The marketing experts at the studio felt there were several problems at work. The theme of the film was clearly geared to appeal to male audiences. The next problem was the title, which wasn’t exactly enticing to women. But the star of the film was Brad Pitt, a magnet for female moviegoers. Pitt was not a neutral element to guys; he was a turn-off, the kind of pretty boy who their girlfriends lusted after. Generally men were jealous of him. As one marketing executive put it, “The core audience from the book was paper thin, and the title sounded stupid to people. Plus, it exacerbated the problem for women.”
Saddled with the theme, title, and star, the studio quickly decided to focus on drawing men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Even with Brad Pitt, Fox marketers ruled out women moviegoers. They believed that if a woman happened to buy a ticket and wander into the theater, she’d head right back out. There was an additional complication. Research testing had confirmed that Fight Club appealed to teenagers, but in the post-Columbine furor over violence in entertainment, studios were under serious scrutiny not to market their R-rated movies to teenagers under seventeen. Technically this wasn’t illegal, but it was clearly not what a socially responsible studio ought to do.
The other option was to go the intellectual route, and market Fight Club as an art film, starting in a few theaters and widening the release slowly. This might have broadened the audience base, but the art-house audience was not terribly big. Still, some within the studio thought this was the way to go. “We could have platformed it, tried to get reviews. It was for a thinking audience. It was social commentary,” said one Fox marketing executive. If that thought occurred to the marketing staff, it never got very far in the actual planning for the film.
Whatever the options for marketing the film, there was little interaction with Fincher. There was never any discussion allowed about the title. Fincher and Laura Ziskin, head of Fox 2000, “were in awe of the property,” an executive noted. The director refused to consider posters or trailers that emphasized the movie’s most obvious marketing hook, Brad Pitt. Instead, Fincher insisted the studio hire a cutting-edge advertising firm, Weiden + Kennedy, based in Seattle, to come up with a marketing plan (they devised Nike’s advertising campaigns). Their main contribution, many billable dollar–hours later, was to use a bar of pink soap as the main marketing image. The veterans at Fox thought this was like a bad joke. The image “was an interesting icon, but it didn’t tell the movie,” said one executive involved. “It was too smart for itself, too in-the-know.” But the director believed in it and would not be moved.
The tag-lines beneath the bar of soap may as well have said: “No women moviegoers expected for this film.” They were pithy, Fincherian lines intended to intrigue: “Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.” was the main tagline, but there was also: “Wash your feminine side clean off”; “Works great even on blood stains”; and “Creates a thick, rich lather. Like rabies.” Said the marketing executive, “That poster lost any chance to get at an upscale, intelligent audience.” But the marketing and publicity department went along. They sent out mailers to the media, one of an actual bar of pink soap, and another of one feather with a piece of paper in the box that read: “Just because you stick a feather in your ass doesn’t mean you’re a chicken,” a line from the movie and audacious by Fox’s standards. When the studio held its press junket, the set for interviews with the cast—despite being located in a luxury suite at the Four Seasons Hotel—was spare, light green walls, “like in a mental institution,” remembered one publicity executive.
The Fox staffers hated the fact that Fincher had done two early trailers for the film that were faux public service announcements. One showed Pitt ending a fire safety spiel by saying, “Did you know that urine is sterile? You can drink it!” Another was of Norton telling people to turn off their cell phones and pagers before saying, “And remember, no one has the right to touch you in the bathing suit area.” Some thought Fincher was just plain sick—a “repressed sadomasochist with torture fantasies,” as one executive put it. Fincher, along with Norton and Pitt, thought it was a hilarious way to set up a misinformation campaign.
The studio was not amused. And it wasn’t going to use trailers like that to open the movie ahead of its release. Instead it used the press junket, a poster and billboard campaign, and buying TV time with the trailers highlighting the fight scenes. It was a large-scale campaign that cost $20 million, giving the film an even higher hurdle to pass into profitability.
Fincher was convinced that the studio could not sell a movie its own executives despised, and that was essentially the task before them. When they’d showed him a poster with a huge picture of Brad Pitt, he deep-sixed it. The trailer that was finally released gave away three of the best jokes in the film and focused exclusively on the boxing; and in the unkindest cut of all, Fox advertised the film on cable during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts. Fincher believed that his movie needed to be explained and placed in context by the more intelligent movie critics. Fox never set that up. They just sold it like any other product, in this case as a movie about underground boxing that would appeal to testosterone-heavy guys—which to Fincher wasn’t what the movie was about at all.
“The problem for me with Twentieth Century Fox when we were trying to get Fight Club released was that they had an intense contempt for creativity and an intense disregard for any kind of intellect that the audience might bring to it,” Fincher said later. “You can’t sell something that you don’t like. You just can’t do it. What do you offer as a reason for somebody to go see it? How do you sell it? I think they gave up on trying to be able to understand it.”
AS PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON HAD DONE WITH BOOGIE Nights, Fincher intentionally larded Fight Club with overlong fight sequences, knowing that the studio would pressure him to cut it back and knowing the MPAA was also likely to raise objections. Even before the MPAA saw the film, Fincher cut the violence back in response to pressure from Fox. Among the scenes reduced in length were Ed Norton pounding a guy in the face at the fight club, punching him over and over until the man’s face was pulverized. In the original cut Jared Leto, playing Angel Face, gets pounded so badly that his nose splits and you see the bubbling blood over the bone (it was a prosthetic). It was removed. The studio also objected to the how-to scenes for making a bomb out of soap. The original cut showed an actual recipe; Fincher had made sure that all of the film’s home-science experiments were accurate. The studio would not let Fincher give moviegoers an audiovisual presentation about how to make a bomb in their own kitchen. The recipes were changed. Sherak also had a problem—and he was sure the MPAA would, too—with the final scene in which Ed Norton shoots Tyler Durden, that is, himself. Fincher trimmed a bit to make the shooting slightly less graphic. But he wouldn’t budge on trimming a scene when Durden deliberately crashes a car.
Ziskin was an enthusiastic supporter of Fincher’s vision for the film. But even she had some limits. In the book, and in the script, after Marla and Tyler meet and have sex for the first time, Marla turns to him and says, “I want to have your abortion.” The line made Ziskin cringe. She thought it crossed the line of good taste—though one could argue that the point of the film was to do just that—and would alienate viewers. It alienated her. Fincher refused. He told her: “You approved the script, you approved the cast and the budget. We’ll shoot it, and if it’s too offensive, we’ll let the audience tell us that.”
The line was shot as written, and at the test screening, it got a big laugh from the audience. Still, Ziskin came back to Fincher. “Look, it got a laugh,” she said. “I don’t have a leg to stand on. But I’m begging you, please. It’s too offensive. You have to take it out.”
Fincher seemed to take perverse pleasure in tormenting studio executives. “Okay, here’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I will shoot something else to replace that line, but you have to promise me that I have the final say on whatever that is. I get to come up with the replacement.”
Ziskin replie
d, “Anything. Nothing could be worse than ‘I want to have your abortion.’ Go ahead.”
Fincher reshot the moment, in which Marla says instead, “Oh my God, I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” He cut it into the movie, and when it was screened for an audience it got an even bigger laugh than the abortion line.
Ziskin approached him after the screening. “Please, my God,” she begged. “Put the abortion line back in.”
Fincher relished the moment. “Nope. We made a deal.”
THE ENDING OF THE FILM WAS ALREADY DIFFERENT FROM Chuck Palahniuk’s book. In the novel, the skyscraper that has been wired for detonation never explodes. Both Fincher and Jim Uhls, the screenwriter, thought that was too esoteric. They wondered what they could blow up that wouldn’t hurt people but would still bring about the collapse of civilization? They decided on credit card companies, though watching the film in the wake of September 11, it seems only to evoke the attacks on the World Trade Center. An early draft had people dancing in the streets and the narrator and Marla driving away in a van with their underground henchmen (called space monkeys even in the script) while credit card bills floated down on them from the collapsed buildings. In the final cut the viewer sees only the buildings collapsing, an end to capitalism-based, consumerist civilization.
The film comes full circle to its opening moment: the narrator talking with the barrel of a gun in his mouth. In the book, Tyler says, “The last thing we have to do is your martyrdom thing. Your big death thing.” But as the moments count down to Tyler-Jack’s self-destruction, Marla comes in and Tyler disappears. Palahniuk writes:
And now I’m just one man holding a gun in my mouth.
“We followed you,” Marla yells. “All the people from the support group. You don’t have to do this. Put the gun down.”
Behind Marla all the bowel cancers, the brain parasites, the melanoma people, the tuberculosis people are walking, limping, wheelchairing toward me.
They’re saying, “Wait.”
…
Marla yells, “We know.”
This is like a total epiphany moment for me.
I’m not killing myself, I yell. I’m killing Tyler.
…
“No, I like you,” Marla shouts. “I know the difference.” And nothing. Nothing explodes.
…
And I pull the trigger.
In the next, final chapter, the narrator is in a mental hospital. Tyler Durden has survived.
That’s the book. There was an early draft of the script that had Marla confessing her love for Tyler-Jack but it was “too Hollywood” for Fincher. Nor did he go for Palahniuk’s version of having Tyler-Jack surviving in a mental hospital. He wanted to be able to vanquish Tyler Durden completely. The shooting script gives a sense of how Fincher and Uhls took Palahniuk’s spare prose and amped it up to a more gory, visceral experience:
Jack looks into his [Tyler’s] eyes for a moment, then reaches up and PULLS THE TRIG-GSR. *GO TO SLOW MOTION * as-KABLAM! his cheeks INFLATE with gas from the gun. His eyes bulge, BLOOD flies out backwards from his head. SMOKE wafts out of his mouth.
RESUME NORMAL SPEED as Tyler gapes at Jack, then reaches behind his head and feels-there’s a HOLE BLOWN OUT THE BACK. Tyler’s eyes glaze over and he falls backwards, plopping on the floor, DEAD, with a grin on his face.
And Jack, the narrator, survives to watch the credit card buildings explode.
All this precedes Fincher’s final subversive wave, the barely perceivable frames of a penis, in close-up, before the credits roll.
OPEN WARFARE HAD NOW BROKEN OUT BETWEEN SHERAK and Fincher. Sherak’s pleas to cut down on the violence just made Fincher add more frames into his cut. Sherak would say something like: “When you go to the MPAA, cut it to what you really want it to be, because we don’t want to have to advocate for something that’s over the top. It puts us in a difficult position.” Fincher would nod and then add in twelve more frames of bloody fistfighting. In the summer of 1999, Sherak visited Fincher in his trailer on the Fox lot. As Fincher recalls, Sherak entered the trailer and said, “Hey buddy, I’ve got some bad news.”
“Really, what’s that?”
“That scene with the gun in the mouth at the end, it’s not going to fly.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. All right, listen, I was going to say something, but I didn’t want to be the one—this is not going to fly at the MPAA.”
“Really. That’s unfortunate, Tom.”
“Yeah, you know—it’s just not gonna happen. No hard feelings.”
“Okay. Tell you what, make my life easier. That shot cost four hundred thousand dollars to do. It’s in the book Fox purchased for sixty thousand dollars. It’s in every iteration of the screenplay. It was, for lack of a better word, approved by the studio. The money that it cost to execute was certainly approved by the studio. I want you to go to Bill Mechanic’s office and tell him that that half-million dollars has to be thrown away because you can’t get this done at the MPAA.”
“Hmmm. Okay. Let me take one more shot at it with the MPAA, and I’ll get back to you.”
Sherak called the next day and said, “Okay. I went on the line for you. They’re gonna let us do it.”
The incident only hardened Fincher’s contempt for the studio.
LIKE ALL FOX FILMS, THE MOVIE WAS SCREENED FOR A test audience, who would give the studio a sense of how it was likely to be received and how to market the film. Fincher resisted the process; Se7en had been screened before a recruited audience ahead of its release by New Line and had scored very poorly. But this was the way of doing business in the studio world. National Research Group, the ubiquitous Hollywood research company, bused in a group of mainly teenagers from Orange County to see the movie on the lot. A studio executive was late, holding up the start of the screening, and Fincher stood, steaming, in the back of the room as they waited; ten minutes passed, fifteen minutes, twenty. Forty minutes later the executive came; Fincher was sure the rhythm had been killed already. But he was surprised. The audience members wrote on their response cards that they liked the intelligence of the film and its look. They also got what more conservative executives like Sherak (and Rupert Murdoch) didn’t—the subversive humor in the film. But many were troubled by what they considered excessive violence. Several said they liked the movie but felt they couldn’t recommend it to their friends, the key element of word of mouth. They thought friends wouldn’t get the humor or would be offended by the violence. Fincher thought, “You had people who felt a sense of, you know, ‘I’ve got to protect people from this.’” The same sense of “I got it, but I don’t know if other people will get it” had pervaded the editing room, where people working on the film said, “I don’t know if my friends could handle this. I’m the smartest person in my peer group and it was a little much for me.”
Sherak and Harper were not terribly impressed by the numbers, which were not disastrous. And again they noted the conflict between the theme and the movie star. “There was one audience for this movie—men,” Sherak concluded. “And Brad Pitt gets girls, not guys.”
Whatever the best strategy might have been, there was no realistic way to sneak into the marketplace with a movie with this large a budget and two major movie stars. Fox opened on 1,963 screens, and took in a very disappointing $11 million in its opening weekend. Still, none of the market research could have prepared them for the scathing media reception that would follow.
Chapter 11
Releasing John Malkovich;
Testing Three Kings;
Trimming Magnolia
1999
Spike Jonze was juggling a grueling schedule. He was acting in Three Kings six days a week in Arizona. Then he would race back to Los Angeles on his one day off, work on Malkovich with editor Eric Zumbrunnen in an editing room on the Warner Brothers lot for a few hours before heading back to Arizona. Over nine months Jonze and Zumbrunnen whittled the assembly from three hours and fifty-two minutes down
to two hours. (Jonze didn’t learn to hurry over time: Adaptation took eighteen months to edit.)
The process was mainly guided by ad hoc screenings with friends of friends and people recruited off the street, drawn into screenings every other week at PolyGram’s screening room on Crescent Drive, in Beverly Hills. Spike would sit in the back of the room, and afterward producer Vince Landay would throw questions at the audience: What did they have trouble understanding? What did they like? What bothered them? “It was the single most important tool in shaping the final product of the movie,” said producer Sandy Stern. Unlike the dreaded research screenings run by the studios, this did not involve response cards with their formulaic questions or mumbo jumbo statistics over who liked the movie and who didn’t. Instead, Jonze took the remarks back to the editing room, and reemerged two weeks later with a new cut, which he showed to a new audience. “They’d made connections you’d never imagine, incorrect connections. We’d say, ‘Why are they thinking that?’” recalled Landay. The screenings eventually led to the cutting of much of Dr. Lester’s bizarre speechifying, distilled to a single moment in the movie, and to shooting several new scenes that emphasized the emotional connections between the characters played by Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, and John Cusack. Most of the scenes consisted of telephone conversations, and by the time they were done, Keener was pregnant, so she had to be filmed from the shoulders up. The movie got progressively shorter, and the producers progressively more nervous.
Throughout the editing process, Jonze had almost no contact with Universal. For the studio, the film was a relatively low-budget affair, green-lighted by a company that had preceded them. “Nobody really cared about the movie,” recalled producer Steve Golin. One of the reasons Zumbrunnen and Jonze kept editing the movie was that no one told them to stop. “We didn’t know anyone there,” said Zumbrunnen. “No one took anything away from us. The checks kept cashing. So we kept working on the movie.” With the movie complete, Golin screened Malkovich for Russell Schwartz, the executive who came from Gramercy to run the distribution unit at USA Films. He showed it to Casey Silver, the head of Universal Pictures. “Nobody cared. At this point there was total ambivalence,” Golin said.
Rebels on the Backlot Page 31
