Rebels on the Backlot (39 page)

Tenenbaum met Soderbergh in 1987 after reading
sex, lies, and videotape.
She recalled, “We were both kids. He was kind of awkward, extremely charming. He was hysterically funny, with a dry sense of humor. I can remember picking him up at the airport with my husband, and someone was whistling. He said, ‘Who is that whistling off tune?’ I thought, ‘He’s so observant, I better be on guard.’ He calls you on everything; he doesn’t let anything go by.”

Russell was different, often living on another plane. “He’s very scary, very smart,” says Tenenbaum. “He couldn’t be more different than Steven. David totally lets you into his neuroses. No matter how fucked-up you feel, he feels so much more fucked-up that you can totally be yourself. That’s an extraodinary trait. He makes you feel like you’re the most normal human being out there.” But she and Russell would fight. And both young directors vied for her affections. Ultimately Tenenbaum stayed to work with Soderbergh on
sex, lies, and videotape
, and drifted from Russell. She and Russell were a complicated pair. “Steven characterized our relationship as reminding him of a
Seinfeld
episode. Like Elaine Benes and George Costanza,” said Tenenbaum. That was kinder than he’d be in subsequent years.

As for Russell, he saw Soderbergh as someone who aimed for the middle and who aimed to please. Most creative figures in Hollywood saw Soderbergh as a risk-taker and a daring artist, but Russell was one of the few who ventured to say otherwise. “I don’t think he has a soul,” Russell would tell friends. “I don’t think he’s a filmmaker who makes films from his heart, that are personal.”

In truth, their sensibilities were just different. Russell wanted to be the next Luis Buñuel. Steven Soderbergh wanted to be the next Sydney Pollack. Soderbergh wanted to shoot movies all the time, constantly, to aim and shoot and miss, then aim and shoot and hit. Russell took his time. He wanted to think and hone and make the exact, precise movie he had in his head, deliberately.

There was ample room for both in a creatively impoverished Hollywood. Sadly, neither of them seemed to think so.

B
y the close of the 1990s Hollywood had long since given up making any meaningful social commentary on modern life through its movies. Paradoxically, an opposite impetus was quietly nurtured within the studios at the very same time.

The creative forces building in Hollywood throughout the decade came crashing forth in 1999 in a cascade of original, funny, harsh, daring, and masterfully off-the-wall movies. It was as if all the struggles and failures experienced by the rebel directors up to that time collectively paid off in one startling, exhilarating year. There seemed no other way to explain the release in a single year of all of these films: Anderson’s
Magnolia;
Russell’s
Three Kings;
Jonze’s
Being John Malkovich;
Fincher’s
Fight Club;
Sam Mendes’s
American Beauty;
the Wachowski brothers’
The Matrix;
Alexander Payne’s
Election;
Sofia Coppola’s
The Virgin Suicides;
and Kimberly Peirce’s
Boys Don’t Cry.

Even in the moment, observant outsiders began to notice the confluence of talent, the unexpected breath of fresh air.
“Fight
Club
is at least the third major Hollywood film of the year to hunt for the hidden meanings beneath our affluent consumer society, after
The Matrix
and
American Beauty,”
wrote critic Andrew O’Hehir in
Salon
in October 1999. “There’s a pattern here—every time North Americans get really fat and self-satisfied we start feeling miserable about ourselves.”

Either that, or we start looking for meaning. We just weren’t used to finding it at the movies.

The directors themselves, as they met each other on the stage of award ceremonies and film symposia, began to notice. Paul Thomas Anderson had no time to watch other movies while he was making
Magnolia
, but by the end of the year he caught up on what he missed. “I was blown away by
Election
and
The Matrix,”
he said. “The first time I’ve felt any millennium thing is this year at the movies. Filmmakers seem to be thinking, ‘What do we have to say?’” When Dylan Tichenor, Anderson’s editor on
Boogie Nights
and
Magnolia
, saw
Fight Club
, he thought, “This is the first film of the twenty-first century.” Or, as Richard Schickel put it in his review in
Time
magazine of Russell’s
Three Kings:
“We keep meeting the enemy on our various peacekeeping missions and discovering that he is very like us—wearing our sneakers and T-shirts, lusting after our music, our gadgets, our more deadly hardware…. This is not exactly what people mean when they talk about the American century. But that’s the way it has worked out. And David Russell has written its epitaph in blazing user-friendly fire.”

To Hollywood veterans, the change was radical. In 1999 the rebel community emerged from the shadows and became recognizable as a group defining the cutting edge of movie culture. “It was no longer, ‘I want to be the next Harrison Ford.’ It was, ‘I want to work with these directors,’” recalled agent Brian Swardstrom, one such veteran. “Nineteen ninety-nine was a major shift in the business. A generational shift. Barry Levinson, Rob Reiner, Richard Donner just a few years earlier had been A-list directors. Suddenly they were over-the-hill. These new guys came in, and they were the new guard.”

On a blindingly sunny day in early 1999 about a dozen senior Fox executives, producers, and one coolly anxious director gathered at Screening Room C on the Fox lot for the first formal screening of
Fight Club.
Security was tight. E-mails had been exchanged about the secret nature of this screening. For ten weeks, Fincher had been editing footage that hadn’t been seen since the shoot ended in December. Only a few of those present had seen the dailies; Fox chief Bill Mechanic had not.

In the interim Fincher had added millions of dollars’ worth of computer effects. Besides the opening shot, there were many other inspired stylistic moments, such as one where Ed Norton as Jack steps into a living Ikea catalogue. Week after week Fincher labored over the film with singular devotion, allowing no one to see it. Tension at the studio was high about the final product. And everyone knew that Fincher was not the kind of director who took “notes” from studio bosses. All the senior executives who’d been responsible for making
Fight Club
were at the screening: Bill Mechanic came, as did producer Arnon Milchan with his top aide David Matalon. Art Linson came, as did Laura Ziskin and her executives Kevin McCormick and Jack Leslie. The Fox head of distribution, Tom Sherak, and head of marketing, Bob Harper, were there. Each person invited one guest whose opinion they trusted. As the lights went down, the buzz of anticipation quickly quieted to silence.

The opening title sequence was a sensorial immersion: a blasting sound track to a tracking shot through the darkness into the cellular synapses of the human brain, racing through cloudy cerebral lobes out into the battered face of Edward Norton with a gun in his mouth. From there the film never let up, two hours and thirty-five minutes of psychological and physical intensity, from the cancer meetings to brutal sex with Marla to Tyler Durden’s mind games to burning lye seared into Jack’s hand to the bare-fisted fighting and Project Mayhem. Fincher, who had been working so closely on the layered computer effects, had lost a sense of the movie’s true impact. He had not spared a frame of the intense, arduous fighting sequences: spurting blood, split flesh, and the
sound of crunching bone and ripping tendons. Everyone in the room had read the script. But they had not expected the film to be as visceral an experience as it was. As the film wore on, no one seemed to find it funny at all, and some found it almost unbearable. Dead silence fell over the room.

Linson described the screening in his book,
What Just Happened:
“In the second hour, I began to notice that some of the women, and a couple of the men, would occasionally jerk their heads backward, a sudden ticlike movement, as if they were trying to avoid a collision. When Tyler (Brad Pitt) in front of his men, begged his assailant (Lou) to hit him again even harder, even though his face was already pulverized, a young assistant to Ziskin put her hands over her eyes and dropped her head. I was getting apprehensive, but I could tell they were jolted.” Meanwhile, Linson observed, “I glanced over at Fincher. He was curiously relaxed. He looked like a man who was getting his money’s worth. He wasn’t at all concerned if the impact of what he had done was gratifying to them or not. He knew he was doing something to these onlookers, something darkly powerful, and that pleased him.”

When the lights came up in the screening room, there was utter silence. Shock, it seemed. Horror, perhaps. And some embarrassment. Mechanic felt the torpor in the room, and had to say something supportive to Fincher. God only knew what the other comments might be. For many long, long minutes no one could speak at all. As the quiet hung in the room, Fincher himself stood up and quickly said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And he left. Mechanic gave Milchan a hug—moral support, perhaps. Or commiseration.

Sherak was horrified by the film. He’d never seen anything so violent. “Who is this movie for?” he asked himself. “So much violence? Who’s gonna buy this?” Linson caught up with Sherak on his way out, finding the veteran executive shuffling aimlessly, as if shell-shocked, in the parking lot.

“Tom, you gotta admit it’s funny,” said Linson.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, don’t say that.” Linson continued to insist that the film had humor. Exasperated, Sherak finally said: “Next week, I have a psychiatrist. …I want you to pick a day, any day, and I would like you to go with me and explain to him, in my presence, why you think this thing is funny.”

About an hour later Mechanic summoned his courage and called Fincher on the phone. “It’s too violent,” he said simply. “And it’s too long.”

Ziskin’s reaction was also stunned, but for a different reason. She thought the film was brilliant. “I was afraid of it,” she later admitted. “I thought it was really smart, it had real ideas in it—and that’s hard. I was afraid: Could we sell it? I was always afraid of that.” Like Mechanic, Ziskin thought the movie was too long. She wanted twenty minutes cut.

Linson, a subversive like Fincher, thought this was all grand. “I loved the movie,” he admitted. “It was so audacious that it couldn’t be brought under control. Soon Murdoch and Chernin would be flopping around like acid-crazed carp wondering how such a thing could even have happened.”

Said Fincher, in hindsight, “It’s very difficult for me to find movies that are less violent than
Fight Club
in a lot of ways.
Fight Club
is a movie that has a kind of psychic violence to it, because what it’s really going after is not, ‘I can bruise you,’ it’s saying, ‘You’re a fraud and you should know it. Here are some of the fraudulent things upon which your life is based.’ Which puts people in a more defensive position than just to say, ‘You’re a wimp, and I can kick your ass.’”

When the stars of the movie saw the film for the first time, they had similarly visceral reactions, without the negative undertones. Norton saw an early rough cut on the Fox lot and drove off in his car, in a daze. Out on Pico Avenue outside the studio, he had to pull over and call Brad Pitt. “I just saw the movie. I just can’t believe it,” he told Pitt. Pitt kept saying: “I know. I know. I know.” Norton felt speechless—a rarity for the Ivy League intellectual. “It was so enormous,” he recalled. “So strange, so hard to place in any frame of reference. I was so happy about that.”

M
ECHANIC 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.

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.