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Soderbergh at Sundance
In his new book Down and Dirty Pictures, author Peter Biskind writes about Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, once a 26-year-old filmmaker at Sundance pushing his first film, sex, lies, and videotape.
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Steven Soderbergh accepts the Palme d'Or for sex,
lies, and videotape at the 1989 Cannes Film
Festival, as Jane Fonda looks on. "Well, I guess it's all
downhill from here," Soderbergh told the audience.
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Courtesy of AP/World Wide Photos
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Before 1989's sex, lies, and videotape, it seemed like there was no Steven Soderbergh, no Sundance Film Festival, and no Miramax Pictures. But Soderbergh's little film that could transformed all three. Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, chronicles this perfect storm of indie-film history and other landmark moments in Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. The following is an excerpt from the book focusing on that period.
WHEN STEPHEN SODERBERGH STEPPED OFF THE PLANE at the Salt Lake City International
Airport headed for the U.S. Film Festival, thirty miles to the northeast
in Park City, it was January 21, 1989, a Saturday afternoon, and he was just
seven days past his twenty-sixth birthday. He was hand-carrying the print
of his film sex, lies and videotape, which
he had just picked up from the lab in Hollywood that morning.
The weather was cloudy, with occasional snow flurries, and the thin mountain air cut like a blade, but he was feeling good. The sutures in his gums had finally healed after painful surgery to correct his exaggerated overbite, the Soderbergh family curse. And having grown up in the oppressive heat and dampness of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he liked cold weather. He was looking forward to screening his film for the first time in front of real people.
In those days Park City was a struggling, sub-Aspen ski resort, a huddle of drab buildings ringed by a dark necklace of high-priced condos splayed across snow-covered hills. The town's tarnished crown jewel was the Egyptian Theater, located at the top of Main Street and the festival's screening venue of choice, built in 1926 apparently as a replica of the old Warner's Egyptian in Pasadena. Everywhere the young director turned were puffy, down-clad filmmakers flogging their films.
Sundance had taken over the ailing U.S. Film Festival in 1985, despite Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford's publicly stated objection to festivals. They involved too much hype, they were too competitive, and so on. But he was finally persuaded by the logic of the argument: so far, the institute had only addressed the development part of the filmmaking equation. By ignoring marketing, distribution, and exhibition, it was virtually relegating itself to irrelevance.
"There was a real fear that Sundance would be perceived as this utopian thing in the mountains, without making any impact on independent filmmaking in the United States," explains former Sundance executive director Sterling Van Wagenen. And, wonders director Sydney Pollack, "If
a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a noise? There
is no noise with a movie unless somebody watches it."
The festival was one of the few devoted exclusively to American indies, which in those days existed well beneath the radar of all but a small band of dedicated enthusiasts. It was a sleepy gathering, not yet the make-or-break event for filmmakers that it would soon become. Few of the films that played the festival got distributed; even fewer scripts that went through the labs got produced, and when by some fluke one did, it was hardly likely to set the world on fire. No agents showed up, few publicists, and fewer press. There was no reason to; the films, with a few exceptions, were eminently forgettable.
Soderbergh's film, which had cost $1.2 million, a hefty budget for an indie feature in those days, had been a tough sell to the festival. Outside of the fact that it had been shot in Baton Rouge, and might therefore qualify as regional, it didn't fit the profile. By design as well as default, Sundance had become wedded to the kind of watered-down populism that was still hanging around from the 1960s. The Grand Jury Prize rarely went to the best film, rather to the most worthy film, and was therefore regarded as the kiss of death. In 1987, the festival had reached a nadir of mediocrity unprecedented even in its history of mediocrity, featuring films where you needed a magnifying glass to find the plot, like Rachel River, or The Silence at Bethany, set among Mennonites, which concerned itself with a crisis set off by milk delivery on Sunday.
But nobody in sex, lies wore bib overalls. Rather, the film was set among urban yuppies in Baton Rouge. The picture had been pushed by Marjorie Skouras, director of acquisitions for Skouras Pictures, whose breakthrough release had been Lasse Hallstrom's My Life as a Dog in 1985, a film that grossed a very healthy $9.1 million. In the 1980s, the few indie distributors who sank money into production, like Cinecom, went bankrupt; the rest bought the rights to finished films financed by others that they discovered at festivals.
Skouras was a member of the festival selection committee. Nancy Tenenbaum, a friend and one of sex, lies's producers, asked her to take a look. The film was still in rough shape and boasted of no actors of any renown. Not expecting much, Skouras popped the tape into her VCR at 11:30 one night before she went into a deep sleep, and she wasn't disappointed. There wasn't much in the way of plot or action, and no sex to speak of, despite the provocative title -- just people sitting around talking about sex. She went, Huh?
Tenenbaum understood. She too had passed
when she first scanned the script. "It read like a first draft," she says, "long speeches, tons of monologues." But
then Soderbergh called her, convinced her to meet him. She remembers him
as an Elvis Costello look-alike, wearing shirts buttoned all the way up to
the Adam's apple, geeky or maybe retro if you were inclined to be generous.
His mouth was sewn up, courtesy of the dental surgeon, and he talked through
clenched teeth. But Tenenbaum liked him. He told her exactly what he thought,
and he was very serious about making movies, a diamond in the rough.
"He doesn't hedge his words, is extremely rational," she says. "Doesn't gush sentimentality. Doesn't like to dumb things down or explain them ad nauseum." She
agreed to help him. But Tenenbaum had a lot of trouble raising money for a
movie about an impotent guy who videotapes women talking about their sexual
experiences and then gets off watching the tapes.
"Sex, lies was passed on by just about
everyone out there," she recalls. "A lot of people thought it was perverted.
One friend of mine who isn't prudish found it vile. She said to me, 'It's pretty
disgusting, Nancy, what are you doing getting involved in a movie like that?'
I felt self-conscious, thinking, Maybe I'm doing something wrong."
In any event, a few days later, Skouras had lunch with Larry Estes, the senior vice president for feature film acquisitions at RCA/Columbia Home Video, which had put up the biggest chunk of cash for sex, lies, and hence numbered, along with Bobby Newmyer and Nick Wechsler, as another of the five producers the picture had accumulated.
None of them thought his film had much commercial
potential. Estes, who retained what he assumed was the film's most valuable
asset -- the video rights -- was just looking to break even, especially since
he felt Soderbergh had welched on his promise to include some skin. Months
before, when Estes looked at Laura San Giacomo's audition tape, he had asked
Soderbergh, "Is she going to have a problem with the nudity?" Without hesitation, Soderbergh assured him that she wouldn't, saying, "No.
She's in this play called Beirut where she is naked on the stage most
of the time." But Estes was watching the dailies, and hadn't seen what he was looking for. He called Soderbergh, asking him, "Are
you sure I've gotten all the footage? Because I'm not seeing any flesh. Why
is that?"
"Because there isn't any."
"Why not?"
"Because I decided it wasn't necessary. It
will be more erotic if it's not so explicit."
"You have a commitment to shoot what's written
in the script. We may have a problem."
Soderbergh was annoyed that Estes wasn't
congratulating him on his great-looking footage instead of saying, "What
happened to the tits?"
Estes asked Skouras to distribute it, even
offered her a service deal. (Service deals are a form of vanity distribution,
in which the producers not only get no advance, they pay the costs of prints
and advertising.) Says Jeff Lipsky, who was head of distribution at Skouras
Pictures, "That's how confident RCA/Columbia was that this film was a bomb." Margie
was dubious, but she discovered that the more she thought about Soderbergh's
film, the more she liked it. Lipsky, who was given to powerful enthusiasms,
also saw a tape and was wild about it, thought, This is the best American
indie film ever made. He went to Tom Skouras, and said, "I would bet the company on this film." But
his boss wouldn't give him the green light to buy it.
Margie thought the film was good enough to
go into the festival, told Tony Safford, the festival director, "You really should see it, something new." Safford,
who was smart, confident in his taste, and just short of arrogant, agreed
to look at it. Although he hated the regional films that Sundance loved,
and boasted of an eclectic, quirky taste, sex, lies left him cold.
Still, Margie pressed him, said, "As a favor to me, take this film, I really feel strongly about it." Safford
gave in, and sex, lies, and videotape became the last entry accepted into the sixteen-film competition of the U.S. Film Festival.
This would prove to be a banner year in the short, lusterless history of the festival. Among the other films in competition were Nancy Savoca's True Love, with Annabella Sciorra; Martin Donovan's Apartment Zero, with Colin Firth and Hart Bochner; Jonathan Wacks' Powwow Highway, executive-produced by George Harrison; Jeffrey Noyes Scher's Prisoners of Inertia, with Amanda Plummer; and Michael Lehmann's Heathers, with Winona Ryder, Shannen Doherty and Christian Slater, a truly questionable choice, given its Hollywood pedigree.
Sex, lies premiered on Sunday night, January 22, at ten o'clock at Prospector Square, a small, cramped theater a couple miles out of town. Before the lights went down, Soderbergh stood up, cleared his throat, and made the usual disclaimers: the film was still long, he was using a temp mix, and the titles were Xeroxed. Personal encounters always made him nervous and uncomfortable, but public occasions like this one didn't seem to faze him. He was fatalistic. The picture was what it was. As the opening scenes unreeled, with Andie MacDowell's character Ann talking to her shrink (Ron Vawter), at least one person in the audience thought, Oh, no, another droning indie film, and promptly dozed off.
But after the first twenty minutes, the pace
picked up, and by the end, the audience seemed to be with it. Soderbergh
made his way to the front of the theater and answered questions. He was still
uncertain about the title, a matter of contention between him and RCA/Columbia
Home Video, which worried that it was too generic, and reeked of straight-to-video.
He recalled, "It got to the point where they were saying, 'You know, we can
keep the first two words, sex, lies -- that's fine. But the third word --
maybe we could change the third word. And I'm like, 'What, sex, lies, and
magnetic oxide?'"
Soderbergh had fooled around with other titles,
facetiously coming up with Hair and Plants (the actors all had great
hair and continually exchanged plants as gifts), but nothing seemed right.
About half the audience voted to change it. It was too early in the festival
to have much basis for comparison, but Soderbergh was relieved. At least
he hadn't been hooted off the stage.
EVEN THOUGH HE HAD SPENT A COUPLE OF years knocking out scripts in Los Angeles,
doing what he could to keep change in his pocket and move his career to the
next square, Soderbergh didn't know a soul in Park City. He was broke, having
gone through the $35,000-odd he got to write, shoot, and edit sex, lies.
He couldn't even afford to rent a car and was forced to use the shuttle bus
or walk. He had nothing to do but wait for the next screening, on Wednesday,
when he expected to be joined by a handful of friends, along with two cast
members, Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo. Much to his surprise, the
tickets were gone a half hour before showtime, and the lobby was packed with
excited moviegoers. This was also the first screening to be attended by distributors,
which wasn't saying much, because in those days, few bothered to take the
long flight to Salt Lake City. Among the ones who showed up were Michael
Barker and Tom Bernard, who were running Orion Classics. The two men alarmed
Soderbergh by walking out after twenty minutes. He thought, Oh well, I guess
we're going straight to video.
Soderbergh was a glass-half-empty kind of guy, and he discounted the favorable response as one from a "festival" audience, that is, one predisposed to be generous. He was worried that the good word of mouth his film was generating would backfire, raise the expectations of the audience so high that future viewers would inevitably be disappointed. But he could not have been insensible of the fact that strangers began to accost him on the street. One man asked, "Can my girlfriend kiss your feet?"
A week after Soderbergh arrived, sex, lies was finally screened at the Egyptian. The tickets were scalped, a first for the festival. The crush was so bad that Soderbergh felt like he'd been "flypapered." He recalls, "It was the first time I really felt a concentrated type of energy coming at me. I had to fight my way out. At one point, some woman handed me a business card saying, if I need a place to stay in L.A., I could stay with her. My agent, Pat Dollard, was standing right next to me. We exchanged a look as if to say, 'This is very, very weird.'"
The appeal of sex, lies was so palpable, it was like a contagion. With the benefit of hindsight, it is not hard to understand. It was the paradigmatic indie film. Soderbergh not only directed it, he wrote the script as well, rendering him a genuine "filmmaker." Moreover, the story was personal, based on aspects of his own life to which he darkly alluded. In 1987, at the age of twenty-four, he had an epiphany.
He recalled, "I was involved in a relationship with a woman in which I was deceptive and mentally manipulative. I got involved with a number of other women simultaneously -- I was just f--king up. Looking back on what happened, I was very intent on getting acceptance and approval from whatever woman I happened to pick out, and then as soon as I got it, I wasn't interested anymore. ... There was one point at which I was in a bar, and within a radius of about two feet there were three different women I was sleeping with.
"Another six months of this behavior -- this went on for the better part of a year -- and I would have been, bare minimum, alcoholic and, going on from there, mentally screwed up. ... I just became somebody that, if I knew them, I would hate. Then one day it hit me that there was no bottom. It would just keep going until I drank myself into a grave or someone shot me."
He tried therapy, but it didn't take. Had he been able, he would, he said, have joined a twelve-step program for recovering liars.
Coming at the end of the 1980s, sex, lies was the first Gen-X picture, taking shots at the predatory, suspender-wearing, Reagan-era yuppie (played with just the right degree of preening enlightenment by Peter Gallagher), in favor of James Spader's version of Soderbergh, a recovering liar who is withholding and impotent, to boot, yet soft and sensitive, a feminized man racked by the kind of guilt that was obviously a stranger to the freewheeling Oliver Norths of the decade about to be past.
Despite its diagrammatic, audience-flattering Manichaeism (the good slacker versus the bad yuppie, complemented by good and bad sisters, played by Andie MacDowell and Laura San Giacomo), sex, lies hit a nerve. To actor Edward Norton, it was his generation's The Graduate. Recalling the film's impact, he says, "There's a zeitgeist, there's a generational energy being expressed in that movie. Spader has a hesitancy, a reluctance to engage, a shell-shockedness in the face of the collective cynicism of our parents about how messed up things were, that many of us connected with. It's about a guy who just wants to keep things simple. I'll always remember this line, 'I just want one key.' People just plugged into that sentiment."
If sex, lies was not a great film, it was a very good one. Characteristically,
Soderbergh himself, always his own harshest critic, couldn't or wouldn't do
it justice: "When I look at it now, it looks like something made by someone
who wants to think he's deep but really isn't. To me the fact that it got the
response it did was only indicative of the fact that there was so little else
for people to latch onto out there."
AS AWARD NIGHT APPROACHED, the word was that sex,
lies was
going to win the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic competition. Fearing the
worst, as usual, Soderbergh didn't want to hear about it, and this time he
was right. The prize went to True Love,
Nancy Savoca's inspired homage to romance in the Bronx. Then director Paul
Mazursky, the master of ceremonies, dramatically announced, "I've seen it and
I loved it: sex, lies, and videotape!" Soderbergh's
film won the Audience Prize. The director, his face flushed and his ears bright
red, stumbled up to the podium and muttered a few words, thanked Marjorie Skouras,
and went out to celebrate. The next day he caught the flight back to L.A.
To Soderbergh, back in L.A., the ten days in Sundance seemed like a dream. He was still broke, and he was still in dental hell. Then a friend thrust into his hands five copies of the Variety review of sex, lies, written by Todd McCarthy, a rave. His agent got a call from Sydney Pollack. He had read the review and wanted to see the picture. Right on the heels of that call, Soderbergh heard from Barbara Maltby, a producer with a deal at Wildwood, Redford's production company. She told him that Redford wanted to be in business with him.
Dollard, who took five hundred calls concerning Soderbergh in the course of a month, had to work into the small hours of the morning to find time for his other clients. "It's like being the manager of the Doors in 1967," he said at the time.
Meanwhile, the indie distributors were not idle. The sky over Larry Estes's RCA/Columbia office in a spanking new building at the corner of Olive and Riverside in Burbank was dark with buyers circling overhead. Estes and Newmyer were in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose. The two producers, seated in the RCA/Columbia conference room with its imposing stone-topped table, slotted in every buyer in town and watched them perform their dog-and-pony shows at one-hour intervals. Barker and Bernard from Orion Pictures, Janet Grillo from New Line, Lipsky from Skouras. Bingham Ray made an impassioned pitch for Alive Films.
New Line offered a couple of hundred thousand dollars but was deterred by the
absence of video rights and regarded Savoca's True Love as a better
bet. Goldwyn, too, was breathing heavy. Like Tom Skouras, Sam Goldwyn was
a scion of Hollywood royalty. He had a reputation for looking over his shoulder
at the studios, worrying about their opinion, staying in the good graces
of the Lew Wasserman crowd. Goldwyn was a gentleman -- genteel, magnanimous,
and gracious. His company had a policy against giving advances without video
rights. But there was one small, struggling company that contacted Estes
and Newmyer that was not genteel, magnanimous, or gracious. It was called
Miramax.
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Miramax would later strike a deal for sex, lies, and videotape, which went on to
win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival
and (for Soderbergh) an Academy Award
nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Soderbergh later capped off an artistic and
commercial comeback with the 2000 film Traffic, which earned four Academy Awards
including Soderbergh's first, for Best Director.
From Down and Dirty Pictures by
Peter Biskind. Copyright © 2004 by Peter
Biskind. Reprinted by permission of Simon &
Schuster, Inc., N.Y. |
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