From Publishers Weekly
New York Times Hollywood correspondent Waxman has written a gritty, truthful study of six boundary-breaking young directors who revolutionized 1990s filmmaking and still represent a refreshing alternative to "cookie cutter scripts and cheap MTV imagery." Her full-blooded profiles introduce Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), David Fincher (Fight Club), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), David O. Russell (Three Kings) and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich). Waxman shows these auteurs, who "wreaked havoc with traditional narrative form" and combined brutality with humor, as eccentric, frequently antisocial and hardheaded. Their stories make for compelling reading: Waxman dramatizes Russell's erratic, explosive nature in the book's most blistering episode, where the director loses his temper and has a fistfight with actor George Clooney on the set of Three Kings. Other chapters depict Tarantino's penchant for jettisoning close friends after achieving success and Soderbergh's unswerving loyalty to pals. These men possess a daring vision, which the author skillfully depicts, simultaneously offering an illuminating view of motion picture politics. Most of all, Waxman proffers assurance to artists with original voices that their ideas can reach the public if they maintain Fincher's attitude - "Take me or leave me. My way or the highway" - and possess a little luck. Photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For a few golden years, a generation ago, Hollywood film directors preened as artists (also known as auteurs, the French word for authors). Then the movie moguls figured out how to make big bucks producing and marketing comic-book blockbusters, and the pretense was over. Most studio directors became faceless functionaries who shouted at actors, "Scream as loud as you can at the blue screen, and the computer guys will put in the monsters later."Most, but not all, says Sharon Waxman in Rebels on the Backlot. A former entertainment reporter for The Washington Post, now with the New York Times, Waxman profiles half-a-dozen young male directors (yes, that gender thing again) who have kept the preening auteur alive even in the corporate kingdoms of contemporary Hollywood, where accountants ride with royalty and artists usually carry the brooms and pans. This Magnificent Six -- Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell and Spike Jonze (Adam Spiegel) -- indeed gave us some of the most thrilling and heartening American works of cinema art during the otherwise generally sour Hollywood movie decade of the '90s.Waxman's approach is about halfway divided between her directors' private lives and professional demeanors, on the one hand, and the intricate bluffs and betrayals of movie deal-making, on the other. No one comes out looking good, as is usual in the Hollywood-behind-the-scenes genre. The directors, no matter how much we may admire their work, generally turn out to be raving egomaniacs or social misfits or both, perfectly willing to jettison any friend, wife, lover or family member to climb out of the primordial ooze of the American indie world and make it in the big time. What's sociologically (or perhaps psychoanalytically) interesting about this group is that several of them seem permanently to have ditched their mothers long before they had a foot up on the ladder of success.That said, Waxman tells a fast-paced and always absorbing story of how some of the most significant American movies of the era -- "Boogie Nights," "Three Kings" and "Being John Malkovich," to name several -- got written, financed and made. Her book is a triumph of journeywoman legwork. In addition to cadging interviews with her sometimes recalcitrant principals, she has spoken with scores of exes: agents, managers, producers, studio heads, co-workers, all of the aforementioned relations, including the ex-mothers, to craft a rich and detailed if ultimately bleak portrait of the lives of young talent on the make and the games they play. A lot of publicity myths get shattered along the way, such as the oft-repeated story that Spike Jonze is heir to the Spiegel catalog fortune.One of Waxman's most compelling accounts details the production of "Three Kings" (1999), a unique major studio film concerning Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, which took on added significance after the 2003 Iraq invasion. Moving from TV to film, George Clooney badly wanted the lead role, and Warner Brothers, which, she writes, "had signed a huge development deal with the actor," badly wanted him in it. But Russell, the director, "hated Clooney's style of acting, which he considered a lot of head-bobbing and mugging for the camera." Although Clooney got the part, the director and star denigrated each other throughout the shoot, and once, Waxman reports, came to physical blows. A quarter-century ago Michael Pye and Lynda Myles published a book called The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, and Waxman might have considered calling her book, in Hollywood sequel fashion, "The Movie Brats II." Some commentators have blamed sex, drugs and rock-and-roll for the fall from grace of the '70s auteurs, rather than changes in movie distribution and marketing. Readers may be relieved (or appalled, or not care either way) to learn from Waxman that sex, drugs and rock-and-roll still play a prominent role in the lives of the '90s auteurs, not necessarily in that order. But the differences between the two generations are instructive.The "film generation" of the '70s -- Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese and the rest -- went to film school and became steeped in film history watching Hollywood classics of the '30s and '40s in class and on late-night TV. The new generation of Tarantino and company not only didn't go to film school, they hardly set foot in secondary school. Their classics were '70s films like "Star Wars," which they watched over and over again, hundreds of times, on their VCRs. They made movies less out of some relation to a heritage (leaving aside Tarantino's kung fu legacy) than out of their private demons, which may be one reason, Waxman suggests, why they persevered for months and years in making the movies they wanted to make, rather than capitulating to the crushing weight of the system that she so extensively documents.The status of her subjects, Waxman acknowledges, is no less precarious than was that of the original Movie Brats. The fabled "green light" to make a movie is as elusive as the Great Gatsby's at the end of a Long Island dock, and often depends on the intricate game of musical chairs played by corporate bosses seeking to make a name or a statement. But one can at least come away from her book with the satisfaction of knowing that disloyalty, duplicity and bad faith are as rife in the creative precincts of young Hollywood as they are in the fat-cat executive suites.Reviewed by Robert Sklar Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
In the 1990s, a group of young directors roiled Hollywood in much the way that Coppola, Scorsese, and their peers shook up the establishment two decades earlier. New York Times correspondent Waxman traces the careers of six of those next-generation rebels--Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Jonze, and David O. Russell--from Tarantino's groundbreaking and influential Reservoir Dogs in 1992 to Soderbergh's success, Traffic, in 2000. The '90s had more than its share of innovative and challenging films, ranging from Anderson's Altmanesque Boogie Nights and Fincher's brutal Fight Club to Russell's prescient Three Kings and Jonze's unclassifiable Being John Malkovich. Waxman details the shooting of those films and others, and the corporate barriers their directors had to overcome. The young turks of the '90s didn't change the course of the film industry the way the '70s rebels did, but if they evaded the self-destructive lifestyles that sabotaged many of their earlier counterparts, their self-indulgences were manifested in their films instead, as Waxman's sympathetic but clear-eyed account shows. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Premiere Magazine
"[Waxman’s] thorough reporting results in a compulsively readable chronicle of the decade’s auteurs and their work."

New York Times Book Review
"Vivid . . . fascinating . . . delightful . . . [Waxman’s] background as a hard news reporter serves her well"

Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Fascinatingly candid"

Buffalo News
"Terrific . . . wildly informative and readable about the plight of the biggest young talents in modern movies"

Salon.com
"Admirably reported . . . Waxman unearths juicy anecdotes that’ll keep film fans cackling and turning the pages."

Variety
"Enjoyably dishy"

Pittsburgh Tribune
"[Rebels on the Backlot] makes a case for creating a new film canon of this late ‘90s renaissance."

Miami Herald
"Addictively readable . . . fascinating"

Library Journal
"Waxman perceptively depicts the vocabulary of the new Hollywood . . . well-written . . . recommended."

men.style.com
"Hums along on detail and gossip, adding up to a template for making it in contemporary Hollywood."

Book Description

The 1990s saw a shock wave of dynamic new directing talent that took the Hollywood studio system by storm. At the forefront of that movement were six innovative and daring directors whose films pushed the boundaries of moviemaking and announced to the world that something exciting was happening in Hollywood, even as much of the industry was mired in mediocrity. Sharon Waxman of the New York Times spent the decade covering these young filmmakers, and now in Rebels on the Backlot she tells this fascinating story by weaving together the lives and careers of: Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction Steven Soderbergh, Traffic David Fincher, Fight Club Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights and Magnolia David 0. Russell, Three Kings Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich

With their movies, these directors let the moviemaking establishment know that there was a new vanguard ready to take over from the previous generation, and that they were ready to shatter the accepted constraints of filmmaking to do it. Their films toyed with form and narrative, shocked with their explicit sex and violence, and dizzied audiences with surreal themes and images. In making their films, the rebel directors fought their way through a studio system that by the 1990s had become part of America's larger corporate culture, conglomerates brutally focused on the bottom line and not inclined to take artistic risks.

Waxman, who conducted more than one hundred interviews with actors, producers, executives, and the six directors themselves, has written a provocative and insightful behind-the-scenes account, a glimpse at the clash between the studio culture and the rebel spirit of artists working within it.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The 1990s saw a shock wave of dynamic new directing talent that took the Hollywood studio system by storm. At the forefront of that movement were six innovative and daring directors whose films pushed the boundaries of moviemaking and announced to the world that something exciting was happening in Hollywood, even as much of the industry was mired in mediocrity." With their movies, these directors let the movie-making establishment know that there was a new vanguard ready to take over from the previous generation, and that they were ready to shatter the accepted constraints of filmmaking to do it. Their films toyed with form and narrative, shocked with their explicit sex and violence, and dizzied audiences with surreal themes and images. In making their films, the rebel directors fought their way through a studio system that by the 1990s had become part of America's larger corporate culture, conglomerates brutally focused on the bottom line and not inclined to take artistic risks.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

New York Times Hollywood correspondent Waxman has written a gritty, truthful study of six boundary-breaking young directors who revolutionized 1990s filmmaking and still represent a refreshing alternative to "cookie cutter scripts and cheap MTV imagery." Her full-blooded profiles introduce Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), David Fincher (Fight Club), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), David O. Russell (Three Kings) and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich). Waxman shows these auteurs, who "wreaked havoc with traditional narrative form" and combined brutality with humor, as eccentric, frequently antisocial and hardheaded. Their stories make for compelling reading: Waxman dramatizes Russell's erratic, explosive nature in the book's most blistering episode, where the director loses his temper and has a fistfight with actor George Clooney on the set of Three Kings. Other chapters depict Tarantino's penchant for jettisoning close friends after achieving success and Soderbergh's unswerving loyalty to pals. These men possess a daring vision, which the author skillfully depicts, simultaneously offering an illuminating view of motion picture politics. Most of all, Waxman proffers assurance to artists with original voices that their ideas can reach the public if they maintain Fincher's attitude-"Take me or leave me. My way or the highway"-and possess a little luck. Photos. Agent, Andrew Blauner. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews