I just finished Sharon Waxman's Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Studio System, which reminded me very much of that other book (Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-'N'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood). I preferred Waxman's book because she a) did much less fawning and ass-kissing, although there was plenty of it, which just indicates how truly fawning and ass-kissing the Biskind book was, and b) did not make Biskind's mistake of introducing an enormous number of people and writing about them in a way that made me lose track of who the fuck he was talking about.

Waxman's book could have used a good copyeditor, however. Since this is one of the many things I get paid for, it bleeds over into my non-job-related reading, and it is seriously annoying to be jarred out of your flow by fixing grammar mistakes in your head while reading.

Waxman concentrates on six directors who she identifies as making up part of a new, auteur-director style in the '90s, which she explicitly links back to the '70s directors treated in Biskind's book. She delves into the backgrounds of the directors, trying her hand at pop psychology (many of them apparently hated their mothers, surprise, surprise), and paying particular attention to the making of one or two of their movies: Quentin Tarentino and Pulp Fiction, Steven Soderbergh and Traffic, Paul Thomas Anderson and Boogie Nights and Magnolia, David Fincher and Fight Club, Spike Jonze and Being John Malkovich, and David Russell and Three Kings. Here is the short version of her portraits of these directors:

• Tarentino is a derivative slacker who blew off his friends once he got famous, even though some of them helped him with writing, which he is extremely bad at on his own. He also has terrible personal hygiene habits and rarely showers. He hates his mother.
• Soderbergh veers wildly between deep art and unwatchable crap. He is intellectual, rational, and finds it impossible to commit to a woman emotionally (the James Spader character in sex, lies, and videotape is widely assumed to be a self-portrait). He hates his mother.
• Anderson is incapable of making a movie under three hours, and refuses to cut from his movies even when advised to do so from every other person on earth. He is also obsessed with pornography. He hates his mother.
• Fincher is possibly a latent serial killer, or at least a violent sado-masochist. He was also the only person who thought Fight Club was not violent enough.
• Jonze is a sweet, unassuming, barely-literate slacker who knows absolutely nothing about film history and is a compulsive liar to the press (although not to Waxman, apparently).
• David Russell is a ball-breaking, detail-oriented perfectionist who beats on his cast, crew, and extras. He also hates his mother.

But Waxman seems to conclude that, far from having "conquered" the studio system, in the '00s these same directors began to get co-opted by it, losing their creative edge. Books like this one are fun to read, for the behind-the-scenes look at how movies really get made - the process, with all its accidents and coincidences, never ceases to amaze me. But everyone in the film industry takes themselves so seriously that, in the end, I come away with the same feeling I get when I have eaten too much sugar or watched too much t.v., kind of like my brain has detached from the inside of my skull. An endorsement? You be the judge.