the facts shoddy at best. The second half has a bit more personality, but quickly becomes a repetitive series of interchangeable anecdotes: egomaniacal auteur, a complete asshole who alienates everyone, lands studio deal. He refuses to compromise, makes picture his way, studio freaks out, demands he shorten it/remove sex and violence, etc. etc.

Waxman concentrates on six filmmakers who came up through indie flicks and made big zeitgeisty studio pictures: Tarantino, Soderbergh, P.T. Anderson, David O. Russell, Spike Jonze and David Fincher. The Tarantino stuff is especially over-familiar and rehashed; I would have preferred the inclusion of Wes Anderson, who really fits in better with the rest of the group, but maybe he refused to talk to her. I’m guessing the rest of these guys wish they had, too; she sure did take her bitter pills before putting pen to paper. The best thing I can say about the book is that it brought back that period about five years ago when, against all odds, a shitload of interesting movies all came out at once. Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, Magnolia, Election, American Beauty, The Limey… It didn’t matter if you liked all of ‘em (I didn’t), there was a bunch of inspiring stuff out there to talk and write about. You really wouldn’t know it from reading Rebels on the Backlot, though.