Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman Read Free Book Online Page A

image, played the daughter. Soderbergh said the purpose of the film was to find closure to their painful episode. Brantley had another motive. “When we split up, I thought it would be interesting to see if he had a different personality as a director than as a husband,” she said. “I read later where he said he made the movie to see if there was still something there, but that had nothing to do with my motivation.”
    For Brantley, acting was about uncovering what was underneath the surface. Soderbergh was still struggling, ever struggling, to get to that place. He was so good at the glib, surface-level matters of filmmaking that it was hard—as he had in
sex, lies, and videotape
—to make it deeper, and personal.
    As for whether anything was different in the two Soderberghs, she said, “Ultimately no. But it gave me closure.”
Au Revoir Les Enfants
    Tarantino did have one early friendship that seemed to last. His bond with Roger Avary seemed sacrosanct. For a time, they had friendship, partnership, synchronicity, a unique collaboration. In the late 1980s they starved together. Scraping around for movie jobs, Tarantino and Avary took all kinds of odd Hollywood work in addition to their gig at the video store and trying to get a movie going. In 1987 they were were hired as production assistants on such low-rent fare as the
Dolph Lundgren: Maximum Potential
exercise video. Tarantino so annoyed the producers by knocking over nightstands and constantly babbling that he nearly got fired. Avary quit after the producer recommended that he follow his dream to write and direct.
    Mostly, though, they worked in tandem on movies; Avary might give Tarantino a script, and Tarantino would return with it a month later, having created his own version of it, scrawled on bits of paper. Many ideas that started in early experimental scripts would turn up in their later work, Avary’s
Killing Zoe
and Tarantino’s
Natural Born Killers.
At one point Avary and Tarantino took out an ad in the
National Enquirer.
“Invest in Motion Pictures,” complete with a profit-projecting pie chart, that failed to lure investors to
True Romance.
    Often it was hard to tell where Avary started and Tarantino ended.
    “When I met Roger, it was very weird; it was as if he and Quentin were twins, just one blond and one with dark hair,” said Scott Spiegel, who befriended Tarantino in the early nineties. “The same staccato way of talking, same cannonball energy, the same mannerisms. It was really strange.”
    According to Avary, Tarantino’s
True Romance
is based on an eighty-page script he wrote called
The Open Road.
Tarantino took that script and synthesized it with his own material, Avary says. According to Tarantino, Avary was the first person to ever read
True Romance
, which he described as “handwritten, five hundred pages, held together by a rubber band in a folder.” When the script ran into trouble, Avary did several rewrites. Said Tarantino. “He gave me little notes on it he wrote in red pen. It was like, you know, Roger got me. He was invigorated by my writing, and I was invigorated by his. I was very excited and inspired by his writing, because we seemed to be similar. We were kind of coming from the same place.” Then there was the ending. Tony Scott, who directed the film, called Tarantino to rewrite the ending. Scott told him. “You can’t shoot a $50 million movie and have everyone die at the end.”
    Tarantino told him: “Go fuck yourself, you paid for it, you rewrite it.”
    Avary rewrote the ending to
True Romance
, by using the same ending of
The Open Road
, which he would do again with
Killing Zoe.
(
Open Road
has apparently been cannibalized throughout the Avary and Tarantino canon.) For his efforts, Avary got no more than a “special thanks” in the end credits of
True Romance.
This was thebeginning of tensions between the two friends that would worsen with time.
    Cathryn Jaymes, manager for both Tarantino and Avary,