In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh
The director on what’s wrong with Hollywood today, why you should never use his name in a pitch, and why he’s retiring from movies to focus on painting:
“The worst development in filmmaking—particularly in the last five years—is how badly directors are treated. It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen, to put it bluntly. It’s not just studios—it’s anyone who is financing a film. I guess I don’t understand the assumption that the director is presumptively wrong about what the audience wants or needs when they are the first audience, in a way. And probably got into making movies because of being in that audience.
“But an alarming thing I learned during Contagion is that the people who pay to make the movies and the audiences who see them are actually very much in sync. I remember during previews how upset the audience was by the Jude Law character. The fact that he created a sort of mixed reaction was viewed as a flaw in the filmmaking. Not, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, I’m not sure if this guy is an asshole or a hero.’ People were really annoyed by that. And I thought, Wow, so ambiguity is not on the table anymore. They were angry.”
The Trials of Art Superdealer Larry Gagosian
How the global art market works:
“The negotiations among Gagosian, Mugrabi, and the Sotheby’s team reflect the sort of favored-client privileges many gallerists who don’t speculate in the secondary market claim can be dangerous to collectors and artists. Mugrabi told Rotter that if Froehlich, the seller, didn’t agree to their price, he ought to take the piece off the market rather than risk a buy-in. ‘I’ll tell you what the bottom price is, and if the guy wants it, we can at least have a secure bid on it,’ he told Rotter. ‘And if he doesn’t, then maybe he withdraws it from the sale.’
“Then Mugrabi called his father. ‘Froehlich está muy stubborn,’ he complained. He proceeded to have a conversation, mostly in Spanish, about which pictures were covered (‘El Tuna, sí. El Hammer and Sickle, no. Los Zapatos tampoco…’). He took his father’s remarks as instructions to make an offer ‘por los dos.’ When Mugrabi called back to Rotter at Sotheby’s, he said, ‘What’s up, Alex? My dad said that he can pay for the two pictures—for the Hammer and Sickle and the shoes—£2 million, all-inclusive.’ Then he said, ‘Okay, cool. Okay, okay.’ They hung up.”
Suds for Drugs
Tide detergent is known as “liquid gold” on the black market, and is being stolen from stores by the cases in exchange for drugs:
“As the cases piled up after his team’s first Tide-theft bust, Thompson sought an answer to the riddle at the center of the crimes: What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. ‘We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,’ Thompson says. ‘I guess they were bragging.’ It turned out the detergent wasn’t being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: ‘Liquid gold.’ The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.”
4:52 on Christmas Morning
One year after a fatal fire in Stamford claims the lives of their children and her parents, a family tries to make sense of what happened:
“He tells me that seeing children can sometimes make him feel better and other times worse. The last photo ever taken of the girls—of the three of them in brightly colored winter coats, lined up with him in front of the Hudson around sunset—was taken right over there. He speaks slowly, sometimes stuttering, not always in complete sentences. He has a diluted British accent, a vestige of his childhood in England. He says he needs caffeine.
“We go to a coffee shop in the neighborhood. He orders a scone, a double cappuccino, and an iced tea. We sit in the sun. In between cigarettes, he chews Nicorette gum. He talks about the girls. He would take them to museums, parks, toy stores, dinner at the local diner, late movies, allowing them to run up in front of the screen to dance as the credits were rolling. He says he was too loose with them. Madonna had called him her fourth child; he says that she was right. He will not say anything else about her. She is struggling and trying to deal in her own way, and he does not want to hurt her.”
The Truce on Drugs
A look at the future of drugs in America—from pot farms in California to drug policing in Baltimore:
“What we have begun to contemplate across the vast expense of the drug war is how that line might be redrawn, and the terms under which the cystic pockets of violence that have developed out beyond our boundaries might be welcomed back into society. America’s prior experience with alcohol prohibition can tell us something about the economics of what might happen in Colorado and Washington. But alcohol was only briefly illegal, and so when prohibition was revoked, the culture and economy of legal consumption could return, almost as if they had always been there. There is no similar memory of the neighborhood marijuana café, no history of the harmless, corporatist transit of cocaine through Central America. In its long tenure behind the line—in the United States and beyond—the drug traffic has acquired its own culture, hierarchy, and distinct habits. It has, as Adam Blackwell would say, a structure.”
The Man Who Charged Himself With Murder
[Not single-page] In the fall of 1993, Trevell Coleman, a former rapper part of Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy crew, shot a man and fled. Haunted by the incident, Coleman turns himself in to the police nearly two decades later:
“Several years after they got married, he told her that he’d fired a gun at a stranger when he was a teenager. ‘One time he said he shot someone and they lived,’ she says. Another time, it was a slightly different story: ‘He shot someone, and he doesn’t know what happened to them.’ She wasn’t sure what to think. Once, while he was high, he’d announced he was Jesus. He’d also accused her of being a cop. At least three times, he’d been carted off to hospital psych wards.
“Coleman confided his secret to three other people, too: his mother, his daughter’s mother, and a friend. He recalls that his mother responded by saying: ‘Well, that was a long time ago, that was in the past.’ And then she’d change the subject. ‘I don’t think she really believed me,’ he says. ‘She was just bringing up other stuff: ‘Are you still going to the rehab?’ She didn’t really want to talk about it.’
“Coleman would sometimes mention that he was thinking of going to the police. ‘I would bring it up just so people would be like: “Man, you can’t be serious. Don’t ever do that.” And I’d be like: “You know, you’re right,” ’ he says. He was hoping somebody would make a convincing argument for moving on. ‘I just wanted somebody to say, “Don’t worry about it,” ’ he says. But after a while, he found that no matter whom he told—or what they said—nothing could quiet his conscience. ‘There wasn’t really an answer I could get. I was looking for something that wasn’t there.'”
A Brain with a Heart
Inside the life and work of Oliver Sacks, whose newest book is Hallucinations:
“He has been in psychoanalysis, continuously and with the same Freudian interlocutor, for 46 years—remarkable for a materialist neurologist. ‘We were both young men, and now we’re old men. There’s a longitudinal study for you,’ he says. The two remain on formal terms: ‘He’s still Dr. Shengold, and I am still Dr. Sacks,’ he says. ‘I think that a patient can become a friend, but that one shouldn’t be a doctor to a friend—there is a distance, which paradoxically allows closeness, as I feel with my own patients.'”
“Sacks says his shyness simply ‘doesn’t occur’ in those interactions, which may be one reason he is so good with his patients and another reason he so loves them. In his work as a physician, the social landscape is unusually even-planed, for him and for them, and he has an uncanny ability to put his patients at ease—with sustained attention; curiosity and empathy; and a physician’s bag, stuffed with balls, a reflex hammer, and magazines, that could serve a clown. ‘Among other things, I’m a good and sometimes involuntary imitator,’ Sacks says a little mischievously.”
The Randian and the Bailout
[Not single-page] A trip to a Croatian vineyard to see Bob Benmosche, the former CEO of MetLife who came out of retirement to run AIG post-bailout:
“Next, Benmosche went to rally the troops at Financial Products in Wilton, Connecticut, who were still salty about Liddy’s appearance in front of Congress and the law subsequently passed by the House taxing 90 percent of AIG pay (it never made it any further). ‘I want you to understand that what happened will not happen again,’ he told them. Then he flew to Houston, where he spoke at a town-hall meeting with 3,000 employees. After that, he headed back to Croatia. ‘It was the first Zinfandel harvest,’ he explains.
“He’d informed Treasury when he’d taken the job that he needed to be in Croatia for two weeks in August, for the celebration accompanying the inaugural reaping of his vines. But they were not prepared for the image of Benmosche that flashed on their screens two weeks after he’d been hired to run one of the most troubled companies in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, showing off his villa while a British-accented voice-over noted its ‘palatial’ proportions and queried, in serious-sounding tones, whether the CEO should be so overtly relaxed.
“‘I mean, I had just hired this guy,’ Millstein says now, choking back the slightly hysterical laugh that tends to bubble out of him when he talks about Benmosche. ‘And there he is, in his shorts and his polo shirt. It was just …’ he trails off. ‘You couldn’t make it up.'”
Bill & Hillary Forever
[Not single-page] Bill Clinton’s relationship with Obama has thawed, and he and Hillary have become two of his biggest assets. A look at their relationship and the Clintons’ political future:
“The Barack-and-Bill double act on display this fall marks a new and intriguing phase in a psychological entanglement so rich that if Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were alive, they would surely be squabbling over it instead of Sabina Spielrein’s hysteria. No one close to Obama or Clinton even bothers with the pretense that there is any real affection between them. But most concur with the assessment of a Democratic operative with tentacles deep in both worlds: that ‘the relationship today is totally transactional—and highly functional.’
“What Obama stands to gain from the transaction is plain enough to see. The support of the political figure with the highest approval rating, 69 percent, of any in America. The suasive services of a surrogate who can talk the owls down from the trees. The imprimatur of a former president associated with a period of broad and deep prosperity, imbued with unparalleled credibility on matters economic, and possessing special traction with the white working- and middle-class voters whom Obama has always had a hard time reaching. What Obama stands to gain, in other words, is a healthy boost in his quest for reelection—one all the more invaluable in the wake of his dismal performance in the first debate.”
Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?
Moderately successful indie rock groups like Grizzly Bear have found it difficult to earn a living that would place them solidly in the middle class:
“For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. ‘People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,’ says Droste. ‘Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.’ Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with ‘a nice little “Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.” ’ They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (‘Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage’), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. ‘I just think it’s inappropriate,’ says Droste. ‘Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.'”