Rebels on the Backlot (49 page)

Instead, Douglas had a long, emotional speech near the end of the movie, after Wakefield decides to resign his post to devote himself to helping his daughter. The speech went back and forth from being grand to more modest, from being political to antipolitical. Gaghan worked on it, and Soderbergh did, too. The screenwriter came to the set on the day the scene was to be shot in the White House press room set on the Warner Brothers lot, which they were renting from the hit TV series,
The West Wing.
He and Soderbergh sat around cutting and pasting the various pieces of the speech. The speech was a delicate balance, meant to sum up
Wakefield’s disgust with the government’s approach to interdicting drugs, its lack of empathy for drug users, and a lack of taking responsibility for the failures to date. At the end of the speech, Wakefield resigns. By lunch they had a version and Gaghan went home. Bickford had called a friend, Lawrence O’Donnell, a political commentator and writer on staff of The
West Wing
, to come by and watch the speech.

“We were doing the first take,” said Bickford. “Lawrence hears the speech. He says, ‘You should tweak this line.’ I said, ‘We can’t, the writer just went home.’” O’Donnell offered to work on the line. Soderbergh agreed. O’Donnell offered a change. Michael Douglas preferred it; so did Soderbergh, and they did another take.

O’Donnell again had a thought. “‘I bet the script says that the press stands in stunned silence at the end,’” he said to Bickford.

“It does,” she replied.

“That would never happen. The press would be screaming and yelling and running after him,” said O’Donnell, who had worked in Washington for years.

The reaction shot was changed. But the line that resonated, that resurfaced in countless reviews, television debates, and hallway discussions, was Wakefield concluding, “If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don’t know how you wage war on your own family.”

R
USSELL
S
CHWARTZ KNEW THAT HE HAD TO MAKE THIS RISKY
movie work. His boss, Barry Diller, was beginning to lose interest in USA Films, and he had to make this release count. The marketing department cut a trailer that made
Traffic
look more like a conventional thriller than the daring, complex, political movie it was, and the market research showed audiences that had seen the trailer wanted to see the film, or would at least try it. The goal always was to reach beyond the art-house audience. “My argument was, if we believe in this movie, we’re not cheating with this trailer. If it gets the reviews it will help middle America see it,” said Schwartz. The studio, together with Soderbergh, Bickford, Zwick,
and Herskovitz, decided to go for it, to release
Traffic
on a lot of screens at once, not to slowly platform and build word of mouth. “We thought Barry Diller was getting bored with us, he was going to fire us—we had to go for it,” said Schwartz.

The first hint that
Traffic
might turn out to be something more than another Saturday night at the mall, or even a small, serious movie about a little-discussed subject in American society, was during the first market research screening, in Austin, Texas. Steven Soderbergh stood in the back of the room, watching the audience watching his film. He had been worried that people might not sit through such a long, complex movie. But he noticed that the viewers lingered long after the lights came up, talking quietly. They spent long minutes filling out their response cards. When they gathered afterward for a group discussion, the debate grew heated and emotional.

“It was like they’d been waiting for someone to ask them about this issue,” Soderbergh remembered. “I’ve done a lot of these previews and it’s never been that intense. They wanted to talk about this.”

It was a positive sign. A few weeks later on December 27, 2000, under the tagline “Nobody gets away clean,”
Traffic
was released on four screens in time to qualify for that year’s Academy Awards. A week later it moved up to one thousand five hundred screens. Tracking had shown the movie would make between $6 and $8 million. It made $15 million. It wasn’t a blockbuster number, but it was a sign of life in a movie that had strong reviews. It was the second weekend that mattered more; attendance dropped just five percent. That box office number would hold steady, and then decline slowly over the next several weeks, unlike most Hollywood releases, which are released with a big bang, then quickly disappear.
Traffic
stayed on almost the same number of screens for weeks and weeks, getting another big bump at the box office after the mid-February Oscar nominations were announced.
Traffic
was nominated in five categories, including Best Picture. The film continued to climb at the box office, all the way, eventually, to $124 million. It was a pattern that tracked in the opposite direction of
most Hollywood studio movies, which opened to a big box office number riding a wave of television ads and junket interviews, then quickly disappeared.

The critical response to
Traffic
was wildly enthusiastic, almost dizzying with praise. Soderbergh knew he’d made a good movie, but he couldn’t know to what degree he’d taken a risk, and to what degree he’d succeeded. The critics told him.
Traffic
marked Soderbergh’s first true triumph, the maturing of a precocious talent finally directed to a subject worthy of his prodigious abilities, an epic story about a complex topic painted masterfully on a broad canvas.

“You don’t have to be an artist to make a movie with a big colorful cast, but only in the rare great ensemble films, like
Nashville
or
Dazed and Confused
, do we get the delicious, vibratory feeling that every character on screen is worth a movie of his or her own,” wrote Owen Gleiberman in
Entertainment Weekly
, in just one of many passionately supportive reviews. Among other comments, Gleiberman praised Soderbergh for using the camera as a “kind of psychological divining rod, ripping away each character’s illusions and the audience’s as well.”

There were other reviews like it. In the
New Yorker
David Denby said, “
Traffic
offers an astoundingly vivid and wide-spanning view of the drug war—high and low, dealer and user, Mexican and American—and the ambiguity of its many encounters is a good part of its meaning…. In the drug world, no one is quite what he seems: greed and humor change human character as acid changes virgin soil. With intelligence and grim good humor, the movie threads its way through lies, put-ons, and betrayals; at the end, it settles at an uneasy point somewhere between resignation and hope.” Several critics noted the quiet inspiration of the final scene, Benicio Del Toro’s Xavier sitting in the stands to watch a baseball game, “a willingly anonymous Everyman who might easily end up the paunchy, quietly beaming patriarch of a large and loving family—or rotting in a ditch somewhere, a forgotten casualty of a war he didn’t start and couldn’t stop,” noted Ella Taylor in
L.A. Weekly.

Michael Wilmington of the
Chicago Tribune
admitted that
Traffic
changed his mind about Soderbergh, having always considered him, he wrote, a snotty-nosed poser. It was the rare critic who found fault with the film. Oddly, the criticism was generally that the film was not ideological enough. Kenneth Turan in the
Los Angeles Times
complained that
Traffic
didn’t take a strong point of view. “Given what this film shows, a clearer stand on decriminalization or even treatment in place of prison seems in order,” he wrote. “Without one, watching
Traffic
, artfully made though it is, feels a little like seeing a version of
The Insider
that thought it politic to waffle on whether cigarettes were a danger to your health.”

S
ODERBERGH AND
B
ICKFORD LEARNED ONLY AFTER HIRING
Steve Gaghan that he had had a severe drug problem himself. Gaghan had been agitating to tell his story to the media throughout the production and hired his own publicist, the now infamous Bumble Ward, to make sure he got sufficient attention. This was the subject of some eye-rolling within USA Films and the production; not even Soderbergh had his own publicist. The studio had hired veteran Lois Smith to run and plan a strategic campaign. She and everyone else on the film—the producers, the studio—were against Gaghan’s need to confess to a reporter. Week after week they went through a media plan and rejected Gaghan’s urgent request to tell. Soderbergh and the producers didn’t want Gaghan’s confession to distract from the larger questions raised by the film or to prompt questions about the drug use of other writers, actors, directors, producers, or anyone else connected to the film. Finally Gaghan couldn’t contain himself any longer and came clean about his past in the middle of the 2001 Oscar season, as he vied for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. “People were asking me about where the movie came from, where I got the characters and situations for
Traffic
and I found myself starting to speak in code,” he said in a full confessional to Rick Lyman in the
New York Times.
“I began to feel that I was not being truthful.”

Soderbergh was peeved, though it did score the movie ink in
the largest paper in the country. Bickford too was nonplussed. “Where I come from people hire publicists to keep that kind of information out of the paper,” she later observed. Gaghan did not respond to requests for comment.

Inevitably, perhaps, with all that praise pouring in, the cinema’s academic elite were unimpressed once they had a chance to think about it. In the magazine
Cineaste
, writer Richard Porton criticized the movie for falling back on stereotyped plotlines and for getting “bogged down by generic formulas and anemic political assumptions.” Porton writes, caustically, “The film ingeniously cuts from one plot line to another before viewers with short attention spans can recognize the ludicrousness of any one of its constituent parts.” He goes on to call the movie racist—worse, casually racist—because Caroline Wakefield ends up prostituting herself to her black drug dealer. “Soderbergh and Gaghan do not object to the drug war because of its devastating effect upon poor African Americans and Latinos or because inmates are languishing in jail as the result of draconian laws,” he writes. “Their credo, appropriately vague as well as vacuous, is summed up by Wakefield’s speech resigning his position: ‘The war on drugs is a war on our nation’s most precious resource—our children.’ … It is difficult not to view the film as a missed opportunity, a project that might have honestly explored the ravages of American drug policy without resorting to creaky generic contrivances of political obfuscation.”

The criticism would have been easier to take if Hollywood did not churn out so many puerile, pandering movies all year long. It wasn’t easy to make any movie. But it was almost a miracle that a movie that was both substantive and engaging made it through the system.

T
HERE WAS A WHOLE OTHER SET OF RESPONSES TO
T
RAFFIC
as a political statement and they were oddly divergent. Opponents of the government’s drug policy saw
Traffic
as a brilliant statement about how the war on drugs had failed, and they took the film as a calling card for legalization of drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance,
whose founder, Ethan Nadelmann, had been cut from the cocktail party scene, set up a state-of-the-art Web site, stopthewar.com, timed to
Traffic’s
release, that had a video game and prizes. The site called for the end of interdiction and highlighted scenes from the film.

Meanwhile Soderbergh screened the film for officials from the DEA and U.S. Customs Service, people who had been key advisers both before and during production. Most thought it was a complimentary portrait of their efforts to stop drugs from penetrating the border, a salute to their success and their devotion to very difficult jobs. None of them saw it as a condemnation of the war on drugs. The Commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service, Ray Kelly, became a public proponent of the film, and praised it as the movie was rolling out on screens. “I thought it was sobering,” he told the New York
Daily News.
“It showed the complexity of the drug problem. The message I got was not that the drug war is unwinnable, but … we have to continue moving forward as far as interdiction is concerned. We also have to increase our resources devoted to prevention and treatment. I don’t think it’s an either-or situation.”

Not everyone was similarly struck with that message. At a screening in Washington, D.C., in the fall, Bill Olson, the staff director of Senator Charles Grassley’s (R-Iowa) drug caucus, walked out on the heels of Michael Douglas’s final speech, hissing at Soderbergh, “Shame on you.” Grassley, who was not exactly an opponent of the drug war, had volunteered to be in the cocktail party scene and lived to regret it.

Whatever one’s interpretation of the film, there was no question that
Traffic
started a broader debate on a subject that was previously largely absent from the sociopolitical landscape. In 2000 Americans were mostly consumed with millennial angst. All of a sudden the opinion pages and even—unbelievably—cable news television shows featured a lively discussion about drugs. The film coincided with a few developments in the real world. In November 2000 California voters had passed Proposition 36, which aimed to divert nonviolent drug users from state prison into treatment programs. Around the time of the movie’s release, Republican New Mexico governor Gary E. Johnson became an outspoken foe of
the drug war, arguing forcefully for legalization. (The ensuing ruckus resulted in several of his cabinet members resigning.)

The movie became a conduit for looking at those issues, a conversation piece that both pundits and the general public could notice. It wasn’t long before the editorial pages seized the topic. The
Nation’s
Michael Massing wrote a piece about the film, urging the new President Bush in the direction of treatment over interdiction. In
Commentary
, a journal of the Jewish neoconservative intelligentsia, writer Gary Rosen called to resist that path, pointing to statistics of declines in marijuana and cocaine usage compared to 1979. And not surprisingly, former drug czar and right-wing culture guru William Bennett warned that the film should not be taken as an invitation to put treatment ahead of sanctions. “Time in treatment is often a function of coercion,” he told the
Washington Post.