*idea missing*

Just finished Steven Soderbergh’s book Getting Away With It, very very interesting reading. Soderbergh makes himself a minor character in the thing, and 80% of it is interviews with Richard Lester. Who’s a one man history of everything I love about 60s/70s film- hanging out with Nic Roeg, talking shit about Lindsay Anderson, stealing cameras with Peter Sellers, singlehandedly inventing modern editing, running interference on the set of Superman 1 and 2 for Richard Donner, freaking out Ringo enough to turn his eyebrow gray overnight. Amazing. All the non-Lester stuff is minutia about Soderbergh between films, trying to fix a couple screenplays (Mimic and an unproduced project for Henry Selick called Toots), edit and sell a couple more (Schizopolis and Grays Anatomy), and try and find something else to work on (ending up working on Out of Sight). He writes it like Schizopolis, very anti-self and flat. It doesn’t always work. The real guts here is just Soderbergh and Lester talking, about everything from raising your kids, religion, special effects, camera processes, what x was really like in person – two people who know what they’re talking about being very honest about their art form and their lives in general. Like Soderbergh’s commentary on Point Blank with John Boorman or the Limey with Lem Dobbs, he’s more than willing to take the back seat and be a great listener, drawing information out with the right questions at the right time. Whats interesting here, is that he explains that openness as a personal deficiency in the non-interview parts. If you believe Soderbergh, he’s a narcissist who sits and waits for his turn to talk, who sits on airplanes with rich people and thinks of ways to hate them, who lies about working but can’t get anything done and watches porn in the hotel for dayswaiting for a break in his writers block. But that clashes against how he goes about talking to Lester, or to Boorman, or even in seeing him on tv. The thing is, he’s probably both a self-involved mess and an honest receiver of ideas. He’s the kind of person you like to think you are, thinking he’s worse than he is, doing what he needs to do in order to get the work done. You hope.