Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  For whatever reason—pique, resentment—Clooney continued to talk about the fight with friends and acquaintances in the clannish Hollywood community. With Russell unknown to many, the popular Clooney’s comments quickly hardened into fact: Russell was a “weirdo” and unpredictable. The impression was supported at Warners, whose executives were alarmed to hear that their director had been in a fistfight with their star. Clooney insists that it was Russell who first started talking publicly about the dispute; it is hard to trace such matters. For a long time Russell refused to publicly respond to the jibes. But if anything, Clooney got more peeved over time, bringing it up yet again in a cover story with Vanity Fair magazine in October 2003. “I would not stand for him humiliating and yelling and screaming at crew members, who weren’t allowed to defend themselves,” he told Ned Zeman five years after the fact. “I don’t believe in it, and it makes me crazy. So my job was then to humiliate the people who were doing the humiliating.” Russell’s response: “George Clooney can suck my dick.” Russell’s camp—there were now two camps—was convinced it was Clooney who was feeding the controversy. They said the actor’s persistence in hanging on to the dispute was ridiculous. “It doesn’t reflect well on him. It’s like some stupid sandbox quarrel,” said Goodman, who noted wryly that Clooney didn’t mind borrowing some of Russell’s filmmaking techniques when he directed his first film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. He added, “There was way too much pressure on David to ‘perform’ in the classic studio sense—‘Don’t fuck this up. You better do good on this.’ We producers should have done a better job protecting David so he could do his job.”

  Clooney insists that he was not the one picking this scab, but that he wouldn’t stand for Russell not admitting to his misbehavior: “Ultimately he’s a good director, but I’m not sure what that means,” said the actor in 2004.

  AFTER CLOONEY HAD HIS SAY, RUSSELL THEN GOT another blow: John Ridley scored a long interview in Entertainment Weekly (the same issue), in which he expounded on writing Spoils of War as an experiment in churning something out quickly. Ridley boasted, “I came up with the most commercially and visually interesting story I could think of. It worked. I wrote it in seven days and sold it in eighteen.” Ridley talked about how wounded he was to be sidelined by Russell in Three Kings. “This is a guy who every step of the way has tried to grab credit,” Ridley said. “I never heard a word while he was shooting the movie. Never saw any of the script changes.” The journalist who wrote the article gave Russell a perfunctory chance to respond; he countered that Ridley was blocking publication of the Three Kings screenplay “because he’s embarrassed by how little of his screenplay ended up in my movie.”

  Russell was right, which any reading of the scripts will reflect. Ridley was a television writer who’d started on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and in 1997 had written and directed a regrettable bomb, Cold Around the Heart. Even Clooney acknowledged that Ridley’s script bore no resemblance to Russell’s; he’d read Spoils of War and passed the first time around. (Years later, Clooney was playing cards in a backroom of a Las Vegas bar while shooting the Soderbergh film Ocean’s Eleven. A manager came back to say that someone at the front door said he’d written Three Kings and wanted to come back and say hello. Clooney said, “If it’s David Russell, he probably doesn’t want to see me, and if it’s John Ridley, he didn’t write Three Kings.”) Indeed, there is little in Ridley’s work before or since that suggests the unusual sensibility of Three Kings. Ridley told the magazine, “Russell may have rewritten it word for word. But it’s still my story.” So why was the writer whining? He had the “story by” credit from the start. Clearly Russell wasn’t too adept at fighting the public relations battle.

  The coup de grâce came when Russell, angered that he didn’t know about the article in advance and that his side of the story became an afterthought, called his publicist, Bumble Ward, and demanded to know what happened. It turned out there was good reason: Ward was also representing John Ridley. Russell and Ward parted ways after that. (The publicist insists that she let Russell go. She considered him an oddity, having once caught Russell lying on the floor, staring up her skirt during a photo shoot. She was perplexed when he shouted on another occasion that she cared more about her own children than her director clients. Russell hasn’t worked with a personal publicist since.)

  THE CLOONEY MATTER HAD MUCH BROADER REPERCUSSIONS, and not just for the director and the movie star. Hollywood, particularly young Hollywood, is a close-knit universe of personal acquaintances and working relationships. You were never more than one or two people removed from someone else. The fight, the media attention, and the subsequent gossiping set off a feud between the director and the star that was only further stoked by Clooney’s growing friendship and partnership with Steven Soderbergh, a longtime rival of Russell’s. That Clooney and Russell should not be friends was somehow understandable. But it was odd, and more than a bit of a shame, to see two of the leading filmmakers of their generation trash each other. Russell would run down Soderbergh to his friends, saying his movies lacked humanity. Soderbergh, while pretending to be above it all, would get in the occasional well-placed dig. When courting actors at the Cannes Film Festival who were committing to a Russell project, Soderbergh made snide remarks about the director’s moodiness and odd personality. More significant, when Soderbergh and several other rebel directors attempted to create an independent directorial company in mid-2001 backed by USA Studios, it included Spike Jonze and Alexander Payne, two close friends of Russell. But Soderbergh didn’t want Russell in the club. Jonze in particular found this offensive, because he was on the set when the dispute broke out with Clooney and thought both sides had been responsible. Similarly the fight caused discomfort for Mark Wahlberg, a close friend of both Russell and Clooney.

  The rivalry between Russell and Soderbergh went back to the 1980s, when both were still young and struggling. Four years younger than Russell, Soderbergh rose to prominence early with sex, lies, and videotape, but they both traveled in the same indie film circles and knew the same people. Producer Nancy Tenenbaum was a friend and mentor to both, and found it ultimately impossible to maintain the dual relationships. “For two years David spent every weekend at my house,” said Tenenbaum, who was also a close friend of Russell’s wife, Janet Grillo. “That was what pulled our friendship apart—he was jealous of my friendship with Steven Soderbergh.”

  Tenenbaum met Soderbergh in 1987 after reading sex, lies, and videotape. She recalled, “We were both kids. He was kind of awkward, extremely charming. He was hysterically funny, with a dry sense of humor. I can remember picking him up at the airport with my husband, and someone was whistling. He said, ‘Who is that whistling off tune?’ I thought, ‘He’s so observant, I better be on guard.’ He calls you on everything; he doesn’t let anything go by.”

  Russell was different, often living on another plane. “He’s very scary, very smart,” says Tenenbaum. “He couldn’t be more different than Steven. David totally lets you into his neuroses. No matter how fucked-up you feel, he feels so much more fucked-up that you can totally be yourself. That’s an extraodinary trait. He makes you feel like you’re the most normal human being out there.” But she and Russell would fight. And both young directors vied for her affections. Ultimately Tenenbaum stayed to work with Soderbergh on sex, lies, and videotape, and drifted from Russell. She and Russell were a complicated pair. “Steven characterized our relationship as reminding him of a Seinfeld episode. Like Elaine Benes and George Costanza,” said Tenenbaum. That was kinder than he’d be in subsequent years.

  As for Russell, he saw Soderbergh as someone who aimed for the middle and who aimed to please. Most creative figures in Hollywood saw Soderbergh as a risk-taker and a daring artist, but Russell was one of the few who ventured to say otherwise. “I don’t think he has a soul,” Russell would tell friends. “I don’t think he’s a filmmaker who makes films from his heart, that are personal.”

  In truth, their
sensibilities were just different. Russell wanted to be the next Luis Buñuel. Steven Soderbergh wanted to be the next Sydney Pollack. Soderbergh wanted to shoot movies all the time, constantly, to aim and shoot and miss, then aim and shoot and hit. Russell took his time. He wanted to think and hone and make the exact, precise movie he had in his head, deliberately.

  There was ample room for both in a creatively impoverished Hollywood. Sadly, neither of them seemed to think so.

  Chapter 10

  1999: A Banner Year;

  Fight Club Agonies, Fox Passes on Traffic

  By the close of the 1990s Hollywood had long since given up making any meaningful social commentary on modern life through its movies. Paradoxically, an opposite impetus was quietly nurtured within the studios at the very same time.

  The creative forces building in Hollywood throughout the decade came crashing forth in 1999 in a cascade of original, funny, harsh, daring, and masterfully off-the-wall movies. It was as if all the struggles and failures experienced by the rebel directors up to that time collectively paid off in one startling, exhilarating year. There seemed no other way to explain the release in a single year of all of these films: Anderson’s Magnolia; Russell’s Three Kings; Jonze’s Being John Malkovich; Fincher’s Fight Club; Sam Mendes’s American Beauty; the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix; Alexander Payne’s Election; Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides; and Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry.

  Even in the moment, observant outsiders began to notice the confluence of talent, the unexpected breath of fresh air. “Fight Club is at least the third major Hollywood film of the year to hunt for the hidden meanings beneath our affluent consumer society, after The Matrix and American Beauty,” wrote critic Andrew O’Hehir in Salon in October 1999. “There’s a pattern here—every time North Americans get really fat and self-satisfied we start feeling miserable about ourselves.”

  Either that, or we start looking for meaning. We just weren’t used to finding it at the movies.

  The directors themselves, as they met each other on the stage of award ceremonies and film symposia, began to notice. Paul Thomas Anderson had no time to watch other movies while he was making Magnolia, but by the end of the year he caught up on what he missed. “I was blown away by Election and The Matrix,” he said. “The first time I’ve felt any millennium thing is this year at the movies. Filmmakers seem to be thinking, ‘What do we have to say?’” When Dylan Tichenor, Anderson’s editor on Boogie Nights and Magnolia, saw Fight Club, he thought, “This is the first film of the twenty-first century.” Or, as Richard Schickel put it in his review in Time magazine of Russell’s Three Kings: “We keep meeting the enemy on our various peacekeeping missions and discovering that he is very like us—wearing our sneakers and T-shirts, lusting after our music, our gadgets, our more deadly hardware…. This is not exactly what people mean when they talk about the American century. But that’s the way it has worked out. And David Russell has written its epitaph in blazing user-friendly fire.”

  To Hollywood veterans, the change was radical. In 1999 the rebel community emerged from the shadows and became recognizable as a group defining the cutting edge of movie culture. “It was no longer, ‘I want to be the next Harrison Ford.’ It was, ‘I want to work with these directors,’” recalled agent Brian Swardstrom, one such veteran. “Nineteen ninety-nine was a major shift in the business. A generational shift. Barry Levinson, Rob Reiner, Richard Donner just a few years earlier had been A-list directors. Suddenly they were over-the-hill. These new guys came in, and they were the new guard.”

  Fight Club

  On a blindingly sunny day in early 1999 about a dozen senior Fox executives, producers, and one coolly anxious director gathered at Screening Room C on the Fox lot for the first formal screening of Fight Club. Security was tight. E-mails had been exchanged about the secret nature of this screening. For ten weeks, Fincher had been editing footage that hadn’t been seen since the shoot ended in December. Only a few of those present had seen the dailies; Fox chief Bill Mechanic had not.

  In the interim Fincher had added millions of dollars’ worth of computer effects. Besides the opening shot, there were many other inspired stylistic moments, such as one where Ed Norton as Jack steps into a living Ikea catalogue. Week after week Fincher labored over the film with singular devotion, allowing no one to see it. Tension at the studio was high about the final product. And everyone knew that Fincher was not the kind of director who took “notes” from studio bosses. All the senior executives who’d been responsible for making Fight Club were at the screening: Bill Mechanic came, as did producer Arnon Milchan with his top aide David Matalon. Art Linson came, as did Laura Ziskin and her executives Kevin McCormick and Jack Leslie. The Fox head of distribution, Tom Sherak, and head of marketing, Bob Harper, were there. Each person invited one guest whose opinion they trusted. As the lights went down, the buzz of anticipation quickly quieted to silence.

  The opening title sequence was a sensorial immersion: a blasting sound track to a tracking shot through the darkness into the cellular synapses of the human brain, racing through cloudy cerebral lobes out into the battered face of Edward Norton with a gun in his mouth. From there the film never let up, two hours and thirty-five minutes of psychological and physical intensity, from the cancer meetings to brutal sex with Marla to Tyler Durden’s mind games to burning lye seared into Jack’s hand to the bare-fisted fighting and Project Mayhem. Fincher, who had been working so closely on the layered computer effects, had lost a sense of the movie’s true impact. He had not spared a frame of the intense, arduous fighting sequences: spurting blood, split flesh, and the sound of crunching bone and ripping tendons. Everyone in the room had read the script. But they had not expected the film to be as visceral an experience as it was. As the film wore on, no one seemed to find it funny at all, and some found it almost unbearable. Dead silence fell over the room.

  Linson described the screening in his book, What Just Happened: “In the second hour, I began to notice that some of the women, and a couple of the men, would occasionally jerk their heads backward, a sudden ticlike movement, as if they were trying to avoid a collision. When Tyler (Brad Pitt) in front of his men, begged his assailant (Lou) to hit him again even harder, even though his face was already pulverized, a young assistant to Ziskin put her hands over her eyes and dropped her head. I was getting apprehensive, but I could tell they were jolted.” Meanwhile, Linson observed, “I glanced over at Fincher. He was curiously relaxed. He looked like a man who was getting his money’s worth. He wasn’t at all concerned if the impact of what he had done was gratifying to them or not. He knew he was doing something to these onlookers, something darkly powerful, and that pleased him.”

  When the lights came up in the screening room, there was utter silence. Shock, it seemed. Horror, perhaps. And some embarrassment. Mechanic felt the torpor in the room, and had to say something supportive to Fincher. God only knew what the other comments might be. For many long, long minutes no one could speak at all. As the quiet hung in the room, Fincher himself stood up and quickly said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And he left. Mechanic gave Milchan a hug—moral support, perhaps. Or commiseration.

  Sherak was horrified by the film. He’d never seen anything so violent. “Who is this movie for?” he asked himself. “So much violence? Who’s gonna buy this?” Linson caught up with Sherak on his way out, finding the veteran executive shuffling aimlessly, as if shell-shocked, in the parking lot.

  “Tom, you gotta admit it’s funny,” said Linson.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, don’t say that.” Linson continued to insist that the film had humor. Exasperated, Sherak finally said: “Next week, I have a psychiatrist. …I want you to pick a day, any day, and I would like you to go with me and explain to him, in my presence, why you think this thing is funny.”

  About an hour later Mechanic summoned his courage and called Fincher on the phone. “It’s too violent,” he sa
id simply. “And it’s too long.”

  Ziskin’s reaction was also stunned, but for a different reason. She thought the film was brilliant. “I was afraid of it,” she later admitted. “I thought it was really smart, it had real ideas in it—and that’s hard. I was afraid: Could we sell it? I was always afraid of that.” Like Mechanic, Ziskin thought the movie was too long. She wanted twenty minutes cut.

  Linson, a subversive like Fincher, thought this was all grand. “I loved the movie,” he admitted. “It was so audacious that it couldn’t be brought under control. Soon Murdoch and Chernin would be flopping around like acid-crazed carp wondering how such a thing could even have happened.”

  Said Fincher, in hindsight, “It’s very difficult for me to find movies that are less violent than Fight Club in a lot of ways. Fight Club is a movie that has a kind of psychic violence to it, because what it’s really going after is not, ‘I can bruise you,’ it’s saying, ‘You’re a fraud and you should know it. Here are some of the fraudulent things upon which your life is based.’ Which puts people in a more defensive position than just to say, ‘You’re a wimp, and I can kick your ass.’”

  When the stars of the movie saw the film for the first time, they had similarly visceral reactions, without the negative undertones. Norton saw an early rough cut on the Fox lot and drove off in his car, in a daze. Out on Pico Avenue outside the studio, he had to pull over and call Brad Pitt. “I just saw the movie. I just can’t believe it,” he told Pitt. Pitt kept saying: “I know. I know. I know.” Norton felt speechless—a rarity for the Ivy League intellectual. “It was so enormous,” he recalled. “So strange, so hard to place in any frame of reference. I was so happy about that.”