Rebels on the Backlot (15 page)

“When I first saw
Pulp Fiction
, I felt completely blown away. Excited. Capable of doing what I wanted to do,” said Paul Thomas Anderson, who saw the movie at 10:00
A.M.
at Cannes. “I felt an explosion of how creative that movie was. It was an inspiration.”

“I thought he really shook everything up,” said David O. Russell. “I loved the way he told the story. But without that Sam Jackson thing at the end, I wouldn’t have liked it as much. …If you don’t have Sam Jackson’s transformation at the end, I don’t give a shit about
Pulp Fiction
, including with the structure and all that shit. It’s just great filmmaking.” The movie injected a jolt of adrenaline into Hollywood’s cookie-cutter system. As the 1990s progressed, the rebel generation of filmmakers emerged to bend the risk-averse studios to their will.

B
Y THE WINTER OF 1994
, M
IRAMAX REALIZED THAT THEY
had a real shot at the Oscars with
Pulp Fiction
, though the favorite was likely to be another surprise hit of the year,
Forrest Gump.
Concerned about winning over the older, conservative voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Weinstein sent out videotapes of
Pulp Fiction
with the volume turned down in every scene that featured gunplay. He also sent a booklet about the film that included an essay written by a film professor at the University of Texas, whom he’d hired to write about the film’s place in the continuum of film noir.

Pulp Fiction
ultimately received seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for Tarantino and Roger Avary. At the Golden Globes, presented well before the Oscars, Tarantino alone won for Best Screenplay and failed to mention Avary in his acceptance speech. This prompted Avary’s wife, Gretchen, to curse him out in front of the attendees. On the night before the Oscar ceremonies, at the Independent Spirit Awards—a small ceremony for independent film—
Pulp Fiction
won the prizes for Best Feature, Best Male Lead, and Best Screenplay. Another film also won a couple of statues at the Spirit Awards: writer-director David O. Russell’s
Spanking the Monkey
, a dark comedy about incest, won Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. Russell’s film may not have shared Tarantino’s penchant for violence, but it had the same droll take on a sinister situation that seemed undeniably fresh and was somehow of a piece with Tarantino’s irreverence.

As expected,
Pulp Fiction
lost at the Oscars in the Best Picture category to the heart-warming
Forrest Gump
, but Tarantino and Avary won for Best Screenplay in front of an audience of millions. It was Tarantino’s thirty-second birthday.

Back in Studio City, Cathryn Jaymes watched the Oscars by herself with a mixture of sadness and pride. She hadn’t expected Tarantino to thank her in his speech. She only noted that he didn’t thank his agent either, or for that matter, his mother. “I was trying to think, maybe I should say a whole lot of stuff, right here, right now, just get it out of my system,” he said. “You know, all year long, everything roiling up and everything, just blow it all, just tonight, just say everything.” Then he paused. “But I’m not. Thanks.” This was followed by Avary’s notorious comment after thanking his “beautiful wife, Gretchen”: “I really have to pee right now, so I’m gonna go.” Then Tarantino headed back to his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel with former girlfriend Grace Lovelace and her sister, Laura, Rand Vossler from the old days at Video Archives, and a few other friends. There was birthday cake and Dom Perignon, a night of triumph.

I
t took a particular kind of hubris for twenty-five-year-old, first-time filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson to shoot a two-and-a-half-hour version of his ninety-five-page script, finish the edit, screen a version for the financial backers and say, that’s my cut. I’m not touching a frame. It took a certain level of bravado for him to be thrown off his first film twice.

That was the kind of hubris Paul Thomas Anderson seemed to be born with.

He came from a show business family, his father a larger-than-life figure who dominated the family nest of nine children from two marriages. Ernie Anderson was tall and skinny (like Paul), a gregarious, charismatic character whose every other word was “cocksucker.” “My dad was an amazing, creative, lovable guy,” Anderson recalled. Paul adored him. Born in Massachusetts, Ernie Anderson had started out in radio, where he met Tim Conway, the variety show comic, and worked with him on television in Cleveland. Anderson became a local cult figure for creating a television
character, “Ghoulardi,” wearing a fright wig and lab coat to introduce late-night schlock horror TV. His Ghoulardi character became a staple for WJW-TV’s Friday night horror movie show
Shock Theater
, where he was known for shouting at characters, reading fan and hate mail, blowing up model cars with firecrackers, smoking cigarettes profusely, tossing rubber chickens, and talking on an old-fashioned telephone. He had five children from his first marriage, to Marguerite Anderson, and met his second wife, Edwina Gough, in Cleveland. Then in 1966 Ernie Anderson moved the family to Los Angeles, the vast suburban hinterland called the San Fernando Valley. The second marriage produced four children: three girls and Paul, who was the second oldest, born on June 26, 1970. (Many databases erroneously list Anderson’s birthday as January 1, 1970.) Ernie Anderson made a good living as the promotional voice of ABC. His deep baritone became known to millions of television viewers on The
Love Boat
(the “Loooove Boat”) and
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
When the trailer was cut for his son’s first feature,
Hard Eight
, Ernie Anderson did the intro voice-over: “Starring John C. Reilly as….”

Growing up in a rambling house in North Hollywood, Paul Thomas Anderson—known as Paulie or P.T. to close friends and family—was surrounded by the chaos of numerous children, eighteen dogs, and his father’s showbiz friends. “The first batch of kids would come in and out; it was always shifting. There were always older kids; I was in the younger group,” Anderson recalled. “I had great sisters but they were tough. We were all tough. We were just fighters; we all fought all the time.” There were always colorful characters in and around the Anderson house, a steady stream of Hollywood’s working stiffs who never pierced through to a mass audience or real celebrity. Bob Ridgely, a nutty character actor who worked in Mel Brooks’s movies, was often around; he later played the colonel in
Boogie Nights.

Amid this chaos, Anderson found his father’s basement stash of porn at the age of nine and watched it obsessively throughout his teens. Every chance he got Anderson would sneak a look at seventies’ porn films like
The Opening of Misty Beethoven.
This would
have a profound effect on him, providing fodder for one of his first, best films. In general porn movie productions were part of the landscape in the Valley. All the kids in the neighborhood knew that the white van that pulled up to a house down the street was shooting porno. “It wasn’t that dark and dirty,” said Anderson.

Like many of those drawn to entertainment, Ernie Anderson tended to suck up a lot of the energy and attention in the Anderson home. Many have described him as extremely self-absorbed, treating his kids as appendages to his needs. But he was fun to be around. The filmmaker once told an interviewer that his first three movies “reflected his life in small, intimate, personal ways that I wouldn’t want to reveal. But you can be sure there’s a lot of my dad in these movies.” Paul Anderson’s mother is described by Anderson’s friends as cold and belittling of her son’s precocious talents. He immortalized her in the icily dismissive character who questions Dirk Diggler’s ability to amount to anything in
Boogie Nights.
Anderson doesn’t like to talk about her much. “She had a tough upbringing. She was Irish. We had our fights, but that was so long ago. We get along all right,” Anderson said in 2004. She would haul the children to church “when things were not swinging her way,” he said.

Luckily, though, Anderson seemed to have plenty of inner resources. He counts a desire to make movies among his very earliest memories, seeing
The Wizard of Oz
at age five or so. “I loved to write as a kid, and I wrote all the time,” he recalled. When he was seven years old, he wrote in a notebook: “My name is Paul Anderson. I want to be a writer, producer, director, special effects man. I know how to do everything and I know everything. Please hire me.” He was enchanted by the movies. His inner life began to revolve around them—his outer life, too. After he saw
ET
, he began dressing up as the Henry Thomas character—another towheaded boy from the Valley—and tried to ride his bike into the clouds. A little older, he saw
Rocky
, and started eating five eggs a day for breakfast and running every morning. His father bought him a Betamax camera and by age twelve, Paul was already making home movies, five-to ten-minute documentary-style pieces that he would edit on
a pair of VCRs at home, adding music to the background. He tells those who ask him, “I never had a backup plan other than directing films. Every time I eat mashed potatoes I still think of
Close Encounters.”
Strangely enough, Paul Thomas Anderson was the only one in the family to go into show business. One sister became a librarian, a half-brother became an auto mechanic, while another was a stay-at-home dad. Two of his half-brothers died in adulthood of complications from diabetes.

S
CHOOL WAS ANOTHER MATTER ENTIRELY.
A
NDERSON WAS
far too headstrong and too much in a hurry to stick around for much schooling. “I was distracted. I never liked the schools I went to. I was tempermental, and I was too impatient to be out of there,” he explained. “When I look back, I still think I was right. Most schools teach fear. ‘If you don’t learn this something bad is going to happen.’ I responded terribly to that.” He was kicked out of more than one school for truancy and getting into fights. He attended an upper-class private school called the Buckley School in the Valley until fifth grade, but his problems with authority led to the end of that. Then he was sent to Campbell Hall, a school for kids with behavioral issues. That didn’t prove successful, either, and in frustration Anderson’s parents sent him to Cardinal Cushing, a school for problem kids located outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where Anderson repeated the tenth grade. “It was rough. It was scary to be away from home. I was with a group of rough kids, and there were a lot of drugs,” he recalled. That experience finally scared him straight, and Anderson returned home for the last two years of high school, finishing at Montclair College Prep, in Reseda.

Anderson spent two semesters at Emerson College as an English major before dropping out, and then got into the prestigious New York University Film School. He dropped out after two days, deciding they had nothing to teach him. Instead Anderson took the tuition money and headed to California to seek his fortune. He worked as a messenger and production assistant on television shows (including one called
Quiz Kid Challenge
that later showed
up in the script of
Magnolia).
In his spare time, Anderson wrote and shot a short film called
Cigarettes and Coffee
, which starred Philip Baker Hall, a character actor he’d met while working as a production assistant on a PBS special about political correctness. The short focused on five characters interacting in a Las Vegas diner, with Hall as the main character, Sydney, an aging gambler who takes a young man under his wing and teaches him about gambling and survival. The film premiered at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Anderson decided to expand the short into a feature-length film called
Sydney
, and was accepted to the Sundance Filmmakers Lab to work on the project. It was at the lab that he met John Lyons, a casting director volunteering his expertise, who became Anderson’s producer on the film.

“I thought he was particularly smart and one of the most interesting directors who came through there,” recalled Lyons. “He had an unusual amount of confidence, even for a director, especially for someone his age. He was very savvy, utterly self-confident.”

Anderson often had that effect on people. “There was something different about him,” said Michelle Satter, who has run the Sundance Feature Film Program since its inception. “Occasionally you meet somebody who just jumps out at you, with an incredible spark, imagination, with incredible originality and confidence…. He was almost like this kid who loved movies, yet a wise soul.”

Satter wasn’t the only one who remarked on the fact that Anderson, barely twenty-three years old, had chosen as his central character a washed-up gambler in his sixties. Lyons was immediately won over by Anderson’s gift for creating humane, believable characters. “He never wrote with any condescension or sense of brittleness or falseness. He has an incredible ear,” he said.

Another producer who had seen
Cigarettes and Coffee
met Anderson at Sundance and was similarly dazzled. British producer Robert Jones contacted Anderson about making his short into a feature with an $800,000 budget. But problems with casting—mainly because Anderson insisted on the unknown Philip Baker Hall for the lead—slowed things down enough that Jones got busy making
The Usual Suspects
, a savvy criminal thriller by another young talent,
Bryan Singer, whom he’d met at Sundance that year, too.

In 1995 Jones picked up the project again, with Lyons still working on casting. Samuel L. Jackson had signed on, as had John C. Reilly and Gwyneth Paltrow, a pale, blue-eyed newcomer who’d attracted attention from a small role in
Flesh and Bone.
Eventually they raised $3 million from a small television production company looking to move into film, Rysher Entertainment, owned by Cox Communications. Anderson never met anyone at Rysher Entertainment before filming, a decision he later came to regret. He admitted that he had bribed his way into directing the movie by refusing to sell them the script unless they let him direct it.