Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Busch also got into a tangle with an on-line critic, David Poland, who went on a local radio station to criticize her for editorializing about Fight Club in the news columns of the Hollywood Reporter. Busch, who was notoriously prickly, sent Poland a letter from her lawyer demanding he “cease and desist” from “further use or publication of any reference whatsoever to Anita Busch or the Hollywood Reporter.”

  But Busch was right that people in Hollywood were buzzing about the film, and not in a good way. The vice chairman of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, Robert Friedman, pulled aside producer Art Linson at the Paramount commissary and pleaded, “How could you?” Walking out of the premiere in Los Angeles, Fincher overheard two women from his agency, CAA, whispering, “This shouldn’t have been made. Who do these people think they are? This is socially irresponsible.”

  Fincher was sincerely bewildered by the scandal. “I honestly thought the movie was funny, and I thought it was fairly innocuous,” he said later. He had obviously forgotten that he once said he intended the film to be “a sharp stick in the eye.”

  Laura Ziskin thought people read the film wrong. “It wasn’t violence with no context, violence for violence’s sake. This is violence used to tell a story, with a real context. I really think it’s an antiviolence movie. You know, what is the obligation of an artist? To hold up a glass to life. This in no way condones violence—the good self triumphs.” Ziskin also didn’t buy any connection between violence in entertainment and real-life violence, like Columbine. “A lot of people condemned the movie without seeing the movie. But it is a scary movie. I think that’s right. It was at the crest of something.”

  Some commented on the irony that Fincher, who’d made millions shooting slick commercials for Madison Avenue, would make the subversive Fight Club. Was he biting the hand that fed him?

  The erudite magazine Film Comment wrote a typically scathing cover story on this order: “Fight Club belongs to a distinct moment of both dread and rupture in American mainstream cinema, also manifested in The Matrix and traceable at least as far back as [Paul] Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers…. Is Fight Club the end of something in cinema, or the beginning? Zeitgeist movie or cult item? Whether you find the state-of-the-art cinematic values of this current moment liberating or oppressive, radical or specious, of lasting significance or entirely transitory, as the little girl in Poltergeist says: They’re here.”

  THE DISCUSSION OVER VIOLENCE CAUSED OTHER FILMMAKERS, even in this rebel generation, to pause and consider what they were doing. Paul Thomas Anderson, who was an acolyte of Quentin Tarantino, that original “poet of violence,” and had made a fairly violent movie himself with Boogie Nights, said he thought Fight Club was “an incredibly irresponsible film.” He for one was convinced that movie violence did encourage real-life violence. “Movies absolutely promote violence. I know that as a kid when I saw movies, I would want to be the characters in the movies. I would want to dress like them, and I would want to talk like them.” The first time Anderson screened Boogie Nights for a test audience, he was horrified to hear people cheer when William H. Macy’s character, Little Bill, got his gun after finding his wife having sex with another man. “When he shot her, the audience cheered,” Anderson said. “I sank in my seat and I have never felt worse in my life. I thought that I’d really done wrong in terms of those characters and in the movie and everything else…. I really kind of changed my tune and felt a real responsibility to not want an audience to cheer, laugh, or have a good time when violence happens. I’m all for having fun, but gunshots hurt. You know, I always thought the subtitle for Boogie Nights should be, ‘It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.’” The scene was later trimmed because of protests by the MPAA over the sex, not the violence.

  David O. Russell also decided that he’d had it with violence, even though Three Kings was quite a violent war movie. “In some ways Quentin Tarantino inspired me to make Three Kings, indirectly,” Russell said. “Because it was the way he embraced the vitality and life—Paul Anderson, too—there was so much life in their movies. The way they dealt with violence and testosterone, you know, it was kind of intriguing to me. But that is not intriguing to me now…. I’d rather now make a movie about like ten thousand volunteer nonviolent warriors who go to the desert of Iraq and decide to sit there, like the way Gandhi used to do things. That’s just more interesting to me.” Russell made his next movie about two existential detectives; the movie had no guns in it.

  But Quentin Tarantino thought Fight Club was one of the best movies of its time. “It’s the rare movie that’s come out in the last six years that inspired me the way Fight Club inspired me,” he said in 2003. “I adored it. It was like a diamond bullet in my brain when I saw that movie. And you know, to this day, I’ve only seen it twice, and I could watch that movie all the time. But actually I love it so much I don’t want to overuse it. I want to wait.”

  NEWS ITEMS, FROM THE WIRES, TRADES, LOS ANGELES TIMES:

  November 1, 1999—A 16-year-old Auburn, Washington, boy was seriously injured in what police said might have been a reenactment of scenes from the film Fight Club. The teen suffered what could have been a life-threatening head injury after stepping into a punch Thursday night during a one-on-one fight before about twenty-five onlookers in a garage near Auburn, about thirty miles south of Seattle.

  April 11, 2002—The son of Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt has been arrested in connection with a teen-run fight club operating inside a Mormon Church gymnasium. Chase Leavitt, 18, was charged this week with battery, disturbing the peace, and trespassing. The incident, which took place in December, came to the attention of authorities because neighbors noticed that attendees arriving at the church meeting house were being charged admission. The fights were advertised on fliers that had been passed out by students from East High School, where Leavitt was a student.

  June 23, 2003—Three filmmakers have been given probationary sentences for paying homeless people to beat each other up on camera and selling the videotape footage of the event, Bumfight, on the Internet. The three were also each ordered to pay a $500 fine. More than 300,000 copies have been sold of the films, which depict homeless men and women ripping out each other’s teeth and ramming each other into doors. A video sold over the Internet for $20.”

  AT THE MAYFAIR THEATRE IN OTTAWA, CANADA, IN THE spring of 2000, a crowd of young men and women were lined up to go the movies. It was a sold-out crowd of moviegoers in their twenties, and one group barely made it into the packed theater. The ticket woman at the door warned them if they couldn’t find seats they’d have to leave. Anticipation coursed through the crowd. They’d seen the movie before; most were seeing it for the second or third time. They’d come to see Fight Club.

  Something strange happened to Fight Club by early 2000. All over the United States, all across Canada, young people were still lining up to see the movie that had taken a nosedive after two weeks in the national box office, settling in a shallow grave at $37 million, just over half the cost of production. In the United Kingdom the news was even worse—just $7 million for the entire run. Marketing costs alone had been $20 million. What was happening at second-run and repertory theaters, at midnight screenings on college campuses, was something close to resurrection, the birth of a cult classic. As Fincher had originally hoped, the people able to see the satire in his story had stuck with it.

  “Ever been at a movie where people all laugh, cheer and clap in the same places, in the right places? This was Fight Club on that night,” said writer Blayne Haggart, who was at the Ottawa screening. “The crowd got Fight Club. The scene in which Edward Norton’s nameless, ultramaterialist character itemizes his Ikea furnishings, as his apartment morphs into an ultradetailed Ikea catalogue layout, brought the house down. People cheered at the end.”

  The Internet also attested to this lingering interest in the film and connection with the issues it raised. A raft of Web sites had sprung up devoted to Fight Club and its ideas. Initially people
wrote begging to find out where the closest fight club was. One wrote: “I need one of these clubs.” Palahniuk insisted that the clubs had never existed, that he had invented them. But mainly bloggers wanted to talk about consumerism and Starbucks, about brand identity, about individualism and responsibility. One launched the question “What is a man?” There were similar sites in French, Russian, Spanish, and German. Despite the fears of Fox and many social critics, there was no significant attempt by young people to create their own fight clubs and their own Project Mayhem. There was, instead, a lively discussion about what the movie meant and why it spoke to them.

  Some journalists began reconsidering the angry furor that followed the release of the movie. A few movie writers and critics were looking back on the previous year and deciding that Fight Club was one of the best films of 1999 after all. Slowly the movie morphed from cultural whipping boy to cult classic, selling 3.2 million DVDs and 1.2 million videocassettes, among Fox’s top-selling DVDs.

  In some sense the debate over Fight Club had a generational element to it. Younger people seemed to get it, while older people seemed horrified by it. The response was not dissimilar to the furor elicited by A Clockwork Orange a generation before. Like that film, Fight Club seemed designed to provoke. Kubrick’s film had been pulled from release in England because gangs of young men in bowler hats began rampaging through London.

  “Once in a great while a film speaks to an entire generation, as Fight Club does with energy, ferocity, and style,” wrote a sixteen-year-old student filmmaker from Santa Monica named David Green in the Los Angeles Times, a reader’s response to critic Kenneth Turan’s scathing dismissal of the film. “With a bitingly sarcastic tone, the film explores our consumerist society and concludes that it should be ripped apart: Everything marketable, pretty, happy, Fight Club tramples. To what degree do your possessions define you? Strip away the cell phone, get rid of the Fred Segal haircut, the Armani suit, and the Prada shoes: Is anything left?”

  Some months after the release of Fight Club, Dustin Hoffman invited Ed Norton to read the Edward Albee play The Zoo Story with him at his daughter’s school, Crossroads, in Santa Monica. The play is about alienation, the inability of people to connect. After the reading before the entire school, Norton was besieged by the teens and preteens noting the similarities to Fight Club.

  “It was palpable; the parents and teachers were looking at each other going, ‘What are they all talking about?’ It was so telling,” recalled Norton. “Everything that people said was so nihilistic, an incitement to the worst things, has been totally grasped by these very young people. They haven’t misunderstood it, they’ve embraced it as a positive experience. By talking about what is painful and dysfunctional, it’s an antidote.”

  ALL THIS HAPPENED TOO LATE TO HELP BILL MECHANIC, who had always insisted the movie was brilliant despite the withering public response. His job was to recoup the studio’s investment on the film, but apparently he had adopted the notion that he was making a work of art. “In twenty, thirty years this will be regarded as a picture of genius,” he would tell anyone who raised the issue with him. “This movie will stand the test of time.”

  Mechanic’s boss, Peter Chernin, had opposed making the film, too, but his attitude was more forgiving. He was willing to move on. Rupert Murdoch, apparently, was not. Observers of the confrontation between Murdoch and Mechanic thought that green-lighting the film might have been a bad idea, but defending it in front of Murdoch was far worse. In June 2000 the trade newspapers announced the “abrupt exit” of Bill Mechanic—one of the most widely liked executives in town—from the chairmanship at Fox. The move was bewildering to many; Mechanic had presided over the making and release of the most successful film in box office history, Titanic, Jim Cameron’s epic tale of the doomed luxury liner. The movie was a box office phenomenon that took in $1.8 billion worldwide, and then won eleven Oscars, including Best Picture, in 1998.

  Many dated the beginning of Mechanic’s end to Fight Club. Murdoch “thought this was a despicable movie,” Mechanic admitted to friends. Ultimately he found himself creatively at odds with the conservative mogul. “He wanted safe movies,” Mechanic later said.

  By 2000 a quick succession of other box office disappointments—Pushing Tin, Anna and the King, Titan A.E., and The Beach, Leonardo DiCaprio’s dud post-Titanic effort—gave Murdoch the reason he needed to push Mechanic out. Mechanic decided to be philosophical about the blow, and never regretted making Fight Club. “Any movie can get you fired, so you’ve got to believe in what you do,” he said later. “I was interested in making interesting films. As a filmgoer you get sick of going out of the theater disappointed, not challenged.” Mechanic was not the only one to pay a price. Laura Ziskin was out of a job even before her boss. Fox 2000 had a number of other bombs —Inventing the Abbotts, Ravenous, Brokedown Palace. And with the success of Fox’s art-house division, Fox Searchlight, there didn’t seem to be much need for another boutique within the studio. Ziskin left and landed a production deal at Sony in 1999.

  Chapter 13

  Casting Harrison Ford; Movie Stars Rule;

  Making Traffic the Schizopolis Way

  2000

  Soderbergh sent the Traffic script to three people initially: Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Benicio Del Toro. Douglas was the real target, a star who could help get the movie going. He read it over Christmas 1999, while in bed with the flu. After Fox could not make his fee, Douglas called Soderbergh to pass on the role, saying the part was not developed enough. Zeta-Jones, his soon-to-be wife, was newly pregnant and read the part of the wife of the drug trafficker in San Diego. She said yes. Benicio Del Toro, producer Laura Bickford’s former boyfriend, got the script. His agent, Rick Yorn, called her and asked, “Are you offering him the part of the DEA agent in the truck?” That was a small role that eventually went to Don Cheadle.

  Bickford replied, “No. We’re offering him Xavier, the Mexican cop. One of the three leads.”

  Yorn cried “Yippie!”

  The Puerto Rico–born Del Toro was thrilled to get the part, but not terribly thrilled with the part itself. He thought the character of Xavier was shallow and played into the hackneyed stereotypes of Mexicans as corrupt and immoral, images perpetuated in Hollywood movies and on television for decades. Del Toro had a friend who knew someone in the Los Angeles Police Department, whose uncle was a retired cop in Tijuana. He went down over the border and talked to the cop about crime and drugs in the 1950s and 1960s, and how it all began to change in the 1980s. He also talked to DEA agents.

  “MY CHARACTER WAS NOT VERY RESEARCHED, AND I DID THE research. I went down to Tijuana. I gave it to Steven—‘This is what I got. This is what they do,’ and we talked about it. Steven took what he thought was important. In my approach of the character, I tried to ground him, and Steven went for it. He became more of an underdog.” He urged Soderbergh to remake the part into more of an honest character struggling amid the corruption of the city.

  In the original draft, Del Toro’s character was a larger-than-life villain, a power-hungry character who rose from being a street cop to being the head of the Tijuana cartel, wresting control from the aging villain, Salazar. In the original draft Xavier was screwing his partner’s girlfriend, not docilely carrying water up the hill to her apartment so they could commiserate about the partner’s death. The original draft also did not have a final scene with Xavier quietly watching kids play at a local baseball diamond.

  Said Del Toro, “The thing is, I had to believe that this guy stood for something.” He told the Los Angeles Times, “So many times we’ve done movies and used an ethnic group to just make a statement about this and that. I think ‘Hey, it’s time to show the other side, too.’ I’m talking about bucking stereotypes. Mexico has this intense history. It’s important to say there’s a lot of people, the majority, who are honest, hardworking people.” Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan had also been impressed by a straight Mexican cop they
met during their research. They remade the character completely, as the moral center of the film. The more subtle portrayal of Xavier not only drew some of the most enthusiastic praise of the movie, but also won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Del Toro. But some felt it hurt the picture overall and that in changing the character Soderbergh caved to the worst kind of Hollywood political correctness. “Benicio was better as a bad guy. It would’ve won Best Picture and made $100 million,” said a principal person involved in the film, who declined to be identified. “The rewrite reflects Benicio’s changes—he won Best Supporting Actor. But the movie lost Best Picture.”

  AS A CAST BEGAN TO BE ATTACHED TO THE FILM, SOME studios began to show interest. And there was one studio that was particularly hungry for interesting, ambitious movies.

  Barry Diller, the now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t mogul, had a near mythical reputation in Hollywood and on Wall Street for having helped resurrect Paramount Studios in the 1980s and then building the Fox television network from scratch into a new network player. He amassed a fortune after Murdoch bought Fox for NewsCorp and parlayed that into even more cash through his ownership of the cash-generating television channel Home Shopping Network, which was part of his company, USA Networks. But that was hardly sexy for a mythical-sized mogul. By the second half of the 1990s Diller was restless, constantly cutting deals, and ever on the prowl for a Hollywood property that would restore his power perch in the entertainment industry. In the spring of 1999 Diller bought himself a little prestige by creating USA Films from the purchase of PolyGram and October Films. It was the latest incarnation of a series of small, independent-oriented ministudios, the reconstitution of the former Gramercy, October, and PolyGram studios and the film divisions of Propaganda and Interscope. Diller hired former Miramax executive Scott Greenstein to run the company from New York and kept the veteran indie executive Russell Schwartz, who had run PolyGram’s Gramercy label, to be based in Los Angeles, at Universal. Diller and Universal were fatally connected; Seagram, which had bought MCA-Universal in 1995, owned 43 percent of USA Networks. In a couple of brief years, the French conglomerate Vivendi would buy Universal from Seagram in a $34 billion deal, and Seagram’s chief, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., would urge Vivendi to buy out Diller’s stake in USA Network in a mostly equity deal, later valued at more than $2 billion. That deal further enriched the already fat Diller, and saddled Vivendi with still more unmanageable debt. But that was down the road.