Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  William H. Macy was interviewed on the set for the same documentary. “What did you think of the script?” asks the interviewer. Macy said, “I thought it was astounding. I went to Paul and said, ‘It’s amazing. It’s a little long.’ He said, ‘You fucking cocksucker. I’m not going to cut one word.’ So I asked Julianne [Moore]. She said, ‘Amazing. It’s a little long.’” The interviewer asks, “What did Paul say?” Macy replies, “You fucking cocksucker. I’m not going to cut it.”

  TOWARD THE END OF THE SHOOT BOB SHAYE RAN INTO HIS filmmaker at a party.

  “How’s the movie coming?” the executive asked him.

  Anderson said, “Good.”

  “How long is it?” Shaye asked.

  “About three hours and twenty minutes,” Anderson replied.

  “It has to come down,” Shaye said.

  Anderson whispered in his ear, “Bob, I have two words for you: Final cut.” And he walked away.

  Shaye quietly seethed. “I hate that kind of arrogance,” he later said. “‘You’re the banker. You’ll get what I give you.’ …I don’t think it’s the studios’ obligation just to support people. If you want a patron, go to Medici Films down the street.”

  THIS TIME THERE WOULD BE NO TEST SCREENINGS; ANDERSON had that in his contract. The closest thing was when Anderson took the print to show to Tom Cruise in Australia, where he was making Mission: Impossible II. On a lark, he showed it to a general audience, which resulted in his taking ten minutes out of the film. There were no index cards, no scores, and no question-and-answer sessions.

  Instead, back at New Line, there was a debate over how many theaters to put the movie into, and eventually it was decided to build an audience with a gradual, platform release. But again, the length of the movie raised hackles. In mid-1998 Anderson and his editor, Dylan Tichenor, showed the first forty-five minutes of the movie to Fiona Apple and Mike De Luca at an editing room in the Valley. After the screening Tichenor and De Luca found themselves in the bathroom standing side by side at urinals. De Luca heaved a big sigh and said, “Tell me this movie will be two and a half hours long.”

  Tichenor shook his head. “No it won’t. And why did you green-light a 192-page script?” Things were dire when even the movie’s own editor thought it was too long. It was this sort of thing that led to Anderson’s growing reputation as a self-indulgent brat—or as the nerviest director around. Jason Robards’s dying monologue goes on for ten full minutes, from twenty-two pages of script. Watching his cut, Anderson remarked, “I like it. It’s long. It’s indulgent. Let’s leave it.”

  When Anderson submitted his completed cut of the movie, it was three hours and eighteen minutes long. After another screening for New Line executives, he met with them in a large conference room. The consensus was clear: They loved the film, but it had to be shorter. Shaye had been the one to push Anderson on Boogie Nights, but this time it was De Luca, the director’s champion, who stepped up to ask his friend, “Can you cut this?”

  Anderson looked down at the table. “No, I can’t.”

  De Luca felt he had protected Anderson and fought his battles at the studio. He also thought he had earned a little more consideration than that, and lost his temper. Voices were raised; “Fuck you, buddy,” shouted De Luca in front of the entire meeting.

  Still, the fight passed, and some of the more cynical observers in the room thought the display of temper by Anderson and De Luca might have been for the benefit of New Line’s executives. “You have to sit in the movie and really absorb it,” Anderson told the New York Times soon after, in his own defense. “I am always looking for that nuance, that moment of truth, and you can’t really do that fast. I was trying to say something with this film without actually screaming the message.” He added: “Although three hours may be something of a scream, I wanted to hold the note for a while.”

  Years later, Anderson admitted to Bob Shaye that the film would have been better if it had been shortened. At a party in 2003, a few years after Magnolia was released, Shaye said Anderson told him, “I thought about what you said, that taking a half hour out of the film would have made it more successful. I was wrong not to take your advice.” Anderson gave this version, telling Shaye, “All right, motherfucker. You said to take out fifteen minutes. I’d take out eight.”

  By 2004 Anderson was more reflective on the topic. “If I needed to take out ten more minutes of Magnolia I could now,” he said. “It is too long. But I was in the middle of it. I couldn’t figure out how to take it out. We were rushing, it was too fast. If I had three or four more months I could have done it.” He hastily added, “That’s not an apology.”

  But De Luca said he never regretted the length. “I love Magnolia,” he said in the years after its release, after losing his job at New Line. “I said, ‘Fuck it,’ with that movie. I loved it. I love the movie.” He paused, sitting in his new office at DreamWorks in early 2003, a quiet and dark place with yellow walls and still nothing hanging on them. “I thought more people would love it.”

  MITCH GOLDMAN, THE MARKETING CHIEF WHO WAS SUCH A fan of Boogie Nights, had left the company after falling out of favor with Shaye. The new marketing chief was Joe Nimziki, who, as producer Joanne Sellar put it, “didn’t get what Paul wanted, didn’t understand him.” And didn’t understand the movie, either. Nimziki had come from a commercial background, and had those kinds of ideas for Magnolia: He wanted to use Tom Cruise’s close-up to sell Magnolia, but the actor’s contract wouldn’t allow it. Neither would Anderson. Nimziki cut trailers to the film that sent Anderson on angry rants. One began with a typical Hollywood voice-over: “You can spend your whole life waiting for the truth. Today, for nine people, the wait is over. From Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Boogie Nights. …” The entire enterprise made the director go berserk. To him, Magnolia was all about bringing moviegoers into a delicate, emotional, very personal experience. Clearly Nimziki didn’t grasp this. Anderson cut his own trailer using no narration, his music, and very little Tom Cruise. Anderson insisted on designing the poster, a filmy picture of a huge magnolia flower with the barely visible characters lightly outlined behind each petal. The studio begged to be permitted to make the actors more prominent, in a checkerboard pattern instead of behind the petals. Anderson resisted. (The director wasn’t the only one to despise Nimziki; Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the writers and director of Stargate came to dislike him so much at MGM, that in their next movie, Independence Day, they named the nasty admiral Nimziki, played by James Rebhorn, after him.)

  Anderson seemed to relish the fight, and loved being a rebel. In the end New Line caved to all his demands. They really did want him to win an Oscar for the studio. Macy had fun with this in the behind-the-scenes documentary. After asking Anderson if he made the poster, Macy turned to the camera and deadpanned, “He developed the film himself, too. Sent it to the lab, but didn’t like the job they were doing. So he did it himself. In the bathroom. He ground the lenses himself, too.”

  Anderson admitted, “I know I’m a lucky guy. But I have to fight. I can have all this power and this great stuff given to me, but I still have to do a dance.”

  The movie had a press junket, but this was stymied somewhat by Cruise’s representatives. They tightly restricted access to the star by journalists because his marriage was publicly falling apart. It seemed a bad time to be promoting Cruise’s performance as a raging misogynist. Anderson’s people thought this reluctance to campaign for the film by its biggest star hurt it badly.

  WHEN MAGNOLIA FINALLY UNROLLED BEFORE THE CRITICS, IT seemed that everyone with a pen needed to weigh in. Some were astonished by the film’s epic scope, others thought it indulgent and its message ultimately banal. But no one could ignore Magnolia’s towering ambition and the masterful performances that Anderson had drawn from his cast. The Washington Post’s three critics each managed to find a different tack: Desson Howe found it “shrill,” Rita Kempley called it “heady,” and Stephen Hunter later weighed in to call i
t “miraculous …a God-mad chunk of pure American magic realism that chatters away (for more than three hours) in voices, tongues, images, and symbols, possibly even numerical sequences.” Some felt the film was a glorious experiment. “Magnolia is drunk and disorderly on the pure joy of making movies,” wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s the kind of jumble only a truly gifted filmmaker can make.”

  And while the New York Times’s Janet Maslin clearly did not think the film succeeded—“as the desperate reach for some larger meaning begins, the sheer arbitrariness of his approach is laid bare,” she wrote—she nonetheless remarked, “Magnolia is still too good to be missed.” A few truly hated the film: Charles Taylor, in Salon, and Henry Sheehan, in the Orange County Register, with the latter accusing Anderson of “emotional immaturity.”

  On the whole, it must be said, the film was a critical success. It won the Golden Bear, the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. When the Oscar nominations came around, Anderson snagged recognition for Best Screenplay and Tom Cruise was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

  But commercially the film could only be called a failure, making only $22.4 million, which was far worse than Boogie Nights. That pain was somewhat diminished by the fact that New Line had presold the foreign rights. After a small release in New York and Los Angeles so Magnolia could qualify for the Oscars, the film received a wide release on one thousand screens in early January 2000—but for two weeks only. On its biggest weekend the film never made more than $5 million. After that New Line scaled the release way back, keeping it in theaters through the Oscar season, but even on Oscar weekend the film was on only sixty-one screens across the country. Anderson spent that opening weekend in January on the phone with friends, including De Luca. Nobody mentioned the grosses, a catastrophic rejection by the box office of the director’s most personal film.

  DESPITE THE CRITICAL ADORATION HEAPED ON MAGNOLIA, Bob Shaye had grown weary from the experience of battling Anderson for cooperation. The same year as Anderson was shooting Magnolia, another difficult film with a headstrong director was getting pushed through the New Line system, American History X. That film was directed by Tony Kaye, a strange but brilliant British director of commercials who had finally decided to turn to feature film. The movie starred Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi American skinhead who comes out of prison a changed man and tries to stop his brother, played by Edward Furlong, from becoming a neo-Nazi racist. Norton gave a mesmerizing, powerful, and frightening performance, but Kaye—who had provocatively declared that he was going to be the best director ever seen in Hollywood—decided in the middle of editing that he needed to change the whole story around. He hooked up with a pacifist poet, Derek Walcott, and announced plans to shift the whole focus of the film to poetry. Norton convinced an alarmed New Line to let him edit the rest of the film. Kaye felt betrayed and mounted a public campaign of self-martyrdom, including a classic moment in which he brought a posse of Buddhist monks to meet Shaye at the studio to help plead his case.

  By the turn of the millennium, Shaye had had it with artsy, arrogant types. The studio turned away from gambling on their sorts of films. “We didn’t like where we were going, making $80 million and $90 million movies where our fingers were crossed,” he told the Los Angeles Times, exaggerating the numbers. “This company couldn’t survive making only those movies. We needed a program that mostly dealt with lower-budget movies. We try to learn from experience. We are not a cultural temple.”

  That said, Shaye then went out and spent $350 million to make the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

  Chapter 12

  Fight Club Fallout;

  The Fruits of Violence

  1999

  Bill Mechanic had counted on the press to be passionate about Fight Club, but he hadn’t counted on them to be passionately opposed to it. When the reviews began to come out, the consensus was definitely not what the studio chief had expected or hoped.

  It began at the Venice Film Festival, where the movie premiered in September 1999. During the main screening, there were walkouts and hisses. The screening for the media left critics from a dozen countries huddled in heated discussions outside the screening room. Some loved it, others hated it; some felt both in equal measure.

  But even that reception could not prepare the studio (or the filmmaker) for the avalanche of derision that followed.

  Roger Ebert, the most influential critic in the country, called the movie “cheerfully fascist.” He wrote, “It’s macho porn—the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.” Even in rejecting the film, Ebert was able to recognize what he considered moments of brilliance by Fincher, and observed that some people would embrace the film. “The movie is visceral and hard-edged, with levels of irony and commentary above and below the action,” Ebert wrote. “Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy—the kind of ride where some people puke and others can’t wait to get on again.”

  Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times was even more dismissive. He called Fight Club “a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence.” Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum said it was a “dumb and brutal shock show of a movie” that was “extreme and disturbing.” Rex Reed, in the New York Observer, called it “a load of rancid depressing swill from start to finish.” Then there was veteran critic Alexander Walker’s comment in the London Evening Standard, scolding one of the Western world’s premier capitalists, Rupert Murdoch, for making a movie that was “not only anti-capitalist, but anti-society and, indeed, anti-God.”

  Fincher didn’t expect everyone to like his film, but he was confused by Ebert’s comment. “How can a movie that is a proponent of no solution whatsoever be labeled as fascist? It’s just fundamentally opposed to the idea of fascism,” he said, defending the movie ahead of its release in England.

  Mechanic had miscalculated, and he knew it. “I had wanted the Pauline Kaels of today—and there isn’t one—to provide a context for understanding the film,” he later said. “Forget about whether you liked it or not. There should be people who see things in a broader context, and there aren’t. I understand not liking the movie. I don’t understand not understanding the movie, or not thinking that it’s an important film.”

  Still, some critics wavered between revulsion and awe. They seemed genuinely confused about what to think. “Early on in Fight Club I found myself exulting at the scary wit with which David Fincher was pulling things off and racking up a score. It was like watching some nerveless kid play pinball in a minefield,” David Thomson observed in the New York Times. “But this is one of the most glossy and treacherous pieces of cinematic black ice we have yet encountered, with good old photography turning into effects beneath our drifting tires.” Thomson concluded that Fincher was too enamored of his own ability to manipulate his chosen medium and the audience that watched it. He wondered if Fincher wasn’t a terrorist of sorts; “I can’t help wondering whether the social scientist in Mr. Fincher wouldn’t be like the cat that swallowed the cream if a riot of copycat fisticuffs ensued…. David Fincher’s bristling attitude is no defense against rubbish.”

  A few key critics championed the movie. Janet Maslin called it “visionary and disturbing” in the New York Times, and advocated seeing it twice. Stephen Hunter seemed to praise the movie in the Washington Post despite himself. The film is “a provocative experience that lights you up even as it brutalizes you,” he wrote. “But unlike so many of today’s movies, you actually come out feeling something, some spike of sensation that could signify your deep brain’s collapse or its enlightenment.” He concluded: “Understand, I am not writing a defense. The movie is indefensible, which is what is so cool about it. It’s a screed against all that’s holy and noble in man, a yelp from the black hole.”

  That was the first wave, the movie critics. But that was quickly followed by a wave of social and cultural cri
tics who within a few days began to have their say. The issue migrated off the arts and leisure pages onto the opinion and editorial pages. Fight Club was immoral. Fight Club was repugnant. Fight Club was a disgrace.

  Even people within Hollywood were outraged.

  THE EDITOR OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, ANITA BUSCH, wrote a scathing column accusing Fincher and Fox of making a scandalous film filled with gratuitous violence, reflecting the chatter throughout town. “The ultragraphic violence of Fox 2000’s Fight Club has drawn more gut anger from the industry than I’ve ever heard,” she wrote. “And for good reason.” Busch argued that the film virtually begged Washington to legislate the film industry into taking a more responsible role as entertainer of the masses. Busch wrote that the film “will become Washington’s poster child for what’s wrong with Hollywood. And Washington, for once, will be right. …The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine.” Busch also presided over two news articles that slammed the film, including one that quoted producers and agents (anonymously, of course) saying the movie was “loathsome,” “absolutely indefensible,” and “deplorable on every level.”

  In retaliation, a furious Fox pulled all its movie advertising from the Hollywood Reporter, though only briefly. Mechanic was particularly outraged that Busch wrote so passionately about the film but had showed up a half hour late to the screening. The publisher, Bob Dowling, hadn’t seen it at all. He called up Dowling and said, “I don’t care if you didn’t like the movie. But you owe us the respect to see it.” Dowling went to see the film that very night—not that it mattered.