Rebels on the Backlot (18 page)

Sex, lies, and videotape
, made Soderbergh the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Returning triumphantly to Los Angeles from Cannes, he found his little movie getting almost embarrassingly glowing reviews in every publication, from the
Los Angeles Times
to the high-toned
American Film.
Before Miramax bought the film, there were eleven companies bidding for the rights to distribution. Within a
month Pat Dollard had logged five hundred calls from people who wanted to meet Soderbergh, see the movie. One studio, having never met Soderbergh, had called and offered a blind deal—money for anything he wanted to do. Typically pessimistic, Soderbergh kept reminding himself of the Hollywood flavors-of-the-month who had been sizzling hot then sank without a trace: Phil Joanou, a protégé of Steven Spielberg; Michael Dinner, the young director of
Miss Lonelyhearts.

But after all this died down, Soderbergh began to feel the sting of Hollywood rejection. He’d been attached to direct
Quiz Show
, a drama about the rigged game show
Twenty-One.
But when Robert Redford showed interest in the movie, Soderbergh was summarily dismissed. (An earlier fallout with Redford had also resulted in the Sundance Kid’s removing his executive producer credit from Soderbergh’s 1993 film
King of the Hill.)

Discouraged by Hollywood, Soderbergh moved back to Baton Rouge and kept plugging away on his own small projects. In a dismal state of mind, he turned to
The Underneath
, a crime film about an armored car heist. Halfway through making the film in 1995, Soderbergh knew he was going through a real crisis. He realized he was miserable. “I was just drifting off course,” he recalled later. “I’m sure there are tons of reasons, some personal and some professional. The bottom line was I sort of woke up in the middle of
The Underneath
and felt I was making a movie I wasn’t interested in.” Soderbergh asked himself whether he even wanted to make movies anymore. “I realized that what I needed to do was change what I was doing.” The epiphany led him to question his entire approach to filmmaking. Soderbergh had never considered himself a Hollywood filmmaker, but the lousy reception of his last several films made him wonder if he even had an art-house audience. The box office was rewarding movies like
Pocahontas
and
Crimson Tide
and even David Fincher’s
Se7en.
At the Oscars it was
Braveheart
that was winning kudos, and he certainly wasn’t making any
Pulp Fiction.
Little wonder that Soderbergh felt isolated and alone.

In April 1996—after making yet another obscure film,
Gray’s Anatomy
, a monologue by actor Spalding Gray about his eye disease—and
with
The Underneath
opening to miserable business in France, Soderbergh told the French review
Positif
, “The times do not favor a filmmaker like me. The proof of this is in the films that are popular. I don’t know where the spectators for my films are. Maybe they are home reading or watching films on video. Before we made
The Underneath
the head of Universal told me he thought there wasn’t an audience for this kind of film in the States. He was probably right.”

He was definitely right.
The Underneath
made a grand total of $336,023 at the domestic box office.

Soderbergh was less charitable toward his work in hindsight. “It’s the coldest of the films I’ve made,” he said of
The Underneath
(he did say this, however, before making
Solaris).
“There’s something somnambulant about it. I was sleepwalking in my life and my work and it shows.”

There’s perhaps a deeper level to what Soderbergh was choosing to do in the wake of his unexpected success with
sex, lies, and videotape.
He seemed to have a penchant for self-sabotage that was not too far beneath his conscious choices, as if he was not quite sure he wanted such fame and fortune, or not sure if he deserved it. “I think Steven is reluctant to be a successful director, and that’s why he stayed independent so long,” remarked his friend George Clooney when asked about it. “There’s a part of him that still wants to be Steven Soderbergh from Baton Rouge who does what he wants and doesn’t have to answer to anybody. But it’s a fear any independent director has: that early on they’re edgy, but when they get fat and happy, the edge goes away.”

In 2001 Soderbergh had this to say about his relationship to success: “I’m very comfortable with failure. I’m very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people. It played right into my idea of myself. I find comfort in how not upsetting it was to have people go, ‘Wow what happened to that guy, what is he doing? Why is he making that shit?’ I really like not being watched.”

S
ODERBERGH KNEW HE NEEDED TO CHANGE DIRECTION RADICALLY
if he was going to continue to be a filmmaker, but he seemed
unable to help himself. He decided to move into even more obscure terrain, announcing to a French interviewer in 1995, “I would like to make small-budget films that are experimental, that may not draw a large audience, or no audience at all.”

No audience at all? Now
that
was a breakthrough. There was, however, a grain of genius in this apparently suicidal leap. Soderbergh had decided to liberate himself from the constraints of script and production, and just shoot. He needed to remember why he wanted to be a filmmaker. Whether or not anyone saw the finished product would be beside the point.

The result was
Schizopolis
, which was shot over a ten-month period in Soderbergh’s hometown of Baton Rouge. He was seeking to re-create the freedom he had felt when making Super 8s with Paul Ledford and Larry Blake back at Louisana State University. The whole film cost $250,000; friends who worked on it deferred their salaries and doubled as both crew and cast. A friend, Michael Corrente, donated raw stock from Kodak, which he’d won as a prize for his first film,
Federal Hill.
This was guerrilla filmmaking pushed to the edge. Soderbergh wrote it, directed it, was cinematographer and—a first—played at least two of the two lead characters, a dentist and an oddball husband (it was kind of hard to tell who was who in the final product). The whole experience seemed to unlock something in the director. He felt a freedom and spontaneity that was long missing from his work. The crew of five people would get up in the morning and shoot a scene. If it didn’t work, they’d head off for lunch to talk about it, then they would drive around and find another location and try the shot there. Actors would be cast the night before, with members of the crew calling up their friends to see if they were available. Soderbergh would write a scene on the spot. One day the woman playing the wife of a character, motivational guru T. Azimuth Schwitters, didn’t show up. The actress had left town and not bothered to tell anyone. Soderbergh shouted to the crew, “Anybody know a girl in her early twenties who we could use to play the assistant?” Someone went off to look. He sat down to write the scene. Soderbergh was exhilarated by the process. “I just felt in the zone all the time,” he later said.

Schizopolis
was the story of the disintegration of Soderbergh’s marriage to Betsy Brantley, with Brantley playing the wife, and their daughter, Sarah, playing the daughter. Working with his ex-wife in a story about his ex-marriage was “intense. I don’t even know what word to use. We both looked at it as an experience that might teach us something,” said Soderbergh. But he also made the film to figure out what was wrong with him professionally.
“Schizopolis
was working on a couple levels,” he said later. “I thought, the work’s gotta bust out, and I’ve gotta bust out.” Whether the experience changed Soderbergh on a personal level was hard to tell, but professionally the experience “woke me up,” he said.

Soderbergh had no idea if it would wake up anyone else, and his skepticism turned out to be well placed.
Schizopolis
was a chaotic jumble of image and plot, reflecting the filmmaker’s energy, but making sense to no one but the most dedicated Soderbergh fan. If the director was reaching for the carefree joy of his idol Richard Lester in
A Hard Day’s Night
, he fell short; characters spoke to each other in different languages (with no subtitles for the benefit of the viewer) and scenes hopped from one strange exchange to another for no apparent reason. It was as if the audience indeed didn’t matter. Much later he admitted that the movie “probably crossed the line from personal into private filmmaking,” but at the time, Soderbergh nonetheless had hopes of selling the film for distribution, securing a slot for a surprise screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996. Word seeped out that there was a new experimental Soderbergh film in the offing, and Harvey Weinstein, who had just paid Soderbergh to do a rewrite on his movie
Mimic
, called to make sure no one else had seen it. He requested an advance screening, but Soderbergh declined. Intrigued, Weinstein made a preemptive bid of $1 million for the film just before the official screening began, sight unseen. That was the last time Weinstein mentioned the film; after the screening—during which about fifty people walked out in the first half hour—the mogul made a beeline for the door.

Still, Soderbergh remained bizarrely optimistic, writing in his diary, “I really think the public will be ahead of the critics on this one, should the public ever get a chance to see it.” That seemed
unlikely, given the reviews. Janet Maslin in the
New York Times
called the film a “bizarre, largely impenetrable experiment in linguistics.” Todd McCarthy at
Variety
hated it, calling the film “cranky” and “disgruntled.”

Back in Los Angeles, a screening was held for distributors and several hundred of Soderbergh’s friends at the Motion Picture Academy theater on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. One by one the independent distributors passed: first Gramercy, then Strand, then Trimark, finally Sony Classics. Northern Arts showed some interest, but the deal fell through. Soderbergh thought it was ironic that he’d made the ultimate independent film, and all the independent studios were, as he put it, “afraid of it.” He didn’t consider that the film was actually impenetrable. He began to get testy. He wrote in his diary: “They tend to say, ‘We really liked it, but we don’t know who the audience is for this.’ Blah blah blah. Nobody has any fucking vision.”

Soderbergh’s supporters in Hollywood were still trying to lure him back to making movies that people might actually want to see. Bobby Newmyer, the producer who’d first worked with Soderbergh on
sex, lies, and videotape
, kept encouraging him to come back to Hollywood and make a mainstream film like
Leatherhead
, the sports film he’d been interested in long ago. He’d call Soderbergh and urge him to pick up the script again. “It’ll be fucking great. It’ll be a blast.” He’d be greeted by long silences and a simple “My head’s just not there now.”

Where was Soderbergh’s head? Nobody knew. “I was frustrated,” admitted Newmyer. “I kept bringing him everything in the world I had. But he had a certain disdain for mainstream Hollywood movies.”

In August 1996 Soderbergh used an advance check he earned from Universal for rewrite work to start on a movie called
Neurotica
, a sequel to
Schizopolis.
This seemed almost like a deliberate act of self-sabotage, but apparently Soderbergh couldn’t imagine other options.

“I sit here and think I’m making films nobody wants to see and finding it near impossible to write, even though it’s been my only
source of income for the past eighteen months,” he wrote in his diary. “And I can also imagine people who would kill even to be in this situation, as shitty as it seems to me right now. What’s bugging me, I think, is the possibility that this road that I’ve been encouraging myself (and everyone around me) to follow the last year and a half leads nowhere, or perhaps somewhere worse than the place I left. But what’s the alternative? Go back and make stupid Hollywood movies? Or fake highbrow movies, with people who would be as cynical about hiring me to make a ‘smart’ movie as others are when they hire the latest hot action director to make some blastfest?”

The thought of trying to make his kind of movies within the Hollywood system seemed to him absurd, impossible. But it would be surprisingly simple to change this view 180 degrees. Soderbergh hadn’t counted on finding a guardian angel within that same system. (And blessedly,
Neurotica
never got made.)

I
N
N
OVEMBER 1996
S
ODERBERGH FINALLY FOUND A
script he wanted to direct. It was called
Human Nature
, a surreal comedy by a young writer named Charlie Kaufman. As Soderbergh noted in his diary at the time, “He actually wrote another script called
Being John Malkovich
that I liked but it was already set up at New Line with another director.” That other director was Spike Jonze, who would turn that into one of the most innovative films of the 1990s.

Human Nature
was what came to be considered typically Kaufmanesque, with characters and a story that existed on a different plane than the rest of the universe. It’s about a behavioral scientist who spends his time trying to teach table manners to mice. He befriends a woman covered in body hair—fur—who wants electrolysis. They meet a boy who thinks he’s an ape and teach him to be human. Soderbergh was enchanted. He spoke to Marc Platt, an executive at Universal, who called the material “challenging,” but was willing to pass it on to his boss, Casey Silver. Silver politely suggested that it might be better suited for, say, Miramax. Silver thought the script had no third act, apart from being entirely
bizarre. Soderbergh persisted in developing the project, even going as far as thinking about David Hyde Pierce for the scientist and
Saturday Night Live’s
Chris Kattan as the Nature Boy (“I think he’s destined for stardom,” Soderbergh wrote), with Marisa Tomei as the Nature Girl. But Miramax passed.

In passing on
Human Nature
, Universal chief Casey Silver delicately asked if he could slip Soderbergh the script of a movie called
Out of Sight
, which had been adapted by screenwriter Scott Frank from an Elmore Leonard novel. TV star George Clooney already wanted to star in the movie.