Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  As it happened, the memo became irrelevant in just under a month. On May 20, 1998, PolyGram was sold to the Seagram Company for $10.4 billion. Michael Kuhn was instantly thrown into career limbo.

  Being John Malkovich went into production on July 29, 1998.

  Magnolia

  The effect of Boogie Nights on New Line was revolutionary. In the space of a single movie release, the studio became a place that appreciated artistic talent, that was a magnet for emerging young directors, that made movies that could compete for the Oscars.

  And overnight, Paul Thomas Anderson became a visionary director with whom every serious actor wanted to work. Not just anybody could make a serious artist out of Marky Mark. Brad Pitt called Anderson’s agent and said, “Tell Paul I’ll sweep the floors in his next movie.”

  Tom Cruise, the number-one box office star in the world, had been shooting Eyes Wide Shut in London with Stanley Kubrick when Boogie Nights came out. Kubrick screened the film at his home for himself, Cruise, and Cruise’s then wife, Nicole Kidman; they all loved the film and wanted to meet the young filmmaker. Anderson happened to be in London for a film festival, and he and agent John Lesher went to the set of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s epic two-year project that turned out to be the director’s last film. Cruise purred that he loved to work with good directors, and he’d love to work with Anderson. That was all the filmmaker needed. He returned to Los Angeles and worked on a script for eight months, then flew to William H. Macy’s cabin in Vermont to churn out most of the work in a two-week spurt. He created the part of Frank T. J. Mackey—the woman-hating, ponytailed motivational speaker for men in search of their libido—for Cruise, a part that would later win him an Oscar nomination. (Meanwhile Cruise’s performance in the Kubrick movie was universally panned and the movie ridiculed; it preceded the end of his marriage to Kidman.)

  Boogie Nights also amazed and inspired other directors trying to fight their way through the studio system. David O. Russell saw Boogie Nights and was smitten. “I thought it had amazing energy in it, amazing testosterone and all this other stuff going on,” he said. Both Anderson and Tarantino’s work, Russell thought, had “vitality and life. There was so much life in their movies.” Boogie Nights helped inspire him to make his next film, Three Kings.

  And none of this did anything to quell the raging ego of the young Anderson, who continued to bully and demand things from people as if it were his due. In the aftermath of the film, he called up music coordinator Danny Bramson, a longtime collaborator and friend of writer-director Cameron Crowe who had done the sound track to Almost Famous, looking to work with him on his next project. He left the following message: “If you can get Cameron Crowe’s dick out of your mouth, call me.”

  ALTHOUGH BOOGIE NIGHTS MADE VERY LITTLE MONEY, THE executives at New Line wanted to continue to be in business with Paul Thomas Anderson. They made a blind deal to buy his next script, which turned out to be, once Anderson wrote it, Magnolia, another multicharacter, multistory, complex, psychological drama set in the San Fernando Valley. The characters this time weren’t porn stars, but instead were average denizens of the Los Angeles urban sprawl. There was a trophy wife, a motivational speaker, a male nurse, a cop, and a desperate thirty-something single woman. Magnolia is a flower that grows in Southern California; more important, it’s the name of a main drag in the strip-mall center of the San Fernando Valley, Anderson’s home turf. After the conflict over Boogie Nights’s length—and comments by movie critics that the film was too long—Anderson had told Joanne Sellar that he intended to make a short film; but he appeared to be incapable of doing so. When he finally gave her the script, it was more than 190 pages—longer than its predecessor. And this time, Anderson—age twenty-eight—had final cut.

  Anderson understood that he was being handed a unique chance. “I was in a position I will never ever be in again,” he said later. “For that moment I was lucky, and I could get the opportunity to make a movie like Magnolia. Truly, truly. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but my argument to them was, ‘You didn’t hire me to take your trailers and test them in Albuquerque. You hired me to be cool. You didn’t hire me to make money, New Line has Mike Myers and the Austin Powers movies to make them tons of money. If I make a good movie, it will help you get at that cool niche of the world.’” And he was right.

  Once again, the ambition was epic, his imagination sweeping. Sellar thought it read more like a novel than a movie, with its depth of character and complexity of emotion. For Anderson Magnolia was hugely cathartic. Like Boogie Nights, it was an intensely personal story, dressed up as tales of random characters on a broad canvas. One very personal story was that of Earl Partridge, an elderly man dying from cancer, struggling with an unresolved relationship with his son, Frank Mackey. Anderson’s own father had died of cancer a year before the film was shot. And there was the Frank Mackey character, who was avoiding his deepest anger over rejection by his mother and father, which could be read as a reflection of Anderson’s own life. The emotions these characters brought so intensely to the screen were Anderson’s—a love for his father and a simultaneous resentment, a desire for love and acceptance, denial and anger in their place. John C. Reilly played a sensitive cop character, Anderson as an idealist and a humanist. And William H. Macy played a gay, former game-show whiz-kid, a subject Anderson knew about from working as an assistant on game shows as a teenager. “I see Paul in all the characters,” observed Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played a touchingly compassionate nurse caring for the dying Jason Robards. “The selfish Paul, the caretaking Paul, the little-kid Paul, the mature Paul—he is all those things at a given time, and I see him telling a story about all aspects of himself.” Anderson said himself later of the story, “I consider Magnolia a kind of beautiful accident. It gets me. I put my heart—every embarrassing thing that I wanted to say—in Magnolia.”

  Anderson’s can’t-be-denied enthusiasm seduced those around him into falling in love with the story in the same way he seduced them into Boogie Nights. One evening the director sat around his Hollywood apartment with his girlfriend, Fiona Apple, and editor Dylan Tichenor, around the time he was recording the commentary for the DVD release of Boogie Nights.

  Tichenor asked him how the writing was coming for his next film, and Anderson said it was going well. When he and Apple asked for a snippet from the script, Anderson jumped up and put on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One,” then proceeded to describe, scene by scene, the eight opening minutes of the story, introducing each character in their defining moment of crisis. It was a mesmerizing performance; both Apple and Tichenor had tears in their eyes. Aimee Mann turned out to be a key inspiration to the filmmaker, who listened to her music while he wrote Magnolia. He ended up stealing some of her lyrics directly as dialogue in the film: “Now that I’ve met you would you object to never seeing each other again?” from her song “Deathly.” In another scene, the characters burst into her plaintive song “Wise Up,” with the words “It’s not going to stop.”

  Mike De Luca, the director’s guardian angel at New Line, had also been waiting eagerly to see what Anderson would write; the director brought the finished script over to his house, where the executive read it immediately and signed on. De Luca recognized that the film was hugely ambitious and characteristically odd. It included a lengthy opening sequence about freak occurrences, played mainly in fast-forward, that ostensibly had nothing to do with the rest of the three-hour film; it included a scene in which all of the characters, in their own lives, break into song. De Luca bought it all. (Though the studio had made a blind deal for the script, they were under no obligation to make it.)

  Anderson was very direct: “The script is 190 pages. The movie is three hours. This is the movie I want to make.” De Luca didn’t flinch. “I thought it would be an important film,” he recalled. To him, it seemed to be about the sins of parents being revisited on their children. It made him think of his own family relationships. He and Anderson talked about this,
and about redemption, about leaving the wreckage of the past behind and finding a better life. Anderson didn’t intend the movie to be big, he always insisted. “I wanted to make something that was very intimate and small-scale, and I thought that I would do it very, very quickly,” he explained later. “It kept blossoming. And I got to the point where it’s still a very intimate movie, but I realized I had so many actors I wanted to write for that the form started to come more from them.” Of course, he couldn’t resist the grand gesture. “I thought it would be really interesting to put this epic spin on topics that don’t necessarily get the epic treatment, which is usually reserved for war movies or political topics. But the thing I know as big and emotional are these real intimate everyday moments, like losing your car keys, for example. You could start with something like that and go anywhere.”

  The themes were, once again, both grand and prosaic, but they also included some moments of inspired surrealism, as in the signature scene when a thudding hailstorm of frogs begins to fall on all the characters in their separate moments of crisis. Anderson first got the idea from a specialist about the supernatural, Charles Fort, who wrote about freak coincidences in his paper, the Fortean Times, and had coined the term UFO. Anderson heard about Charles Fort from musician and friend Michael Penn, Sean’s brother, and used some of Fort’s coincidences in the prologue to the film. When he heard about the frogs, he thought they could represent a kind of sign in the story, or a warning. “There are certain moments in your life when things are so fucked-up and so confused that someone can say to you, ‘It’s raining frogs,’ and that makes sense,” Anderson said. But he says he wrote the scene without even thinking about the obvious biblical reference to the ten plagues. (Later he inserted a reference to the biblical passage of frogs raining down on Egypt earlier in the film: Exodus 8:2. Perhaps he expected it to become a cult classic to be watched repeatedly, because the average viewer rarely caught it.)

  Frogs quickly became an obsession for Anderson. It was all he could talk about, even after he landed Tom Cruise for one of the key roles. One day Anderson ran into marketing president Mitch Goldman at the studio offices and told him about the frogs. He said he wanted the teaser-trailer for the movie to be the frogs. The marketing veteran reeled slightly. In a movie starring Tom Cruise, he said gently, the frogs might not do an optimal job of selling the movie. Anderson, typically, was unmoved. When he told Philip Baker Hall about the sequence, Hall nodded in recognition. It turned out he had once driven through an actual rain of frogs in Switzerland. Anderson recalled Hall’s story; “It was really foggy and the mountain road was covered in ice. The frogs falling was not the thing that freaked him out. What freaked him out was that his car could not get any traction, and he was afraid he was going to fall off the mountain.” Sellar, meanwhile, racked her brains wondering how they’d pull off a scene with thousands of frogs falling from the sky, worrying it could ruin the movie if done poorly. Eventually $5 million was budgeted just for the frogs: real frogs, latex frogs, and hundreds of digital ones. On the day of the shoot, on location in the Valley, everyone was somewhat stunned by the surrealism; Bill Macy and John C. Reilly did their scene in which they run from a low-rent furniture store as crew members hurled frogs at them from cranes. “It was a completely crazy thing to be doing on a Thursday night, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, off Reseda Boulevard,” recalled Sellar.

  Viewers did not always get the significance of the frogs. Anderson always said they were meant to be tied to the prologue as an exploration of a freak occurrence that took place in the world. For him, they remained the heart of the movie, and he put it on the poster.

  THIS TIME BOB SHAYE AND MICHAEL LYNNE, IF LESS PASSIONATE than De Luca, were quickly won over to making Magnolia, the main reason being that Anderson had written a key role for Tom Cruise, and Cruise had said yes. Bob Shaye knew this movie might not make much money, but he’d come to take the measure of having an artist in the house. In his mind he was doing with Paul Thomas Anderson what Warner Brothers chieftains Bob Daly and Terry Semel had done with Stanley Kubrick for decades, backing all his films because they believed in his talent, while still making big, Hollywood, star-driven movies most of the time. Kubrick’s films were an exception they rarely made in their starsystem, formulaic way of running Warner Brothers, but it held to the end of Kubrick’s career. Even the super-sensitive Anderson felt the change in Shaye. The entire green-light process took just a few weeks, though Shaye imposed two conditions: that the movie not go over three hours, and Tom Cruise had to be in the cast. (The former went by the wayside; the latter held.) “New Line wanted to keep Paul in the fold,” recalled Sellar. “Magnolia was a big risk for them.”

  As to why Cruise said yes to such a high-wire act—Mackey was an odious character who oozed sexism and urged the exploitation of women—that was a mystery to everyone, including Anderson. Sellar was amazed he took the role.

  The day it happened, it was front-page news in Variety. “NL Books Cruise: Actor joins ensemble in Anderson pic,” read the headline. Bumble Ward, Anderson’s longtime publicist, framed the October 28, 1998, story by Dan Cox and put it on her wall. “It was a big day for my little Paul,” she said.

  INITIALLY THE MAGNOLIA BUDGET WAS MEANT TO BE $20 million, a moderate amount for a moderate film. But after casting Tom Cruise, who commanded $20 million per role, that had to change. To play the role (which required him to work for only three weeks), Cruise would have to cut his fee, and he did, to $7 million plus a back-end participation in profits (which were not forthcoming). Still, this pushed up the budget significantly, to $35 million. In the end the film cost about $42 million.

  The other roles had been virtually cast during the writing process. Anderson had written the role of Quiz Kid Donnie Smith for pal William H. Macy, trophy wife Linda Partridge for Julianne Moore, kind cop Jim Kurring for buddy John C. Reilly. Veteran actor Jason Robards happened to be recovering from a near-death staph infection during which he had fallen into a coma and lost forty-six pounds. It was pure coincidence that Anderson tapped him for the role of the dying Earl Partridge. Robards, still underweight and weakened, felt the opportunity was fateful. “I just went through the experience where the life-or-death thing for nine weeks was unknown,” he said. “They somehow kept me alive. It was somehow prophetic that I’d be asked to do a guy going out in life. A parent. My daughter read it and said, ‘Isn’t this strange. This is something you can’t turn down.’ … My wife felt the same. But it was shocking when you first read it.” Magnolia turned out to be Robards’s last feature film; he died in December 2000.

  Anderson and Cruise spent many days together before shooting began, getting to know each other. The Mackey character had been based on a real-life conversation between two guys in a recording studio, relayed to Anderson by a third party. “A friend of mine was teaching a class on audio-recording engineering. He had two students in the class that he thought were particularly interesting. One afternoon he was going to lunch and he noticed these two guys talking in the recording studio. There was an open mike out there, and he recorded a [tape] of these two guys talking,” Anderson explained. “A couple of years after that he found this unlabeled [tape] and what he heard blew his mind. He played it for me, and essentially what happened was you heard these two guys talking about women and how you’ve got to ‘respect the cock and tame the cunt.’” Anderson did some research on the topic and found there actually was a motivational course on how to pick up women using hypnotism and subliminal language techniques (although the subliminal part of “tame the cunt” is unclear). Said Anderson about the character, “I just went hog-wild.”

  So did Cruise, apparently. Far from being shy about playing such a misogynistic character, Cruise frequently had to be told by Anderson to tone it down: not to use a whip, for example, which Cruise wanted as a prop, and to hold back the emotion in a key scene of final reconciliation with Jason Robards. “I would just have to calm him down and remind him to keep it simple so
metimes,” said Anderson. Though not always. In a scene where Cruise is coming offstage from a seminar he’s just taught to meet a female interviewer who will skewer him on very personal questions, Cruise suggested, “I want to intimidate her, so what if I change my shirt?” Anderson upped the ante. “What if you change your pants too, hotshot?” And Cruise did.

  Fight Club

  With the Fight Club budget climbing, Fox had decided it needed some kind of financial reassurance that if the movie failed, they wouldn’t be left alone to face the consequences. Mechanic had brought in producer Arnon Milchan and his company, New Regency, who agreed to put up $25 million, half of the production budget. In addition to cutting his fee, Fincher would have to relinquish final cut.

  But the budget continued to climb past $60 million, until it finally stood at $67 million. And this was for a bleak story about men in basements beating each other bloody as they plot the end of civilization. Brad Pitt with a face pounded into hamburger. Great.

  About four weeks before production was set to start, both the Fox bosses and Arnon Milchan began to panic. Milchan was sent on an errand to get Fincher to scale the movie back from $67 million to $62 million. Milchan invited Fincher to dinner at Les Deux Cafés, a French restaurant in Hollywood, near the Egyptian Theater. They ordered a couple of glasses of wine and Milchan—tall, handsome, tan, smooth as they come—put an arm around Fincher and said, “David, I’m going to tell you something and I know it’s not what you want to hear, but I think we’re friends, and I think I can explain something that you may not have considered.”