Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Malkovich looked at him and nodded. “I was getting a little Blanche there, wasn’t I?”

  Jonze stared back. “What?”

  Malkovich said, “Blanche Dubois.”

  “Who?”

  “Tennessee Williams? A Streetcar Named Desire? Blanche Dubois?”

  Jonze just stared, a blank.

  Malkovich sighed deeply and glanced at producer Steve Golin helplessly. “What did you get me into?”

  Golin laughed. “Well, at least it won’t be derivative,” he said.

  CHARLIE KAUFMAN, LIKE JONZE, WAS SHY AROUND PEOPLE HE didn’t know. But he had a much darker, more cynical outlook on the world. And unlike Jonze, Kaufman was entirely literate, a New York University graduate who was well read and well informed. In fact, by Hollywood standards, he was overeducated. He read several papers every morning. Jonze was clueless about world events. What they shared instead was a quiet understanding of one another and a kind of wordless synergy in their work. Neither liked to talk too much about their process, but they understood instinctively how to pursue it together. A few years into their collaboration, friends noted that on a transatlantic trip, Jonze slept with his head resting affectionately on Kaufman’s shoulder.

  CHARLIE KAUFMAN’S BEING JOHN MALKOVICH WAS ONE OF those scripts that had been knocking around Hollywood for years. The movie was an odd antifantasy about a puppeteer who discovers a portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich and starts selling tickets to tourists who pay two hundred dollars to take a trip inside Malkovich’s consciousness, and are then ejected onto a stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. As a concept, it seemed pretty hard to imagine on screen. “It doesn’t pitch well,” noted Tom Pollock, a veteran studio executive who was in the meetings when Malkovich had been pitched to PolyGram chief Michael Kuhn. The plot gets still odder in the second act, when the entrepreneurs selling spaces in Malkovich start having sex while inhabiting the actor’s body. Meanwhile a group of senior citizens led by a strange Dr. Lester schemes a way to eternal life by inhabiting the bodies of others, like Malkovich.

  The script was so outrageous, so wildly original, that it became famous around Hollywood. People read it, marveled at it, and put it on the pile of Things To Do As Soon As I Get Some Money. But no one ever got to around to making Being John Malkovich. It was just too strange.

  Charlie Kaufman was a quiet, curly-haired, nebbishy-looking guy from Long Island who, after going to New York University Film School, headed to Pasadena to attempt a career in the movie industry. Kaufman had anything but a Hollywood sensibility. He hated most studio movies, with their mix-and-stir formulaic plots. He hated how everybody thought they could write a blockbuster screenplay by buying a software program. Kaufman later mocked the entire screenwriting process in a script called Adaptation, in which a character based on screenplay guru Robert McKee gives one of his seminars, instructing wide-eyed would-be millionaires on the first act, second act, third act structure. In 1999 Kaufman said, in a rare show of passion, that screenwriting seminars “feel like factories for people to make a product: ‘If I learn these rules, I’ll make a million dollars.’ I think that’s how they sell these seminars, and I think it’s crap, taking advantage of people, and I don’t think we need more people learning to write that way. Why would you want to impose those limits on yourself? I hate movies that lie to me. Should I sit there thinking my life sucks because it’s not like the ones on the screen, and I’m not getting these life lessons? My life, anyone’s life, is more like a muddle, and these movies are just dangerous garbage.”

  Of course, some of that “dangerous garbage” got produced and made hundreds of millions of dollars. And that made Kaufman, not the most people-friendly of beings, even more miserable. He was not at all sure there was a place in Hollywood for a writer like him. Malkovich was a story that had started out being about a married man who fell in love with another woman. The film evolved unexpectedly—“I just have certain things that I am anxious about, and they wind up in my script,” he later explained—and after finishing it in 1994, Kaufman used it as a calling card to get himself other writing gigs in town. Sometimes it won him strange looks from uncomprehending agents, and other times people were so delighted by his original voice that he felt encouraged to do more. But Malkovich itself was not considered make-able. “It got a lot of attention and it was fun for people to read, but nobody was interested in producing it,” Kaufman remembered.

  Even the producer who finally developed the script, labored to get it financed, and then put his job on the line to get a green light never thought it would be made. At the time, Steve Golin was an executive running Propaganda Films, a small film company financed by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, owned by the Dutch electronics giant Philips. At monthly meetings at PolyGram, Golin would bring up the project. The executives sitting around the conference table from the various production companies owned by PolyGram—Interscope, Pollock’s Montecito, Working Title—would titter, and then Kuhn would say No. Pollock would belly-laugh. Golin would look sheepish, then go away for a month before bringing it up again at the following meeting.

  “I did everything I possibly could to prevent the movie from happening,” said Kuhn.

  In 1995, Kaufman was working in New York as a writer on a Fox television show, Ned and Stacey, a pre–Will and Grace show starring Debra Messing about a couple who gets married for reasons of real estate scarcity and—of course—start to fall in love. Kaufman was terribly unhappy. His agency at the time, William Morris, was only interested in paying gigs, or as Kaufman put it, “My former agent at William Morris was only interested in sure things.” Malkovich “wasn’t something he was going to put energy into, because it wasn’t going to happen.” But a friend, agent Sue Naegle, introduced Kaufman to an energetic young agent named Marty Bowen, who loved the script. “I was laughing my ass off,” Bowen recalled. He vowed to stay with the script, even as Kaufman would call, desperate to be rescued from his hack television show. One of the many producers to whom he sent the script was Sandy Stern. He called Bowen back and said: “This script is half brilliant. I want to meet Charlie Kaufman.”

  UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES BEING JOHN MALKOVICH probably wouldn’t have had a prayer of being made in 1990s Hollywood. The fact that it was made was due to an accident of timing. The movie slipped through the cracks of the Hollywood system for reasons that had nothing to do with the movie itself. What made Malkovich possible, unexpectedly, was the continuing machinations of Hollywood’s endless mergers and conglomeration. At a key moment, just a few weeks after the green light was reluctantly given in 1998, PolyGram was bought by Universal, which had in turn been bought from Japanese owner Matsushita by the Canadian beverage conglomerate the Seagram Company in 1995. The $10.4 billion merger had a huge effect on the music business, as the industry giant PolyGram and all its record labels were immediately absorbed into Universal Music Group, creating (for a moment) the largest music company in the world. Seagram was less interested in PolyGram’s movie business—it already had its own operation, Universal Studios—and for the next six months the ultimate fate of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment was left dangling. The mini-major was finally sold to Barry Diller’s USA Networks (almost half-owned by Seagram) in early 1999. Michael Kuhn, the man with the power to green-light, no longer had a job. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, including its distribution arms Gramercy Pictures and October Films, ceased to exist. A new entity arose from their ashes, USA Films (which would disappear within four years into yet another new entity, Focus).

  And amid the mergings, firings, transfers, and deal-making, everyone forgot about an odd little movie being made on the back streets of downtown Los Angeles called Being John Malkovich.

  SPIKE JONZE READ KAUFMAN’S SCRIPT IN 1996. BASED AT Propaganda, Jonze had rocketed to the top tier of the music video and commercial industry with his whimsical, often nutty ideas. His first video, which made him a star in the music world, had the Beastie Boys dress up as cops from a seventies televisio
n show for their song “Sabotage.” For Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” he had the musicians turn up in a Happy Days episode. He made dozens of videos like these. One of them was for the rock band R.E.M., in which he hired a group of Japanese rockers to lip-sync the entire song. R.E.M.’s lead singer, Michael Stipe, had begun a film company with partner Sandy Stern. They kept sending Jonze scripts they wanted to produce that they thought he might like to direct. One of them, a black comedy called Frigid and Impotent, had Drew Barrymore attached to star. Jonze didn’t like that one, or any of them. Finally Stern asked, Wasn’t there anything Jonze wanted to make? He said there was: Being John Malkovich. A friend had recently sent the script to him, and reading it was a rare moment of epiphany (of course, reading anything was a rare moment for Jonze). “It was a completely original script, different from anything I’d ever read,” he said later. He felt he’d found a kindred spirit in Charlie Kaufman. “The sense of humor and the tone was exactly what I would have wanted to do if I could write as well as Charlie could.”

  Jonze wasn’t a writer, to be sure. He was born in Bethesda, Maryland, and named Adam Spiegel. Somewhere along the path of Hollywood mythmaking Jonze became the scion of the Spiegel family fortune. It wasn’t true, but he never bothered to correct the record, or at least not very strenuously. His father, Arthur Spiegel III, was related to that Spiegel family, but was not an heir. He worked as a successful executive with a health care corporation, one of the first models for the managed care behemoths that would take over that industry in the 1990s. The filmmaker’s mother, Sandy, worked as a public relations expert in Washington, D.C.

  Jonze’s parents divorced when he was in elementary school. (Arthur Spiegel moved to New York, where he had once served in city government under Mayor John Lindsay, and remarried.) Jonze attended a public high school, Whitman High, a sprawling brick campus for two thousand students in the wooded, residential district of Bethesda. The students here were handsome, privileged, and overwhelmingly white, the sons and daughters of the yuppie class serving Washington, D.C. (Burr Steers, the upper-class writer-director of Igby Goes Down, attended the school in 1983.) Jonze seemed to wander through school in a sort of daze, and early on was diagnosed with a learning disability. He hated his studies and spent all his time fanatically devoted to riding a BMX bike. He competed in dirt-bike contests and rode ramps. It was the Reagan years, and Jonze appears in the 1985 yearbook as a diminutive, smiling young sprite, looking more like a sixth-grader than a high school sophomore. The next year he appears in the yearbook as Adam Spiegel again, mugging in a French beret in a candid photo, posing in his BMX helmet, then lined up alongside his classmates. But in the index at the back of the book Adam Spiegel is nowhere to be found—at least not under his birth name. Instead he’s become “Spike Jones,” eleventh-grader. By twelfth grade his name and likeness are nowhere in the yearbook. He’d entered Whitman school as Adam Spiegel; by the time he graduated a new identity had emerged.

  While ignoring his studies and detaching himself from an upwardly mobile career path, Jonze had already begun freelancing for a skate magazine called Freestyling when he was just seventeen years old. After his senior year Jonze was offered a slot to be an assistant editor at the Los Angeles–based magazine. He bought a camera and moved into an apartment in Torrance, Tarantino’s neighborhood, with a group of other guys working on the magazine.

  With his skateboarder friends Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman, Jonze set out to record the emerging skateboarding culture, a lifestyle that was much more urban and immediate than skate park culture. In the early 1990s the trio (they called themselves “Master Cluster”) came up with Dirt, a smart and irreverent magazine that was not long for this world. The magazine published seven issues and collaborated with ESPN2, a twenty-four-hour sports network geared toward a younger audience, before its publisher, Lang Communications, pulled the plug.

  But then came Jonze’s first skate video, Blind Video Daze, which was considered a landmark, showing skaters for who they really were, something Jonze was able to do because he actually was a part of the culture. The video was raw, and showed skaters driving around in Cadillacs, drinking booze, capturing the essence of the movement, which was about youthful rebellion. Jonze carried his camera on his skateboard and followed the person he was shooting. In the video Jonze shows the skaters riding in a 1970s low-rider car; they go drinking in Tijuana, then they drive the car off a cliff. The video makes it appear as if they all died, giving the dates of their deaths in the video credit. Even Jonze’s mother worried that the skaters had actually been killed.

  Recalled Rudy Johnson, who skated in the Blind video, “We went from Vegas to Tijuana to Huntington Beach to Hollywood. I did technical tricks, handrails, all that stuff that’s big now. We got hassled in Vegas. We were trying to skate down the Strip, in front of Caesar’s Palace. The cops started coming. We scattered and they caught us. Spike said his name was Arthur Spiegel, so I said a fake name because I didn’t know that wasn’t his fake name.” Jonze had a slightly different recollection of that time, less glamorous, more slackerlike. “It’s a lot like shooting photos,” he recalled about trying to make the videos. “For one, it’s getting guys together. I’d go to their house in Huntington Beach, pick them up. They’d be asleep. I’d spend an hour getting them up, they’d take a shower. Then somebody would be hungry…. We’d drive to Santa Ana and pick somebody up. Then Mark [Lewman] would know a spot in Alhambra and we’d go up there. Somebody would need shoelaces. So we have to stop and get shoelaces, or new grip tape. Finally we’d get to Alhambra, then we’d get kicked out after twenty minutes, before we got anything.”

  The skate videos led to the music videos, which led to Jonze’s joining Propaganda in 1993. Advertising agencies that were dying to be hip sought him out, and he didn’t let them down. Jonze’s ads for Nissan, Wrangler, and Levi’s were droll and observant comments on American society. They often featured office-geek men in spectacular car crashes. And often they had little or nothing to do with the product. One classic Jonze ad showed a man in the wake of a car crash being wheeled into surgery to the tune of “Tainted Love,” with the entire surgical team joining in the song. Another memorable ad featured a man and a dog in a recliner racing downhill through a maze of traffic, coming to a stop in front of a new Nissan truck.

  Jonze’s work often seemed imbued with a joyous innocence, however absurd the conceit. And he observed that the common elements between his early work and his later films are spareness and simplicity. “If it can be small, I try to keep it small, try to keep it as bare bones as it was when we were shooting skate videos,” he said. “In the ‘Sabotage’ video, we ran around the streets of L.A. and shot it with a handheld camera, just like I’d shoot a skate video. It’s so stripped-down that all that it’s about is me, the camera, and what’s in front of the camera…. It’s the same thing with the two movies: the more specific information you can give an actor, what they’re thinking about, [and] what they’re thinking about the person they’re reacting with, the better.”

  In retrospect it seems likely that Jonze’s off-kilter gifts didn’t shine in a traditional academic environment and that his teachers had no clue how to tap into them. Whatever the reason, reading was and remains a chore. He didn’t drive, either. The first time Jonze finished reading Malkovich, slowly, he found himself, late at night, riding in a cab. “So the first guy I told about it was a cab-driver. It was a half-hour drive from Hollywood to Santa Monica, and I was telling him about the story. And by the time I got to Santa Monica I was only about, you know, like 20 pages into it. So I spent another 20 minutes trying to finish it,” he said.

  Sandy Stern, meanwhile, had flown to New York to meet Charlie Kaufman. He felt the movie was makeable, but needed considerable reworking in the third act, which was mainly about Dr. Lester descending into devil worship. Stern was also more optimistic than most because he had met John Malkovich before and found the famously intimidating actor to be “goofier, more fun” than expect
ed. “I thought, ‘He’ll totally get this script,’” Stern said. He and Kaufman went to lunch at Mangia on Fifty-seventh Street and ordered food, which Kaufman declined to eat. “He sat there with his arms crossed, looking at me like I’m from another planet,” recalled Stern, a skinny, nervous sort with a heavy Long Island accent. “I felt like I was a stand-up act.” Later he learned that Kaufman was struck dumb that anyone in Hollywood was considering making his script at all. Lunch, uneaten, was wrapped and taken in a doggy bag.

  Given Stern’s and Stipe’s interest and Jonze’s enthusiasm, Sandy Stern went to Mike De Luca at New Line, where they had a development deal, and asked him to option the script for Jonze. There was a reason Jonze was so intent on making Malkovich: his attempts to make a feature film up to then had been wholly frustrated. In 1995 Jonze had been attached to make Harold and the Purple Crayon, a part-live-action, part-animated film for TriStar Entertainment at Sony. Jonze seemed perfect for this project. His own sensibility seemed so much like the famous wide-eyed boy with a crayon, and he’d worked for a year on the screenplay with Michael Tolkin and then David O. Russell, who became a close friend. The project had gotten as far as having completed multiple scripts, casting, and storyboards when Sony, going through one of its periodic executive reshuffles, pulled the plug. Frustrated by the studio endgame, Jonze then turned to write an independent film with some friends called We Can Do This, featuring a series of outrageous stunts. The movie was to star the Beastie Boys, the rock band that Jonze had first helped catapult to prominence in 1994. But just a week before filming was to start, the Beastie Boys bowed out, saying they didn’t feel comfortable starring in the film. Jonze was too discouraged to rewrite it for a different cast. When he came across the Malkovich script in 1996, it was his third stab in a row at a movie, and he was determined to make this one happen.