Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  AT THE SAME TIME SOFIA COPPOLA, JONZE’S FIANCÉE, WAS EDITING her first film, The Virgin Suicides, on the other side of the Warner Brothers lot. They’d visit each other occasionally, and there was usually some creative rivalry between them. “You have your movie, and I have mine,” Coppola would tell him. Coppola was making a lyrical, moody tragedy about a houseful of teenaged sisters, restricted by a severely Christian mother, who commit suicide. Coppola had a distinctly different but equally singular sensibility than Jonze. Later she was wounded when Jonze did not invite her to be part of the directors-only production company that was announced in October 2001 with Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Alexander Payne, and Sam Mendes.

  By June 1999, Jonze—still editing Being John Malkovich—and Coppola—having just finished The Virgin Suicides—were married at the sprawling Napa Valley vineyard of iconic 1970s director and larger-than-life papa, Francis Ford Coppola. (Sofia Coppola described how the magnetic irresistibility of Daddy’s enthusiasm finally pushed her into a career in film: “Every time my dad talks about the movies you just feel like jumping in.”) At the wedding some old seventies movie rebels, like Coppola and George Lucas, met some of the nineties rebels, like Jonze and David O. Russell. Tom Waits, that unmusical genius, sang. Jonze’s crew from Malkovich were there, including Vince Landay, K. K. Barrett, and Eric Zumbrunnen. The wedding was large and joyous, but the union was an odd one. The couple would suffer under the pressures of constant work and long separations.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1999, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH PREMIERED AT the Venice Film Festival. Jonze was apprehensive: Would the staid European festivalgoers get a movie like his? Unexpectedly, the reaction was almost immediately delirious. No one had ever seen a film like Being John Malkovich before, and the media embraced the film as an unselfconscious, brilliantly original piece of work. Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times began his review by saying the film “is a clever and outrageous piece of whimsical fantasy that is unique, unpredictable, and more than a little strange. You could see a lot of movies over a lot of years and not hear a line of dialogue as playful and bizarre as ‘I’ll see you in Malkovich in one hour.’ What the heck is going on here?”

  The same month Malkovich screened at the New York Film Festival. The New York Times review landed on producer Landay’s door at the SoHo Grand Hotel at 2:00 A.M. the next morning. He tore through the paper to see Janet Maslin’s passionate endorsement. He called Jonze at the Mercer: “Have you seen this?” Jonze, Kaufman, and Landay were amazed. “We had hoped it wasn’t something that would get lost or buried,” recalled Landay. “We hoped for some critical praise. But we wondered how broad an audience would appreciate it.”

  The critics continued to weigh in, getting positively giddy. “The Oscar nominating committees huddle behind closed doors. There is much wringing of hands, pounding of foreheads. ‘Do we have a category for Least Likely Screenplay to See the Light of Day?’” wrote Jan Stuart in Newsday. In Esquire magazine Tom Carson called Malkovich “the last great movie of the century …. Being John Malkovich is the kind of breakthrough that leaves every other movie around looking clueless; it’s about all the things that they don’t know they’re saying.” The reviews were more or less unanimous: The movie was a masterpiece. And the critics wondered how it slipped through the system: “I don’t know how a movie this original got made today, but thank God for wonderful aberrations,” wrote David Ansen in Newsweek.

  The reception encouraged Universal to devote some money to promote the film, eventually spending $18 million on prints and advertising. Russell Schwartz had worked with the writer-directors Ethan and Joel Coen, who had done Fargo and Blood Simple, and had a feel for Jonze’s offbeat tone. The director and his production crew set up Web sites with teaser posters and trailers put up on the Internet. One Web site was for a company called J.M. Inc., and it claimed to allow customers into another person’s mind; it had a link to the movie’s official Web site. They devised TV spots that said: “If you want to change your identity, become anyone you want, go to the J.M. Inc. Web site,” and ran them on late-night cable channels.

  The studio set up a junket to introduce the film and the filmmaker to the entertainment media, but it was problematic since nobody connected to the film felt comfortable representing it. John Malkovich was afraid the movie would be too closely identified with him, and what if it bombed? Cameron Diaz didn’t want the media interest to be all about her. Catherine Keener hated publicity and interviews. John Cusack didn’t want to overshadow the film. And when it came to this sort of thing, Charlie Kaufman was usually hiding under a couch. “That’s a class in marketing,” observed Schwartz wryly.

  So the marketing wizards were left with Spike Jonze, who wasn’t the most talkative of interviews. More to the point, there was no getting him to behave. Jonze was used to staging pranks at the expense of his friends—or himself. He liked to impersonate studio chiefs when he phoned filmmaker friends. Once when visiting David O. Russell on Martha’s Vineyard, Russell had to rescue Jonze within an hour of his arrival when Jonze was caught spinning 360-degree circles with the rental car. Jonze was cornered by the cops, and Hertz came to take away the keys. This was all fun, but playing pranks on the national and international press was another matter. Zumbrunnen overheard Jonze tell an interviewer over the phone that he’d started out making videos for an agricultural company. In a British television interview, Jonze presented himself as a Corvette-driving loudmouth, dressed in a tank top and a ghetto do-rag. While promoting Malkovich in London in March 2000, Jonze told a writer from the prestigious Sunday Times how he’d met Charlie Kaufman: “My old friend Ray served in Panama with Charlie’s brother, Donald. Charlie sent it to Donald to read, then Donald gave it to another soldier, Larry, who then gave it to my friend Ray, who gave it to me.” The writer, Christopher Goodwin, dutifully reported the facts as invented by Jonze. (Charlie’s “brother” Donald was in the midst of being created for Adaptation; Donald eventually won an Academy Award nomination for cowriting the screenplay of that film.) Jonze also repeated a story he liked to tell journalists, of how he got into the business: “My step-dad sells juicers to a lot of people in Hollywood and he knows Jim Carrey through his juicing connections.”

  Jonze simply refused to talk about anything personal—his background, his childhood, his marriage to Sofia Coppola. He chose not to confirm or deny the ubiquitous, false story that he was an heir to the Spiegel catalogue fortune, with the result that it was reprinted constantly. Even a writer for New York magazine who had several personal connections to Jonze tripped on that bit of mythic lore, calling Jonze a “Bethesda, Maryland–bred heir to the $3-billion-a-year Spiegel catalogue business.” By 2003 the fact was deeply entrenched in Nexis-Lexis. A New York Times story in November 2003 about the children of the super-rich made note of Spike Jonze as an exception to the rule of indolence and paralysis. (The story was later corrected.)

  For Jonze, saying little or nothing was an excellent tactic that reinforced his aura of effortless cool. He gave the impression that he didn’t need to suck up to the entertainment press, but in truth he was not that self-confident. The impulse to be a prankster and a teller of tall tales masked an intense, almost painful shyness. His inventions for the media machine belied the very real emotions that the filmmaker expressed so touchingly in his work. Jonze created an air of mystery and quirkiness with his unpredictable interviews, but in truth he had no desire to revisit the academic and social awkwardness of his youth. The most obvious example of that was the creation of Jonze’s alter ego, Richard Koufay, the leader of the “Torrance Community Dance Group” who appeared in a Fatboy Slim video made by Jonze. When accepting an MTV award for the video in 2000 it was Koufay who appeared onstage in a shaggy beard, talking trash about Jonze (to whom Jonze later sent an injunction to cease and desist). He gave one gullible journalist an entire interview as Koufay. It was a joke, surely, but it was no less importantly a way for Spike Jonze to avoid revealing any of his real self.

&
nbsp; The result was a strange concoction of media hype about Jonze that had little to do with the real person. “Jonze has always been blessed with killer taste, a good eye, and near perfect timing,” wrote Harper’s Bazaar breathlessly in November 1999. “There’s no disputing that his résumé reads like a time line of cool.” Time line of cool? Jonze had been a nerdy kid, scrawny and most definitely not part of the cool crowd, destined for a career in dirt bikes. By not saying a word, Jonze had managed to reinvent his past into a seamless continuum of silver spoon privilege and effortless cool. Talk about revenge of the nerds.

  Not that it mattered much to Jonze, but Being John Malkovich didn’t make much money. It opened on October 29, 1999, in thirty theaters and expanded up to six hundred screens for a few weeks. Even after being nominated for three Academy Awards in January, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, the movie took in only $22 million—hardly a blockbuster of Pulp Fiction proportions. But in its own way, Malkovich became a landmark of the decade, a signature for the deadpan humor and absurdist sensibility that would imbue the work of Jonze and his contemporaries.

  Three Kings

  Warner chief Terry Semel sat in the back of the hall for the first test screening of Three Kings at a Los Angeles theater. Afterward he walked over to David Russell and extended his hand, saying: “I was wrong. I didn’t get it. Congratulations, it’s a wonderful film.” He had opposed the making of the film, but at least he was willing to admit when he was wrong.

  Still, Warner Brothers didn’t really know how to promote or market something so unusual. The marketing executives weren’t accustomed to selling a thinking person’s action movie about war and human conflict. So they sold it the same way they sold all of Warner Brothers’ products, with a gangbang-style press junket—hundreds of journalists taped five-minute interviews for a quick sound bite, and picked up a gift bag before being sent out the door. The more discerning critics still managed to find the movie and tell readers about it. The influential Richard Schickel, in Time magazine, said the film was “a brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism…. This is how combat appears to us in the new technological age—no terrible beauty, just absurdity’s flat, deadly record keeping.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman described the film as “The Man Who Would Be King meets Salvador,” with elements of M*A*S*H, The Killing Fields, Catch-22, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Saving Private Ryan. The Los Angeles Times’s Kenneth Turan recognized the arrival of a major, if subversive, talent within the heart of the studio system. “Three Kings is Hollywood with a twist,” he wrote, “demonstrating how far a film can stray from business as usual and still deliver old-fashioned satisfactions.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times, who loved Russell’s two earlier films, was one of the few to be less than thrilled by Three Kings, saying that only in its second half did it wake up to the “political and moral conundrums that were always at the heart of this material. …Too little, too late,” she clucked.

  But the overwhelming response was positive. The movie sparked a buzz within the Hollywood creative community. Russell had proved he could pull off a big-budget action movie, that he wasn’t limited to quirky indie comedies. Other filmmakers noticed, too. David Fincher, who had met Russell just once, at Spike Jonze’s bachelor party in a bowling alley, was envious. He had hoped that Fight Club, which came out at around the same time as Three Kings, would be greeted as a subversive, compelling studio film. Instead Fight Club was attacked as immoral and irresponsible, and it was Three Kings that critics were calling brilliantly subversive. When Fincher finally saw Three Kings for himself, he was admiring and floored by the casting. “Mark Wahlberg?” he wondered. “Who’da thought?” And George Clooney? It was a rare time the star showed that he could act, Fincher believed.

  Three Kings sparked a buzz in broader circles, too. When Russell was invited to a fund-raiser in 1999 at Terry Semel’s house for Republican candidate George W. Bush, he decided to tell the candidate about the movie. Bush was wearing a suit; Russell had on a pair of shorts and a Windbreaker. After Bush’s remarks to the crowd, the director approached and mentioned that his upcoming film would not reflect favorably on Bush’s father and the Gulf War of 1991. “You could see this look of uncomprehending concern and panic wash over his face,” Russell recalled. “Then he immediately snapped into presidential mode and said, ‘Well, am I going to have to go finish the job?’”

  At the time, Russell could have had no idea that President Bush would do exactly that.

  But there was an enduring disappointment to Three Kings, besides Russell’s endless feud with George Clooney. Despite all the glowing reviews and the admiring press, Three Kings was not nominated for a single Oscar. The studio did not lobby for the film, which had become critically necessary to snagging nominations. Some thought the snub was deliberate. Clooney and others were sure that Russell’s bad behavior on the set had hit the industry gossip circuit, and no one wanted to reward it. Perhaps; but many were mystified to see one of the year’s best films ignored. Harvey Weinstein, who had movies competing for the Oscars that year, was among those most surprised. When he saw Three Kings, he called George Clooney and told him it was the film that worried him most in the upcoming Oscar race. Lucky for Weinstein—and unfortunately for Clooney and Russell—Warner had no clue how to compete in this arena. Apparently it had been too long since they had had something to work with. Or maybe Semel really was angry over Russell’s tantrums. Whichever, Three Kings was shut out of every other award, too. It was ignored by the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild. Lorenzo di Bonaventura was crestfallen. Russell tried not to care. Alexander Payne, who barely knew Russell and whose Election screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, called him to commiserate. Three Kings should have been nominated, he insisted. Said Harvey Weinstein, “I thought it was the best movie of the year.”

  IN 2000 ANOTHER EXTREMELY ORIGINAL AND VERY NON-ACADEMY film, American Beauty, won Best Picture at the Oscars. That movie, written by a young screenwriter named Alan Ball, could easily have been considered another rebel project and was part of the explosion of young talent and the new sensibility defining the end of the 1990s.

  The executives who ran the youngest studio in Hollywood, DreamWorks SKG, founded in 1994 by director Steven Spielberg, movie executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and music mogul David Geffen, had taken a chance on the project. They bought the script for $400,000 and cast about for a director. At Spielberg’s insistence, the studio gave the project to an untested director named Sam Mendes, who had made a name for himself on the London stage; he made the film a haunting meditation on alienation and desperation in American suburbia. The movie starred Kevin Spacey as a suburban husband—already dead by the movie’s start—going through a midlife crisis; Annette Bening was his striving, real estate agent wife. The recurring motif of the film was Spacey’s daydream about a nubile young teenager, naked, surrounded by rose petals. After the film Ball, who came from suburban Georgia and went on to create the acclaimed Six Feet Under series for HBO, kept a massive, framed canvas of rose petals in his office. American Beauty cost just $15 million and took in some $350 million worldwide. Some thought it was a turning point in Hollywood moviemaking.

  Magnolia

  Magnolia was shot in the San Fernando Valley, of course. Being a Paul Thomas Anderson project, it went over schedule. Orginally planned at seventy-nine days, the shoot went to ninety days, with an additional ten days for secondary scenes and background shots. The budget rose with the overages. Anderson was a man on a mission. He talked about the film as the start of a revolution in filmmaking, a spark to a wildfire of artistic independence. “It’s a revolution, and it’s just not happening well enough or fast enough,” he later complained to the New York Times. He worried that Magnolia didn’t cost enough to get the attention of executives at New Line. It was a counterintuitive logic that he’d adopted since Boogie Nights: Spend a lot, and the studio would have to spend more to guarantee a big aud
ience. “New Line loves the movie, but I’m nervous about the fact that Magnolia only cost $35 million,” he said. “It didn’t cost enough to scare them in a marketing way. If it cost $50 million or $60 million, it would be scaring them, but it didn’t cost that, and it’s got Tom Cruise in it. So they’re thinking, ‘We’re okay, guys. We’re okay.’”

  Actually the executives at New Line weren’t thinking that at all. They were watching dailies back at the West Hollywood offices, and they liked the film. They felt confident they could sell the Tom Cruise material.

  Anderson’s nervousness manifested itself to many as arrogance. All the way through the shoot, he took comfort in the knowledge that he had final cut. And as the movie’s length quickly began to become an issue, he began to use it as a bludgeon, dissing the New Line executives who were paying the bills.

  In a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Magnolia included on the DVD, Anderson appears during the shoot—lanky, chain-smoking, dressed in loose black trousers and a white button-down shirt—on the set of What Do Kids Know, the game show in the film. The director pretends to be the emcee, asking, “What will the final running time of this movie be?” Various shouts are heard from the crew: Three hours and twenty-five minutes. Three hours and eight minutes. Five hours. Anderson shouts, “Eighty-eight minutes for the prologue!” He asks, “How much money will it make?” and answers, “A dollar.”