From 'Fight Club' to 'The Phantom Menace': Looking Back on the Mixed Legacy of Hollywood's Class of 1999
Brad Pitt in ‘Fight Club’ — one of the now-classic movies that brawled into theaters in 1999
Stanley Kubrick died on March 7, 1999 — just days after completing work on what would be his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. To many at the time, it must have felt like the end of an era: Kubrick was one of the few masters of the form still alive and probably the only filmmaker who could have persuaded a major studio to let him spend three years (and $65 million) on a 159-minute erotic drama.
But as it turned out, Kubrick’s passing occurred during a year of renewed vigor for Hollywood movies. In a remarkably prescient article at the time, Entertainment Weekly dubbed 1999 “the year that changed movies.” And in the years since, it’s increasingly been considered one of the finest 12-month periods in Hollywood history, with a host of bold, unconventional, and brilliant films, including The Matrix, Magnolia, Fight Club, and American Beauty (the latter of which won five Oscars, including one for best picture). All of these films were made by independent-minded mavericks who’d found a way to work within the studio system, and the resulting films energized movie fans — who by then had taken to discussing and analyzing new releases in real time, on the Web — and sent shockwaves through the industry. But how lasting were those effects?
It certainly felt like a changing of the guard at the time: As hot new directors came in, others seemed to fall away. Established name directors had a rough go of it in 1999 for the most part: Eyes Wide Shut was coolly received by audiences at the time, as were new films by Martin Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead), Oliver Stone (Any Given Sunday), and Spike Lee (Summer of Sam), though some of them have had their reputation restored in the intervening years.
'The Matrix' wowed action audiences
Instead, it was movies by first-, second-, and third-time directors that were getting all the attention: Alongside The Matrix, Magnolia, Fight Club, and American Beauty, the year saw the U.S. releases of Doug Liman’s Go, Alexander Payne’s Election, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, David O. Russell’s Three Kings, Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, to name but a few. It was a hugely diverse list that ran from lo-fi horror to slick supernatural thriller, from wrenching real-life biopic to high school satire, from subversive war actioner to frenetic alternate-reality thriller.
The seeds for that seminal class of ‘99 had been sown five years earlier, with the immense critical and commercial success of Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino’s idiosyncratic, ambitious caper electrified moviegoers and earned multiple Oscar nominations — and, most important, had a huge box-office haul. Suddenly, all the studios wanted their own Tarantino and their own Pulp Fiction, and they were willing to give relatively untested filmmakers carte blanche and multimillion-dollar budgets to get them.
It took a little while for these follow-ons to take effect, but they were turning heads before long: The Coen brothers crossed over with the Oscar-winning Fargo in 1996, Paul Thomas Anderson was anointed the next big thing in 1997 with Boogie Nights, and Steven Soderbergh finally hit the mainstream with Out of Sight in 1998. None were Pulp Fiction rip-offs exactly, but all those directors, like Tarantino, took dark, often bloody material and leavened the mix with unexpected humor, big names playing against type, and stylish, hyperkinetic filmmaking.
Nonetheless, there was something unique about the batch of new movies in 1999. Filmmakers were starting to follow Tarantino’s technically audacious lead and taking it to new places. Unconventional, time-hopping structures like that of Go or the more distinctive Run Lola Run were becoming more and more prevalent. Some directors were taking advantage of new technology to pull off seemingly impossible shots: The camera followed a bullet inside a human body in Three Kings and revolved around slow-motion action sequences in The Matrix.
Others were pushing mainstream storytelling boundaries into surreal territory not usually explored by mainstream American cinema: Being John Malkovich explored celebrity, identity, and twisted love affairs through a portal into the mind of the titular star, while Magnolia was a messy, raw movie about grief and forgiveness that climaxed with a rain of frogs and a fourth-wall-breaking sing-along.
The films weren’t just emphasizing style over substance, though: At a time when many people were terrified of the potential impact of the so-called Y2K bug, the Wachowskis’ celebrated sci-fi actioner The Matrix and David Fincher’s Fight Club both played into these turn-of-the-millennium anxieties, addressing fear of the future, the rise of technology, anticapitalism, and the emasculation of men. The increasing accessibility of media was a recurring theme, too, with Wes Bentley and his ever-present camcorder in American Beauty prefiguring the YouTube and Vine generations, and The Blair Witch Project essentially inventing the found-footage horror genre that remains wildly popular, and profitable, today.
Some of their films were hits, some were not. Some disappointed in theaters, only to find new life on home video (Fight Club, for instance, was a consistently huge seller for 20th Century Fox). Not all were immediately recognized by their peers, but most went on to inspire a new, younger generation of filmmakers and fans. And yet for all that, if 1999 did change film, it may not have been because of these movies.
Some of them managed to penetrate the consciousness of Oscar voters, but aside from the big winner, American Beauty (and it’s notable that this is the film in the group that’s faced the biggest backlash in the years since), the big movies were more middle-brow, conventional, awards-friendly pictures such as The Cider House Rules and The Green Mile, films that led the way to the awards-baiting likes of The King’s Speech and A Beautiful Mind.
'American Beauty' won 1999's Best Picture Oscar, but has since faced a backlash
Signs were initially good that the more idiosyncratic filmmakers would continue to work within the system, with some even looking to team up: In 2001, Soderbergh, Jonze, Fincher, Payne, and Mendes announced that they were setting up a film company at USA Films (the group fell apart before anything could happen, partly, according to Sharon Waxman’s book Rebels on the Backlot, because Soderbergh didn’t want David O. Russell to join them).
But the Blair Witch duo virtually disappeared, and Kimberly Peirce has struggled with her follow-up films. And while directors like Fincher and Mendes have continued to make acclaimed big-budget studio films, they’ve arguably been absorbed into the system: The former has been busy making adaptations of best-selling novels such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, and Mendes is about to make his second film in the massive James Bond franchise.
In theory, some of their contemporaries are making individual and idiosyncratic films with the help of studios: Warner Bros. released Jonze’s Her last year and is putting out Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice this year. But both films were financed by wealthy independent producer Megan Ellison, who was also responsible for Russell’s American Hustle. Soderbergh, meanwhile, claims to have retired from directing movies, focusing instead on theater and television, and saying that cinema “is under assault by the studios … with the full support of the audience.”
He may be right. Without the backing of a patron like Ellison or the creative freedoms of a cable network (directors like Cary Fukunaga and Jill Soloway have skipped almost straight from Sundance to HBO’s True Detective and Amazon’s Transparent, respectively), studios don’t seem to be interested in filmmakers’ original ideas. They just want to co-opt them for their mega-franchises. Directors such as Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed), Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer), and Gareth Edwards (Monsters) once would have gone from their low-budget debuts to something more modest in the studio system. Now, they’re being handed mega-budget tentpole pictures like Jurassic World, Skull Island, and Godzilla.
And the seeds for those films were sewn in 1999, too. The Sixth Sense and The Matrix were among the biggest films of the year, but the top grosser was Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, a bonanza of shiny CGI, stilted greenscreen performances, and out-of-touch storytelling that, despite backlash from fans, made a fortune at the box office and was a huge influence on the next decade of blockbusters (the similarly effects-stuffed The Mummy was another big hit that year). There was hope that the Wachowskis and M. Night Shyamalan would help give the blockbuster a new lease on life, but sequels to The Matrix were noisy and incomprehensible, and Shyamalan’s films got progressively worse as the years went on.
Back in 1999, Columbia studio executive Ricky Strauss told Entertainment Weekly, “Ten years ago, Being John Malkovich wouldn’t have been set up somewhere.” It speaks to the cyclical nature of the business that 15 years on, it’s hard to imagine the film being set up anywhere now, either (Malkovich writer Charlie Kaufman couldn’t get his last script, Frank or Francis, financed despite the presence of Jack Black, Steve Carell, and Nicolas Cage), while Strauss now works at Disney, helping to market up to three Marvel movies and one Star Wars picture a year. Being John Malkovich might have won the battle, but it was The Phantom Menace that won the war.
Photo credits: Everett Collection, DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox
