Getting Away With It: Or - Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw - Kindle edition by Steven Soderbergh. Humor & Entertainment Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
(Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester are a generation apa...)
Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester are a generation apart, but theyshare a sense of humour and a passion for cinema. Soderbergh's freshman film, sex, lies and videotape, inaugurated a movementin US independent cinema. Lester's freewheeling work in the '60s and '70s (Help!, A Hard Day's Night, The Knack, How I Won the War, Petulia) helped create a 'new wave' of British film-making. Here, the two cineastes discuss their mutual passion for the medium in a frank,funny and free-ranging series of interviews. Also included is Soderbergh's diary of an extraordinary twelve months in which he ventured into 'guerilla film-making' with offbeatprojects Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, before returning to the Hollywood fray with the George Clooney hit Out of Sight.
Steven Soderbergh: Interviews, Revised and Updated (Conversations with Filmmakers Series) - Kindle edition by Anthony Kaufman. Humor & Entertainment Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
(The long and prolific career of Steven Soderbergh (b. 196...)
The long and prolific career of Steven Soderbergh (b. 1963) defies easy categorization. From his breakout beginnings in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape to 2013, when he retired from big-screen movie-making to focus on other pursuits including television, the director’s output resembles nothing less than an elaborate experiment. Soderbergh’s Hollywood vehicles such as the Ocean’s Eleven movies, Contagion and Magic Mike appear just as risky and outside-the-box as low-budget exercises such as Schizopolis, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience. This updated edition details key career moments: his creative crisis surrounding his fourth film, The Underneath; his rejuvenation with the ultra-low-budget free-style Schizopolis; the mainstream achievements Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Ocean’s Eleven films; and his continuing dedication to pushing his craft forward with films as diverse as conspiracy thrillers, sexy dramas, and biopics on Che Guevara and Liberace. Spanning twenty-five years, these conversations reveal Soderbergh to be as self-effacing and lighthearted in his later more established years as he was when just beginning to make movies. He comes across as a man undaunted by the glitz and power of Hollywood, remaining, above all, a truly independent filmmaker unafraid to get his hands dirty and pick up the camera himself.
Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood - Kindle edition by Mark Gallagher. Humor & Entertainment Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
(How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens ...)
How do we determine authorship in film, and what happens when we look in-depth at the creative activity of living filmmakers rather than approach their work through the abstract prism of auteur theory? Mark Gallagher uses Steven Soderbergh’s career as a lens through which to re-view screen authorship and offer a new model that acknowledges the fundamentally collaborative nature of authorial work and its circulation. Working in film, television, and digital video, Soderbergh is the most prolific and protean filmmaker in contemporary American cinema. At the same time, his activity typifies contemporary screen industry practice, in which production entities, distribution platforms, and creative labor increasingly cross-pollinate. Gallagher investigates Soderbergh’s work on such films as The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, Solaris, The Good German, Che, and The Informant!, as well as on the K Street television series. Dispensing with classical auteurist models, he positions Soderbergh and authorship in terms of collaborative production, location filming activity, dealmaking and distribution, textual representation, genre and adaptation work, critical reception, and other industrial and cultural phenomena. Gallagher also addresses Soderbergh’s role as standard-bearer for U.S. independent cinema following 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, as well as his cinephilic dialogues with different forms of U.S. and international cinema from the 1920s through the 1970s. Including an extensive new interview with the filmmaker, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience demonstrates how industries and institutions cultivate, recognize, and challenge creative screen artists.
Steven Soderbergh, in full Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film director who worked in disparate genres, directing both idiosyncratic independent films and popular box-office successes.
Background
Soderbergh was born on January 14, 1963, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Mary Ann (née Bernard) and Peter Andrew Soderbergh, who was a university administrator and educator. His father's ancestry was Swedish and Irish; his paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Stockholm. His mother was of Italian, and "a little Irish", descent. As a child, he moved with his family to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived during his adolescence, then to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father became Dean of Education at Louisiana State University. In Baton Rouge, he discovered filmmaking as a teenager, directing short Super 8 mm films with equipment borrowed from LSU students. He has a brother, Charley.
Education
While the family resided in Baton Rouge, Soderbergh's mother appeared regularly on 2une In, the early-morning show of local ABC affiliate WBRZ-TV (broadcast channel 2), as a "call-in" psychic, and taught adult-education and "alternative education" classes in "parapsychology" at LSU.[citation needed] His primary high school education was at Louisiana State University Laboratory School, a K–12 school that is directed by the University. While still taking classes there around the age of 15, Soderbergh enrolled in the university's film animation class and began making short 16 mm films with secondhand equipment.
Rather than attend LSU, Soderbergh tried his luck in Hollywood after graduating from high school; he worked as a game show scorer and cue card holder to make ends meet, and eventually found work as a freelance film editor. His big break came when he directed the Grammy-nominated concert video 9012Live for the rock band Yes in 1985.
Career
It was not until Soderbergh came back to Baton Rouge that he conceived the idea for Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), which he wrote in eight days. The independent film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, became a worldwide commercial success and contributed to the 1990s independent film revolution. At age 26, Soderbergh became the second youngest director to win the festival's top award (after French director Louis Malle who won for Le Monde du Silence). Movie critic Roger Ebert dubbed Soderbergh the "poster boy of the Sundance generation".
Sex, Lies, and Videotape was followed by a series of low-budget box-office disappointments: Kafka, a biopic mixing fact and Kafka's own fiction (notably The Castle and The Trial), written by Lem Dobbs and starring Jeremy Irons as Franz Kafka; King of the Hill (1993), a critically acclaimed Depression-era drama; The Underneath (1995), a remake of Robert Siodmak's 1949 film noir Criss Cross; and Schizopolis (1996), a comedy which he starred in, wrote, composed, and shot as well as directed. He also directed the Spalding Gray monologue film Gray's Anatomy in 1996.
Making good on his Schizopolis-inspired "artistic wake-up call", his commercial slump ended in 1998 with Out of Sight, a stylized adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, written by Scott Frank and starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. The film was widely praised, though only a moderate box-office success. It reaffirmed Soderbergh's potential, sparking the beginnings of a lucrative artistic partnership between Clooney and Soderbergh.
Soderbergh followed up on the success of Out of Sight by making another crime caper, The Limey (1999), from a screenplay by Lem Dobbs and starring veteran actors Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda. The film was well-received, but not as much as Erin Brockovich (2000), written by Susannah Grant and starring Julia Roberts in her Oscar-winning role as a single mother taking on industry in a civil action. Later that year, Soderbergh released Traffic, a social drama written by Stephen Gaghan and featuring an ensemble cast.
Traffic became his most acclaimed movie since Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and earned him an Academy Award for Best Director. He was also nominated that same year for Erin Brockovich. He is the only director to have been nominated in the same year for Best Director for two different films by the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America. The double nomination was the first in 60 years. (In 1938, Michael Curtiz was nominated twice, for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters, but did not win for either film.)
Ocean's Eleven (2001), a Ted Griffin-scripted remake from a Rat Pack-movie from 1960, featuring an all-star cast and flashy aesthetics, is Soderbergh's highest-grossing movie to date, grossing more than $183 million domestically and more than $450 million worldwide. The film's star, George Clooney, subsequently appeared in Solaris (2002), marking the third time the two have headlined a film. In the same year, Soderbergh made Full Frontal, which was shot mostly on digital video in an improvisational style that deliberately blurred the line between which actors were playing characters and which were playing fictionalized versions of themselves. A film within a film, the title is a film industry reference to an actor or actress appearing fully nude (a.k.a., "full frontal nudity"). Also in 2002, Soderbergh was elected First Vice President of the Directors Guild of America.
Following up Full Frontal stylistically was Soderbergh next project, K Street (2003), a ten-part political HBO series he co-produced with Clooney. The series was noteworthy for being both partially improvised and each episode being produced in the five days prior to airing to take advantage of topical events that could be worked into the fictional narrative. Actual political players appeared as themselves, either in cameos or portraying fictionalized versions of themselves (as were the leads, real life husband and wife James Carville and Mary Matalin). The show caused a stir during the 2004 Democratic Primary when Carville gave candidate Howard Dean a soundbite during a location shoot that Dean then used in a debate.
In 2005, Soderbergh raised eyebrows with Bubble, a $1.6 million film featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors. It opened in selected theaters and HDNet simultaneously, and four days later on DVD. Industry heads were reportedly watching how the film performed, as its unusual release schedule could have implications for future feature films. Theater-owners, who at the time had been suffering from dropping attendance rates, did not welcome so-called "day-and-date" movies. National Association of Theatre Owners president and CEO John Fithian indirectly called the film's release model "the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today."
Soderbergh's response to such criticism: "I don't think it's going to destroy the movie-going experience any more than the ability to get takeout has destroyed the restaurant business." The film did poor business both at the box office and on the home video market. Nevertheless, Soderbergh is on contract to deliver five more day-and-date movies. In fall of 2006 he contributed a mini-essay on hotel pornography, along with an accompanying series of long-exposure photographs, to Anthem magazine's November/December issue.
A romantic drama set in post-war Berlin, The Good German, starring Cate Blanchett and Clooney, was released in late 2006.
In 2010, Soderbergh shot the action-thriller Haywire, starring Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, and Channing Tatum which, even though was shot in early 2010, was not released until January 2012. The film's end credits include "In Loving Memory of Blake Asner" dedicating the film to Soderbergh's cat that died while he was completing the film's post production.
In the fall of 2010, he shot the epic virus thriller Contagion, written by Scott Z. Burns. With a star-studded cast including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard and Jude Law, the film follows the outbreak of a lethal pandemic across the globe and the efforts of doctors and scientists to discover the cause and develop a cure. It was released on September 9, 2011.
His next project, the psychological thriller Side Effects, starred Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It was shot in April 2012 and was released on February 8, 2013. It also screened at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.
Behind the Candelabra, his final film before his much publicized hiatus (see below), was shot in the summer of 2012. It stars Michael Douglas as legendarily flamboyant pianist Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover Scott Thorson. The film is written by Richard LaGravenese, based on Thorson's book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, and produced by HBO Films. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
Soderbergh had announced in numerous interviews his intention to retire from feature filmmaking. He stated that "when you reach the point where you're saying, 'If I have to get into a van to do another scout, I'm just going to shoot myself,' it's time to let somebody who's still excited about getting in the van, get in the van." Soderbergh later said that he would retire from filmmaking and begin to explore painting. A few weeks later, Soderbergh played down his earlier comments, saying a film-making "sabbatical" was more accurate. In the end, while promoting Side Effects in early 2013, he clarified that he had a five-year plan that saw him transitioning away from making feature films around his fiftieth birthday. Around that time, he gave a much publicized speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival, detailing the obstacles facing filmmakers in the current corporate Hollywood environment.
In May 2013, Soderbergh announced that he would direct a 10-part miniseries for Cinemax. Called The Knick, it follows doctors at a fictionalized version of the Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan in the early twentieth century. The series stars Clive Owen, Andre Holland, Jeremy Bobb, Juliet Rylance, Eve Hewson and Michael Angarano and was filmed in the fall of 2013. It began airing in August 2014 to critical acclaim. After completing the second season, Soderbergh revealed he was finished directing for the show and said, "I told them Cinemax that I'm going to do the first two years and then we are going to break out the story for seasons 3 and 4 and try and find a filmmaker or filmmakers to do this the way that I did. This is how we want to do this so that every two years, whoever comes on, has the freedom to create their universe."
Soderbergh helped Spike Jonze with his film Her. The original cut ran over 150 minutes and Jonze asked Soderbergh to "do his own quick, gut-instinct cut", which he did, cutting the film down to 90 minutes. This was not the final version of the film but it allowed Jonze to remove unnecessary plots.
In January 2014, Soderbergh announced that he was going to be working on an Off-Broadway play titled The Library, and that Chloë Grace Moretz would star.
It was announced in June 2014 that Soderbergh would be executive producing a series based on his earlier film The Girlfriend Experience for the Starz network, to premiere sometime in 2016. In September 2015, Soderbergh was announced to be directing a series for HBO titled Mosaic. It stars Sharon Stone and will allow the audience to interact with the story. In February 2016, Soderbergh ended his retirement from feature films to direct a NASCAR heist film, Logan Lucky, starring Channing Tatum. In August 2016, he posted on Twitter that the first day of shooting the film has begun. It is set to be released on August 18,2017 by Bleecker Street.
Soderbergh claims to not be a fan of possessory credits, and prefers not to have his name front and center at the start of a film. "The fact that I'm not an identifiable brand is very freeing," says Soderbergh, "because people get tired of brands and they switch brands. I've never had a desire to be out in front of anything, which is why I don't take a possessory credit."
On Monday, April 5, 2009, Soderbergh appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, and "cited the French initiative in asking lawmakers to deputize the American film industry to pursue copyright pirates," indicating he supports anti-piracy laws and Internet regulation.
Connections
Soderbergh is married to television personality Jules Asner, whom he often credits for influencing his female characters. Soderbergh claims he no longer reads reviews of his movies. "After Traffic I just stopped completely," says the director. "After winning the LA and New York film critics awards, I really felt like, this can only get worse". Steven has a daughter with his first wife, actress Betsy Brantley.
