New in Nerve
"Class of '99", a "report card" feature about the directors who helped make 1999 the most exciting movie year of my adult life, and what they've done with themselves in the ten years since.
Part of what I wrote had to be chopped for space reasons, and in the name of egotism, the wide-ranging nature of the subject at hand, and the possibility of hurting Kevin Smith's feelings, I'm tacking it on here:
BRAD BIRD: Bird first attracted attention back in 1987, with Family Dog, a hilarious animated short that was shown on TV as an episode of the anthology series Amazing Stories. It says a lot about the animator's plight that it would be almost ten years, by which time Bird was a veteran of TV series such as The Simpsons, The Critic, and King of the Hill, before he was able to get a studio to let him begin working seriously on his first feature: The Iron Giant, which was based on a book by Ted Hughes. Bird's extraordinary graceful, beautiful crafted Cold War fable was a high point in an especially good year for animation, but the movie tanked commercially amid charges that Warner Bros. had botched its marketing campaign. Bird might have seriously despaired at his prospects of ever getting to direct another feature, but in a lucky piece of synchronicity, he was invited aboard Pixar to develop his idea for became The Incredibles. (In 1999, Pixar itself released Toy Story 2, which had been made for the direct-to-video market before the suits realized that it was too good not to open in theaters.) The Incredibles proved to be such a blockbuster success that Bird was pushed into the director's chair for Pixar's Ratatouille. He's currently working on his live-action debut, the historical disaster picture 1906.
KEVIN SMITH: Smith's early films had the full benefit of the freshness of his writing talent and the full drawback that, as a visual artist, he has the eye of the average bat. It seemed kind of appropriate that Clerks (1994) looked like unedited security camera footage, and the indie sex comedy Chasing Amy (1997) connected with its audience in a way that made them very forgiving of its washed-out look and static frames, but Smith tried very hard to push himself for the 1999 religious satire Dogma, not just working to get some visual energy into the movie but even hiring the likes of Alan Rickman to make his dialogue soar.The results, while pretty much confirming that Smith and Martin Scorsese are never going to really seem to be in the same profession, might have been the zenith of Smith's indie-moviemaking-as-fanzine-production approach. For a while there, he seemed to care, if only about applying his wit to subject matter where he had something to say. But ever since then, Smith has frittered away what career he has left in a case of terminal drift. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Clerks II overestimated the world's enthusiasm for his in-jokes about himself, his friends, and his "View Askewniverse", just as the attempted game-changer Jersey Girl (2004) badly miscalculated in its assumption that anyone was interested in seeing him explore his warm and tender side. Smith also maintains a public presence as a stage monologuist, talk show guest, sometime character actor--basically, any job that mainly requires him to talk. But as a director, his last brilliant idea, in last year's Zach and Mira Make a Porno, seemed to be to cast the movie in such a way that people might go see it because they thought it was the new one from Judd Apatow.
DOUG LIMAN: Liman had a big critical and commercial success with his second feature, Swingers (2006), but unfortunately for him, the media made such a fuss over the fact that the movie had been written by one of its stars, Jon Favreau, and that he and his co-star, Vince Vaughan, actually hung out together, that a lot of people wound up under the impression that they'd made the film by themselves. (It was as if the media somehow knew that, in just a year, they'd be all agog over Matt 'n Ben after Good Will Hunting and wanted to practice.) Liman's 1999 Go, while not nearly as big a hit, did manage to be funny and energetic in a way that felt both fresh and moderately slick. It was a calling card picture that suggested that Liman might have the chops to make big commercial movies and also that he might be restless and talented enough to have things on his mind that he'd like to explore in smaller projects between big-money gigs. Liman wasted no time in making good on the first half of that supposition with The Bourne Identity (2002), which established the template for the franchise to come, with its star, Matt Damon, crediting Liman for saving his career. Liman went on to direct Brad 'n Angelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which showed that he could sometimes take the dumbest, noisiest project off the rack and make something passably entertaining out of it, and Jumper, which proved that, yeah, sometimes, but not always! He recently finished Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, which might give us a clue about whether Liman does have anything on his mind. Either way, just to be on the safe side, his next project is Jumper 2.If there's a common thread running through all this, it may be that it's shocking to realize how few completed movies have been made by so many talented people in the course of ten years. I don't know that it would have been anything but a fool's errand to try to guess, back in 1999, where any of these people were headed, but I would have been surprised if I'd been told that most of them would average, at best, three films a decade.

It's always been hard for people who care about doing good work in movies to fulfill their visions. Another Class of '99 alumni, Kimberly Pierce, had a huge critical success and a moderate commercial hit with Boys Don't Cry, for which its star, Hilary Swank, won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Since then, she's directed one movie, Stop-Loss, about the practice of extending the terms of U.S. military service people and ordering them back to combat zones after their official contracts have expired. A look at how national issues impact the lives of young people in rural small-town America, it shared many of the qualities that audiences responded to in Boys Don't Cry, but it was released at the tail end of a movie season spent hammering away at the conclusion that movies about the Iraq War are always dogs, and it got buried. In the years between her two pictures, Pierce wasted her time on a whole slate of projects that, for one reason or other, got derailed on the way to the first day of shooting.
On the other hand, earlier generations of directors managed to keep working at something even as their dream projects caught fire on the side of the road. People like David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson see themselves as artists, and it's understandable that they don't want to waste their creative lives on hackwork, just as it's surely no accident that the most prolific members of the Class of '99 have tended to be those who've been most comfortable grinding out stuff that the studios are happy to fund. Anderson spent some of time between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood doing a service for his hero, the late Robert Altman, hanging around the set of Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion so that the insurance company would have the reassurance of knowing there was someone there who could jump in for the ailing, 80-year-old director. Altman was a notoriously ornery bastard who fought with the studios his whole career, but he also made four features between 2000 and his death six years later, seven features between 1990 and 1999, and 15 between 1970 and 1980. Between 1982 and 1989, a period traditionally thought of as his lost years, when no studio would look at him cross-eyed, Altman made six features released to theaters, five filmed plays made for television, and the HBO mini-series Tanner '88. He didn't really find his voice as a director until he was in his mid-40s, and as soon as he had a name he could trade on, he was raring to work.I'm also not sure what to make of the fact that such current directors as Soderbergh and Richard Linklater, who are older than most of the Class of '99 by only some five to ten years, have been so much more prolific, with Soderbergh directing twelve features (while also becoming very active as a producer for other directors' projects) and Linklater directing nine (including the just-released Me and Orson Welles). Both these guys belong to a continuing tradition in American film of directors who've had trouble doing exactly what they want learning to do their best with what they can get off the ground. They had to learn to pick their battles. Do the Class of '99 represent a break from that? Maybe they're the first generation of American directors who haven't had it hard enough.

















