Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Lucas remained a mystery, a tiny guy wearing glasses in his bathrobe, picking up the paper at the end of his driveway. But it was an eye-opener for Fincher. “Suddenly the patina was sort of off movies. It was not like movies were made in Hollywood, what we considered to be Hollywood movies,” Fincher recalled. “It was also a time when movies that we considered to be Hollywood movies—big movies—were being made by a guy down the street.”

  Lucas wasn’t the only reason. For a time, Marin and nearby San Francisco served as a base for the artistic rebels of 1970s cinema. Francis Ford Coppola was shooting The Godfather at the Marin Art and Garden Center. Philip Kaufman (Henry and June, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) relocated to San Francisco. Michael Ritchie shot The Candidate in the area with Robert Redford. Fincher’s sister did a voice-over for John Korty cartoons for Sesame Street (he later directed Oliver’s Story and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman), while Ritchie was known to be cutting his film The Bad News Bears in Lucas’s basement. Movies were part of the natural ebb and flow of life.

  FINCHER’S FATHER HAD BEEN THE BUREAU CHIEF FOR LIFE magazine in San Francisco, but he later retired and became a freelance magazine writer, spending a lot of time around the house. Fincher’s mother worked as a methadone maintenance nurse, helping in rehab centers, which were filled with the strung-out refugees of the peace-and-love generation. Her son grew up familiar with the look, sound, and mood of junkies.

  Fincher was artistic and solitary as a youth. From an early age he did not live up to his own exacting standards. He spent hours drawing in his room, copying from comic books, trying to put on paper the images he saw in his fervid imagination. He hated that they never came out on paper the way he saw them in his mind and determined that one day he would find a way of translating those pictures in the real world. He gave up on drawing, then tried painting, then sculpture, then acting, and then photography—even getting his parents to build him a darkroom. Colleagues in later life remarked, always, on Fincher’s edginess and demanding nature. “He’s got a bitterness to him,” observed Steve Golin, who cofounded Propaganda with Fincher in the 1980s. “It works for him. I’ve known him for twenty years, and I don’t know where it comes from. There’s a whole group of guys like him—the Jim Camerons—with a little bit of a mean streak. They take it out on everybody.”

  Apart from the local connection to cinema, Fincher’s father was a film buff. He took his son, aged ten, to see Hitchcock’s Rear Window at the Sausalito theater. And they often went to double features: Singin’ in the Rain and 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Yellow Submarine and an old Danny Kaye comedy. Fincher’s earliest memory of film was at age eight, seeing a television documentary about the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He would later say as an adult that Butch Cassidy was perhaps his favorite movie of all time and claimed to have seen it almost two hundred times. It’s where he traces his desire to become a filmmaker. “It was the first time it ever occurred to me that movies weren’t recorded in real time,” said Fincher. Seeing the documentary, “it was like, ‘How cool.’ What a great thing—you get to take pictures, you get to play, you get to shoot blank guns, put blood pellets in your mouth and get riddled by Mexican gunfire at the end of the movie. …So I thought, ‘That sounds like a pretty good gig.’ And from that moment on that’s all I ever wanted to do.”

  However much Fincher loved Butch Cassidy, his passion for movies was nothing if not wide-ranging. He became obsessed with the movies, and not just dark material that would later become his professional trademark. David Fincher loved La Cage aux Folles, the French cross-dressing farce, and says he’s probably seen it fifty times. He was devoted to jazz master Bob Fosse. “I saw All That Jazz a hundred times,” he said. “Bob Fosse was one of my favorite moviemakers,” he said, and did not appear to be joking. He imbibed the great movies of the seventies. At the local Marin College the young Fincher saw Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, Open City, and Satyricon.

  The family stayed in Marin until Fincher started high school, but by 1976 neither parent was happy with the indulgent environment for their kids and they moved to Ashland, Oregon, a small city in the rainy northwest, with a population of fourteen thousand. Dad continued to work as a magazine writer, and Mom took a job with the Southern Oregon Mental Health department.

  Fincher was miserable in Oregon. It was “a fucking drag,” he recalled years later. In Marin he had his hopes set on taking a 16-mm film course at Sir Francis Drake High School. When his parents dashed those plans, Fincher made the best of it, taking courses in theater, photography, and painting; he got a job as a projectionist at an Oregon theater and worked weekends at a news station in Medford, Oregon. “I worked all the time. When I wasn’t doing that I was making movies with a Super 8,” he said.

  He did poorly in school in Oregon, which was not to say he wasn’t smart. He was, extremely. But he didn’t feel challenged. “I slept through fucking high school,” he said. Getting a B-plus average was easy for him. As Fincher puts it, “You’re still the fastest guy at the Special Olympics. It was public school in southern Oregon, for God’s sake. I could spell better than most lumberjacks’ kids.” He didn’t lose touch with the drug culture, either, which had a hold in Oregon; one of his favorite teachers in high school lost his job for selling amphetamines to students. His recollection of this time underscores his penchant for a certain cynicism. “It wasn’t that different from Twin Peaks. It was fairly sordid. When I was a junior in high school I think there was a senior who was actually caught running a prostitution ring in a local convention hotel. That kind of shit went on. So I kept myself busy. My whole thing was, ‘Just keep busy and eventually you’ll get out of this place.’”

  He was in a hurry to get back to Marin, which he did during the summers, and he was also in a hurry to get to make movies. While still in high school he’d planned to apply to the prestigious film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (where Lucas had gone, probably no coincidence). By the time he graduated, he had no patience for that. “The notion of doing two years of undergraduate work before I could spend $70,000 of my own money to make a film that USC would then own the copyright to just seemed ludicrous. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have to go and do all this crap that I don’t want to do for the opportunity to spend my money to make assets for the USC Film School.’ I don’t think so.”

  Fincher went straight to work. In 1980 he was seventeen years old. He moved back to Marin, into an apartment with some friends who took mushrooms, ate pot brownies, and played Dungeons and Dragons for much of the day, and into the night. Fincher read movie books and wasn’t wasting a minute. He got a job with director John Korty (for whom his sister had worked) in Mill Valley, doing visual effects and second unit camera work. His goal, however, was a job with Industrial Light and Magic, the cutting-edge, cool-defining special effects house owned by George Lucas that had spun Star Wars magic. It happened through a friend named Craig Barron, who had done matte paintings for The Empire Strikes Back. Fincher met Barron at the Berkeley Film Institute, and when ILM began to staff up for Return of the Jedi, Fincher got a job helping to shoot blue-screen elements on a motion capture stage. He was a first assistant cameraman, loading cameras, pulling the focus, learning aspects of the special effects house from the high-tech to the minutiae of matte painting.

  He didn’t like Return of the Jedi, though he got a credit on the movie. He remarked, delicately as always, “That movie sucked shit through a straw. It’s terrible.”

  After two years of working at ILM, Fincher itched to move on to filmmaking. ILM was an exciting place when George Lucas was making a film; but in between it became a workaday office where the feverish Fincher found himself working on matte photography for softball films like The Neverending Story. Not for him. He left to direct television commercials and music videos after signing with N. Lee Lacy, a commercial production house in Hollywood. Very quickly he made his name with top clients, and by 1987 Fincher had cofounded Propagand
a, the production company, with fellow directors Dominic Sena, Greg Gold, Nigel Dick, and producer Steve Golin. Fincher directed commercials for Nike, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Heineken, Pepsi, Levi’s, Converse, AT&T, and Chanel. The company was an immediate financial success. It wasn’t long before they moved from rich corporate clients to cool music superstars. Madonna became a friend when Fincher made the videos for her 1990 album The Immaculate Collection, including the landmark video for “Vogue.” He also directed music videos for Sting, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith, George Michael, Iggy Pop, the Wallflowers, Billy Idol, Steve Winwood, and the Motels.

  In 1992 Fincher’s first movie was released. It was one of the sequels to Alien, called Alien 3, for Twentieth Century Fox. It was an unmitigated disaster.

  AFTER MANY YEARS AS A SUCCESSFUL MUSIC VIDEO AND commercial director, Fincher had been offered in 1991 the chance to direct his first feature film, the third installment in the successful Alien franchise, Alien 3. But the project was fraught with problems, to say the least. Fincher was brought to the $65 million production after several years of development and production turmoil and a succession of directors, from Ridley Scott to Renny Harlin to Vincent Ward. The script had also gone through endless drafts that dramatically changed the story. Fincher ended up having to shoot the movie with the final script practically being written as it was shot—he’d get pages with dialogue marked for “prisoner number four,” with no more character development than that. Fincher felt that the studio, run by Joe Roth at the time, meddled incessantly with his vision, micromanaging the shoot. “It was a bloodbath to get made,” he later said. And then the reviews were terrible. Fincher, aged twenty-seven at the time, left the experience feeling like the studio had not supported him; he doubted he’d ever want to work there again. He considered it a place with “intense contempt for creativity.”

  There was one bright spot in Fincher’s miserable experience with Alien 3. After opening to miserable reviews, the director got one supportive call that he remembers. It was from Steven Soderbergh, who told him, “I really see what you’re trying to do with this movie. There’s some really good character work here.” Fincher always remembered that act of support.

  Of course, people’s memories in Hollywood tend to be extremely short. Since the failure of Alien 3 Fincher had made Se7en, a dark thriller about a killer terrorizing New York City with serial murders that mirror the seven deadly sins. The 1995 film—devastating, dramatic, and unrelentingly bleak—confirmed Fincher’s gift for the morbid and psychically violent, and his gift for edge-of-your-seat storytelling. Some of his friends felt that his edginess was a deeply ingrained instinct. “He’s not interested in redemptiveness,” observed Edward Norton. “He has that antihypocrisy component. He’s very uncompromising, and he has tremendous professional and personal integrity. And he’s very drawn to things that reveal the lie. I admire that.” The New Line movie was a massive, surprise hit, ultimately taking in more than $300 million at the box office worldwide. It instantly catapulted Fincher into the category of hot directors in Hollywood. And it was Fincher who had insisted on keeping the final scene, with Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in the box; New Line had chucked it, but the director insisted that the movie didn’t work without it.

  Things were not going as well in his personal life either. In the early 1990s, Fincher had married model and photographer Donya Fiorentino, who suffered from a drug and alcohol addiction. The couple had a daughter, Phelix, in 1994, but the marriage was breaking up; after the divorce, Fincher won custody of their daughter.

  BY 1996 IT WAS BILL MECHANIC, AND NOT JOE ROTH, WHO was running Fox. Josh Donen spent a considerable amount of time convincing Fincher that the studio had changed from the days of Alien 3. Mechanic had a reputation for being straight with people and for respecting the creative choices of his directors. Fincher also met Laura Ziskin and liked her. She had brought the script by Jim Uhls to her boss with a strong recommendation to make it with Fincher.

  Mechanic had read the Fight Club script and thought it was a difficult topic, though credibly done. And Fincher, with the blockbuster hit Se7en under his belt, seemed like a very good bet on risky material. Would a big studio like Fox go for this film? Producer Ross Bell was skeptical. “This is a seditious movie about blowing up people like Rupert Murdoch,” he remarked to friends. He was not optimistic.

  Fincher later said on the studio’s own DVD of the film, “I could not fathom the idea that Twentieth Century Fox would want to make this movie.”

  Fox didn’t normally make excessively violent films. It was New Line that trafficked in Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy Krueger–style fare, not the venerable, nearly century-old studio. But Mechanic, curiously, was moved by the script. “I thought this had redeeming qualities,” he said later. The bleakness and the violence, he thought, served a purpose. “I thought it talked about the roots of violence, where it came from. You could feel in it the alienation of young men who’ve lost their sense of masculinity. The idea of what a man is today is different, it’s a question of how I live in the world. To me it was a new form of existentialism: your life is what you make it. That’s what I took with me.” He also thought Fight Club could ignite a new passion for film among a new generation of moviegoers; to him, it could—in the best of circumstances—become a classic of its time, a Citizen Kane, a Raging Bull.

  At the weekly staff meeting Mechanic presided over a dozen executives from production, business affairs, marketing, and distribution, who reviewed prospective movie ideas ahead of the green-light decision. For the meeting when Fight Club was on the list, most everyone had read the coverage, if not the script. Everyone, that is, but distribution chief Tom Sherak. He asked, “How violent is it?” The answer came. “It’s violent, but nothing you haven’t seen before.” In the wake of Pulp Fiction, men punching each other out in basements didn’t seem off the charts. It was the message of the film that was more disturbing. Fight Club was an indictment of American consumer society that featured dicey elements like recipes for making homemade bombs and examples of sabotaging civilian life by having waiters pee in the caterer’s soup. Certainly no one thought, as Fincher did, that this was a comedy. But everyone knew his taste. “He’s like from the Dark Side, but he is a visionary filmmaker,” Sherak observed later. The main question was: Could the film make money? The consensus was that it could; “everyone felt we could get guys”—as opposed to gals—“to go see it,” said Sherak.

  Ziskin too saw Fight Club as something that could make an important statement about society and the role of men in it. Once she finally read the book, she sat up in bed at night and read passages to her screenwriter husband, Alvin Sargent. She found in Palahniuk’s harsh language what she considered the “shock of truth. He was someone who had captured a moment in our culture.” Later, she noted that the same year that Fight Club came out, a book called Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man was published. The book was a vast survey of men across America by a feminist writer, Susan Faludi, and chronicled the feelings of inadequacy, marginalization, and emasculation suffered by American men who felt threatened by the culture of political correctness and were confused about their purpose in society. The book, she felt, came to the same conclusion as Palahniuk’s book, with the difference that he was a diesel mechanic in Portland, Oregon, while Faludi was a journalist who had traveled the country talking to people before drawing her conclusions.

  Ziskin still didn’t really know how to make a movie out of Fight Club; much of the book was an interior monologue by a narrator. The ending, with the narrator esconced in a mental hospital, confounded her. But she wanted to try.

  The newly existentialist Mechanic saw the film as a dark little movie he could keep on his slate as long as the budget didn’t go much above $23 million or so. Ziskin agreed; the budget should be about in the mid-twenties. Ziskin figured she could draw movie stars to the smart, risky script and get them to cut their fees, as they did on independent productions that had smart
, risky scripts and good roles for actors accustomed to working with weak scripts or against green-screens shouting: “Nooooo!” and “Aaaaaargh!”

  Cheap and dirty. “That was my plan,” she said later. “It was naïve of me.”

  Fox wasn’t an independent studio, and no decent Hollywood agent was going to let them get away with paying independent studio prices.

  Chapter 6

  The Essence of Malkovich;

  Making Boogie Nights

  1996

  By all accounts, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman had a unique chemistry. Jonze was a quiet prankster with a whimsical, almost naïve sense of the world. He was small and slight with a high, nasal voice, and seemed to have retained a child’s sense of wonder along with an ability to imagine impossible situations as a matter of course. Jonze was kind of shockingly uneducated, not well read, and not well versed in the history of his craft; he was raised on dirt bikes, sports magazines, and music videos. Jonze did know about the things he liked, however; for instance, he was an expert on Star Wars, which he’d seen three hundred times. By the time he made his first feature film in the mid-1990s, he hadn’t a clue about Citizen Kane, hadn’t even heard of D. W. Griffith or Birth of a Nation. Like most of the rebel generation, Jonze had no interest in film school—or any school for that matter.

  But even by his contemporaries’ standards, Jonze’s aliteracy—ignorance of all history before Generation X, and proud of it—was pronounced and sometimes comical. On one of the first days of shooting Being John Malkovich, the temperamental, erudite Malkovich was overacting a scene, laying it on for the cameras. Jonze walked over to him and said quietly, “Do the same thing, but do a lot less of it.”