From Rolling Stone, May 18, 1989, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1989. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Steven Soderbergh has a pile of phone messages. Sydney Pollack’s been calling for weeks. Demi Moore has invited him to lunch at the Ivy. Taylor Hackford called from his car phone. David Hoberman, the president of Walt Disney Pictures, wants to set up a meeting. So do executives at Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and Universal. Soderbergh sees no point in returning the call from Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producers of Beverly Hills Cop. “They’re slime,” he says, “just barely passing for humans.”
A year ago, Soderbergh couldn’t have gotten these people to look at him sideways. Then he was just some twenty-five-year-old kid come to Hollywood with six unproduced screenplays and a director’s reel of fourteen-minute films he’d made in his home town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Now he’s a twenty-six-year-old with the same reel, the same screenplays, and a $1.2 million independent feature he wrote and directed called sex, lies, and videotape. The overwhelming and unanimous praise this film is receiving even before it’s been released has left Soderbergh stunned. It’s not as if his movie is filled with big-screen moments—it has no chase scene or special effects or even, despite the title, explicit nudity. It just has four people confronting their feelings about, well, sex and lies and videotape.
When the movie was shown for the first time, in January, at the U.S. Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, Soderbergh felt the need to apologize to the audience for his unfinished work. It was still too long, the sound mix was temporary and the titles were made on a Xerox machine. Nobody seemed to notice or care. After the first screening, tickets to the remaining three shows became so scarce that they were being scalped. Agents, producers, critics, and even just regular people kept stopping Soderbergh to shake his hand, to press their cards into his palm, even to tell him that they’d seen a lot of movies but they had never seen one quite like his. One woman told him to call her if he ever, ever needed a place to stay in Los Angeles. A man came up and asked him, “Can my girlfriend kiss your feet?”
It’s hard to know how to act when you’re getting this outpouring of admiration and affection. Soderbergh says he’s never been very good at accepting compliments. His first instinct was to dismiss them, as if such talk were ridiculous, but he was told that was annoying and he should cut it out. For the week of the festival, Soderbergh could have been eating every meal courtesy of some movie muckety-muck. Instead he took a job as a volunteer shuttle driver.
Back in Los Angeles it was more of the same—actually, much more. The reviews of sex, lies, and videotape that appeared in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, and American Film were so laudatory that Soderbergh was embarrassed. “They’re not even like I wrote them myself,” he says, “because if I wrote them myself, I would have found something to pick at.” Within a month, his agent had gotten five hundred phone calls from people who wanted to meet Soderbergh or see his movie, as well as piles of scripts and novels for him to consider, directing or adapting. One studio offered to make a blind deal—anything Soderbergh wanted to do.
Executives made pitches for Soderbergh to come work for them. The people at Warner Bros. said, “Look, we encourage young talent. Didn’t we give Batman to Tim Burton to direct?” The people at Paramount said, “Look, we already do our share of big-budget extravaganzas. We need someone like you who makes smaller, more personal films.” During his meeting at Paramount, Soderbergh found himself distracted by a bowl of fruit in the middle of the table. He hadn’t eaten lunch, and he was starving. But the bowl was filled with bananas, navel oranges—things you’d have to peel. Soderbergh didn’t want to leave behind a pile of litter; somehow, it didn’t seem appropriate when four studio executives were comparing him to Woody Allen.
You can’t let this stuff go to your head, Soderbergh keeps telling himself; there’s a term in Hollywood for what you are: flavor of the month. Which is no guarantee of success. Far better, safer anyway, to remain suspicious and cynical of the sudden attention, to regard yourself merely as a bone that every golden retriever in town has to sniff. What about Phil Joanou, protégé of Steven Spielberg’s who probably could have made any movie he wanted. He chose to do Three O’Clock High, which nobody saw. Soderbergh has given instructions that he be shot on sight if he ever makes a movie about high school. Or what about Michael Dinner? Soderbergh loved Dinner’s American Playhouse production of Miss Lonelyhearts, but now Dinner’s directing totally innocuous comedies like Off Beat and Hot to Trot. Soderbergh doesn’t know Dinner, but he can’t imagine this is what Dinner wanted to do with his career. Soderbergh can name a half a dozen others who have been the flavor of the month, and these days you practically have to put out an all-points bulletin to find out what they’re up to.
“When you meet somebody and you haven’t done anything, you’re just a guy,” says Soderbergh. “You know that the person’s response to you is contingent wholly upon how you act and what you’re like. Which is as it should be. I got to make a movie. Okay, you know? So? I’m happy that I did. I’m still a schmuck like everybody else. I have problems, just like anyone. There are people who get to make movies who are fucking assholes, who are terrible people. Okay, I know I’m not a terrible person. It’s just that this attention—it’s potentially harmful, and it has so little to do with sitting in a room and trying to write, trying to make something good and make something work. It has nothing to do with that.”
All the same, people seem to look at him differently now, with awe; even some of his friends have started calling him “the genius”—and not sarcastically. While scores of other independent movies will go searching this year for a distributor, sex, lies, and videotape has eleven companies in a bidding war. Soderbergh’s agent, Pat Dollard of Leading Artists, has to work until late at night just so he can give some attention to his other clients. “It’s like being the manager of the Doors in 1967,” says Dollard, “and their first album comes out, and ‘Light My Fire’ goes to Number One. It’s kinda like that.”
Soderbergh has to search for things to worry about, so he does. The other night he went to a screening at the Writers Guild. He hated the movie so much he walked out, but not before it registered that everybody else in the room seemed to love it. “It’s scary,” he says. “It was so effortlessly bad that you think that’s how everything is. You begin to think, ‘Maybe my stuff is like that.’ “On top of that, Fawn Hall was at the screening too. Soderbergh remembers thinking, “Here’s a semipublic personality out being seen, and I’m becoming a semipublic personality, and what does that mean? That someday I’m going to have my picture taken with Fawn Hall?”
Soderbergh is living every filmmaker’s fantasy (including his own since he was fifteen)—that you make one picture, and Hollywood spontaneously and collectively heralds you as a major talent—and the most satisfaction he will express verbally is “Yeah, it feels nice,” or “I keep expecting to get hit by a bus.” A friend of his was heard asking, “Do you think maybe he’s screaming inside?”
On the face of it, Soderbergh seems like the perfect, the obvious, candidate for this kind of hype. He is a movie buff’s movie buff, the kind that goes to see Altered States eleven times in a two-week period, four of those in a single day, because the film’s sound technician came to that particular theater to retune and enhance the speaker system. “I was there when the subwoofer blew out,” he says, the way another person might say, “I was at Woodstock.” Not only does he keep a mental list of his top ten favorite movies of all time, he also has specific rules for compiling it: “It has to be a film that if somebody says, ‘Hey, let’s watch whatever,’ or ‘Let’s go see whatever,’ no matter what format, no matter what time, you will drop everything and go, or sit down and watch. And it can’t be a movie that came out within the past ten years, because you haven’t had enough time to put it in perspective.” (His ten favorite movies are, in no particular order, Citizen Kane, The Third Man, The Conversation, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Godfather (parts I and II), Annie Hall, Jaws, Sunset Boulevard, The Last Picture Show, and All the President’s Men.)
In Hollywood, where a new concept is often cast as the hybrid of two older, proven ones, Soderbergh might be described as a cross between Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen. Like Spielberg, Soderbergh had a precious interest in film and debuted as a feature-film director at the age of twenty-six; like Allen, he has made a movie that is talky and intimate and topically consumed with relationships between men and women.
Sex, lies, and videotape is about four people: John (Peter Gallagher); his wife Ann (Andie MacDowell); Ann’s wild sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo); and Graham (James Spader), a friend of John’s from college. John is having a torrid affair with Cynthia, while Ann, ignorant of their deception, finds herself increasingly disinterested in sex. The balance of this precarious triangle is tipped with the arrival of Graham. He is emotionally remote and enigmatic, given to posing the most personal inquiries as if he were making small talk. Despite the fact that Graham hasn’t seen John in nine years and has never met Ann or Cynthia, he is privy to all their secrets within a few days. He is also willing to reveal his own—that he was once a pathological liar and that his disgust with himself has made him impotent, able to become excited only when watching his homemade videotapes of women talking about sex.
If anyone asks—and people usually do—where Soderbergh got the inspiration for sex, lies, and videotape, he tells them about his twenty-fourth year: “I was involved in a relationship with a woman in which I behaved poorly—in which I was deceptive and mentally manipulative. I got involved with a number of other women, you know, simultaneously—I was just fucking 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, and I went somewhere else. 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, you know, going on from there, mentally screwed up.
“It was just really what I consider to be ugly behavior in the sense that it was, you know, it was lying, and it was, it was, it was sexual politics. It was manipulation; it was, it was power-tripping. It was just really bad. I just became somebody that, if I knew him, I would hate. Which was disturbing. And at the same time, I wanted to see how far I could push it.”
Soderbergh put a stop to this behavior by abruptly withdrawing from all his liasons and, as an act of contrition, selling off his most-prized material possessions, his audio and video equipment. “He had the proverbial wall of sound, all that matte-black stuff, and he stripped the walls bare,” says David Foil, a friend of Soderbergh’s from Baton Rouge. “In my thirty-five years, I’ve never seen someone go through so much anguish and soul-searching.” Soderbergh tried therapy but gave up after a few sessions, and now, like his movie character Graham, he regards himself as a recovering liar.
He gets different reactions to his confession, the most common being surprise. Soderbergh hardly looks like a depraved Lothario. He is six feet tall and thin, near to gangly, and considers himself unattractive. (While watching scenes of his movie, he is moved to push at the contours of his face. “Where are my cheekbones?” he asks. “Look at Jimmy and Andie—I mean, they have cheekbones. You could plane doors with my face.”)
Some people, total strangers, want to engage him in philosophical discussions about their own sexual relationships. Studio executives, on the other hand, sometimes seem discomforted by his admissions. At Paramount, they just said, “Oh,” and changed the subject. Maybe it sounded indiscreet to them.
Well, they asked.
When Soderbergh was thirteen, his father, a college professor, enrolled him in an animation course taught at Louisiana State University. Despite his talent for drawing, Soderbergh quickly grew bored with the amount of work required to produce just a minute’s worth of cartoon, preferring instead to audit the Super-8 moviemaking class. It was his only formal film education, and the teacher’s main piece of advice was this: “You can do anything you want, so long as you don’t shoot footage at the zoo and then put that Simon and Garfunkel song to it.”
His first completed product was an Ex-Lax commercial, starring his brother-in-law and featuring the Doobie Brothers song “It Keeps You Runnin’.” At fifteen, he made a twenty-minute short, an homage to Taxi Driver called Janitor. He cannot say enough awful things about it, including, “It’s just the worst thing you’ve ever seen.” At least it had the benefit of teaching him that he didn’t want to make movies about other movies, which, he says now, is the failing of most other young filmmakers.
To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, there are two ways to make it in the movie business: gradually and suddenly. After high school, Soderbergh felt he was ready for the sudden alternative, but he had to settle for the gradual one. His former MU instructor, who was then working in Los Angeles on the television show Games People Play, hired Soderbergh as an editor. But the show went off the air six months later, and Soderbergh had to take odd jobs on the fringes of the industry—as a cue-card holder, a game-show scorekeeper, a freelance editor for cable’s Showtime channel.
Los Angeles, his personal mecca, now appeared to him to be the most disheartening place on earth. It was all about what you drove and what you wore and where you are. Even little things began to bug Soderbergh—like why weren’t there left-turn signals on the stoplights at all the major intersections? The film schools were the worst—he disliked the pressure and the competition. There was no guarantee you’d even get to make a movie (only a handful in each class do), and if you did, it would be shown at a big public screening attended by all these Hollywood honchos. In other words, you could have a bomb even before you graduated from college.
Instead, Soderbergh returned to Baton Rouge and went to work as a coin changer in a video arcade. He also made Rapid Eye Movement, a comically self-effacing short about his own obsession with moving to Los Angeles and making movies.
When Soderbergh was twenty-one, an acquaintance at Showtime recommended him to members of the musical group Yes, who were looking for a young, cheap director to make a home movie for them. They liked his work so much that they hired him to chronicle the concert tour for their album 9012live; the hour-long video was ultimately nominated for a Grammy. Armed with these credentials and the draft of a screenplay, he got an agent and then a couple of assignments—one to rewrite a Disney Sunday-night movie and another to script a musical, kind of an updated West Side Story, for TriStar Pictures. It was never made.
Soderbergh wrote the screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape in eight days, and on half of those he was driving from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles. “It came out so fast,” he says. “I just wanted it dealt with. I didn’t know if anybody would read it. I didn’t know if my agent would say, ‘I can’t send this out.’ It just seemed too personal.”
Soderbergh thinks of his four characters as himself cut into quarters, but it is the placid, withdrawn Graham who most apparently resembles his creator. “We never talked about it,” says actor James Spader. “But there would be days when I’d get out of wardrobe and come to the set, and we’d be wearing the same thing.”
The movie’s development was, by Hollywood’s standards, obscenely brief—it was financed (by RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video), shot, edited, and shown at the U.S. Film Festival within twelve and a half months after Soderbergh first dropped the script on his agent’s desk. The snags were minor. Several talent agencies refused to show it to their clients because they thought it was pornographic. He wanted to shoot the movie in black and white, but RCA/Columbia insisted on color. And the title—which Soderbergh chose after thinking to himself, “How would Graham describe this movie?”—met with some resistance. His investors feared that potential distributors would assume from the name that it was shot on videotape instead of film stock.
“It got to the point,” says Soderbergh, “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?’ I said, ‘No. You either change the whole thing or you leave it.’ As long as we came up with something good. Nobody could, including myself.”
The shooting, according to his actors, went so smoothly that the only issue they can recall is Soderbergh’s telling MacDowell and San Giacomo to tone down their southern accents. “We aren’t doing Tennessee Williams here,” he’d say. In response, they started calling him Steven Subtle-bergh.
He made $37,000 for his efforts, 10 percent of which went to his agent, 5 percent to his lawyer, and 1 3/4 percent to the Writers Guild. He owed about $5000 in back taxes, which he paid, and he bought himself a 1960 AMC Rambler for $1300. He has $2100 left to get him through the next two months of living in Los Angeles, and his monthly rent, $400, is due. Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and Universal have all offered to pay him to rewrite two of his scripts; Soderbergh, being conservative, guesses he could get about $100,000 to do that, but he doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone.
The thing is, he could use the money. He wants to get braces. During a particularly unpleasant episode with his former girlfriend, she retaliated with a slew of withheld criticisms, including one aimed at his teeth. It was just another thing to feel self-conscious about. When Soderbergh finally makes his next movie deal, that will be the first thing he buys for himself.
Soderbergh is in an editing room in North Hollywood, working on the final details of postproduction with his friend and sound editor Larry Blake. They met nine years ago, about the time that Soderbergh was making a rather disjointed film starring the Goodyear blimp and himself doing poor Marlon Brando imitations. For that reason, it’s pretty hard for Blake to connect Soderbergh with his new-found celebrity.
“I’ll stand for anything,” Blake says, “except for seeing your picture in ‘The Great Life,’” —a column in the Hollywood Reporter.
Soderbergh tells him about seeing Fawn Hall at a screening. “What if somebody takes a picture,” he says, “and I’m in the shot somewhere?”
“If you’re in the background, then that’s okay,” Blake says. “But not if it’s you and your arm’s around Morgan Fairchild.”
Soderbergh dismisses this as impossible. Still, it’s certain that his next project will have a higher profile. Although he’s been offered a lot of “relationship” movies, Soderbergh has a more ambitious idea for himself. He wants to make the film version of a 616-page novel by William Brinkley called The Last Ship, an apocalyptic epic about the men and women of a naval crew who survive World War III.
Such a project will probably cost at least twenty times what sex, lies, and videotape did, but he knows that he can get a deal for it, if only because Sydney Pollack has agreed to become involved. At the same time, he’s embarrassed by the figures his agent is saying he’s going to demand for Soderbergh’s services: $250,000 to write the script, $100,000 for a rewrite, $500,000 to direct. “That’s absurd,” he says. “I don’t want to draw attention to myself.”
He’s feeling guilty, too, about the distribution deal that’s been made for his movie. Miramax Films had promised to pay $100,000 over the highest bid, but then Island Pictures weighed in with an extremely generous $1 million for the distribution rights, plus $1 million to be spent on advertising. The only problem was that Island expected Soderbergh and his producers to split any promotional costs above that. So they went back to Miramax and offered to wave the extra $100,000 in exchange for Miramax’s picking up the tab for all the advertising. That fee, along with the $575,000 that Virgin Vision is paying for the foreign rights, meant that Soderbergh’s investors will have made all their money back, and then some, by the time the movie opens in early fall.
“It’s a ruthless deal, it really is,” says Soderbergh. “The film has to make like $4 million just to break even.” At the point the deal was made, Miramax had Pelle the Conqueror in release, and even though it had been nominated for two Academy Awards and had been out for nearly two months, it had just barely grossed $1 million.
Meanwhile, sex, lies, and videotape still isn’t finished to Soderbergh’s satisfaction. He’s in a cutting room, excising lines from the climactic moment when Ann and Graham admit their attraction for each other. Just a few hours ago, he got his first lukewarm response to the film. Barry London, the head of marketing at Paramount, apparently wasn’t impressed by it. There had been some discussion that Paramount was going to make a bid to distribute the movie, which would have been a coup, to get the promotional force of a major studio. (None of the other majors was interested because RCA/Columbia already owned the video rights, the real cash cow of the film business.) But then Soderbergh got a call telling him that London’s reaction to the movie was, “Yeah? So?”
It’s exactly what he feared would happen—that the word-of-mouth has built expectations so high that people will be disappointed when they finally see it. Soderbergh has this joke; speaking in a nasal Long Island accent, he’ll say, “Dawn Steel’s being very cold to me,” or “Ray Stark’s being very cold to me.” It mostly works as a joke because these people aren’t being cold to him; in fact, Steel, the president of Columbia Pictures, called to tell him how much she enjoyed his movie and that she hopes he’ll do something for her. And now he gets this review of his work: “Yeah? So?” Soderbergh may not want to wallow in being the flavor of the month, but he doesn’t want to blow it, either; Simpson and Bruckheimer were invited to a screening of sex, lies, and videotape in late April.
A voice comes over the intercom into the room. “Steve! Call for you on line one.” He picks up the receiver. “Hello? Yes? . . . Oh no, that was today? Oh, fuck. What time is it? . . . Ah, shit! Yeah, you better. I’ll leave right now. Tell her, tell her that we just concluded negotiations, that I’m on my way. . . . Yeah, it looks like the Miramax thing is . . . Yeah. Everything that we wanted. . . . Everything. Yeah. Yeah. Tell them I’m running ten minutes behind.”
He jumps up and then looks down at himself. Most of the time he wears what he calls his “arty, pretentious filmmaker garb”—jeans, a black T-shirt and a long black cotton coat—but today the T-shirt has been replaced by a white one bearing the words SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE.
He winces; he’s forgotten that he had a three o’clock meeting at Warner Bros., and now he’s going to show up for it not only late but with the name of his movie stenciled across his chest. “Oh, man,” he says, “they’re going to think I’m a complete dork.” When it comes right down to it, he can’t help wanting these people to like him.