Salon.com has a great review up of a new book about the directors behind the indie film revolution of the '90s, Rebels on the Backlot:

The more talented the young (or youngish) directors Waxman profiles are, it seems, the more obnoxious they are. Quentin Tarantino comes off as a ruthless social climber who has dropped all the friends who helped him when he was a struggling nobody, and won't take calls from his own mother. David O. Russell has infamously poor social skills, picks meaningless fights and is gratuitously mean to crew members on his shoots. Paul Thomas Anderson is a fathead control freak who treats any suggestion or criticism as an insult to his masterly creative vision.

But the book appears to be mostly devoted to exploring why the indie revolution didn't really change Hollywood much at all:

It's an era that, for better or worse, is now in the past: The once-rebellious indie spirit seems almost as remote from the mainstream movie biz today as it did 15 years ago. (Consider the two "independent" films up for Oscars this year, "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland"; whatever their merits may be, they're about as threatening and confrontational as a glass of milk before bedtime.) Despite her book's subtitle (which to any indie-film fan sounds suspiciously like a post-production decision by the marketing department), "Rebels on the Backlot" is less the story of how Tarantino and those who followed him conquered Hollywood than of how Hollywood conquered them, or, perhaps more accurately, how the two forces fought each other to a stalemate.

Sounds interesting. And bonus: judging by the review, my boy Wes Anderson (who, yes, is the true genius of the era, though I hate to give Tarantino short shrift) seems to come out completely unscathed.

PS: This line is funny too:

When he was pitched Charlie Kaufman's now-legendary screenplay, for example, New Line Cinema honcho Bob Shaye said, "'Being John Malkovich'? Why can't it be 'Being Tom Cruise'?"

Oh, corporate idiots in suits. I can't stay mad at you.