Soderbergh: The Wilderness Years
This piece was originally published at the late, lamented The Dissolve, on August 28, 2014. One of their coolest features was selecting a "Movie of the Week" every week and building features and conversations around it; the Movie of the Week that particular week was Steven Soderbergh's "Out of Sight," so I pitched them a piece on the peculiar period of his career that fell between his debut feature "sex, lies, and videotape" in 1989 and that Elmore Leonard adaptation nine years later. Still pretty proud of this one. Jane Fonda hands me the Palme d’Or and I stand there for a moment, waiting for the applause to stop and trying to figure out what to say and trying not to fall apart. I looked out and said “Well, I guess it’s all downhill from here.” —Steven Soderbergh’s journal, 5/23/89 Over the near-decade that followed that night in Cannes, Soderbergh’s quip came to sound more like than self-fulfilling prophecy than facetious modesty. The 26-year-old wu...