Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  If the premise of the story was familiar, the tone and the attitude of the script was wholly original. And its plot was ultimately exceedingly subversive, juxtaposing the greed of the four soldiers with the hypocrisy and cynicism of the American government led by President George H. W. Bush. In the real world, Bush had repeatedly urged Iraqis to overthrow their dictator, but refused to help them do so once they began. The American refusal to become involved, beyond ousting Saddam from Kuwait, resulted in the dictator’s staying in power and in the mass killing of tens of thousands of Kurds, Shi’ites, and others who dared oppose him. Russell claimed to have been influenced by the stylish violence of Tarantino’s movies and the harsh vitality of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights in writing Three Kings. Critics would later cite a whole host of other influences, from M*A*S*H to Catch-22 to Kelly’s Heroes to The Man Who Would Be King. But the script was astonishingly original in other ways, too; it was one of the only movies ever made in Hollywood to depict Arabs as nuanced individuals rather than as a guttural, dirty mob. Russell not only created sympathetic rebel Iraqi characters, he even allowed the Iraqis who served Saddam’s regime to show humanity—utterly unique in the annals of Hollywood’s rote demonization of Arabs. Even an Iraqi torturer gets a backstory, with his baby having been killed by an American bomb. And all of it was laced with David Russell’s uniquely bizarre humor. A Bart Simpson doll tied to the front of the protagonists’ Jeep led the way. One signature scene in the film involves an Iraqi henchman who attaches electrodes to a captured reservist. But first he asks, What’s the matter with Michael Jackson’s face?

  Once again, neither Bob Daly nor Terry Semel particularly got the script. It deviated too much from the classic action-hero sensibility. Nor were they comfortable with such a political piece of work. Politics traditionally did not do well at the box office; Three Kings was meant to be an action-adventure war film, but it was too intelligent and the story was too subtle not to reflect badly on the American government. This always made studios uncomfortable. Semel admired Russell’s writing and his voice, but warned, “Those political movies don’t always make money.”

  Di Bonaventura agreed the movie was a risk. “It was fairly singular. And controversial,” he said. But he wanted to make it. As they had with The Matrix, the studio chiefs decided to trust di Bonaventura’s passion. But they wanted a rewrite.

  In May 1998 Russell delivered one, stripped of some of the more controversial aspects of his brilliant first draft. The essence of the story was there: the map of the gold up a POW’s rear end, the horrific torture scene, jokes about the Lexus and Infiniti models, the run for the border with the Shi’ite refugees. Russell had toned down a rape scene at a key shift in the film, when the heist turns bad, and softened details such as putting clothes and handcuffs on a group of Iraqi prisoners who were originally naked. Still, George Clooney, who was to be cast in the lead, was appalled at the changes. “What the fuck?” he scrawled on his copy of the second draft, and told di Bonaventura the studio was pushing Russell to ruin the movie. A third draft moved back closer to the original, and a fourth draft was an improved version of the first draft. (All the drafts were genius compared to most Hollywood scripts, but that’s a minor point. Russell said he never intended to water down his vision and had no idea what Clooney was talking about. “He never said anything to me about that at the time,” he said.)

  Traffic

  In February 1998 Steven Soderbergh’s father suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The event was a devastating loss to the director. Peter Soderbergh had been a role model and a consistent support to Steven through his precocious youth, meteoric success, and subsequent career doldrums. The director’s father had a strain of warmth that Soderbergh himself lacked and to which he seemed ever to aspire. Especially because Soderbergh distanced himself from his eccentric mother, the loss of his father was all the more acute. There were many eulogies at the funeral. The director kept the obituary about his father printed in the local paper framed in his office in Los Angeles.

  “Although superfically our relationship was not complicated, to this day I’m not sure what his life and death mean to me,” wrote Soderbergh in the epilogue to Getting Away with It. “Mostly I am left with the nagging sensation that I did not make enough use of his vast knowledge and life experience because I was too busy trying to amass my own.”

  Even during Soderbergh’s grieving, he and producer Laura Bickford pushed ahead on Traffic without a studio. But they still needed a writer. After laboring to get someone to watch Traffik and consider doing an adaptation, suddenly Bickford found that dozens of writers were interested now that Soderbergh, the maker of Out of Sight, was involved. They got some three hundred writing samples from eager volunteers, and among them Bickford found a script by a writer named Steve Gaghan about upper-class kids from Beverly Hills who were pretending to be in a Latino gang. It rang true and reminded her of the portion of Traffik that depicted upper-crust Oxbridge students scrounging for drugs. There was a reason the script rang true; its writer, Steven Gaghan, was a former drug addict who had started using pot and cocaine while still a student at a private high school in Louisville, Kentucky. Bickford called Gaghan’s agent but hit an immediate bump. “There’s a problem,” said the agent, John Lesher. “Steve Gaghan is already writing a script about the war on drugs, for Ed Zwick.”

  What were the odds? Actually, pretty high. Hollywood had a strange, almost metaphysical tendency to spit forth near identical projects at the same time. Sometimes this was a handful of disparate producers feeling the zeitgeist simultaneously. More often it was about some studio or TV executive doing their own version of a hot topic to avoid paying for the rights to source material, or a race between competing producers to rip a current idea from the headlines and be first to the finish line. This time, though, it seemed to be a true coincidence. Zwick and his partner, Marshall Herskovitz, were one of the preeminent writer-director-producer teams in Hollywood. Zwick was a bushy-haired, stubble-bound talent in all three departments, and got the idea for a movie about the drug wars from an article he’d read in the Utne Reader about a drug bust gone awry in South Florida. With Herskovitz, Zwick had long been a powerhouse television producer, creating and producing the series Thirtysomething in the 1980s; in recent years he had turned to film, directing movies such as Courage Under Fire and The Siege. Gaghan and Zwick had sold the drug war pitch to Laura Ziskin at Fox 2000, the boutique division of Twentieth Century Fox.

  When Bickford met Gaghan for lunch in June 1998 at the popular industry deli Kate Mantolini, on Wilshire Boulevard, the writer was depressed. And strung out, though only he knew that at the time. Gaghan was still in the throes of his addiction and had been virtually unable to put anything coherent down on paper. “I am the perfect person to write this,” Gaghan said about Traffik. Gaghan had already done a year’s worth of research on the drug wars. He spent time in Washington interviewing key figures. He’d met the folks from the legalization movement. He’d read everything he could get his hands on. But then—nothing. “I haven’t written a word,” he confessed. “It’s not funny. I owe them a script.” Gaghan, who at the time was getting treatment for his addiction, hadn’t figured out a way to turn his research into a filmable story. Traffik offered him a road map. He called Zwick in a panic: What should they do?

  Looking for a way to free Gaghan from the obligation to Fox so he could write Traffic, Bickford met with Ed Zwick. (Zwick recalls that Soderbergh initiated the contact.) The producer-director, who had committed to his partner to work for a year on a new television series, Once and Again, agreed to let Gaghan write the adaptation and thus fulfill the obligation to Fox, on condition that Soderbergh would direct the project and Zwick and his partner Herskovitz would get lead position as producers on the finished product. It meant Bickford, despite her work, would have a lesser credit as producer. Bickford agreed. Ziskin agreed. The movie was set up at Fox.

  For Bickford, it was a worthwhile trade-off. “I’d
have been an idiot not to make that deal,” she said later, about reducing her own credit. “The only thing that mattered was getting the movie made. This meant it was mine and Steven’s show. Ed and Marshall had nothing to do with production of the movie. That’s what it’s about.” For Zwick it was an act of artistic generosity, giving up the work he’d done so the movie could be made. “I was giving up creative vision of that movie to Steven Soderbergh,” he later said. “I didn’t make that call lightly.” On July 7, 1998, all the parties signed on to the deal, and Soderbergh, Gaghan, and Bickford got to work in earnest.

  Steve Gaghan had the ten-hour mini-series Traffik to go by in writing the screenplay, but he had plenty of participants in the process. Soderbergh contributed constant notes, and the New York Times writer Tim Golden contributed his own comments throughout.

  Much had to be shifted and significantly pared down from the British story. One big decision was shifting the focus of the drug wars from Colombia to Mexico. Golden told them that Colombia had been the legitimate heart of the drug war when the British producers made their series, but the drug cartels, under pressure from the government and Washington, D.C., had set up shop in the more permissive and kickback-happy host of Mexico. Golden explained that once Washington had shut down Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord, the Mexican cartels found an entrée into the drug market. In the 1990s drug money had flooded into Mexico.

  They also made the painful decision to cut out one entire story line of a Pakistani opium farmer and jettisoned an early decision to replace him with a Colombian farmer who grows coco leaves; there just wasn’t enough time in a two-and-a-half-hour Hollywood movie.

  But the essence of the British series was there. Gaghan’s script was a multicharacter, multilingual, multilevel story that tried to encompass the many facets of the drug war. The closest thing to a lead character was Robert Wakefield, a conservative Ohio judge named by the president to be the national drug czar, a can-do believer determined to make a difference in the war on drugs. But Wakefield finds out that his job is far more complicated than he first believes, and his job touches close to home in a horrifying way. His own teenaged daughter, an honors student in a private school in Cleveland, Ohio, has become addicted to drugs and begins a downward descent into a world of depravity and violence in her quest to feed her addiction. This part of the story drew directly on Gaghan’s own experiences at private school in Kentucky. Gaghan had been a high-achieving prep school student, on the allstate soccer team in Kentucky, who started using pot and cocaine in high school. He was arrested many times, including once on felony drug charges when he was caught with heroin and cocaine. Gaghan hit bottom in 1997, the year before getting the Traffic assignment, and finally got help to kick his two-decade addiction as he turned to write a screenplay—about drugs.

  Another story line involved Benicio Del Toro’s character, a cop working the streets of Tijuana, where the drug cartels run rampant over the corrupt city government and military. In the first draft, the corrupt cop rises to the top of the heap as a drug kingpin. A third story line followed the bourgeois lifestyle of a narcotrafficker and his family who live in San Diego, just over the border with Mexico. The narco-trafficker is under surveillance by federal agents and arrested, but his very pregnant wife—determined to protect her life and her kids—bloodlessly steps into his role, negotiating drug deals and ordering hits on inconvenient federal witnesses. The story would be told in discrete sections, in distinct tones and colors, with the Mexican portions in Spanish, the American portions in English.

  In August 1999 Gaghan, Soderbergh, and Bickford went with Golden on a research trip to San Diego and Tijuana to see firsthand what the drug war was about. They met a whole series of people who would end up, one way or another, incorporated into the screenplay, among them a straight cop in a corrupt police force and the sister of a drug dealer who’d been kidnapped as part of a financial dispute. They met officials with the district attorney’s office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, criminal defense lawyers, prosecutors, and the retired head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Craig Chretien (they hired him to be a consultant, too). Much changed in Soderbergh’s attitude after the excursion. “I had a totally different idea about the law enforcement side of the issue going into this movie than I had coming out,” he said later. “Just about every one of the people I met on the enforcement side was committed, smart, and very hip to what was going on. And they cared, they really did. I mean they weren’t these jingoistic crew-cut jarheads so many of us think they are. They have a lot of professional pride in what they do, which is something else I wanted to get across. But they’re frustrated. They don’t make the laws, they just enforce them.” Initially disdainful of the establishment, Soderbergh questioned his own questioning.

  AMID THIS ACTIVITY, SODERBERGH SHOT THE LIMEY, A LOW-BUDGET drama about an aging ex-con (Terrence Stamp) who goes to Los Angeles to find out who murdered his daughter. And he was getting started on Erin Brockovich, the big-budget Universal movie starring Julia Roberts. Bickford and Gaghan would trek out to Barstow, California, the dusty town that stood in for the real-life place poisoned by toxic chemicals, to talk about the Traffic script with Soderbergh.

  By November 1999 there was a second draft and a budget—$25 million—handed to Twentieth Century Fox with a copy of the screenplay to read over the Thanksgiving holiday. No one was attached to play the lead, nor was it clear who that would be. More than the script, though, was the style in which Soderbergh intended to make the movie. On the heels of Brockovich, Soderbergh wanted to make a movie that was infused with the anarchic spirit of Schizopolis. He would be his own director of photography, and he wanted to use numerous experimental techniques with special filters to alter the look of the film. Soderbergh wanted to shoot with a small crew, handheld cameras, and natural light. “The whole movie should feel as though we showed up and shot and there was no design. By the end of the film the more real it feels and the less it feels like a Hollywood movie, the more the audience will connect with it,” he said.

  So, an experimental Hollywood movie. This was the point where the studio would decide whether to make it.

  Fight Club

  Fight Club, with its one-hundred-day, June-to-December schedule, quick cuts, extended fight sequences, and about 270 scenes, was a brutal shoot in more ways than one. Just about everyone who participated in the fight sequences ended up with one injury or another. Stunt doubles did large segments of the bare-knuckle fighting, but plenty of it had to be done by the actors themselves. To make bareknuckle fighting look realistic, it had to be done with actual bare knuckles. Actors and stunt doubles ended up with dislocated fingers, broken ribs, and more than a few scratches. Edward Norton got beaten up worse than most in a scene where he actually pummels himself. In the last extended fight sequence with Tyler Durden, Norton’s character got kicked and dragged across the floor. It ripped the skin off his palms, tore his fingernails, and bruised several of the actor’s ribs.

  It didn’t take long for the studio to be nervous. The rock singer Meat Loaf Aday had a small role in the film as a member of a cancer support group; there’s a scene in which he shows massive man-breasts. After the dailies were sent up to the executive offices, a note came back to Fincher: Do the breasts have to have nipples?

  The actors themselves found the making of the movie terribly fulfilling, a near spiritual experience. Norton and Pitt, whose roles were merely different aspects of the same person, found that they kept getting the same injuries. Pitt was badly bruised under his left ribs, and the same thing happened to Norton. They both hurt their thumbs. On the other hand, perhaps this was natural with a director who insisted on thirty takes of each fight scene.

  Meanwhile, the violence of the movie could hardly be kept secret on a lot where hundreds of people crisscrossed the property. Pretty soon the word got out that every day on sound stage sixteen Fincher was shooting huge, endless fistfights. At lunchtime in the commissary the stunt actors would show up we
aring black trench coats and black jeans with shaved heads, covered in fake blood. Tongues began to wag: What were they making over there?

  Earlier, one of the stunt trainers working with the actors ahead of production had been given a top-secret, eyes-only script. It was printed on red paper to make it difficult to photocopy. The veteran trainer was alarmed at what he thought was over-the-line violence in the script, the urban terrorism, the bare-knuckle fighting, the recipes for bombs. (The script language was pretty raw, too.) He showed it to Michael Cieply, a friend who at the time was a producer at Columbia Pictures. Cieply was appalled and thought it went over the line.

  Cieply was a former journalist who had many contacts in the media, and he took the unusual step of photocopying the script (there are ways to photocopy from red paper, but it takes effort) to send to several select journalists. “There was something in it that kicked my head back and made me say, ‘This is a new point in the downward spiral,’” said Cieply. “I was reading a lot of scripts at [the] time, and I’d read a fair number of fairly violent scripts.” Cieply was shocked when not a single journalist responded, something he attributed to a herdlike embrace of the Tarantino culture that Fincher inherited after Se7en. Perhaps, too, it was a generational thing. Cieply was more than a decade older than the Tarantinos and Finchers. He was as upset at the lack of outrage by journalists as by the script itself. “At the time there was kind of a hipness around the whole enterprise, particularly around the director,” Cieply later said. “‘If they’re doing this, this is the next turn of the screw, then it’s pretty cool.’”

  Chapter 9

  Casting Three Kings–George