Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  After Pulp Fiction Lawrence Bender cashed in more quickly, buying an elegant stone mansion in Brentwood, where he lived by himself, often hosting Democratic political events.

  Roger Avary decided a change of scenery would do him good. His experiences with Pulp Fiction and his former best friend had left him bitter—but also with plenty of cash. He moved to Cap d’Antibes in the south of France and tried to raise money to buy the historic La Victorine Studio in Nice, now in mothballs. This was where François Truffaut had worked, and where Jacques Tati had filmed Mon Oncle in 1958. Avary dreamed of reviving the studio to make his kind of movies there. “I had romantic ideals of forging a film community, especially in Nice, with such an intense history.”

  A small problem arose in that the studio was right below the flight path of planes landing and taking off from Nice Airport. Avary and the minister of culture Jacques Lang joined forces to try to convince the transportation authorities to reroute the planes so the studio could be reopened—only in France, n’est ce pas?—but ultimately they were unsuccessful.

  He then wrote Fantasme’s End, his rewrite of an old horror film, calling the original director and offering to do the film for no money. He wrote a lot of scripts, one about the famous Hotel Lutecia in Paris, which the Gestapo used as their headquarters during World War Two. He became obsessed with Salvador Dali—he even growing a Dali-style mustache—and moved into the Hotel St. Regis, where Dali lived, to write a screenplay about him in 1997. He spent a couple of years adapting Beowulf, the gothic English tale. But mostly he made lots and lots of money doing script polishes and rewrites for the Hollywood studio machine.

  Ten years passed before Avary made another film, eventually writing and directing Rules of Attraction, an adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis book, released in 2002. Avary had been offered to direct American Psycho, Ellis’s signature 1980s book about a psychopathic investment banker on a killing spree through New York City. Avary considered the project until he read the book and got to the part where the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, guts a dog. “I can handle a lot on screen,” said the man who cowrote a screenplay with torture scenes. “My threshold for anything is high, except animal cruelty.” He never finished the book and wrote the producers a letter imploring them not to make the film. (They did anyway, with director Mary Harron.)

  As for his relationship with Tarantino, Avary barely spoke to his once best friend again until they ran into each other on the red carpet in early 2000 and slapped one another on the back as if nothing nasty had ever passed between them. By 2003, Avary was again referring to Tarantino as “the best friend I ever had.”

  Chapter 5

  David Fincher Takes on Fight Club

  1996

  “It is not simply the unbelievable brutality of the film that has caused critics to wonder if Rupert Murdoch’s company, Twentieth Century Fox, which produced it, knew what it was doing. The movie is not only anti-capitalist, but anti-society and, indeed, anti-God.”

  —ALEXANDER WALKER, EVENING

  STANDARD

  Rupert Murdoch was not in the habit of dictating movie choices to his film executives. He sat in his office on the top floor of the five-story, modernist office building that overlooked a small piece of his sprawling media empire, the Fox lot in Century City, with its murals of Luke Skywalker and Marilyn Monroe, and its gritty re-creation of New York City streets that was the set of NYPD Blue. The executives who ran Twentieth Century Fox were far below in the older, bungalow-style buildings across the way.

  Murdoch did not need to get involved in the decisions of his movie executives; his media empire was, after all, one of the largest in the world, including newspapers, magazines, a book publisher, a television network, a baseball team (the Dodgers), and a television production company in addition to the movie studio. Those who worked for him didn’t necessarily follow his political convictions, though there was no avoiding the certain knowledge that the boss was a decidedly conservative individual, a man who had famously broken the unions in England with the support of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and who gleefully used his daily paper the New York Post to flatten every liberal political idea that came along.

  But Twentieth Century Fox didn’t make conservative films. It made great, big Hollywood films like Titanic and Independence Day and Braveheart. Still, there were limits. When Rupert Murdoch saw an early version of Fight Club at a private screening in Australia—his son Lachlan was there, and so was Tom Cruise—he was livid. Never mind that both Lachlan and Cruise thought the film was brilliant and daring. Murdoch was outraged.

  When he got back to Los Angeles he made a surprise appearance at a meeting of senior executives at Fox and confronted his studio chief, Bill Mechanic, in front of his staff. “I finally saw Fight Club,” Murdoch growled in his gravelly Aussie timbre. “I thought it was too violent. We shouldn’t have made it. We shouldn’t be making movies like that.” He went on. “You aren’t the one who gets called up on Capitol Hill and on Wall Street to answer for these movies, it’s me,” he said. “I take the flak for this.”

  Mechanic, recently promoted from president to chairman, rose to the bait and defended the movie. “Yes, it’s violent,” he agreed, “but it’s a brilliant film, brilliant. We should be proud of it.” He went on to offer a ringing endorsement of Fincher’s vision and the lasting commentary the movie made on twentieth-century society. A few weeks later Fight Club opened to mostly scandalized reviews and lousy box office.

  How the most conservative media mogul in the country ended up making one of the most graphically violent films of its time, excoriated by social critics and politicians as a prime example of the moral decay in Hollywood, is one of the many ironies in the making of Fight Club. In green-lighting the film, starring heartthrob Brad Pitt and intellectual Ed Norton, Fox made an abrupt detour from the kinds of films that usually filled its slate. As with other films, it was a single executive, in this case Bill Mechanic, who protected Fight Club through the perils of the studio bureaucracy for better or worse. And he seemed one of the least likely types to defend such a film: Mechanic was a strict vegetarian and animal rights activist to whom the idea of butchering an animal was repugnant. Yet he put his reputation on the line to defend a movie that reveled in violence. Within two years of the release he’d be out of a job.

  Even David Fincher, a man who rarely disguised his contempt for the studios and the people who ran them, was mystified when Twentieth Century Fox finally handed him a green light, with a budget more suited to a summer blockbuster. When he got the call he turned to his producer and said, “Those idiots just green-lit a $75 million experimental movie.”

  IT WAS RAYMOND BONGIOVANNI, A BOOK SCOUT AT TWENTIETH Century Fox in New York, who got Chuck Palahniuk’s book The Fight Club, when it was still in galleys, and sent it to Fox creative executive Kevin McCormick, who gave it to Laura Ziskin, head of a boutique division at the studio called Fox 2000. It was a slim first novel by a completely unknown writer from Portland, Oregon. Palahniuk was working as a diesel mechanic.

  A studio reader wrote coverage of the book, and it was unequivocal: Do not make this into a film. It is unconventional. It will make people squirm.

  There was good reason for the reader to feel this way. Palahniuk’s tersely funny book was a dark satire on twentieth-century consumer culture, the story of a young man who seeks relief from the emptiness of materialist society by posing as a victim in various survivor groups: melanoma, breast cancer, prostate. Then he meets Tyler Durden, a kin spirit who acts on his anarchic urges. Durden initiates the narrator into an underworld of mischief and mayhem, underground clubs where desperate men engage in open-ended, bare-knuckle fistfights for the mere purpose of feeling something, anything—even and especially pain. Eventually the groups evolve into cadres of urban terrorists, alienated middle-class white men who sabotage civil society and blow up buildings out of an inexplicable desperation, a need to assert themselves and rebel against a passive culture numbed by cra
ss acquisitiveness. By the time the reader finds out that Tyler and the narrator are the same person and that one must kill the other in order to survive, the message is unrelentingly bleak. Fight Club can be regarded as a fable about the rage of the emasculated white American male—something Tarantino would know something about—and about his search for meaning and self-respect. It was a powerful message likely to resonate with young men particularly and thinking moviegoers more generally, especially given Palahniuk’s biting prose and subversive humor:

  “The three ways to make napalm: One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate. Two, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and diet cola. Three, you can dissolve crumbled cat litter in gasoline until the mixture is thick.

  “Ask me how to make nerve gas. Oh, all those crazy car bombs.”

  It was hard to tell when Palahniuk was joking, or if he was at all.

  DULY CHASTENED BY THE READER’S MEMO, THE FOX executives sent the galleys on to a couple of producers to see if they were interested. Lawrence Bender and Art Linson both dealt in dark, violent material, but they passed. (Linson temporarily so, though he didn’t know it yet.) Kevin McCormick also sent the galleys to Josh Donen and his new partner Ross Bell: Donen, a former executive at Universal Studios, was the son of the famed musical director-producer Stanley Donen; Bell was a young Australian striver who had worked with Hollywood veteran Ray Stark. He read the galleys and, until halfway through the book, agreed with the studio’s coverage. But when he discovered that Tyler and the narrator were the same character, “my heart started racing. I had never had an experience like this,” said Bell. “Everything I read had to be reassessed.” He went back to Kevin McCormick and told him that all the reasons the studio reader said not to make the film were exactly why they should make it. It is unconventional, he said, and it will make people squirm. But it is also a groundbreaking piece of material that holds up a mirror to our society. He recognized it as a zeitgeist film, a movie that would define its era. Zeitgeist is a word that came up often with those who fell under the spell of Fight Club.

  At first, McCormick was still not that interested.

  But Bell pursued his quest, deciding to try to see how to turn the book into a movie. He and Donen gathered a group of actors to read the book. It took six hours, and both realized that the book, though slim, was far too long for a movie. They began cutting out sections, especially the most cringe-worthy parts—when the characters burn themselves with cigarettes, for example. The actors, who never got paid for their efforts, continued to read for Bell through each new edit.

  At the time Bell was broke, living off his credit cards and the belief that he could someday be an independent producer. Already $50,000 in debt, he spent another $300 to rent sound equipment and record the book on tape. Fox was still unenthusiastic, but Bell thought “fuck it,” and sent the tape to Laura Ziskin. She popped the cassette in her car as she drove up to Santa Barbara for a weekend. On Monday she ponied up $10,000 to buy the rights to Palahniuk’s book.

  ZISKIN WAS THINKING ABOUT ASKING BUCK HENRY, A SIXTY-something comedy and acting veteran who had written comic classics in the 1960s like What’s Up, Doc?, The Owl and the Pussycat, and The Graduate, to adapt Chuck Palahniuk’s dark manifesto. She thought the book had a lot in common with The Graduate, the brilliant coming-of-age movie starring Dustin Hoffman. But a young screenwriter named Jim Uhls—who’d never written anything that had actually been made—had gotten his hands on the book and began lobbying the producers for a chance to translate it for the screen. Bell and Donen thought the material needed a younger eye, and Uhls was given a shot.

  Meanwhile, Bell started trolling for directors, he had four on his list. The first was Peter Jackson, an Australian best known at the time for the off-beat Heavenly Creatures, a true, bizarre story about two inordinately close girlfriends who conspire to kill the mother of one of the girls (Jackson, of course, would later make the epic Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy). The other choices were Bryan Singer, who had directed the gripping, Oscar-winning crime thriller The Usual Suspects; Danny Boyle, who had made the gritty, violent, and critically lauded Trainspotting (another from the Tarantino school); and David Fincher, who had made Se7ven, a hit; Alien 3, a bomb; and lots and lots of top-notch commercials.

  Bell thought Jackson was the best choice of the four. When he called Jackson’s agent, Ken Kamins, to pitch the project, Kamins told him to forget it. Jackson was in Wellington, New Zealand, editing a new film called The Frighteners. Undeterred, Bell got on a plane to Auckland and called up the editing room. Jackson’s assistant answered and said, “Don’t bother coming, Peter doesn’t have time to see you.” Bell said thanks but he was coming anyway, and got in a car to drive the three-hundred miles to Wellington. It was a lot of miles for nothing. Jackson did finally meet Bell, but never read the book. Later, when Fincher got the project, the same assistant sent Bell a note saying, “Peter thanks you for your visit, and I should have read the book sooner.”

  On the same trip, Bell swung through Sydney to visit Russell Crowe, a friend. Bell thought that Crowe was perfect to play Tyler Durden. In his mind, the masculine, rough-edged Crowe was about as close to the character written on the page as any actor was likely to be. They went for a long walk in a Sydney park, and threw a football back and forth, feeling one another out. Bell made a pitch and gave Crowe the book. Later he found himself in conflict with Art Linson over his negotiations with Crowe. Linson was a powerful coproducer whom Fox later brought on board to keep Fincher and the budget in line. Linson was meeting with Brad Pitt to discuss the title role while Bell was meeting elsewhere with Crowe. It was a sign of Bell’s increasing marginalization that Crowe had to fall out of the picture (and tantalizing to consider how Crowe might have interpreted the role).

  Bell also gave the book to Bryan Singer’s producing partner, but the director never read it. Danny Boyle and his producing partner, Andrew Macdonald, met Bell; they read the book but found another project.

  That left Fincher. Donen and Bell sent him the book ahead of Christmas 1996, via his assistants. Bell got both of Fincher’s assistants to read it first, and they loved it. One of the assistants, Doug Friedman, called Bell several times to enthuse about one line or other in the book. Finally Fincher got curious and picked up the phone during one of these calls and said, “Okay, what’s everybody talking about?” Donen urged Fincher to read it, which he did quickly. He had a visceral reaction. He felt he was built for this movie. “It’s sardonic, it’s sarcastic, and naïve, and cynical and funny,” he said later. “I know Marla. I know the Narrator, I know the Narrator’s attraction and repulsion to Marla, I know his need for Tyler. I know why he looks up to Tyler. I just knew it.”

  His next thought was, “There’s not a movie studio in the world who’s gonna make this.” Studios were antithetical to this sort of film, he thought. They made product designed to make the corporate media conglomerate look good. This was the very antithesis of that. Either way, he told his agent he wanted to direct it, definitely.

  The very next day Josh Donen called Fincher on the phone and said, “It looks like Twentieth Century Fox is going to buy it.”

  “If Fox buys it, I’ll never have anything to do with it,” Fincher responded. He had no intention of working with Fox again.

  Growing Up Fincher

  “When I was eighteen or nineteen, and I was working in the darkroom on visual effects and second unit camera stuff, I was going, ‘Fuck, I cannot wait to get out of here and get on to the next gig.’ Then when I got a job at ILM I was like, ‘I cannot wait to get out of this fucking place.’ And when I was directing TV commercials, it was ‘I cannot fucking wait to not be doing this.’ So it was always sort of about getting to make movies.”

  —DAVID FINCHER

  He was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1962, but raised from the age of two or three in posh Marin County, north of San Francisco, in the San Rafael Valley.

  Northern California in th
e 1970s was an idyllic niche of comfortable American life, and Marin a well-to-do suburb that flourished in the wake of the turbulent sixties—a leafy community attracting urban exiles, lefties gone bourgeois, hippies turned organic farmers, and drug dealers. The Fincher family—father Jack, mother Claire, sister Emily, and David—lived in San Anselmo, an upper-middle-class community just beside the town of San Rafael, practically down the street from the local architectural landmark, the futuristic, massive pink-and-blue Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Civic Center in Marin.

  The Finchers fit right in. They were intellectuals and social liberals living in a cozy three-bedroom, ivy-wrapped house on Park Way, a tiny street in downtown San Anselmo where traffic whizzed noisily past along Redhill Boulevard. One day Hollywood moved in. Director George Lucas became the neighbor practically across the street, buying an incongruously huge estate at number 52 Park Way, across the narrow alley lined by modest houses that made up Park Way. The estate, a big, white Victorian mansion with formal stone balustrades leading up the steep driveway, had been built by a successful (and somewhat overzealous) general contractor. Lucas became a local celebrity, having made his ode to Americana, American Graffiti, in San Rafael, at the local high school, and downtown on Fourth Street. For Fincher and his friends, it was one of their favorite movies; they saw it probably fifteen times at the local theater in nearby Novato. A couple of years earlier, a few classmates showed up in the second grade with shaved heads, having served as extras in a shot for Lucas’s THX 1138 at the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center. When Fincher later lived in Oregon, he made a special trip back to Marin to see Star Wars in home territory.