MECHANIC HAD ORIGINALLY WANTED TO RELEASE THE MOVIE in July or August. It took the next month and a half to get Fincher to cut less than two minutes from the fighting scenes. Fincher said he shaved only a few frames here and there, but in fact by the time editing was done, the movie lost about fifteen minutes from the first cut. Still, editing was only one reason to reschedule the movie for release in October 1999. There were thirteen other reasons: victims at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Traffic
With Twentieth Century Fox in the midst of an edgy, groundbreaking, experimental movie in Fight Club, the studio would have little stomach for another in Traffic. In December Bill Mechanic, the head of the studio; Tom Rothman, the head of production; and Liz Gabler, a Fox 2000 executive, met with Laura Bickford and Steven Soderbergh to tell them the bad news: they wouldn’t make the film. The problem, they said, was the subject matter. Movies about drugs were difficult by nature.
Soderbergh and Bickford had heard that song before. But it was more than that. Mechanic’s job security was not what you might call rock solid and it was definitely not the time to take another flyer on a dark, less-than-commercial project about drugs with no lead actor attached. Mechanic said, “It’s episodic.” This was code for: There’s no star in this movie.
Mechanic said he had problems with the script. “We had other issues. The environment at Fox was getting rougher with these pictures. Things had changed in the script, and Steven was resistant to changing them.” For example, in this version of the script, according to Mechanic, the drug czar character first offered to Michael Douglas never changed to eventually oppose the policy he represented. And the Catherine Zeta-Jones character (originally not pregnant) had an affair with her lawyer, played by Dennis Quaid. At the same time, Mechanic felt the budget beginning to rise, another repeat of the Fight Club experience. He’d wanted to make the film for about $24 million; instead he found the budget creeping up to $31 million, $32 million. Mechanic thought he’d found a solution by selling off the international rights to a foreign financier, Graham King, who would share the financial risk. But “when the budget got into the thirties, and the script got ‘hard’ with Steven not making any more changes, we let it go with turnaround rights,” said Mechanic.
Hoping to smooth things over, the studio chief went to lunch with Soderbergh to talk it out. Soderbergh was direct. “Tell me your terms to give us the movie back,” he said. “We want to make it somewhere else.”
But the issue was not as simple as all that. Mechanic may not have been willing to make a risky drug movie with Steven Soderbergh, but he also wasn’t willing to let him walk away with the source material and make a hit out of it for another studio. Mechanic had done that once before, giving back the rights to The English Patient to director Anthony Minghella after Laura Ziskin and Tom Rothman helped develop the script at Fox. When Miramax rode that film all the way to Academy Award glory, Mechanic had felt like a fool. To make matters worse, it was the former Miramax executive Scott Greenstein who had gone around town crowing about how Fox was stupid to let The English Patient get away, and he was now the most eager candidate vying for Traffic. Greenstein was now running Barry Diller’s film unit, USA Films. Mechanic had a sensitive spot where Greenstein was concerned. On the other hand, Mechanic did not need to make an enemy of Steven Soderbergh.
There was another element in the mix. Peter Rice, a rising executive at Fox who had recently taken over the studio’s art-house division, Fox Searchlight, was adamant about getting Traffic. He wanted it to be his first high-profile prestige project. Michael Douglas was showing interest in playing the lead, and Pat Dollard, Soderbergh’s agent, was trying to get the deal done. Dollard had been fighting hard to get the movie made, partly because he was in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction himself. “I thought it was important to get the movie made. I thought it would help people get sober,” he explained. He said it was consistent “with AA principles”—what he learned at Alcoholics Anonymous about working for a cause bigger than himself. Ultimately that wouldn’t work, and he ended up having to lie and cheat, as was usually the case in Hollywood. But it served a good cause. Douglas wanted a full fee, $20 million, to star in the film. Rice was choking on that figure; it put the film budget above $50 million. The studio would go no higher than $2 million. Douglas was ready to pass. So was Rice. Soderbergh and Dollard found themselves on the phone with Rice and Fox business affairs chief Joe De Marco. Dollard sensed that Fox was unwilling to make Douglas’s deal.
“I want you to say to me right now, with Steven on the phone, that you won’t let us have the movie if we can’t make the deal,” said Dollard.
“No,” replied Rice. “If we can’t make the deal, you can have the movie back.”
After prying loose Rice’s agreement to give up the film, Dollard and Soderbergh were about to hang up. But before they did, they heard Rice—who obviously thought they had already hung up—say to De Marco, “I hope it doesn’t win any Oscars.”
Ultimately, Bill Mechanic allowed the movie to go into turnaround with a twist on a conventional caveat. Studios typically put “change element” clauses into their turnaround agreements. These clauses essentially allowed them to change their minds later if something changed in the makeup of the project. In this case, Bickford and Soderbergh got Fox to give them a list of actors whose involvement would require them to come back to the studio. The list had about thirty names, but only one really counted: Harrison Ford. If Ford expressed interest in the lead role, Fox would have an option again to make the film. This seemed to be a nonissue. Everyone in Hollywood knew that Harrison Ford, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, only made big studio action movies where he got to be the hero; this was a smaller budget, prestige film unlike any Ford had made. Bickford and Soderbergh thought it was a strange provision. “We thought it was ludicrous at the time,” said Bickford. But that didn’t stop them from agreeing to it.
Fight Club
On April 20, 1999, high school seniors Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris strode through the front doors of their school in Littleton, Colorado, wearing long black trench coats and armed with two sawed-off shotguns, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic carbine rifle, and a nine-millimeter Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol. For the next ninety minutes, the two best friends proceeded to murder their way through the campus, shooting classmates and teachers while trying to detonate bombs they had placed in various sites around the school. It was a cold-blooded, incomprehensible act, unimpeded by fear or conscience. In a single room they murdered a student, injured five others, apparently at random, and then continued through the building.
News of the surreal rampage quickly spread across the country, and Americans raced to their television sets to watch much of the chaos as it unfolded live on cable news television. The pleas for help from panic-stricken students were relayed from their cell phones to 911 to on-air. On one of the recorded calls it is possible to hear Klebold and Harris marching through the library, murdering one victim after another, with one of the gunman shouting, “Yahoo!” School surveillance tapes later showed the pair in the cafeteria, calmly continuing their carnage, waving their guns over students who were cowering under tables as the pair attempted to detonate a propane gas bomb.
In all, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered thirteen classmates and teachers before using their guns to kill themselves in the library. Three days earlier they had both attended their senior prom. They would have graduated seventeen days after the killings.
The massacre at Columbine High School had nothing to do with Fight Club, at least nominally. But the tragedy had a huge effect on that film, and many others. Columbine turned out to be a landmark moment in the life of the nation, sending a chill through American society.
In the wake of the killings, Americans went through a paroxysm of soul-searching, grasping for answers to the questions of how and why, asking: Where did we go wrong? There had been other shootings in middle-class and upper-middle-class
(white) neighborhoods and schools, incidents of young people firing at classmates and their peers. (Poor ethnic kids using guns on one another never seems to raise as much outrage as comfy white kids doing so.) Those had shocked the nation and raised the question of violence among American youth. But the Columbine massacre was the biggest and the worst. In its wake many issues came under intense public scrutiny: the prevalence of guns; the lack of parental supervision in cushy American society; the bullying of weak students by stronger, more popular ones. But more than any other subject, Hollywood came under intense scrutiny in the wake of Columbine. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had been fanatic devotees of the shooter video games Doom and Quake, in which the purpose is to kill as many targets as possible. Their fateful decision to attack their school seemed to mimic—eerily, many thought—a scene in the 1995 movie The Basketball Diaries, in which Leonardo DiCaprio, in a long trench coat, stalks the hall of his school, killing people (in the film it is a dream sequence). In the search for answers, many were drawn to the thought that a steady coarsening of American culture, the incremental creep of ever-bloodier violence in movies, video games, and rock and rap music was, perhaps, fueling the amoral impulses of alienated young people like the Columbine killers.
The government started to get involved. Congress called hearings and demanded the presence of Hollywood’s moguls on Capitol Hill to explain why they were peddling violence to American kids. A study found what everyone already knew, that the movie industry, gorging itself on movies for teen, male audiences, was now actively selling even its R-rated movies to youngsters under seventeen years old. There was talk, briefly, of passing legislation that would regulate the amount of violence in entertainment.
In the middle of this debate, David Fincher was editing Fight Club, deliberately making the movie as visceral an experience as possible. After Fox executives got a glimpse of the first cut, it was decided that it would be prudent to release it after the furor over Columbine had died down. Besides, they were pushing for Fincher to reduce some of the more hard-to-watch sequences.
But Fight Club was not the only movie affected by the massacre. Throughout Hollywood, studios were forced to pay close attention to its movies. The overall effect of the outcry that followed Columbine was to make Hollywood even more cautious in its moviemaking choices and more reluctant to make or release risky fare, movies that might upset or discomfort the people in power. A study that came out about a year after Columbine found that, indeed, Hollywood had scaled back making R-rated movies altogether, with the renewed restrictions on marketing the movies to underage teens. In the immediate aftermath, Miramax changed the title of its movie Killing Mrs. Tingle, about high school kids who plot the murder of a nasty teacher, to Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and later yanked from its release schedule a film called O, an updating of Shakespeare’s Othello, set in an American high school. The movie depicted several murders—the play is a tragedy, after all—and was deemed too sensitive for the time. Miramax sold the film to Lions Gate, a small, independent film company, which finally released the movie in 2001. As for Fight Club, Klebold and Harris might as well have been charter members of Project Mayhem. In diaries and videos found after their rampage, they professed to be devotees of fascist ideology and iconography, but they actually seemed much closer to the nihilist, anarchic impulses of Fight Club. The release was scheduled for July, but Fox made what seemed to be an inevitable decision: to hold off until a later date.
A COUPLE OF MONTHS AFTER FINCHER’S INITIAL SCREENING, Fox showed Fight Club to its second-tier executives (marketing, distribution, international). The buzz was already out on the lot that the movie was extremely violent, first during production, and then even more so after that screening for senior executives. They were expecting an extreme sort of film. They were not disappointed.
“There were people who abhorred it,” Bill Mechanic acknowledged later. “They’d walk up to me and say, ‘I hated it.’” The fight sequences seemed to go on forever, with many long minutes of bone-crunching sound, of fist smashing into soft tissue, or cheek, nose, or jaw smashing into concrete. It was as if Fincher were trying to pummel the viewer.
The director, meanwhile, was obviously living in a different universe. He said, “Right up to when we finished I just didn’t think it was violent enough. I was like, ‘We’ve got a movie called Fight Club, we might as well call it Glee Club.’ … My biggest worry when we previewed the movie was that everybody would say, ‘What’s this? There’s not enough fighting.’”
More Fincher humor, perhaps. If anybody noticed this distinct disconnect between filmmaker (Fincher) and film owner (Fox), they didn’t say. Tom Sherak, Fox’s head of domestic distribution, and Robert Harper, Fox’s head of marketing, both disliked the film intensely, though it was their job to sell it. Eventually the cracks in communication between the studio suits and the director and his producer, Art Linson, slowly widened into a gulf.
Ed Norton recalled that at the very first marketing meeting for the film with Fincher and the studio, Harper opened the discussion with the following: “Can anyone tell me one fucking thing about this movie that’s funny?” All along, there had been little chance that Sherak would get David Fincher or his work. An avuncular, back-slapping veteran of the Fox lot, Sherak was widely considered to be a nice guy from the industry’s old school. He knew the business of distribution and could reel off decades’ worth of tales about his relationships with exhibitors. He was also a pillar of the Hollywood community, a master schmoozer who for many years hosted a huge multiple sclerosis charity event that all of Hollywood attended, an obligatory, mogul-studded affair. Sherak always took out a full-page ad in the trades to thank everyone who showed up. He liked mainstream movies. To him, There’s Something About Mary, the Farrelly brothers gross-out comedy, was genius. XXX, the plot-free bash-’em-crash-’em car derby, was a good time. Fight Club was a disgrace.
Robert Harper, the head of marketing, also hated the film. This is how Art Linson described him in his book:
At first glance you’re struck by his calmness. Always casually dressed in the latest Banana Republic uniform, he conducts his meetings while occasionally taking practice putts on his carpet. Even though he was a minnow in the NewsCorp food chain, back in his secluded set of offices he was, to quote Tom Wolfe, “master of his universe.” Except for the occasional blockbuster or mega result from a preordained sequel, most of the movies that Harper devises campaigns for fail. This fact is ameliorated by the larger fact that most movies fail. Harper was accustomed to dying on Friday night only to be reborn on Monday morning ready to service the next Fox movie waiting to come out.
Fincher and Linson agreed that marketing wizards would always find reasons why a movie was a major challenge to open. Fincher said the attitude was always: This movie’s a tough nut; possibly, if they got lucky, they would find a way to crack it. “If a movie worked, it was a goddamn great campaign. If a movie failed, well, you get the drill, the movie had an incurable cancer,” observed Linson.
But Fincher did nothing to make matters easier. On his best day he was not what anyone would consider a warm people-person, and he was barely civil to executives he thought were drones and half-wits. He seemed to think that if you had a studio job it was impossible to have a creative bone in your body. Among filmmakers Fincher was known as being one of the quickest wits in town, but he was just as quick with a cutting put-down. He talked very little in meetings with Fox executives. He did not schmooze. For Fincher, the studio system was a necessary evil, a financial means to an artistic end. Around the Fox marketing department, executives began to refer to him as “Doberman Fincher.”
Gradually Fincher ended up in open war with Harper and Sherak, and the bitterness lasted. “I’ve been through the Robert Harper experience…. I’ve seen cluelessness at its most refined,” he later said. He was similarly dismissive of Sherak: “What is the career of somebody who’s in fucking distribution?” asked Fincher. “What are we talking about? We’re talking a
bout someone who is like, ‘Look, I supply popcorn to theaters, and I need to know that those theaters aren’t showing things that I would find morally objectionable.’ What does that have to do with the movies? That’s all this guy’s job is, his relationship with the exhibitors. He’s got a product that he’s got to get to those exhibitors. They don’t have to like it…. What is the added value of the head of distribution?”
Harper provided the following statement: “The very qualities that made Fight Club a unique moviegoing experience made it a difficult sell to a broad audience. Despite an aggressive marketing campaign, the general public wasn’t ready for a gritty take on the world of semiorganized bare knuckles street fighting. Whatever the film’s flaws, I personally enjoyed it, particularly Brad Pitt’s extraordinary performance.”
Sherak had this to say about working with Fincher: “You can blame anybody you’d like to blame. The bottom line is everyone worked very hard on the movie. If you think the director and the producer didn’t have input into the marketing campaign—that’s wrong. Fincher is a visionary, an incredible filmmaker. He tried to tell a story that the majority of people who go to movies didn’t necessarily want to see. There’s enough credit to go around and enough blame to go around.”
THE DECISION TO DELAY THE MOVIE FROM JULY OR AUGUST to October resulted in some publicity confusion. Norton was on the cover of Vanity Fair in August, because the article was timed for the original planned release date, and Pitt and Norton appeared on the cover of Premiere that same month, talking about a movie no one would see for weeks and weeks.
There was nothing to be done about those missteps, but Sherak and Harper had other problems. Sherak didn’t think anybody would buy the notion that this movie was a profound statement of any sort. He wasn’t even sure what the movie was trying to say. The best he could muster was that this was a black comedy from the mind of a director with a twisted imagination. He spoke out at a meeting after the first screening. “We got problems,” he said simply. “How are we gonna sell this thing?”
Rebels on the Backlot Page 30
