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  Steven Soderbergh entered the world of filmmaking with absolutely no connections and no outside funding. Nonetheless, his second feature-length film, sex, lies, and videotape, was a surprising box office hit; it jump-started the young filmmaker's career and, at the same time, redefined mainstream cinema's conception of the economic process of filmmaking. The notoriety of Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape, according to Mim Udovitch in Rolling Stone, "more or less kick-started the rise of the independent movie throughout the Nineties, a movement that has so thoroughly reformed the standards of the industry that Soderbergh films are now studio films."
Steven Andrew Soderbergh was born January 14, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia, the second of six children. His family soon moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Soderbergh's father, Peter, eventually became the dean of the College of Education at Louisiana State University. Soderbergh grew up in relative middle class affluence and had ample time and opportunity to explore his creative side.
Soderbergh's first passion was baseball. In fact, he was known as one of the best young baseball players in Baton Rouge. Something unexplained happened when he was 12 years old, and his talent fizzled away. "I woke up one morning and I didn't have it," Soderbergh said in a 2001 interview in Time. "And I knew that I wasn't gonna be able to get it back. Whatever the thing was, it was just gone."
Timing, however, was on his side, and Soderbergh's passion began to be directed towards filmmaking. The turning point came in the summer of 1975,with the release of Jaws. Soderbergh was heavily influenced by the film, and immediately bought a copy of Carl Gottleib's nonfiction account of Steven Spielberg's behind-the-scenes work, The Jaws Log. Soderbergh dedicated himself absorbing Spielberg's directorial process, and the book convinced him that a career in film was indeed possible.
When Soderbergh was in high school, his father signed him up for a college class in animation, but the arduous process of animation would prove to frustrate him, and he soon switched to a course on filmmaking. His first projects were filmed on Super 8, and included a commercial for laxatives and a short film entitled The Janitor, which he filmed at the age of 15.
Thanks to his father's influence, Soderbergh attended high school on the Louisiana State University campus, where met his mentor, the documentary filmmaker and LSU professor Michael McCallum. He also made friends with his present sound mixer, Paul Edford. The team of people Soderbergh worked with while in high school and the relative isolation of Louisiana helped shape his filmmaking style, as he states in an interview in Film Threat:
I came from [independent film] because it was my only option. I lived in Louisiana. I didn't know anybody in the film business. My only way in was to make shorts, and to try and make something that was so cheap that somebody would give me money to make it. That was my way in. Nobody at Columbia Pictures was going to hand me a movie. So, I was just doing what I felt I had to do to get my foot in the door, and had I grown up under different circumstances and known different people maybe I would have started out differently.
After graduating from high school, Soderbergh decided against college, and, instead, decided to pursue on-the-job training. He moved to Hollywood and worked in the television industry as an editor, cue card holder and game show scorekeeper. But the mundane reality of these entry-level positions soon got the best of him, and Soderbergh returned to Baton Rouge. He worked as a clerk in a video arcade and focused on shooting more short films. During this Louisiana sojourn, Soderbergh filmed a documentary of his Hollywood experience, entitled Rapid Eye Movement.
The Louisiana sojourn, however, did not last long, and Soderbergh returned to California to work with a video production company. Soderbergh soon began directing music videos for the rock band Yes. These videos included a one-hour video of the band's U.S. tour. The video was nominated for a Grammy Award for best long-form video, and created a range of opportunities for the young director.
At about the same time, Soderbergh, with $7500 of his own money, wrote, directed and produced the film Winston, a dark tale of sexual deception. Winston became the impetus for Soderbergh's next screenplay, sex, lies, and videotape (1989), written in eight days while en route from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles. "It came out so fast," Soderbergh says. "I didn't know if anybody would read it… It just seemed so personal."
The film focused on the misappropriated relationships between four characters: Graham (James Spader), his old fraternity brother, John (Peter Gallagher), John's wife, Ann (Andie MacDowell), and Ann's sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). Similar in theme to Winston, sex, lies, and videotape focused on the sexual deceit implicit in the four characters' relationships, and the ultimate destruction of their tender connections due to the exposure of a few traitorous truths.
sex, lies, and videotape was quickly optioned by RCA/Columbia. Shot on a minimal budget of $1.2 million, the film, a dialogue-driven piece shot on a few bare sets, was considered immensely simple by Hollywood Standards. Soderbergh earned a mere $37,000 from the film, which, ultimately, grossed almost $100 million.
Soderbergh, at age 29, became the youngest winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or Award, along with receiving the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. However, sex, lies, and videotape's true success is defined by its groundbreaking effect on the economics of Hollywood. "For American independent cinema, it was a shot heard 'round the world, reminding audiences that there were films being made outside of Hollywood while reminding Hollywood that there was money to be made from those movies," says Keith Phipps in The Onion.
sex, lies, and videotape may have created a name for Soderbergh, but his next three films received less than favorable reviews. Kafka (1991), a suspense film which cast Jeremy Irons in the role of noted writer Franz Kafka, was a commercial disaster. His next two films, the Depression-era piece King of the Hill (1993), and the modern film noir, The Underneath (1995), were both effectively ignored by mainstream media and audiences.
Soderbergh's next two films, both filmed in 1996, helped him get back on track. While Gray's Anatomy and Schizopolis were box office failures, the two projects helped reinvigorate his passion for film. Schizopolis starred Soderbergh, and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Betsy Brantley, along with their daughter, Sarah. Soderbergh, who met Brantley during his casting for The Last Ship, and accepts blame for their marriage's failure, became estranged from Brantley during the filming of Schizopolis.
Gray's Anatomy, a documentation of a spoken word performance by the monologist Spalding Gray, focused on Gray's bout with a serious eye disorder. Gray's performance received rave reviews, but critics again considered Soderbergh's documentation uneventful. Said Marc Caro in the Chicago Tribune: "[The film] demonstrates that fully stimulating the senses isn't the same as fully engaging them." Even though the films garnered disappointing responses, Soderbergh considers them, especially Schizopolis, cathartic exercises in creativity. "It was just sort of a shout from the edge of a cliff," says Soderbergh. "I needed to start over, and so in many ways that was my second first film. That's all it was: I needed to change the way I was working. For me, creatively, it was a turning point."
The catharsis seemed to have worked. Soderbergh's next film, Out of Sight (1998), starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, and based on the Elmore Leonard novel by the same name, was a box office success, grossing almost $40 million. "Out of Sight is a departure into markedly commercial material," says Janet Maslin in the New York Times. "And [Soderbergh] makes it work like a dream." Soderbergh did not consider his filming of Out of Sight as "selling out"; instead, he accepted and utilized his status in the mainstream to obtain larger budgets.
After Out of Sight came The Limey (1999), an innovative film which received a modicum of critical success for its blending of film noir and modern cinema. But Soderbergh truly reached mainstream fame with 1999's Erin Brockovich. Starring Julia Roberts and Albert Finney, the film grossed over $125 million and won Roberts an Oscar for Best Actress. The film focuses on the true story of a legal assistant who helps a lawyer sue a corporate utility company for causing an outbreak of cancer and other illnesses in a rural community.
In the wake of critical and box office success from Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh released Traffic, an epic tale of drug use and enforcement. Starring Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Traffic melds several difference dramatic story lines. One story focuses on the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency who finds himself coping with his daughter's drug habit; in a second story, the wife of a jailed drug dealer takes over the family business; the third storyline concentrates on the challenges of a Mexican police officer.
Traffic was Soderbergh's first foray into cinematography. He joined the cinematographer's union and shot a majority of the scenes with a hand-held camera. Says Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic: "Soderbergh spreads contrasting tones in some sequences, sometimes sepia, sometimes almost icy blue, much of the time sharply realistic." Traffic grossed over $120 million. The film won the best director's award from the New York and Los Angeles critics and the National Board of Review, best picture by the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as four Academy Awards.
Soderbergh's upcoming project is Ocean's Eleven, a remake of the classic Rat Pack heist film, now starring George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. Soderbergh, always a busy man, is also planning an adaptation of Stanislav Lem's sci-fi classic, Solaris, orginally filmed in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Steven Soderbergh has come a long way from his meager beginnings. Traffic was filmed with a $46 million budget and received complete support from the Hollywood elite. He will, however, always be remembered as the first independent filmmaker to break through the rigidity of mainstream American filmmaking. Like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh is an honored member of a group of young directors challenging the definitions of creativity and ingenuity in Hollywood.
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