Rebels on the Backlot (34 page)

With Reeves and Fishburne cast as the leads, Daly and Semel wanted a financing partner. Village Roadshow, a production company, agreed to put up half the budget, and the Australian government kicked in a 15 percent tax rebate to attract the project overseas, the first of many large productions to leave Hollywood in the second half of the decade.

In Terry Semel’s private conference room, the final green-light
meeting took place with the cochairman, producer Joel Silver, and di Bonaventura. The Wachowski brothers—who normally are so silent as to seem almost mute—came in carrying detailed, painted storyboards, laying out the entire movie as if it were a graphic novel. The brothers positioned themselves on either side of Terry Semel, with one telling the story of the movie—“there’s a jack in the back of the human’s head, like a plug …”—while the other provided all the special effects noises—
boom, hiss, whoosh
—in the background while holding up the storyboards. It was a tour-de-force performance. Semel asked, “How does their spinal fluid not leak?” One of the brothers explained. They talked about Kierkegaard, about science fiction writer William Gibson. They discussed Buddhism, Islam, and Christ’s role in the Bible. They explained the characters, what a “sentinel” is and what it looks like. They explained “bullet time” and how that would be filmed. After two hours, Semel was convinced. “This is one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen,” he announced. “Let’s go.”

O
N ITS RELEASE IN 1999
T
HE
M
ATRIX
WAS MARKETED AS A
classic action movie in the traditional Warner Brothers style. No matter. Audiences recognized something very different in the film.
The Matrix
quickly became a phenomena, sparking an explosion of pop interest in the concept of the movie, its look, its style, and stars, and inspiring a near religious fervor by fans devoted to the movie’s philosophy (whatever that was). It also raked in close to $400 million at the worldwide box office. And there were two more
Matrix
movies to come.

As a sidenote, Larry Wachowski became somewhat less reclusive in the wake of
The Matrix
’s success. He left the college sweetheart he’d married in 1993, Thea Bloom, for a professional dominatrix, Karin Winslow, who left her own husband to take the director on as her slave. Then he also became a cross-dresser and appeared at the premiere of the final installment of the trilogy,
The Matrix Revolutions
, dressed as a woman. The quality of the second and third films seemed to decline with the Wachowskis’ meteoric
Hollywood success. Neither gave interviews to talk about it. Meanwhile the technophobic Terry Semel left Warner Brothers to take over Yahoo, the Internet company.

I
T WAS AROUND THIS TIME, THE END OF 1995
,
THAT
B
ILL
Gerber saw an early copy of
Flirting with Disaster
, the odd comedy-drama by David O. Russell. The Miramax film starred Ben Stiller, who goes off on a search for his birth parents (played by Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda), and it was generating a lot of buzz both in the independent world and beyond. Harvey Weinstein had bought the project for distribution and cleverly gave Russell a two-picture deal at the same time. This meant Miramax had the first shot at making any new screenplay that Russell wrote. But the director had other things in mind. For one, he had been researching a movie at Princeton, a turn-of-the-century drama about spiritual death in the twentieth century, based around a family in the oil industry. Russell found the topic entirely intimidating, and once immersed in the research was wondering whether he could pull it off. Additionally, he was annoyed that Miramax had not put much effort into the video release of
Flirting
, slapping mediocre art on the package and using quotes he didn’t like. So Russell was intrigued when Gerber invited him over to the Warner Brothers lot to read scripts to see if there was something he might be interested in directing. If he found a screenplay to direct that someone else had written, he could circumvent his obligation to Miramax. The draw of a big canvas—and a big Warner Brothers budget—was tempting.

Russell did find something. Writer John Ridley had written a screenplay called
Spoils of War.
Sitting in di Bonaventura’s office, Russell saw it listed as an entry in a log of Warner scripts: “Four soldiers go on heist in Iraq during Gulf War,” it said. The story line was very different from anything Russell had done before, but that was part of what interested him. He had a long-standing interest in foreign politics, from volunteering with Nicaraguan refugees in New England in his early twenties after graduating from Amherst, and later visiting Central America. Russell’s first interest in filmmaking
had come from shooting video of the refugees. Indeed, he was one of the few rebel directors of his era not to discover his desire to make movies at an early age. Instead, Russell came to the craft through storytelling and character, based on his own life and the people he met. But after making two very personal films—
Spanking
and
Flirting
—politics was clearly on his mind. Russell had considered directing
Bulworth
, the cynical comedy about domestic politics, but Warren Beatty directed it instead. Ridley’s idea involving the Gulf War intrigued him; the bizarre nature of the conflict, America going there to liberate Kuwait, and then leaving the Iraqis to deal with their dictator, reminded him of American cynicism in Central America.

The story “seemed like something I could go nuts with in terms of exploring every human and political dimension,” Russell said. This project would take him out of the territory of personal drama into a wholly new universe: an action-adventure war story at a major studio. Gerber brought Russell in to meet di Bonaventura, and he agreed that Russell was just the kind of young talent Warner needed to recharge itself creatively. They agreed that Russell would rewrite the script, and the studio would then decide whether to make it. But Russell was aware of the Warner Brothers culture. At the time, he thought to ask if this studio really wanted to make his kind of movies. Gerber replied, “We’re not afraid of this type of thing. We made
JFK.”
Before the movie was made, Gerber would be out of a job, after losing a power struggle with di Bonaventura.

R
USSELL TOOK EIGHTEEN MONTHS TO RESEARCH AND
rewrite
Three Kings.
He claims he never read the John Ridley version, though Ridley later complained that much of the story was his own. It wasn’t, really, and in fact there’s not much to discuss here: Ridley’s script is nothing like Russell’s. After negotiation with the studio, Ridley was given joint credit for the story on Russell’s very first draft. Russell took the screenplay credit.

The premise of the story was clever but not particularly original as war capers go. It was about a Special Forces major and three
reservists at the end of the 1991 Gulf War who discover a map to a cache of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s gold bullion. They decide to go briefly AWOL to steal it, but along the way they meet up with a group of opposition fighters who have been abandoned by the Americans and who are battling the crumbling regime by themselves. The soldiers are caught between their greed and their desire to help the Iraqis escape, if not fight their oppressors. They end up abandoning their quest for the gold and, against the direct orders of their commander, aid the rebels escape to the Iranian border.

If the premise of the story was familiar, the tone and the attitude of the script was wholly original. And its plot was ultimately exceedingly subversive, juxtaposing the greed of the four soldiers with the hypocrisy and cynicism of the American government led by President George H. W. Bush. In the real world, Bush had repeatedly urged Iraqis to overthrow their dictator, but refused to help them do so once they began. The American refusal to become involved, beyond ousting Saddam from Kuwait, resulted in the dictator’s staying in power and in the mass killing of tens of thousands of Kurds, Shi’ites, and others who dared oppose him. Russell claimed to have been influenced by the stylish violence of Tarantino’s movies and the harsh vitality of Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Boogie Nights
in writing
Three Kings.
Critics would later cite a whole host of other influences, from
M*A*S*H
to
Catch-22
to
Kelly’s Heroes
to
The Man Who Would Be King.
But the script was astonishingly original in other ways, too; it was one of the only movies ever made in Hollywood to depict Arabs as nuanced individuals rather than as a guttural, dirty mob. Russell not only created sympathetic rebel Iraqi characters, he even allowed the Iraqis who served Saddam’s regime to show humanity—utterly unique in the annals of Hollywood’s rote demonization of Arabs. Even an Iraqi torturer gets a backstory, with his baby having been killed by an American bomb. And all of it was laced with David Russell’s uniquely bizarre humor. A Bart Simpson doll tied to the front of the protagonists’ Jeep led the way. One signature scene in the film involves an Iraqi henchman who attaches electrodes to a captured reservist. But first he asks, What’s the matter with Michael Jackson’s face?

Once again, neither Bob Daly nor Terry Semel particularly got the script. It deviated too much from the classic action-hero sensibility. Nor were they comfortable with such a political piece of work. Politics traditionally did not do well at the box office;
Three Kings
was meant to be an action-adventure war film, but it was too intelligent and the story was too subtle not to reflect badly on the American government. This always made studios uncomfortable. Semel admired Russell’s writing and his voice, but warned, “Those political movies don’t always make money.”

Di Bonaventura agreed the movie was a risk. “It was fairly singular. And controversial,” he said. But he wanted to make it. As they had with The
Matrix
, the studio chiefs decided to trust di Bonaventura’s passion. But they wanted a rewrite.

In May 1998 Russell delivered one, stripped of some of the more controversial aspects of his brilliant first draft. The essence of the story was there: the map of the gold up a POW’s rear end, the horrific torture scene, jokes about the Lexus and Infiniti models, the run for the border with the Shi’ite refugees. Russell had toned down a rape scene at a key shift in the film, when the heist turns bad, and softened details such as putting clothes and handcuffs on a group of Iraqi prisoners who were originally naked. Still, George Clooney, who was to be cast in the lead, was appalled at the changes. “What the fuck?” he scrawled on his copy of the second draft, and told di Bonaventura the studio was pushing Russell to ruin the movie. A third draft moved back closer to the original, and a fourth draft was an improved version of the first draft. (All the drafts were genius compared to most Hollywood scripts, but that’s a minor point. Russell said he never intended to water down his vision and had no idea what Clooney was talking about. “He never said anything to me about that at the time,” he said.)

In February 1998 Steven Soderbergh’s father suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The event was a devastating loss to the director. Peter Soderbergh had been a role model and a consistent support to Steven through his precocious youth, meteoric success,
and subsequent career doldrums. The director’s father had a strain of warmth that Soderbergh himself lacked and to which he seemed ever to aspire. Especially because Soderbergh distanced himself from his eccentric mother, the loss of his father was all the more acute. There were many eulogies at the funeral. The director kept the obituary about his father printed in the local paper framed in his office in Los Angeles.

“Although superfically our relationship was not complicated, to this day I’m not sure what his life and death mean to me,” wrote Soderbergh in the epilogue to
Getting Away with It.
“Mostly I am left with the nagging sensation that I did not make enough use of his vast knowledge and life experience because I was too busy trying to amass my own.”

Even during Soderbergh’s grieving, he and producer Laura Bickford pushed ahead on
Traffic
without a studio. But they still needed a writer. After laboring to get someone to watch
Traffik
and consider doing an adaptation, suddenly Bickford found that dozens of writers were interested now that Soderbergh, the maker of
Out of Sight
, was involved. They got some three hundred writing samples from eager volunteers, and among them Bickford found a script by a writer named Steve Gaghan about upper-class kids from Beverly Hills who were pretending to be in a Latino gang. It rang true and reminded her of the portion of
Traffik
that depicted upper-crust Oxbridge students scrounging for drugs. There was a reason the script rang true; its writer, Steven Gaghan, was a former drug addict who had started using pot and cocaine while still a student at a private high school in Louisville, Kentucky. Bickford called Gaghan’s agent but hit an immediate bump. “There’s a problem,” said the agent, John Lesher. “Steve Gaghan is already writing a script about the war on drugs, for Ed Zwick.”

What were the odds? Actually, pretty high. Hollywood had a strange, almost metaphysical tendency to spit forth near identical projects at the same time. Sometimes this was a handful of disparate producers feeling the zeitgeist simultaneously. More often it was about some studio or TV executive doing their own version of a hot topic to avoid paying for the rights to source material, or a race
between competing producers to rip a current idea from the headlines and be first to the finish line. This time, though, it seemed to be a true coincidence. Zwick and his partner, Marshall Herskovitz, were one of the preeminent writer-director-producer teams in Hollywood. Zwick was a bushy-haired, stubble-bound talent in all three departments, and got the idea for a movie about the drug wars from an article he’d read in the
Utne Reader
about a drug bust gone awry in South Florida. With Herskovitz, Zwick had long been a powerhouse television producer, creating and producing the series
Thirtysomething
in the 1980s; in recent years he had turned to film, directing movies such as
Courage Under Fire
and
The Siege.
Gaghan and Zwick had sold the drug war pitch to Laura Ziskin at Fox 2000, the boutique division of Twentieth Century Fox.