By Dan Krovich

November 9, 2002

In 1995, Steven Soderbergh directed The Underneath, which on the surface looks to be a rather unremarkable film in his career, but in reality it turned out to be a pivotal moment for Soderbergh. Two years earlier, he had made a 30-minute episode of the Showtime anthology series, Fallen Angels, which also featured guest director turns from Peter Bogdanovich, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, and Alfonso Cuarón. Soderbergh’s episode, “The Quiet Room,” was based on Jonathan Craig’s short story about a crooked cop, played by Joe Mantegna, raising his teenage daughter as a single father.

That noir episode could have been viewed as a tune up for The Underneath. A remake of the Burt Lancaster film Criss Cross, or perhaps better characterized as an update of the Don Tracy novel, Soderbergh was not originally intending to direct, as he was only hired to write the screenplay. Though it was a crime thriller, Soderbergh decided to climb into the director’s chair when he became interested in examining the relationship elements in the story of a man who returns home years after being run out of town because of gambling debts. He finds his ex-girlfriend involved with a local hoodlum as he tries to set his life straight and win her back. We flash back to watch his gambling destroy the relationship and flash forward to the events of a heist attempt as Soderbergh cuts among these three periods. Stylish, but cold, The Underneath received mixed critical reaction and was a box office flop, making barely more than $500,000 in the United States.

It was during the filming of The Underneath that Soderbergh experienced what he has described as a “near psychotic break,” realizing that although he had worked steadily since his feature film debut in 1989, he wasn’t happy with the films he was making. Tired of making Hollywood films, he returned to his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana to make his next film, Schizopolis. Working outside of Hollywood again and making the film without a distribution deal in place meant raising the money on his own and having to make the film very cheaply. It was the atmosphere he felt he needed to revisit at the time. Taking more of a filmmaking on the fly approach with a small crew of friends, Soderbergh wrote, directed, shot, and starred in this bizarre comedy, which plays sort of like an anarchic experimental version of a Monty Python film or Kentucky Fried Movie. Though it is rather outlandish and eccentric, it is also one of Soderbergh’s most personal films. For instance, he cast his soon to be ex-wife in the role of his character’s wife in a marriage where all meaningful communication had ceased to exist.

If the goal of Schizopolis was to re-energize Soderbergh as a filmmaker, it certainly succeeded. In interviews promoting The Underneath, it was all that Soderbergh could do to keep from talking about Schizopolis. Of course, his personal enthusiasm didn’t exactly translate into box office success. Playing at festivals, it was met with some praise but also plenty of bafflement, and distributors balked at the offbeat film. (Miramax apparently had offered to buy the film for $1 million sight unseen. Sight seen, no such offer existed.) The film eventually received an extremely limited release from Northern Arts Entertainment before heading to video.

That same year, Soderbergh also directed Spalding Gray’s monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, in which Gray recounts his experiences when he developed a rare eye disorder. Made ten years after Jonathan Demme’s definitive filmed Spalding Gray monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, Soderbergh managed to leave his mark by adding animation to the static monologue and interspersing “man on the street” interviews with people about their own ocular experiences to add a universality to Gray’s story. Still, filmed monologues are generally not in high demand, and Gray’s Anatomy was no exception. Also released by Northern Arts Entertainment, it barely registered at the box office.

Though Schizopolis and Gray’s Anatomy may not have set fire to the box office or even received much critical recognition, they served their stated purpose of focusing Soderbergh. Re-energized by making a couple films outside of Hollywood, he was ready to jump back into the game. The question was, would Hollywood want anything to do with him? The one time boy wonder, Palm d’Or winner whose first film made nearly $25 million had followed that up with five films of varying critical response. Perhaps more importantly to any studio looking to hire him, those five films had made less than $3 million combined at the box office. While it was a precipitous moment in his career, Soderbergh had already established a “just do it” pattern in his life of making his own opportunities.

Born January 14, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia, Steven Soderbergh was the fifth of six children. His family moved around while he was growing up before settling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father was a professor and later dean at Louisiana State University. During those years, Soderbergh developed his passion for cinema, voraciously going to the movie theater to see films such as The Conversation, Five Easy Pieces, and Scarecrow; heady stuff for someone who had just crossed the double-digit barrier in age. Then, as he told Kenneth M. Chanko in an interview in the Boston Globe in 1993, “Seeing Jaws when I was 12 made me think about making movies,” so at age 13 he signed up for an animation class at LSU. However, he quickly decided that animation was too much work and audited a super-8 moviemaking class instead. This would be his only formal education in filmmaking.

He continued making short films through high school. Early films were naturally based on mimicking some of his favorite movies, including the Taxi Driver homage, Janitor, but he soon adopted a more impressionistic style making films to capture his thoughts and moods rather than concentrating on formal narratives. After graduating from high school, Soderbergh decided to forego the film school route, figuring he was already learning by doing, and moved to Los Angeles with hopes of beginning his filmmaking career there. Fortunately, one of his former teachers from LSU was able to get him a job editing the game show Games People Play. Unfortunately, the show was not on the air long, and Soderbergh had to resort to doing odd jobs while writing screenplays before eventually moving back to Baton Rouge, where he made Rapid Eye Movement, a short film about his time in Los Angeles.

The time spent in Los Angeles turned out not to be a complete waste, however. When the band Yes was looking for an inexpensive director to make a documentary about their tour in support of the album 90125, a friend recommended Soderbergh. The band liked the 30-minute film enough that they then hired him to make a full-length concert film. Soderbergh shot two nights of concert footage in Vancouver and then mixed that with some computer effects and stock footage from black and white educational films. The resulting video, 9012LIVE, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Long Form Music Video. This success convinced him to make the move back to Los Angeles.

It was while making the eight-day drive from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles, that Soderbergh wrote the screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape. Though not autobiographical, Soderbergh did draw on personal experiences for the screenplay, and he has said that the four main characters represent four aspects of himself. A $1.2 million budget was obtained by selling the domestic video rights, a move that made it unlikely that any distributor would pick up the film for theatrical domestic release. With that in mind, Soderbergh went about shooting sex, lies, and videotape as though it would wind up being on his feature length resume to get work directing other movies at studios. Shot in 30 days in Louisiana, sex, lies, and videotape, not quite finished, premiered at the U.S. Film Festival (now known as Sundance) in January of 1989 where it won the Audience Award for Best Dramatic Picture.

Picked up by Miramax, sex, lies, and videotape then went to Cannes where it was originally scheduled to be screened out of competition. As a last minute replacement in the competition, Steven Soderbergh walked away with the Palm d’Or as well as the FIPRESCI (critic’s) award. James Spader also grabbed the Best Actor award. In interviews following Cannes, Soderbergh seemed genuinely surprised by the reaction that this film, which he expected to function as a calling card rather than be a hit in its own right, had received. He did have touches of the brashness you might expect from a young filmmaker hitting it big, such as when in a 1989 Rolling Stone interview by Terri Minsky, he said of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, “They’re slime, just barely passing for humans.” (He later apologized for the remark.) In general, however, his stance has remained that he got somewhat lucky by happening to make the right film at the right time.

With awards and glowing reviews from critics, Miramax released the film in August of 1989, and it went on to make nearly $25 million in the U.S. and over $100 million worldwide. The film also garnered multiple year-end awards and nominations from critics and other groups, including a Best Original Screenplay nomination at the Academy Awards (it lost to Dead Poet’s Society).

Garnering both critical and box office success, for better and worse, sex, lies, and videotape did for independent films what the film that originally inspired Soderbergh, Jaws, had done for summer films. Studios realized that there was an audience for these films. It may not have been a huge audience, but it was large enough to make the relatively cheap price tag to acquire these films worthwhile. This would be later known as the Sundance Film Festival quickly became a place where studios would not only scout for talent, but also a place where they could buy films to take to the marketplace. This meant more exposure for these films, but many have complained that the end result has been that independent films have lost their edge and have simply become lower budget versions of the films that studios already make as filmmakers try to get their big

break. Of course, for Soderbergh, sex, lies, and videotape opened many doors. Studios were willing to hire him and let him develop his own projects, and Soderbergh had settled on The Last Ship, based on the novel by William Brinkley. The novel dealt partially with the sexual politics that Soderbergh had covered in his debut but with much higher stakes, as the 152 man, 26 woman crew of a guided missile destroyer become the only survivors of a global nuclear holocaust. Problems with the script and the end of the Cold War resulted in the film being set aside, and ultimately never made. Soderbergh instead made Kafka, based on a script by Lem Dobbs, as his sophomore film.

Kafka was certainly not what most expected from a filmmaker many thought would become a new Woody Allen, based on the talky, intimate portrait of romantic relationships of his debut. Instead of more of the same, they got a black and white (mostly, there was a sequence filmed in color) period film that wasn’t a biopic, nor a direct adaptation of Kafka’s work. Assuming that a writer “writes what he knows,” Kafka mixes historical facts and elements from Kafka’s writing to create a fictional imagining of what he may have experienced in life to inspire him to write such tales. It is similar in many ways to the device that Shakespeare in Love would use seven years later. It, however, did not fair nearly as well as the John Madden Oscar winner as Kafka received a mixed critical reception, and audiences avoided it like a cockroach. Budgeted at nearly ten times more than sex, lies, and videotape, Kafka barely crossed the $1 million mark at the domestic box office.

Of course, Kafka could just have been a case of a sophomore slump. Soderbergh next moved on to make King of the Hill, based on the memoirs of A.E. Hotchner, for Universal. This was yet again a period film, though this time the period was St. Louis during the Great Depression. Jesse Bradford played twelve-year-old Aaron Kurlander, who had to learn life lessons on his own as his family struggled through the harsh economic times in this bittersweet coming of age story. While Kafka’s obscure subject matter and style made its anemic box office performance somewhat unsurprising, King of the Hill sported a more accessible look and subject. Still, even though it received a great reception from critics (Gene Siskel placed on his list of top ten films of the year), it floundered at the box office, making only $1.3 million. This criminally underseen film remains one of the most overlooked films of the past ten years.

King of the Hill was followed by The Underneath, and then came Soderbergh’s Schizopolis/Gray’s Anatomy sabbatical from Hollywood. Though he had a somewhat bumpy road to that point, that short intermission was just the jolt he needed as Soderbergh’s career was about to take off yet again.

View other columns by Dan Krovich