Movie Directors

It wasn't unprecedented, by any means. In 1985, Steven Spieberg was omitted from the list of best director nominees when "The Color Purple" received 11 Oscar nominations. And four years later, Bruce Beresford was overlooked when "Driving Miss Daisy" took the top prize.

Every day here in the Bosnian capital, people make simple testimonies to faith in the country's uncertain peace. They ride in trolley cars, even though some passengers were killed as recently as last month. They stroll along the city's main thoroughfares, even though sniper fire sometimes still rings out. They gawk at expensive display windows, even though most can barely afford basic groceries.

His name is synonymous with underground filmmaking. But when Stan Brakhage came along in the 1950s, he sought out two giants of 20th century music as his artistic mentors: composers John Cage and Edgard Varese, the father of electronic music. "I came to New York to meet them because I already had set film to a score by each of them," he recalled. "Cage accepted the piece and Varese did not. But both took me on as a student because they were intrigued by the relationship between music and film."

On a movie set in an industrial corner of downtown Los Angeles, actor Eric Idle, playing a disillusioned director, plots aloud to burn his latest film after it has been butchered by studio honchos and producers. "I don't want the world to have to see another appalling film, for God's sake," a distraught Idle tells a pair of director brothers, fellow film aficionados. "If we believe in film--and we do--don't we have a responsibility to protect the world from bad ones?"

'Ridicule," France's official entry in the Oscar race, evokes the glittering, treacherous court of Louis XVI several years before the French Revolution. It marks a departure for its esteemed director, Patrice Leconte, who's known in America for two intimate, distinctive accounts of obsessive love, "Monsieur Hire" (1989) and "The Hairdresser's Husband" (1992).

It wasn't enough that Mike Nichols had pledged $1.5 million of his own money in a bidding war for the film rights to the best-selling "Primary Colors," a roman a clef based on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. The Oscar-winning director also had to "audition"--that is, present his vision of the film to "Anonymous," the phantom author of the book.

Mickey and Mallory Knox refuse to die. It has been nearly two years since those "Natural Born Killers" rode unpunished and unrepentant into the sunset. Oliver Stone's R-rated film has triggered intense debate by critics and politicians, Bob Dole most prominent among them, over the violent content of Hollywood films. Then the studio that released the movie balked at releasing on video the version Stone wanted.

Somewhere over India, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the '80s, George Miller suddenly woke up. Flying to London, having just wrapped his third Mad Max feature, "Beyond Thunderdome," the exhausted director-writer-producer inexplicably tuned in the plane's children's audio channel. A woman was reading from Dick King-Smith's 80-page children's book "The Sheep-Pig."