Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

1. Sex, Lies, and Independent Film

19 The success of sex, lies, and videotape at the Cannes and U.S. (a.k.a. Sundance) film festivals and in commercial release earned Soderbergh indelible associations with the discourses and institutions of U.S. independent cinema on a global stage. Measured in terms of commercial visibility, Soderbergh’s career floundered for much of the 1990s. The limited impact of his post–sex, lies features stood as an apparent object lesson in the pitfalls of Hollywood authorship. For example, one 1998 profile, subtitled “The Return of Steven Soderbergh,” describes him as “the indie hero whose films nobody goes to see.”1 While the view of Soderbergh as icon of independents obscures U.S. independent cinema’s long history, Soderbergh’s debut feature may rightly be credited with ushering in the 1990s boom in independent-cinema production and distribution. sex, lies, and videotape featured prominently in entertainment-press commentary upon its release and in subsequent popular histories of independent cinema. This chapter identifies the conditions that facilitated the 1990s indie-film boom, as well as Soderbergh’s specific contributions through film direction, collaborative production, and promotion. The chapter also considers Soderbergh’s relationships with major studios and independent producers in the early 1990s. While his early films as director bore the hallmarks of independent cinema in subject, style, and distribution, some were in fact produced or distributed by “mini-major” boutique divisions created or acquired by major studios. Soderbergh’s second feature, Kafka (1991), appeared as a co-production from small U.S. independent Baltimore Pictures and two French production companies. He then began a relationship with Universal, whose Gramercy Pictures imprint distributed his next two directing efforts, King of the Hill and Chapter 1 Sex, Lies, and Independent Film 20 Soderbergh and American Cinema The Underneath. Even his low-budget experiment Schizopolis, which received almost no theatrical release and which was shot on film stock donated by a fellow filmmaker,2 owed its financing to Universal’s advance purchase of home-video rights and its payment to Soderbergh of a fee for another project in development.3 Also during this period, Soderbergh directed the 1996 adaptation of a Spalding Gray stage monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, a transnational collaboration of two television producers, the UK’s BBC and the U.S.’s Independent Film Channel (and with U.S. theatrical distribution from the independent Northern Arts). I argue in this chapter that Soderbergh’s 1990s work exemplifies U.S. and European film industries’ sustenance of a range of idiosyncratic filmmaking modes and styles. As many commentators have noted, during this period conglomerate studios moved increasingly toward blockbuster or tentpole releases with large production and marketing budgets (e.g., the Batman franchise of 1989 and beyond, and the Jurassic Park series beginning in 1993). Consequently, smaller producers filled gaps for ostensibly adult fare with low- to medium-budget ($1 million to $10 million) films, films then often acquired for distribution by companies in which major studios had controlling investments or owned outright. As in Hollywood’s post–Paramount Decree era, a substantial number of films in wide circulation came from independent producers , with studios operating chiefly as distributors rather than directly managing the creative process of production.4 Such decentralization of production meant that even films released under studio logos could manifest the creative impulses of small production teams. I do not mean here to endorse the crude binary that posits studio production as artless and profit-driven against the auteurist paradise of independent filmmaking, but merely to indicate industrial structures outside the studio sector that encourage definitively artisanal production modes. These production determinants include small production partnerships often responsible for only single films; production financing earned through such strategies as pre-sales to European television markets, further reducing executive oversight; creative personnel assembling for single productions and then dispersing; and location filmmaking often distant from the production centers of Los Angeles and New York. Often film-school trained, the acclaimed 1980s independent filmmakers worked largely within the parameters of narrative fiction, hewing closely to realist convention and linear storytelling norms, and their films still draw on exploitable elements such as genres and stars. This loose template offered substantial latitude for Sex, Lies, and Independent Film 21 experimentation in narrative, performance style, image and sound aesthetics , and subject matter. Marginal and radical filmmaking traditions abounded: documentary, artists’ video, black underground filmmaking, gay and lesbian cinema, and numerous other movements...