A Very Good Year

Andrew O'Heir reviews Sharon Waxman's new book, Rebels on the Backlot, in today's Salon. Despite the corny title and hackneyed subtitle (Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System), the book sounds interesting, examining the indie-film origins of Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, and David Fincher, and their varying degrees of assimilation into Hollywood. I haven't read much of Waxman's work since she moved to the New York Times a few years ago, but I liked her stuff when she was the Post's Hollywood reporter; her articles were always meticulously reported and stylishly written. Plus she moderated a fun weekly online chat called "Hollywood & Vine" on washingtonpost.com.

O'Heir seems to have liked her book, which he uses as a catalyst for a good hit-and-run discussion of these and other notable auteurs of the last decade. In many ways, O'Heir writes, they (and movies in general) hit some kind of peak peak six years ago:

In 1999, the indie wave crashed onto the beach of American culture with tremendous force; we couldn't have realized at the time that we'd probably never see anything like it again. That year not only saw the release of "Magnolia," "Three Kings," "Being John Malkovich" and "Fight Club," but also "The Matrix," Sam Mendes' Oscar-sweeping "American Beauty," Alexander Payne's "Election," Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry."

Yeah, whatever you think (or thought) of the individual movies, that was a good year, wasn't it?