Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

Conclusion

235 Between 2009 and 2011, interviews with Soderbergh and some collaborators suggested that he would soon retire from filmmaking. “I feel like I’ll hit the ceiling of my imagination,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, on the eve of the release of The Girlfriend Experience.1 At the end of 2010, interviewed during production of the Soderbergh-directed Contagion, Matt Damon discussed Soderbergh’s plans for retirement, noting that “[h]e’s kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He’s not interested in telling stories.”2 But while Soderbergh confirmed his interests in turning away from filmmaking and toward painting, he also signed on to direct a screen adaptation of the 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with longtime collaborator Clooney as star (both later left the project);3 and later, to direct the male-stripper biopic Magic Mike (2012), based on the early career of Haywire co-star Channing Tatum. Amid this activity, he also worked, in a fairly unprecedented move for an A-list filmmaker, as second-unit director for The Hunger Games (2012), directed by his friend and earlier collaborator Gary Ross (Soderbergh acted as one of multiple producers on Ross’s directorial debut, Pleasantville).4 With these and multiple other projects brewing, Soderbergh’s creative activity showed few signs of losing speed. He also maintained a presence in other surprising areas of pop culture. In early 2011, he participated in a lengthy NFL Network podcast5 that included his detailed handicapping of U.S. television networks’ HD football coverage. Not long after, to accompany an interview with Soderbergh, WNYC Radio’s “Studio 360” program published on its website a list he had compiled of his entire past year’s media consumption, including movies, books, and television series.6 (As readers might surmise by this Conclusion 236 Another Steven Soderbergh Experience point, Soderbergh’s “Daily Diet,” as the site titled the list, is bountiful and wide-ranging.) These conversations and disclosures, while unusual for any major filmmaker let alone one claiming an imminent retirement , are entirely consistent with Soderbergh’s creative profile. As the interview that follows also demonstrates, amid prolific filmmaking activity, Soderbergh shows himself in deep, enthusiastic dialogue with many modes of cultural production. Throughout this book, I have emphasized Soderbergh’s creative collaborations and his material and discursive affiliations across screen culture. I have argued that these complex artistic and professional relationships indeed constitute significant elements of that culture. The maintenance of artistic and professional profiles depends on networks of work activity, patronage, and also taste. Public and private reputations, and the circulation of these reputations, are central to artistic practice and its wider recognition. The phenomena that comprise what technology evangelist Chris Anderson terms the “reputation economy”7 operate not only within industrial circles but in wider connoisseur and consumer activity as well. While I have interrogated artistic reputation-building and critical reception throughout this book, in closing I wish to consider the specifics of a Soderbergh-directed film’s circulation through emergent discursive channels increasingly significant to screen industries. This final case identifies new agents involved in the formation of contemporary author personas, the stakes and rewards of this cultural activity, and above all the continued importance of recognizing authorship as the convergence of production, textual, and reception activities. Guerilla Hunters: The Precirculation of Che This concluding case study investigates the embryonic and subsequent half-life of a prestige independent release. As noted in Chapter 3, the over-four-hour feature Che debuted at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where it earned the Best Actor award for star Benicio Del Toro. Despite this accolade and Soderbergh’s name recognition, the film did not find a U.S. distributor until four months after its festival debut. During and after this period, print periodicals and online forums reported on or reproduced abundant promotional material for the film—set photos, film stills, and eventually moving-image teasers, trailers, and video clips. The circulation of Che material shows how official and unofficial discourses can converge in prefiguration of theatrical film releases.8 In Conclusion 237 most markets in which it played theatrically, the film was released in two parts, and in some advertising with the subtitles Guerilla and The Argentine. The first part follows Del Toro’s Che Guevara mostly in the run-up to the 1959 Cuban Revolution; the second...