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Last weekend I came across one of those books that one ends up reading start to finish, without taking a break right upto the wee hours of the morning. Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (P.S.), will have the same effect on you.

Recently there has been a talk of a “Wave”, “Revolution”, “New Age Filmmakers” and even my own coined “Gen 21″ breed… what does it all mean?

In plain simple terms in my book, it means the group or different sets of people that bring about a change in the system every 10 - 20 years.

It seems to be happening in Indian movie industry… specially in Bollywood and to some extent perhaps in the Telugu movie industry. Ironically the Bollywood rebels seem to come - well most of them atleast - from the factory of Ram Gopal Varma, who’s story telling sense these days seems to have gone for a toss. There are others too, that we haven’t heard about, but their names, reverberate within the walls of the movie industry. People like Nishikant Kamat, Amol Gupte and many others.

The rebels. The people who bring about a change. The word “cult following” is their middle name. These are the people who create that “CULT” not the studios… never.

And one such group of rebels who did not know each other (well most of them), rose in Hollywood in the nineties, changing the face of the Hollywood studio system. Not many of their movies were hits at the time of their release. But the fan following in such “cult” scenarios grows, over a period of time. It’s not what the account books have yet understood.

Sharon Waxman takes us in her book to meet six principal directors in Hollywood who rose, drove ahead on their own terms and smacked every rule in the Hollywood rule book to became Cult directors in their own right. Sharon’s writing style takes us to the childhoods of each of these six directors, to tracing their passion for cinema, to their uni-focus attention on one thing that existed in their life - movies, to their rise, and fall and rise again.

Their impact was so huge that the impenetrable Hollywood studio system was forced to change it’s ways. Each big studio came out with a separate division which produce independent movies. And to this day they do.

The book also brings forth the story behind the origins of two independent studios that gave a big boost to the Indy revolution… New Line Pictures and Miramax (the latter was formerly started and owned by the Weinstein Brothers).

And the six principal characters in question?

Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia)

David Fincher (Seven, The Game, Fight Club)

Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich)

David O. Russell (Spanking the monkey, Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees)

Steven Soderbergh (Sex Lies and Videotape, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven/Twelve)

and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill)

The commonalities are striking. The (personality) differences throw you off. Yet the impassioned drive to achieve their objectives hits the bulls eyes in each of them.

The tons of inner view of the lives of these directors also shows you how their dysfunctional lives that led to perfect (well almost) creations.

It’s a treat not to be missed. The Russell - Clooney war on the sets of Three Kings, Soderbergh’s disappearance after the success of Sex Lies and Videotape, the projected selfishness of Tarantino who dropped friends before the next blink of the eye, Jonze’s problems in convincing the producers that a video guy could make a movie like Malkovich (and how!), Anderson’s uppity arrogance and Fincher’s… well you guys have to read the book….

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