The film industry is commonly regarded as either a cultural landfill, a General Motors assembly line or a self-adoring, power-lunching version of ancient Babylon. For me, I've always pictured it as a giant, wind-breaking gastrointestinal system, trying its best to digest the non nutritious mountains of Batman Cereal that are shoveled into its maw.
Movies are consumed, after all, just as surely as the "golden flavored" popcorn that makes more money for theater owners than ticket sales. And though the hapless film-goer experiences, on a film-to-film basis, a mad seesawing between constipation and malnourishment, the industry does make the pretense of offering a '90s health regimen, allowing some fatty foods (the occasional four-pound Arnold pork roast), then compensating with a low-sodium bowl of oatmeal like Sister Act.
So what keeps it all regular and running smoothly? Hype. If profits are the protein and ego the binding carbohydrates, then hype is the fiber, helping the system's eventual end-product slide easily from the roiling depths of the movie making belly to the dawning light of the media's rectum. Here the movie reaches us (if you'll allow me to extend an already merciless metaphor for one more moment) accompanied by startling aural detonations that can often obscure the film itself. Hype is an integral part of the Hollywood diet, without which the system would grind to an uncomfortable halt.
Still, no one ever has much good to say about hype--it's regarded as a necessary evil, like AstroTurf. No one knows this better than the Hollywood freshmen, whose talents and opportunities are viewed in the light of their own ever-hype-able youth. Of all Hollywood success stories, none fascinate or bug us more than the wunderkind--the twentysomething screenwriter punk who picks up a cool million for a brainless screenplay, or the executive granted Olympian power at about the same age the rest of us get our first apartment. Most grating of all is the director who would, in an alternate universe, still be busy paying off his college loan by waiting tables at Planet Hollywood.
Let's face it, nothing hypes as well as directors, those presumed polymaths whose authorial presence hovers over even the most horrible of films. Our concept of the director at work hasn't changed much since Erich von Stroheim dressed the Merry-Go Round cast in real silk panties from Paris; no one really needed the auteur theory to characterize the director as the egomaniacal Rommel of filmmaking. But when directors are the age of the average Taco Bell night manager, the ante is upped considerably. The younger these third-or fourth-generation movie brats are, the more fascinated we become--it's as if we care less about the movies they make than about how they got this great career.
It's easy to forget that directors as young as John Singleton (24) or David Fincher (30) are a relatively recent phenomenon, like flapsticks or 10-year-olds divorcing their parents. With the ceaselessly invoked exception of the 1941 Orson Welles, directors of yesteryear are best remembered today as old, overweight, working-class, cigar-chomping autodidacts, given to hectoring sensitive actors, hunting big-game animals between shoots, and nursing Napoleon complexes. Ford, Huston, Wyler, Stevens, Hawks, Fleming, et al.--these hardboiled guys learned about making movies by being boxers, fighting in world wars, rum-running, or at least putting in a decade or two as a studio prop boy first. Failing as a novelist and drinking heavily generally helped, too. If an aspiring youngster was lucky enough to get employed at a studio, he spent the early half of his career running for coffee before anyone would allow him to helm a picture.
Then came Welles, an apple-cheeked Mozartian prodigy who reinvented the syntax of film at the age of 26 with Citizen Kane. And we all know what happened to his career. The system wasn't quite ready for the rule-fucking director brat. The phenomenon for which Welles was the prototype didn't bloom again until the '60s, with the advent of two disparate but powerfully influential forces: film schools and the skid-row apprentice system of Roger Corman. Any driven, would-be director could either go to college or work five jobs for Corman's American International Pictures and eventually be entrusted with a low-budget quickie. Many did both, and ever since Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, Demme and Bogdanovich emerged on the scene in the early '70s like a law firm of snot-nosed frat boys, the Young Turk Club has been with us, right up through Jarmusch, Lee, Coen and Soderbergh.
One of the things that separates the current season's crop of whippersnappers from the previous wave of the mid-'80s is MTV. Though thoroughly schooled in the three-and-half-minute dynamics of grand-mal montage, powercuts and the ubiquitous "cool shot," when it comes to the big screen, the young firebrands of video still couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. Of course, it's not their fault the studios consider a Def Leppard video sufficient resume for a big-budget feature-film assignment. Thus, there are as many veterans of music videos in today's Hollywood as there are Sons of Scorsese. In fact, MTV and Mean Streets split time as this generation's point of departure.
For an example of an MTV toddler, you can't get higher-on-the-ladder, farther-to-fall than David Fincher, the then 29-year-old Madonna alumnus who was given about $40 million to make the third Alien movie. Proclaimed a genius in the Wellesian tradition, despite the absence of anything longer than five minutes in his filmography, Fincher produced the only box-office lemon in the series. (With foreign rentals and video sales, Alien3 will pass into the black, but it's still a long way to hoe between that and the pocket-fattening pedigree of the first two films.) Despite all the media rumpus during the troubled production of Alien3, no one expected what Fincher came up with--a muddled, unscary, personal film that scans like a hybrid of The Passion of Joan of Arc and Fincher's own rain-and-chains video for "Express Yourself," a postindustrial dirge-like tone poem more concerned with reproductive rights than suspense. You can't say he played it safe--pulling a Renny Harlin or burping out a Predator 2. His daring disregard for the people whose money he spent is breathtaking.
Today's elite cub-scout pack has been so easily and unjudgmentally adopted by the industry that they make the currently lionized Reservoir Dogs auteur Quentin Tarantino look like a hard-luck case. Many of these kids, of whom David Fincher is only the most notorious, were blessed with agents and contracts before they had even made a feature film. Robbing the academic cradle has become common practice; Hollywood knows Zeitgeist when it sees it, and today studio scouts regularly attend the student film shows of schools like USC, searching for the next hot new thang. This is more a function of hype than anything else: the film industry doesn't actually need any more directors. The DGA lists thousands of experienced directors who have to settle for working on cable movies and episodes of "Murder, She Wrote." But hiring a veteran hack for your latest production is hardly an attention-getter. "Discovering" a 24-year-old whiz kid fresh out of NYU plays much better on "Entertainment Tonight."
As a result, we have the unsolved mystery of John Singleton, who was signed with CAA before he'd even graduated from film school and went on to break Orson Welles's record as the youngest director ever nominated for an Oscar. With its connect-the-dots "After school Special" script and faux sense of Ice Cubic "authenticity," Boyz N the Hood doesn't look like a studio film, but it is one, which is what accounts for its huge national publicity sweep during the summer of 1991 and its subsequent grosses. Easily the most overrated film ever made by an under-30 American, Boyz is as pure a cinematic product of hype as any the industry's ever seen. Without hype, Singleton's movie might've mustered some of the limited notoriety of Straight out of Brooklyn, the made-for-pennies lovechild of the then 19 homey Matty Rich. A much cruder, much more mature entry into the Spike Lee Jr. Sweepstakes, Brooklyn managed a rough-hewn charm and brutal realism without the multimillion-dollar budget, studio support or publicity machine Singleton had at his disposal. Rich, for the moment, remains an outsider, while Singleton basks in the spotlight of opportunity and fame.
Once the industry adopts an heir, he can pretty much skate until he does something outright scandalous. Singleton's next movie couldn't really hurt him in Hollywood's eyes if he shot it in Swedish. (Not a bad idea, actually, Singleton remaking The Seventh Seal.) Certainly, if his guardian angel is at least half as on the ball as whatever benevolent spirit watches over the once-hyped Phil Joanou, he'll have a long career, regardless of results. Joanou, an extraordinarily fortunate, maladroit mainstream director, has been running on empty since his first forgettable feature, Three O'Clock High, released in 1987 when he was a mere 25. He hasn't a single decent movie to his credit: U2 Rattle and Hum, State of Grace, Final Analysis. His most recent project was the first installment of an Americanized version of Michael Apted's groundbreaking Up documentaries. You'd think someone in the studios would realize that hiring Joanou to direct their film is like handing Dean Martin the keys to their Porsche.
Address the phenomenon of industry wunderkinds, and you must confront Tim Burton and Chris Columbus, the twin 100-mil youth-Zeuses of the last few years. Just as Spielberg & Co. reigned a decade ago by dint of their unprecedented box-office savvy, Burton and Columbus--both 34 and counting--ascended to superauteurism on the strength of profits, and set the pace against which young comers are measured.
Significantly less distinctive a film making personality than Burton, Columbus is the bastard offspring of Steven Spielberg and John Hughes, and thus comes with two strands of hype in his DNA. At 25 he saw two of his scripts produced: Reckless, a minor bomb starring Daryl Hannah, and Gremlins, which made him simultaneously chili-hot and the favorite scriptsmith of Spielberg, who went on to produce Columbus's Young Sherlock Holmes and The Goonies.
In many ways, Columbus quickly revealed himself to be even more a creature of Hollywood than Spielberg, who, however popular, has always followed his own second star to the right, so to speak. Columbus's Fantasy-Comedy Lite strategy served to exemplify mid-'80s American movies: inoffensive, formulaic, cartoonish, for-the-kid-in-all-of-us. Columbus is the unassuming, comfortable Zeppo of young directors. It's difficult to imagine a thinner premise than Adventures in Babysitting, Columbus's debut, or a more foolish one than his Heartbreak Hotel, unless you consider the pictures already generated by John Hughes. When the two of them united for Home Alone, which has a story line the Ritz Brothers would've scrambled to flesh out, it became one of the top-grossing films in history, and Columbus got his sugar-coated revenge, assuring himself a place in the cash-cow pantheon.
Next to Spielberg, Tim Burton may be the most famous director working today. Surely no one else's movies have ever been as thoroughly drowned in hype. The most remarkable thing about Burton is that he doesn't care. He knows he's a child of popular trash culture, comic books and Walt Disney World, and revels in it. He manages, therefore, to make each of his gloomy fantasies both populist and personal. How many other A-list directors of huge moneymakers have visual styles so distinctive that the average filmgoer can recognize them? If Batman Returns failed to live up to Batman's cash flow, it still earned enough to prove Burton a studio treasure. Consider these films, together with Pee-wee 's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, in comparison with any other director's first five films, and Burton emerges as perhaps the only studio-owned stripling in town who's worth his salt. Naturally, Burton can pick his projects, and even if he goes off the quirky deep end--he's currently considering working on a biopic of fringe grade-Z horror director Edward D. Wood Jr.--no one can doubt his ability to turn the contents of his mental attic into mainstream pop art. I can't wait for the ED hats, personally. Or the ED breakfast cereal.
Having proven himself as natural a commodity as tie-in action figures, Burton unwillingly incited the industry's fool's gold rush for the next young visionary weirdo, a dubious quest that inevitably leads them not only to film schools but to the world of independent filmmaking, where chutzpa and idiosyncracy are in limitless supply. Housebreaking the indie wild child can, however, be an expensive and messy proposition, as Hollywood has learned and unlearned repeatedly since Easy Rider.
In fact, being an independent filmmaker is a bit like being a bachelor: you can sleep around, stay out late, watch football games all Sunday long in peace, leave the toilet seat up, toss dirty laundry on the floor. There's no reason to plan more than a week in advance--forget about taking out a mortgage, saving for the kids' college, prestructuring a retirement nest egg. (This is truer than you think: the only Darla Hood to today's "Little Rascals" He-Man Women-Hater Club is Stacy Cochran, the 33-year-old Columbia grad behind the conspicuously unhyped My New Gun.) Bachelors don't have to make anyone else happy, or answer for their (in)actions. And when independent filmmakers do the equivalent of sitting home naked on a Saturday night with a bowl of Cherry Garcia in their laps watching an amateur cricket game on cable TV, no one has anything to say about it.
It is, of course, a two-edged sword: however freewheeling, bachelors spend a lot of time looking to hook up with an Other and sacrifice their freedom for a sense of belonging, union and financial cooperation. Similarly, no matter how marvelously and self-expressively autonomous they may feel, indies still want to be absorbed by a studio and accepted into the mainstream. Any beginning filmmaker who thinks he or she can come out of the system unscathed and uncompromised is as naive as the newlywed husband who thinks taking out the garbage should be a non-gender-specific chore.
Every budding young director should take note of the short-but-hairpin-curved career arc of Steven Soderbergh's two-film oeuvre. In a recent Variety survey that pitted a film's bottom-line cost against its profits, sex, lies, and videotape was judged the most profitable film of all time, earning back 100 times its $1 million budget worldwide. Not bad. Don't even mention the awards at Cannes or the Oscar nomination. With a modest film featuring four characters, Soderbergh managed a nearly Herculean feat: establishing himself instantly as a financially powerful player as well as a redoubtable talent. His next step seemed well-reasoned: He selected a reputedly brilliant script that had been gathering dust on studio shelves for years (Lem Dobbs's Kafka), he got Jeremy Irons to play the lead, and he went to Prague with a truckload of studio money. When he and it came back, Kafka was roasted by critics and bombed badly, suddenly casting into doubt whatever notions the studios had about dishing out eight-digits'-worth of investment capital to geeky youngsters who happen to strike a rich lode with their first low-budgeter.
That revelation's chastening effect on Hollywood's hype habits lasted only a few weeks--just about Kafka's theatrical run, in fact-- and then it was open season on young'uns once again. The '90s indie rush had begun.
The '90s Scorsese spawn have all, suitably, begun as urban independents, enjoying the freedom and pro-am showboating that low-budget, guerrilla-style film shoots afford. Fresh from maxing their credit cards and haunting the festival circuit, these novice filmmakers are easy prey, and once the industry scouts get ahold of them, it's Faustian bargain time: sign away any notion of actually making the films you want to make, and we'll guarantee you've got enough money to make them.
Everyone has his or her own story, but few map out the potholes young directors must navigate as effectively as the complementary (and ongoing) sagas of Quentin Tarantino and Nick Gomez. Both are indisputably testosterone-heavy, post-Don Siegel movieheads, each co-opting in his own way the history of American genre films. Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs has been trumpeted as loudly as any independent film since Do the Right Thing, and understandably so: it's a bloody '90s dance number through the familiar noir territory of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), with enough confrontational acting riffs and bristling Mametian dialogue to make an otherwise dozy industry sit up and smell the gunpowder. Tarantino's far from a Hollywood outsider. An experienced small-time actor (appearances ranging from an episode of "Golden Girls" to Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear), he began grinding our screenplays five or so years ago, managing to attach both executive producer Monte Hellman and star Harvey Keitel to Reservoir Dogs by using his producer Lawrence Bender's acting teachers as middlemen, which eventually led to rehearsals at the Sundance Institute Director's Workshop and Lab. Tutored by the likes of Sydney Pollack, Terry Gilliam and Volker Schlondorff, the then 28-year-old Tarantino fine-tuned the material, assembled a dream cast and shot it for just 1.3 mil.
Since his first movie's festival raves and national release, Tarantino is swimming in studio offers, has up to five original scripts in production (with titles like True Romance, Natural Born Killers and Past Midnight), and is slated to write an original script for transplanted Hong Kong action-meister John Woo. It seems hardly anyone can help themselves from wondering what Tarantino's follow-up films will be like, or rather, how great they'll be. (I think he may've shot his wad, if anyone's wondering.) The guy better be careful: hype can be the film industry's steroids, bulking you up as your face breaks out, your penis shrinks, and your brain gets deep-fried in its own Mazola. But, because of his rapacious relationship with movie culture, Tarantino currently seems inviolate from Hollywood's worst tendencies--you can't buy me, he's saying, I'm already sold.
If Chris Columbus is the aging wunderkind generation's Zeppo, and Tarantino is the new generation's Groucho--the irreverent wiseacre who is unaccountably given authority as a college president or leader of Freedonia--then Nick Gomez, 29, is closer to Harpo, a relatively incorruptible agent of anarchy. His Laws of Gravity, which he completed on a $38,000 budget, is as much a movie-movie as Dogs, but with a difference. Instead of feeding on the remains of timeworn mainstream genres, Gomez traffics with the independent-film pathmarks of yesteryear. Laws of Gravity hearkens explicitly to Scorsese's Mean Streets by using its characters' names and its Gotham neighborhoods; more significantly, the ghost of John Cassavetes is invoked by the movie's hyperrealism, hand-held camera, and penchant for toe-to-toe domestic psychodrama.
Though Reservoir Dogs and Laws of Gravity were yoked together during their prerelease festival hype phase--both are, after all, portraits of mano-a-mano lowlife where every third word is "fuck"-- the chasm between them and their directors widened when the guys began wondering how they'd get their second films made. As much as Tarantino is swamped with options and open for business, Gomez has been holding out for a deal in which he gets as much autonomy on his second film as he had on his first. In Hollywood terms, he may as well hang a string of garlic around his neck. His first three-picture deal with Island Pictures last April was a good beginning, until they required that he cast Marky Mark in his new urban filth-fest about Boston car thieves, Young Americans. You don't like that? the executives asked. All right, how about a sequel to Laws of Gravity designed as Elizabeth Taylor's comeback vehicle?
Not surprisingly, Gomez walked. He cut his losses by repackaging his project, then began directing episodic TV (including "America's Most Wanted") and decided that if he couldn't get substantial backing, he'd hit the streets guerrilla-style again, and practice the same balls-to-the-wall type of ultracheap filmmaking he's proven he's the best at since the early Coen brothers.
Like manna from heaven, the ubiquitous studio contract sometimes falls into a young filmhead's life with almost divine grace. Twenty-four-year-old Robert Rodriguez had the most modest of film production strategies: raise $7,000 by selling himself as a medical-experiment guinea pig, make the first of a projected handful of shoestring Spanish-language gangster movies, and sell it to a Latino video company. Rodriguez figured he'd work his way up to skid row this way, and didn't think much would come of leaving a screener of El Mariachi on ICM's Los Angeles desk. Soon the bandwagon-jumpers at Columbia who bought up John Singleton were calling him, contract at the ready, and El Mariachi was given a February '93 release date.
Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you're young, period. But even Mr. Rodriguez has to give a little, take a little as the studio tries to get the tenderfoot to Anglicize and whitewash his subsequent scrubby-bordertown scenarios. There's more than integrity at stake: as one can see by comparing the undeniably unique personality of a film like El Mariachi to the usual homogenous Hollywood product, too many power-mad dolts masquerading as cooks will spoil the gazpacho.
Hype often attaches itself tick-like to the unlikeliest of hosts, most notably Nick Gomez's SUNY Purchase alumni compatriot Hal Hartley, perhaps the reigning dean of filmmakers too young to remember where they were, or if they were, when JFK was shot. Still only 33, Hartley's practically a veteran, each of his films (three features, three original TV projects) garnering berserk critical accolades and earning enough in urban markets to ensure subsequent funding. That Hartley's films are, subjectively speaking, built on perfume-ad posing, dead one-liners and sub-Pinter pauses makes his success all the more baffling. Watching his films is like getting lost in Attitudeland without a map, and if his brand of half-lidded film-school archness can reap respect and press (his latest, Simple Men, was hyped heavier than the last three Lawrence Kasdan films), then even the most uncommercial of personal filmmakers can take heart in a seemingly hopeless world. Hartley's attraction lies in the simple fact that he makes his films his way, and however you feel about his movies, they're definitely the distinctive work of a single man.
While it may be self-evident that maintaining a directorial voice is an easier stunt to pull when your movie costs less than a used BMW, what's less obvious is how a filmmaker's subject matter itself can be a hurdle. Alongside fellow urchins Richard Linklater (Slacker) and Atom Egoyan (Speaking Parts, The Adjuster), Hartley's terrain, no matter how idiosyncratic, is easier going down the Hollywood gullet than last year's spate of emerging gay filmmakers. Sexually frank, formally risky movies like Gregg Araki's uppity homoerotic AIDS roadtrip, The Living End, Christopher Munch's quixotic hypothesis on an unrequited John Lennon/Brian Epstein love affair, The Hours and Times, and Tom Kalin's smooth-as-silk reupholstering of the Leopold and Loeb case, Swoon, were praised everywhere, played well, and nevertheless present Hollywood with an ideological conundrum, Gus Van Sant or no Gus Van Sant.
All under 32, neither Araki, Munch nor Kalin seem to be very easily marketable or hypeable properties, despite their films' acclaim, respectable art-house receipts and the industry's sympathy for AIDS issues. The hype was there, but it was critical hype characterizing the three as the front guard of a gay minimovement. And critical hype can only do so much, especially when a filmmaker's chief virtue is marginality. Of the three, Munch seems to have the best shot at. transforming himself into a mainstream Van Sant-ish art-house wonder; Kalin and especially Araki are too expressly absorbed in gay issues and too infatuated with the try-anything prerogatives of low-budget moviemaking to be taken into the industry fold anytime soon, where the big-time hype makes for big careers. Kalin and Araki have, after all, designed their films to be snot-nosed winters of discontent in a homophobic world; they don't try very hard to be liked. Remember that Hollywood's idea of an acceptably risky film about gay life was 1990's Longtime Companion, an Oscar-nominated weeper about AIDS that was, nevertheless, independently financed. One can't help but imagine the collective bureaucratic jaw-drop that accompanied the studio's first look at The Living End, with its CHOOSE DEATH bumper sticker and rough-trade, gun-in-mouth sex scenes. If they stick to their same-sex cinematic agenda, these three guys will remain independents for at least as long as it takes Spike Lee to remake The Birth of a Nation.
Serious industry hype is, finally, a precious ingredient of the film-culture diet and is not dished out indiscriminately. Hollywood only serves up a leafy, fiber-strong Caesar salad of hype with main courses they know the public will eat in substantial quantities. The industry wants some level of confidence that the tyros they put at the helm will justify their faith by making easily masticated movie fare--the better for John and Edna Q. Filmgoer to digest the notion of paying $7 to see a film directed by someone the age of Bobby, the boy who mows the lawn every Saturday. Of course, the more the young filmmakers are hyped, the younger they get--picture Matty Rich unable to buy a can of beer next door to the theater showing his film. How long before a fresh-faced 12-year-old writer/director signs a three-picture deal with Paramount? Splitting time between story meetings and 6th-grade math instruction? Fielding questions from "Entertainment Tonight" interviewers? (Actually, that'd be the easy part.) The day is coming, my friends, just as surely as Sister Act 2.
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Michael Atkinson is a film critic for the New York Press.