Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  He paused before continuing. “Rupert Murdoch owns a baseball team, and he doesn’t even like baseball,” he explained. “He owns the Dodgers, and he doesn’t care at all about baseball. He looks at it as an asset. This is something that can make money for him. And he looks at this movie as either an asset, or a bad investment. You are walking on a very, very thin line here because you have taken a risky proposition and you’ve moved it over into becoming this ridiculously risky proposition. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t care about movies, he doesn’t own a movie studio because he likes movies. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re going to have to either cut $5 million out of this budget, or they’re probably not going to make the movie.”

  Fincher thought about this for a while before responding. “Arnon, I completely understand what you’re saying. It makes all the sense in the world to me. I understand Rupert’s position, too. But my position is as follows: I’m not making this movie for people who don’t like movies. There are kids out there who go and wait in the sun and spend whatever allowance money they can to go to a Dodgers game, or to be outside the stadium when someone hits a home run. And they go there with their gloves that are oiled and wrapped with twine and run over by their parents’ station wagons. And they are there to catch a fly ball because they love baseball. And that’s who I’m making this movie for.”

  Fincher took a beat before concluding. “I can’t help you when it comes to cutting this number down, because it’s not going to come down. The budget is what it is. This is what we’re going to spend. If you guys don’t want to make the movie I completely respect that.”

  Essentially Fincher wanted to make the movie he wanted to make or to pass on the whole thing. He had cut his fee under pressure, but he had hit his own personal wall. This was also Fincher’s way of dealing with the world, a maximalist sort of approach: Take me or leave me. My way or the highway. Usually people ended up doing things his way, because more often than not his way worked. To Fincher it was about much more than cutting $5 million, it was about what would get lost with that cut, the margin that set the movie apart from the movie that another director-for-hire would have made. “That $5 million is not going to come from Eastman Kodak, it’s not going to come from Teamsters—it’s going to come from visual effects, it’s going to come from sets, from costumes, it’s going to come right off the screen. It’s going to come from the moments they want in the fucking trailer,” he said later. To him, they were asking him to take out the stuff that made the movie worthwhile. If they wanted the movie so badly, he thought, why don’t they take out the studio overhead and executives’ salaries charged to the budget?

  That wasn’t going to happen. Arnon Milchan wasn’t willing to put up more than half of the budget, and Fox wouldn’t pay more than half of $62 million. The dinner ended in a stalemate, though a cordial one. Fincher understood Milchan’s position, and Milchan understood Fincher’s. But the producer declined to finance the film under those conditions.

  Milchan went back to Mechanic and told him, “I’m out. I can’t make the movie.”

  Now it was Mechanic’s call. The chairman of Twentieth Century Fox had somehow become emotionally connected to this project, but as the budgets kept landing on his desk, he wondered, “What the fuck happened?” After Milchan backed out, Mechanic took the script to his boss, Peter Chernin. At a tense meeting, Chernin said he thought the movie was dicey at that price, a high risk. He was against moving forward with the production.

  But Mechanic, in typical form, would not back down. He argued that having Brad Pitt in the lead role made the movie more expensive, certainly, but also more commercial. Brad Pitt’s audience was female, so that would be a good way to draw women to the picture. Chernin was not convinced. “This is crazy,” he told Mechanic. “It’s a risk.” Essentially he was saying no.

  Mechanic argued back. To him the movie was more confrontational than actually violent. Hollywood made movies all the time in which thousands of people were mowed down, but in Fight Club only one person dies. He acknowledged that it was disturbing because of the intimacy of the violence and because Fincher would probably shoot it graphically, but this could be an important film. It was the kind of movie Bill Mechanic was in the movie business to make. He wasn’t willing to back down. He would quit first. “I said if I couldn’t make the movie, I wouldn’t stay in the job,” the executive recalled. “I said he should let me make my mistakes, or I wasn’t interested in the job.”

  Later Mechanic recognized that he had put himself on the line for this film. “I wasn’t looking for approval. I was going against the grain,” he said. “I wasn’t following the orders my bosses would have liked me to follow.”

  There was an ironic postscript to the Fight Club budgeting process. As shooting began, Mechanic began sending tapes of the dailies to Milchan. After three weeks of looking at Fincher’s daily footage, Milchan called Mechanic and said, “Okay, I’ll take half of this.” Milchan and Fincher remained on good terms throughout the production and release of Fight Club, despite the poor box office performance of the film. Every so often he’d whine to Fincher about how much money he’d lost on Fight Club. Fincher would respond, “Dude—I have no sympathy for you. Ten years from now you’ll still be picking up chicks saying, ‘You know, I was the producer of Fight Club.”

  Chapter 8

  Shooting the Real Malkovich;

  Warner Brothers Anoints Three Kings;

  Getting Traffic Out of a Jam

  1998

  During the summer of 1998 the entertainment trade press was rife with speculation about what would happen to PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, the movie division of PolyGram. Just after PolyGram was sold, Variety wrote on May 25, 1998: “Calls are starting to grow for some sort of European rescue of PolyGram’s film division to prevent it from vanishing or coming under the control of yet another American company.” Then in August, the trade paper wrote: “Bidders line up for PolyGram.” And a month later, in mid-September: “PolyGram execs brace for final auction bids.”

  The speculation was that PolyGram’s sale would end the production of the independent-style films that the studio made. PolyGram had been formed with a decentralized system of in-house production companies like Working Title and Interscope, which most believed would be crushed in one more corporate takeover in Hollywood.

  Ultimately PolyGram’s approach did vanish. But in the meantime it was largely because of PolyGram’s impending sale that a quirky film like Being John Malkovich continued in production without serious interference. Initially Polygram studio chief Michael Kuhn was busy trying to dress up the film unit for sale to someone who wouldn’t just pillage its film library and shut down the rest of the company. He was more nervous than ever about Malkovich; he needed all his movies to look profitable to investors. And when he first saw the dailies, Kuhn was perplexed. The film was dark, using lots of natural light on real-life locations. The set looked dingy, and so did the actors. Kuhn was vexed and the pressure continued on producer Steve Golin.

  The producer would come down to the set and plead with Jonze and his cinematographer, Lance Acord, to make the film look a little more conventional. “You’ve gotta see what I’m up against,” he’d plead. “These people are freaked out. You’ve gotta somehow light this thing more.” But Jonze resisted. Said Acord, “There was a point early on in the film where I worried for my job.” Much of the time he was lighting the set with just table lamps, not using any movie lights at all (a technique that directors like Soderbergh started to use). Jonze was approaching the film more like a documentary. He wanted it to look like one of those BBC films of a working-class family in the East End. As for Cameron Diaz, she was unrecognizable. Where was that sexy, blond Something About Mary man-magnet? Golin would show executives dailies and they’d turn and say, confused: “I thought Cameron Diaz was in this scene.” Golin would say: “She is. That’s Cameron Diaz.” Other times visitors would come to the set and sit down next to the deglamorized actress at lunch an
d have no idea it was her.

  Kuhn didn’t exactly get a confidence boost when he went to the Toronto Film Festival in September 1998. The festival was stymied by an airline strike in Canada, and he and a group of others chartered a plane back to Los Angeles. Cameron Diaz happened to be on the plane, and—forgetting she was in Malkovich (he was preoccupied)—he asked her what she was doing these days. “I’m in this crazy movie, Being John Malkovich,” she said. Kuhn sighed: “Yeah. I’m paying for that.” Diaz roared with laughter. “You are? No way!” Kuhn felt himself shrink inside; even the cast of the movie thought it was insane.

  Eventually the executive became preoccupied with more critical matters. PolyGram’s worldwide CEO, Alain Levy, had already been fired by June 1998, before the movie even began production. As the year drew to a close, it seemed less and less likely that Kuhn would find a buyer for PolyGram’s film unit. In early 1999 Kuhn lost his job when the studio was bought up by USA Networks and folded into a new movie unit, USA Films. Malkovich became the orphaned property of Universal Studios, and was able to slide by. After months of pressure from a studio parent, all of a sudden it was like the adults had gone out of town and left the kids on their own. “It was great,” said Golin. “Nobody said anything. Nobody cared what we did. Nobody paid any attention, and we finished the movie.”

  Eventually, months later, Vince Landay got a call on the sound mixing stage. A voice came down the line: “Hi, my name is Kevin Misher. I’m from Universal. I’m the executive on your movie.” It was the first studio executive they’d heard from in months.

  WITH ALL THIS GOING ON, JONZE SHOT THE MOVIE MORE OR less the way he’d done dozens of music videos. He used the same crew he’d worked with for eight years: cinematographer Lance Acord, production designer K. K. Barrett, costume designer Casey Storm, producer Vince Landay, and editor Eric Zumbrunnen. Everyone got to weigh in on the process, including Charlie Kaufman.

  One of the early oddities in the Malkovich script is the seven-and-a-half floor, where Craig goes looking for Malkovich’s portal. (In the original script Kaufman had everything scaled to three-quarter size, including the furniture, but he and Jonze eventually changed it so that only the ceiling was lowered.) Though Propaganda executives had suggested he build a set—it would have made life a lot easier for the crew—Jonze decided not to; he wanted the look and feel of a real building. He sent Landay and production designers to scour the downtown area for a building with a half floor. (Good luck.) They turned up empty-handed but eventually found a building with an empty floor, where they lowered the ceiling. Everyone on the movie had the strange experience of coming to the shoot at a regular office building, taking the elevator to the twelfth floor, then getting off and ducking their way into Jonze’s strange world. After several days of shooting there, everyone had a condition they called “the bendovers,” aching backs from bending over all day. Cast and crew developed their own techniques for dealing with the problem; some people squatted down and walked like ducks. Others crawled on all fours. John Cusack developed a habit of poking out an acoustic ceiling panel whenever he could take a break and stand up. To everybody else he looked like a man with his shoulders stuck through the ceiling. You’d see people having conversations like this, poked through the ceiling. Eventually the producers had to bring in a chiropractor to deal with the back problems.

  (When Jonze made Adaptation, there’s a scene in which Nicolas Cage, playing Charlie Kaufman, visits the set of Malkovich while he’s struggling to adapt The Orchid Thief. In re-creating the Malkovich scene, Jonze shows the seven-and-a-half floor as a set on a sound stage. It was a movie version of what a set on a movie might be, but not how it was in real life: Jonze was playing another prank.)

  In this atmosphere, John Malkovich qualified as the closest thing to an adult. He showed up somewhere about five weeks into the shoot, temporarily throwing things into disarray. Up to then, he’d seemed like an abstract concept; people on set were used to throwing around his name with a “Malkovich this, Malkovich is doing that.” When the actor visited for the first time, a palapable hush fell over the production.

  “I think we all felt busted, like—Oh my God,” said Jonze. “Up until then we’d just been saying, ‘So Malkovich….’ He had just become a concept in the movie and a character in the movie. We’re talking about Malkovich like he’s ours, like we own him. And all of a sudden he showed up on the set. …There were days like that where it sort of hit you like, ‘Wow, this is strange.’”

  Still, the whole production was nothing if not strange. Sometimes you’d hear Jonze speaking quietly to Malkovich on set. “I don’t really think Malkovich would do it that way….”

  A few days later Malkovich returned to the set, this time for work. They were shooting a dream sequence, when John Malkovich appears everywhere. Sixty extras were made up to look like the actor, complete with Malkovich face masks. Also, one of the crew photocopied a glossy head shot of Malkovich and made masks for everyone on the crew to wear. When the actor showed up, everyone everywhere was Malkovich. The actor took it in stride, though he has a reputation for being a diva. He did indeed have a raging temper and suffered no fools, including directors. Golin warned Jonze: Don’t keep Malkovich waiting. Get him to work, and get him off the set. “He throws a shit fit. That’s what he does all the time,” said Golin. “He’s a screamer.” Jonze managed to minimize most of these personality issues, mainly by ignoring them. Unlike many directors, Jonze didn’t work on nervous energy; he liked to create an atmosphere that was far more relaxed. (One of Malkovich’s hissy fits was filmed by behind-the-scenes documentarian Lance Bangs on the set, and used by Jonze, to hilarious effect, in Adaptation. Malkovich was good-natured enough about his temper to let Jonze use it.) It helped that Malkovich genuinely loved the ethos of the script. “I think it’s about acting—opening the door into the mind of someone else, and how, escaping your own mind for fifteen minutes, you see the beauty and fascination and eroticism even in the most boring things,” he said later. “I think it’s about the need to escape yourself for fifteen minutes that everyone feels. But what it’s really about is something more sinister. It’s the idea that we now lead virtual lives. We live our joys and sorrows and foibles through the lives of public people. It’s about the end of art. Because art has to take its cue from life.”

  A lot of the discussions during production seemed entirely surreal. The tunnel into Malkovich’s brain was described in the script as a “pulsating, pink, gelatinous, membranous tunnel.” Jonze struggled with it, and finally decided against it. Production designer K. K. Barrett described his conversations with Jonze about the tunnel thus: “You open the door and where are you? You’re in a tunnel that leads somewhere. You’re surrounded on all sides, none of the sides are man-made. “You’re curious, there’s a bit of light at the end, you feel your way along, the tunnel has a soft dirt floor. Then it gets mucky. You say, ‘Should I go on?’ At that point the door slams behind you, the wind comes along and you land in New Jersey.” Jonze decided to keep the portal more like something you’d find if exploring in an attic, or underground. “It would have been another leap of faith,” said Barrett. “It became a problem to solve: What does it [the tunnel] imply? Do we want it back-lit, soft? Somehow Spike and I arrived at dirt. It was equally organic to the membranous tunnel and more plausible that someone would go in if it was dirt. And why not have dirt in someone’s head? It may seem absurd to listen to that conversation, but it seemed very commonplace to me.”

  That approach was ultimately what made the film so original and singular, many felt, rooting it—exactly as Jonze had first described it—in the real world. “If Terry Gilliam had made this, he’d have gone the opposite way. Or if the Farrelly brothers had made it, there would be magical moments,” said Lance Acord, the cinematographer. “This became an ensemble piece set in the real world. What Spike wanted to do, and it was a stroke of genius in a way, was he wanted the film to look as everyday and realistic as possible. It didn’t
matter how fantastic and crazy the script was. It should be completely believable. And the eccentricities and quirks should be played as straight as possible.”

  Early in the shoot the pace and atmosphere was low-key; Kaufman came frequently to the set, as did Sofia Coppola, who was working on her first film, The Virgin Suicides. Jonze’s younger brother Sam was a production assistant who challenged crew and cast members to regular Ping-Pong tournaments. The table was carted from one location to another. But the pace of filming grew more and more frantic as the crew fell behind on its tight, forty-day schedule. Almost every day they kept trying to squeeze in time to shoot the scenes of people falling through the portal, a twelve-foot-long tunnel, six feet in diameter. The crew kept carting the tunnel from one location to another, dismantling it, and reassembling the thing, hoping there’d be time to get to it. They carted it to six different locations before the portal scenes were finally shot.

  That was typical of the low-tech approach to production. Other directors would probably have used computer graphics to achieve the effect of seeing out of Malkovich’s eyes, for example. At first they tried to achieve that with a high-definition camera mounted to a pair of glasses, worn on the cinematographer’s head. The plan was to stabilize the picture in postproduction. But this was too elaborate for Jonze, who kept insisting on keeping things simple. Instead Acord ended up strapping a camera to a life preserver and mounting it on his shoulder. This kept his hands free as he rolled film, so he could put them in view of the camera, giving the impression that they were Malkovich’s. To get the shape of Malkovich’s eye, they painted an oval-shaped filter over a wide lens.