Introduction:

Pizza Knights, F-64 and The Mild Bunch



Too many people have made a couple of good movies

and burned out. The truth is, studios know how to

make a successful film, one that works at the box office.

Nobody believes in the maverick anymore.

Rod Lurie1



Imagine the scene: a select club has gathered in Los Angeles to watch a private screening of Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time. This 1978 story of a burglar who attempts to reform keeps its viewers' rapt attention. Afterwards, its star, Dustin Hoffman, is on hand to take questions and talk about his time making it. The avid listeners are all Hollywood filmmakers, men and women working inside the studio system. They include David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Kimberly Peirce and Alexander Payne. Meeting once a month, they call themselves ‘Pizza Knights'. Indebted to the filmmakers who inspired them as they grew up, they pay homage twelve times a year. They are the spiritual descendants of the so-called maverick filmmakers of 1970s Hollywood. They still believe, even if nobody else does.

This book centres on the question: ‘Are we returning to an age where formerly independent directors are using studio funds to further their own idiosyncratic vision?' In other words, is this the dawn of New Hollywood Part II? As the title of this book suggests, many of the contemporary filmmakers under consideration here have been connected to Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. For most – like Alexander Payne, Bryan Singer, Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, David O. Russell or Steven Soderbergh – it is with a film at the festival. Then there is Wes Anderson, whose debut feature began life as a short film showcased there. For others, like Kimberly Peirce or Paul Thomas Anderson, their debuts began life in the workshops of the Institute. Many of them flunked college and eschewed film school; it was Sundance that gave them their education.

That said, David Fincher and Spike Jonze have never been anywhere near the snowy heights of Park City (at least not with a film). Both stem from a commercials/music video background. But these two Pizza Knights, as we shall see, are honorary Sundance Kids. Both were involved with the development of a short-lived filmmaking collective called F-64. Together with an article entitled ‘The Mild Bunch', published in The Hollywood Reporter in 2002, it gave the inspiration for this book. But more of that later.



A Brief History of Sundance

Formed on the cusp of 1980, the Sundance Institute was the brainchild of Hollywood golden-boy Robert Redford. His plan was to lay the groundwork for an organization that would nurture independent filmmaking talent. Based in the wilds of Utah, where he had bought some land in the mid-1960s, it was named after his outlaw from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Redford, positioning himself – incorrectly or otherwise – as a true Hollywood maverick, was at the forefront of a new era in American cinema. The Institute quickly became known for its June Laboratory, which brought independent filmmakers together with talent from Hollywood. As it evolved, other events included an annual producers' conference, a playwrights' lab and even a children's theatre.

The most high-profile face of the Institute was the film festival. Taking over the ailing United States Film Festival in 1984, Sundance – to call it by its abbreviated name – became the Mecca for any independent filmmaker with a dream. If its first years weren't spectacular, there were still finds – notably the Coen brothers, whose neo-noir debut, Blood Simple, won the Grand Jury Prize in 1985. As we will see, it was Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape four years later that bolstered the Sundance profile immeasurably. As Hollywood executives began to sniff money in the pine-scented mountain air, they descended on Park City in their droves for this annual January cinematic showcase. This was the place where distribution deals could be struck and nobodies could become players overnight. It was like a funfair for the American dream.

Like any organization, as it grew, it began to swallow up cash. Peter Biskind noted that by 1991 the Institute was dogged by ‘a ballooning seven-figure deficit that required the elimination of nearly half the staff'.2 Moreover, behind its idyllic façade, the Institute had ‘been torn by staff backbiting and factionalism', as well as accusations of long-term mismanagement. Sydney Pollack – who directed Redford seven times and was a founder member of the Sundance Institute – notes, ‘Like anything that's good and successful, the Institute is a bit of a victim of its own success. You can't help that. Once something is terrifically successful, it's hard to hang on to the purity of what it was originally.'

Over time, the sponsors moved in. Suddenly, Starbucks was providing free coffee, socialites like Paris Hilton came to party and accusations that the festival had become an annexe of Hollywood were as frequent as the snow-showers that fell on Park City. ‘It's become this monster,' Redford told me in 2001. ‘Jesus, it's like going to Las Vegas. It's so exhausting, yet the heart of it is still true. The heart gets smaller and smaller every year, because the body around it overwhelms it: fashion, Hollywood, the media. The media pays more attention to the celebrity aspect of Sundance, and the celebrity aspect feeds itself. It becomes this self-perpetuating goon. At the heart is still a wonderful festival, which I have a lot of pride in. We program it the same way every year; it's not about commercial quality. It's about the originality, the diversity. The independence of the film.'

The purpose of this book is not to explore the Institute as an entity or to examine Redford's part in its successes and failures. As David O. Russell, who would arrive in 1994 with his debut Spanking the Monkey, says: ‘People are always beating up on Sundance. It's a classic American story and they want it to follow those beats, like the beats of F. Scott Fitzgerald – talented, successful, drunken, dissolute and ruined by success. I don't think that's necessarily accurate. It's still a launching platform for some really good filmmakers. It's a market – but it's kept that alive. It's an identifiable niche that studios can point to now. It's definitely a good thing that this entity exists. I think there's an understanding that audiences have an appetite for something that's different and ahead of the curve.'

The Sundance Kids aims to look at its graduates and how they shaped American film over the past fifteen years. To do that, we must first consider their predecessors.



New Hollywood, the French New Wave and the Maverick Filmmaker

As critics, industry figures and the public increasingly celebrate 1970s Hollywood, the term ‘maverick' has become more loosely used. Figures such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and William Friedkin are regularly termed ‘mavericks', despite the fact that they all worked within the studio system. The New Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘maverick' as ‘an unorthodox or independent-minded person' or ‘a person who refuses to conform to a particular party or group'.3 If anything, grouping these directors as part of the New Hollywood movement is surely to contradict the isolation felt by true maverick filmmakers.

It's not unreasonable, however, to treat these directors as a collective: seemingly given carte blanche at the studios as a new generation of executives swept a broom through the Hollywood closet, each was fuelled by ego, drugs or ambition – often all three. Many of them had graduated from film schools and were raised on the same diet of Italian neo-realism and French New Wave, as well as the works of Howard Hawks, John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock. Many had become friends or colleagues – George Lucas started his career as Francis Ford Coppola's assistant, for example. Much of their work was a reaction against the glossy, bloated epics that almost destroyed the studio system in the 1960s. Their films buzzed with references to the political upheavals of the time and even elevated classic American genres, like the gangster film, to a higher level. But, though critics like Pauline Kael influenced their thinking, they were not united to change the course of cinema. They were just in the right place at the right time.

The closest any of them came to being a conscious collective was in the summer of 1973 when Charles Bludhorn, CEO of Gulf and Western, the owner of Paramount, suggested that Coppola, Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich start what would become known as the Directors Company. All three were riding on the back of glorious films – respectively, The Godfather (1972), The French Connection and The Last Picture Show (both 1971). The idea was simplicity itself, and appealed to their desire for creative freedom. With Paramount bankrolling the company to the tune of $31.5 million, each could make any picture he wanted for under $3 million without the need to seek studio approval. With each director sharing in the profits of the others' movies, the scheme should in principle have worked. But while Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973) was a hit, his adaptation of Henry James's Daisy Miller, along with Coppola's The Conversation (both 1974) was not. Irritated by the others' work, Friedkin got fed up and backed out, without even making a film.

All three soon fell from grace. Likewise, the careers of other New Hollywood directors would fluctuate. Altman and Scorsese both left indelible marks on American cinema, but even they – along with the likes of Arthur Penn, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson and Michael Cimino – lost their way as the 1970s came to a close. The era of the talent agency was ushered in as William Morris and ICM took over, packaging their actors up for the studios to flesh out the crowd-pleasing disposable fare that was now de rigueur at any studio worth its salt. Directors no longer held the reins.

Much has been written about the era of the blockbuster that followed. Two so-called mavericks, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, have been fêted for breaking away from the pack and starting their own revolution. Or maybe, like guilty schoolboys, they stopped playing truant. Both gave the ailing Hollywood studio system what it wanted: a serious cash injection. True, Coppola's The Godfather and its sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), had broken box office records – but it was the arrival of Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Lucas's Star Wars (1977) that ushered in an era far more lasting than that of New Hollywood. They embodied the perfect marketing formula: high-impact mainstream product that had the potential to catch on like wildfire.

Whatever the rise of the blockbuster has subsequently done to cripple Hollywood – spiralling budgets and actors' salaries, not to mention the dumbing down of world culture – one thing is certain. Blockbusters made many nostalgic for a time when artists ruled, when they changed the direction of their medium by bucking the system. There's nothing people like to hear more than stories of individuals upsetting the status quo for the better. The dearth of auteur-driven cinema in the 1980s led to nostalgia for the filmmaking of the 1970s. The decade has become hermetically sealed and preserved, viewed with a wistful glance and spoken of with hushed reverence. With films like Taxi Driver, Nashville and The Conversation, genuine classics all of them, this attitude is in no way unjustified. You'd be hard pressed to find three studio products in the subsequent decade that have anything like the longevity of these masterpieces. Director Sydney Pollack puts it succinctly: ‘I think it was without a doubt the best ten years of American filmmaking. In terms of consistency of interesting and original films, it was a great era. It really was.'

But there's no doubt that a mythology now surrounds these filmmakers, partly of their own creating, partly due to critical re-assessment. It comes back to this romantic idea of the maverick, the masked Hollywood gunslinger riding into town alone. Not unlike the equally romantic notion of the auteur, it has come to mean any director who made a personal statement. Given how collaborative the filmmaking process is – and many of the directors from the 1970s regularly worked with screenwriters – the idea of one individual gunning against the system is rather misleading. Only directors such as John Cassavetes, who self-funded his work and used his family as cast members, could lay claim to such status. The rest may have argued over or lied about final cuts, drunk their budgets away, and pushed the boundaries of sex and violence – but it was all done inside the Hollywood ‘party'.

Compare them to the French New Wave, the group formed by Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut. These men, bonded by their time as critics for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, were driven to forge a new cinema. It was in the January 1954 edition that Truffaut published his landmark essay A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema. A plea for more personal cinema, it attacked directors who merely churned out films without any individual vision. In the same piece he promoted what would become the auteur theory, in which he suggested that the only directors worth serious consideration were those who left their own individual signatures on each of their films. When he and his colleagues began a frantic period of activity between 1958 and 1964, they put theory into practice.

Initially, they were liberated by new lightweight equipment that released them from the shackles of the studio-bound glossy French films they loathed. Such freedom stretched to using improvized dialogue, long takes, and real-time and jump-cut editing. Influenced by American genres such as the gangster film, stars like Humphrey Bogart and directors like Howard Hawks, they also recognized the work of their fellow countrymen Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. With their protagonists often anti-heroes and loners, French New Wave films were also united in their devotion to the existential philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre. Replete with anarchic humour and an entrenched cynicism (about the political powers-that-be), these were the touchstone films for the New Hollywood generation.

While more ‘maverick' than their New Hollywood counterparts – in the sense that they were fighting against the French studio system from the outside – even they did not completely fit the New OED definition of the word. Take Orson Welles, a true Hollywood maverick. A renegade who revolutionized cinematic techniques with Citizen Kane (1941), Welles never came to terms with Hollywood after The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey to Fear (both 1942) were mangled by the studio, RKO. Although well received as an actor there, his early experiences as a director prompted him to make films outside the system – notably his troubled production of Macbeth (1948). When his film noir Touch of Evil (1958) was re-cut by Universal, it would be the last time he attempted to grapple with Hollywood. A self-imposed exile in Europe followed, furthering his reputation as a maverick in the most romantic of ways.

So, you might ask, why is this book subtitled: ‘How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood'? After all, like those of New Hollywood, none of these contemporary directors are working outside the studio system. In fact, they're working hand in hand. As is indicated by the rather flippant title of his article, riffing on Sam Peckinpah's revisionist Western, The Wild Bunch (1969), Stephen Galloway explained that these filmmakers were not rebels like their predecessors. ‘What is so striking about this current crop of young directors is . . . how seamlessly they work with the studios and how willing they are to be collaborative and open-minded.'4

What's more, even within their nominal ranks, there are dissenters. Sofia Coppola, perhaps the one young filmmaker working today who has a genuine connection to a filmmaking dynasty, believes that attempts to replicate a bygone era are phoney. After all, she was there, albeit as a toddler. ‘There's guys in my generation who are trying to recreate that thing they thought was happening in the 1970s – let's have a filmmakers' night and all hang out, trying to make themselves into the gang they thought those guys were. But I don't know if it was what it appeared to be. It's easy to idealize that era; it seems so macho and cool. Those guys really did seem like they were putting their necks on the line and now it seems safer – nobody's marching into the jungle to make a movie.'5

If the word has come to lose its original meaning, there is still some validity in terming these new directors mavericks. To take the first half of the New OED definition of the word, all of the directors under consideration here – whether you consider them auteurs or not – are ‘unorthodox or independent-minded'. They are most definitely maverick filmmakers, in that meaning of the word.



Who's In and Who's Out

What must be made clear at this point is that, rather like hip hop labels Death Row and Bad Boy, the division between East and West Coast remains distinct. The filmmakers that this study will look at are working on the latter coast. As Isabelle Huppert, the French actress who has come full circle – from Michael Cimino's 1980 disaster Heaven's Gate to David O. Russell's I § Huckabees – notes: ‘You have people like Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson . . . they do the same kind of movies. These people come from the West Coast and some years earlier, they would've been independent filmmakers from the East Coast. Now you have this group of people who make studio films, but very imaginative, like an independent film would be. It's interesting how much the industry in Hollywood is aware of all the new talents, instead of rejecting them and putting them on the side as independent filmmakers. They take them into the studios, so it's just noticeable.'

Whether it's Jim Jarmusch, Todd Solondz or Hal Hartley – all Sundance graduates in their own right – they have remained camped out on the East Coast, largely avoiding entanglements with the studios. Though this, as Alexander Payne claims, has limited the size of their audience. ‘No one sees Hal Hartley movies. [Solondz's] Happiness got out there a bit. But they're New York movies. I'm glad they're there, but it's such a drop in the bucket in terms of American production.' If these East Coast filmmakers are doing their own thing, they're also forced to look outside the U.S. for funding – usually to Europe. Unlike our Sundance Kids, they don't use A-list stars, their budgets are minuscule and they all fit the traditional definition of the auteur far better than any of the filmmakers under consideration in this book. As Russell puts it, the word ‘independent' still has a meaning that can apply to both East and West Coast. ‘I think if you are taking risks that are very different from standard movies, you are independently minded. But there are varying degrees of independence. If you finance a Jim Jarmusch movie completely out of Europe, that's a more extreme form of independence.'

My criteria for entry into the new band of outsiders being considered here are partly a matter of subjective taste. That's why you won't find M. Night Shyamalan included, a filmmaker who belongs to the Spielberg–Lucas brigade and whose work is pure spectacle. Some, like Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater, are the subjects of only brief accounts because, while independent in spirit, they have remained distanced from Hollywood for the most part.

Some would argue that Kevin Smith deserves a place in any work that surveys the cream of burgeoning American filmmakers in the 1990s. After all, following his caustic convenience-store comedy Clerks (1994) – famous for costing just $23,000 – he has made five films in ten years, no mean feat for any low-budget director. On top of that, he survived the studio experience with his second film, the teen comedy Mallrats (1995), matured considerably with his third, Chasing Amy (1997), and courted controversy with his fourth, the Catholic comedy Dogma (1999). As if to provide cohesion to the Kevin Smith world, he then reunited many of his principal characters in the road movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), only to swap farts for fatherhood in the sickly sweet Jersey Girl (2004). He's a genuine auteur who has written all his films, but what stops me from including him in this book is not so much his penchant for the puerile – though that doesn't help – as the limits of his cinematic ambitions.

Although Dogma, for example, indicated a willingness to tackle serious subject matter, Smith's body of work has yet to make an impact on the medium of cinema in the way films by Soderbergh, Payne, Fincher or Tarantino have. And it may never do. While Clerks, in particular, reflects the socioeconomic problems faced by working-class American youth, Smith has no desire to be a polemicist. Pop-culture saturated – everything from Star Wars to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air – a Kevin Smith film bears little or no signature aside from his trademark acerbic dialogue. With a fanbase inspired by rabid devotion, Smith is a cult filmmaker who is happy to remain so: ‘I didn't get into this business to make bigger and better movies. I got into this business to make Clerks, over and over and over again.'

There are also no rules here about the number of films each filmmaker needs to have made; Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola have only made two films each; Kimberly Peirce just one. That said, with the exception of Steven Soderbergh – who began his career in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape – each director under consideration began his or her professional career in the 1990s. That rules out, for example, a director like Terry Gilliam, who could easily be admitted into such a group, having made non-conformist works like Brazil (1984) inside the studio system.

If there is one event that points to why certain filmmakers have been chosen and others left out, it was the announcement in October 2001 that several prominent Hollywood young guns were banding together. Four of our filmmakers – Soderbergh, Jonze, Fincher and Payne – were in talks to form a cooperative venture called F-64, in which each partner pledged to direct three movies over the first five years. In existence solely for the production of their films – with Barry Diller's USA Films enlisted to market and distribute the end products – it immediately recalled the notions of the Directors Company from the 1970s.

‘It's an idea that's as old as cinema, almost,' Soderbergh noted. ‘The idea behind it, which is very similar to what we're doing in [his and George Clooney's production company] Section Eight, is getting a group of artists together who aren't driven by money, to try and gain greater control over their work, from the content to how it's sold. But it's complicated.' While few details were released – such as whether an executive would oversee the company, whether guidelines on ratings, budgets or length would be issued – the issue of ownership was clear- cut.

‘You would own the negative after seven years,' Payne noted at the time. ‘The company would actually own the film. It's kind of a financial and moral thing about owning your own creative work. We're similar in that we're all interested in making good movies. I think we have similar tastes as to what are the components of a good movie.' It was envisioned that the directors' existing development deals with the studios would be honoured, with the companies acquiring foreign distribution rights. Having recently scored a success with the distribution and Oscar campaign for Traffic, Diller's company was touted as the home for this quartet – who also invited the British director Sam Mendes on board – because it was not a major studio. In other words, it would not look to swallow world rights and exert control over creative content. In principle, it was a great idea: keeping the studios at arm's length and using them only for distribution where necessary. Added to which, the promised creative brainstorming sessions between the filmmakers could only have been beneficial to each member of the collective.

Excerpted from THE SUNDANCE KIDS: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood by James Mottram. Copyright © 2006 by James Mottram. Published in May 2007 by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.