It's gratifyingly romantic to see the history of Hollywood as a saga of visionary filmmakers against philistine studios. That's the subtext of both New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman's "Rebels on the Backlot," about '90s maverick directors including Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, and biographer Clinton Heylin's "Despite the System," a blow-by-blow account of the travails of the arch martyr Orson Welles. "This is a story that goes all the way back to the beginning of cinema in this country," Soderbergh tells Waxman, "with the struggle for auteur filmmaking within the American cine-culture." Of course, you side with the good guys. To a point.

Granted, nobody likes what Waxman calls "the Hollywood system of cookie- cutter scripts and cheap MTV imagery" (except millions of paying customers), but heroically innovative film directors are crucially different from heroically innovative writers or painters. It cost James Joyce a few francs of his own money for the ink and paper to produce "Ulysses"; it cost David Fincher some $400,000 of Twentieth Century Fox's money to film the few seconds of "Fight Club" in which Ed Norton's character blows his brains out. One unintended effect of these books is to give you a little sympathy for the bean counters. It's their beans.

Filmmaking has always been an outrageously expensive art to practice--and therefore a devil's bargain for a principled director. It may have cost only $800,000 to make all of "Citizen Kane," but that was back when Coke was a nickel. "Kane" tanked at the box office, and Welles's next, "The Magnificent Ambersons," had gone $160,000 over budget when RKO Pictures took it away from him and began the desperate, incompetent edit that ruined a second masterpiece. It can break your heart to read Welles's memos: thoroughly reasonable, largely unheeded pleas for the integrity of his versions of "Ambersons" and "Touch of Evil." It can also break your heart to read that it took Fox a month and a half to get Fincher to cut less than two minutes of ultraviolence from "Fight Club," and that Paul Thomas Anderson finally admitted New Line had been right when it had told him "Magnolia" was too long--after it failed to get people into the theaters.

The notion that shortsighted moneymen resent genius directors (and the countermyth that producers are sensible folk reining in the crazies) has some basis in fact. Only vindictiveness could have led studios to destroy Welles's footage that didn't survive their cuts; only mad genius could have led to Spike Jonze's film about a portal into the brain of a real-life actor--an idea, one executive noted, that "doesn't pitch well." "Being John Malkovich," luckily, slipped through the cracks during a period of studio mergers. But audiences and critics wondered who opened a crack for David O. Russell's "I (Heart) Huckabees."

Despite their thorough research, neither Waxman nor Heylin can write a lick: both use journalistic cliches, and Heylin's jauntily aggressive tone is downright grating. But it's not their fault that their stories end as unhappily as your average auteur film. After "Kane," Welles saw his pictures mutilated, took acting gigs ("Wuthering Heights," "The Third Man") to fund them on his own, and--though Heylin denies it--surely conspired in his own undoing. Waxman concludes that the system "beat down" her rebels, who either joined the mainstream (Soderbergh) or lost their mojo (the Wachowski brothers, who made the "Matrix" films). What did they think was going to happen? The script had already been written.

CORRECTION

In "Downer Of A System" (Feb. 7) we incorrectly stated that Orson Welles acted in "Wuthering Heights." He did not.