Rebels on the Backlot (28 page)

Suddenly a marketing campaign was born, but it was based on free publicity—interviews with prominent journalists, glowing reviews in glossy magazines—rather than paid advertising. The movie opened on two screens, in New York and Los Angeles, and at its most popular point was on nine hundred screens nationwide, barely a wide release by 1990s standards.

Despite all the critical acclaim, when the movie came out, many exhibitors still found the subject matter distasteful and didn’t hesitate to boot the film out of their theaters if the box office failed to take off. In small towns exhibitors refused to book the picture at all. The broader public wasn’t quite ready for Paul Thomas Anderson. But at the time Anderson blamed the studio. He determined that making an inexpensive movie—$15 million—had been the wrong strategy. The studio would be able to cover its investment with a minimum of box office success; the stakes were too low for them. To really get their attention, you had to spend a whole mountain of their money. It was a lesson he would take with him into his next film.

Boogie Nights
ended up making $26 million, squeezing out a small profit for New Line. Only later on video would it turn out to be a real profit center. At Oscar time, the film was rewarded with three Oscar nominations—for Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, and Best Screenplay—but the movie was too edgy for the conservative Academy. It won no Oscars.

Meanwhile the porn industry, which might have been flattered to be the subject of a serious, feature-length Hollywood movie, was upset at what many insiders considered a negative depiction. Pornographers pointed out that Anderson made elementary mistakes in re-creating the industry norms, like when he let Burt Reynolds film a sex scene entirely in long shot, or when he allowed
Dirk Diggler to ejaculate inside Julianne Moore “instead of demanding the customary pop shot…” as one industry Web site put it. Porn veteran and pro-porn idealogue Juliet Anderson hated the movie’s depiction of porn-world figures as “losers and weirdos who couldn’t make it any other way.” She complained to the Web site Tranquileye. “It’s one of the most awful movies I’ve ever seen in my life. I feel like I’ve been assaulted.”

But Mike De Luca remained inordinately proud of
Boogie Nights
and continued to believe he was, as he put it, “planting” talent at the studio. When it came to Paul Thomas Anderson, he admitted, price was no object, even though “I couldn’t justify it in practical terms.”

That would turn out to be a real understatement. Somewhere near the end of making of
Boogie Nights
Anderson called up his producer, Joanne Sellar, at her San Fernando Valley home and asked, “How do you feel about making a movie with frogs falling out of the sky?”

A
year after making his deal with Twentieth Century Fox, David Fincher was ready to present the studio with his project. Under the agreement they’d made with the studio, Fincher had taken the script out of the studio development process to work independently with screenwriter Jim Uhls. The studio did not have to pay him for this process, so essentially
Fight Club
was, for the moment, an independent project. With typical diplomacy Fincher had told Ziskin, “I’m not interested in making the movie
with
you. I’m interested in making the movie
for
you.”

Uhls had worked from a draft written by Ross Bell that had no voice-over, following a Hollywood rule that voice-overs were hackneyed and trite. Fincher disagreed, saying the humor in the movie came from the narrator’s voice, and put a voice-over back in. Apparently several other cutting-edge filmmakers agreed, because the long-abandoned device also showed up in
American Beauty
, the elegantly tortured film by another voice of the new generation of filmmakers, Sam Mendes. In that film it was Kevin Spacey, already
dead, who narrated. (In the years that followed, voice-over again became an acceptable, even common device, with Charlie Kaufman finally poking fun at the ironclad Hollywood “rule” in
Adaptation
, in which his self-referential character Charles Kaufman sits in Robert McKee’s screenwriting seminar. While Kaufman’s thoughts are heard in voice-over, McKee is shouting that only an idiot would use voice-over as a device in a movie.) In this second draft, Fincher also didn’t care for the fact that Jack, the narrator, had become more of a victim. He and Uhls worked for six or seven months and by 1997 they had a third draft that they liked much better, jettisoning major elements from the book and reordering the story.

Ross Bell was fired from the project. Fincher wanted total isolation during his work with Uhls on the script, and he suspected that Bell was leaking information to the studio. He’d meet with Bell, and then get calls from Laura Ziskin and Kevin McCormick. Fincher hated the interference and blamed Bell, who he derisively called Saucy Rossy. He found more of a kindred spirit in Art Linson, a producer with a development deal at the studio, whom Fox had added to the production to keep an eye on Fincher. The idea was that Linson, a tough-talking, thick-necked veteran of many movie battles, would keep a tight leash on Fincher, who had big plans for spending the studio’s money on his “experimental movie.” Bell found himself nudged aside almost as soon as Linson joined the team. But Linson and Fincher turned out to be birds of a feather, contemptuous of the studio system and mavericks at heart, and Linson ended up defending Fincher’s interests from studio pressure instead of the reverse; after the movie he and Fincher formed a production company together.

T
HE MOVIE STILL HAD NO CAST.
F
INCHER NATURALLY
showed the
Fight Club
script to Brad Pitt; they had become good friends while making
Se7en
together.

But would Pitt, probably the most handsome face in Hollywood, go for a role that called for hours of voluntary beatings? Actually, it wasn’t that unlikely. Pitt considered himself a serious
actor, and at times seemed to go out of his way to mar his own beauty on camera. He had already played a mentally imbalanced character in
Twelve Monkeys
, the Terry Gilliam film in which Pitt, as the mad son of a famous scientist, wore a wandering glass eye throughout the picture.

For Fincher, the actor didn’t represent the glossy cover boy image that his camera-in ready looks implied. He’d already begun to form an image in his mind of Tyler Durden that quite resembled Pitt. Fincher had seen the actor go from being broke and unknown, in torn clothes and bumming meals before his breakout role as a hot young stud who seduces then robs Geena Davis in
Thelma and Louise
, to an overnight Hollywood screen star who couldn’t go anywhere without two bodyguards at all times. There was something very Tyler Durden about that bizarre, overnight transformation.

Pitt had good reason to be interested in the role. He was looking to reclaim his acting chops after starring in a disastrous three-hour Hollywood production,
Meet Joe Black
, filled with pensive, soft-light shots of a very blond movie-idol Pitt. (He played Death, on a very good day. The movie was Death at the box office.)

Pitt’s CAA agent, Bryan Lourd, met Ziskin and McCormick for dinner at Orso, a popular industry restaurant in West Hollywood, to talk about the role of Tyler Durden. “Brad will have to cut his fee,” said McCormick, confidently. He and Ziskin were thinking Pitt would take the role for $7 million, less than half his usual asking price. Lourd didn’t say anything, but he had no intention of allowing his client to cut his price. What if
Fight Club
turned out to be the blockbuster hit that
Se7en
was? If Fox wanted his client, they had to pay. And pay they did, because Fincher wanted Brad Pitt, and so did Fox. The studio felt that having a movie star in the lead increased the chance of selling the movie commercially. But with Pitt getting $17.5 million for the role, there was no chance that the other actors would reduce their fees for the good of the film. Suddenly everyone forgot that this was once intended to be a $20 million movie. The budget had just taken a quantum leap and was not coming back down.

W
HILE THESE NEGOTIATIONS WERE GOING ON WITH
P
ITT
, Fincher and the studio were also talking to Edward Norton. The studio was resistant to Fincher’s choice of the intellectual young actor who had burst on the scene with a tour-de-force performance in the thriller
Primal Fear.
Norton had been a student at Yale plucked from hundreds of actors who’d auditioned for the part of a homeless altar boy in Chicago accused of butchering a prominent Catholic priest. To win the part he had to transform himself in one scene from a stuttering, traumatized, sexually abused victim to a cold, calculating serial killer pretending to have a split personality. He’d been nominated for an Oscar for the role. But Fox wanted a sexier marquis name, someone like Matt Damon, who could be a box office draw. Norton was a good actor—he’d also given a strong performance in the Milos Forman movie
The People vs. Larry Flynt
—but he could not “open” a movie. Fincher’s agent, Joe Rosenberg, sent Fincher an early tape of the Forman movie in which Norton played Larry Flynt’s First Amendment attorney, and Fincher was won over. “He looked very young and yet he also had that sense about him that he was taking it all in and weighing it all, that it all weighed heavily on him even though he looked like he was twenty-three years old,” said Fincher. Norton was making another very violent film when Fincher sent him the script, the ill-fated
American History X
, in which he gained thirty pounds of muscle to play a skinhead neo-Nazi. (The director, Tony Kaye, later feuded with Norton and the studio that made the film, and sought to remove his name from the credits.)

In the early summer of 1997, Fincher and Linson took Norton to lunch and told him about the book. Norton read the book, and called Fincher with a question: “I love it, but do you think it’s funny?” he asked. Fincher burst out laughing. “That’s the whole point,” he said. Norton said, “Good, as long as we’re all on the same page.” Another subversive. But when Fox started to negotiate with Norton they offered him a low-ball salary, well below $1 million, according to Fincher. At that point they had Sean Penn in mind.
(Norton’s then manager, Brian Swardstrom, remembers the offer to have been $2 million.) While the studio diddled, Norton’s star was beginning to rise, and he was being considered for leading roles in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
and the Andy Kaufman bio-pic
Man on the Moon.
He ultimately settled on doing
Runaway Jury
, a thriller that was to costar Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean Connery. But that fell apart, and by this time Fox was ready to cast both Pitt and Norton together; they had to pay him $2.5 million to woo him away from other projects he’d been offered.

And there was another problem for the actor. Under an old contract, Norton owed another movie to Paramount. That contract that was about to expire, but he still needed Paramount’s legal release to make
Fight Club.
Paramount chief Sherry Lansing would not give the release unless Norton signed the optional picture contract again at his old, less expensive rate. “They had me over a barrel,” recalled Norton. The actor balked, but finally caved and signed again with Paramount in order to make
Fight Club.
“I ultimately said, ‘I’m not gonna be out of this film, and I signed the agreement.” Later the contract was fulfilled when he made
The Italian Job
, a movie he said he never otherwise would have made.

J
UST AS NORTON WAS COMMITTING HIMSELF
, P
ITT BEGAN TO
waver on the movie. He wasn’t happy with Tyler Durden, who was a figment of Jack’s imagination, after all. He felt the character was too unidimensional, a Joe Cool troublemaker with little complexity.

Fincher agreed—he didn’t have much choice—and sent the script to a friend, writer-director Cameron Crowe, for comment. Crowe hardly seemed like an obvious candidate for advice. He wrote and directed sincere, heartwarming humanist stories like
Jerry Maguire
and
Almost Famous
, about as far from Fincher’s sensibility as you could get.

Fincher told Crowe, “I have this problem. I’m at a loss what to do with Tyler. I feel like we’ve done what Tyler does in the book, but we want to get Brad Pitt to do it. Yet it feels a little bit one-note.”

Crowe suggested working more ambiguity into Pitt’s character.
“Make sure that he’s not so sure about what it is that he’s doing, because [otherwise] that’s going to be boring,” Crowe told Fincher.

Fincher hired Andrew Kevin Walker, who had written
Se7en
, to do a rewrite on the script, and invited Pitt to help, warning him, “You’re not going to get to be a dilettante about this.”

Every day for four weeks, Fincher and Walker showed up at 8:00
A.M.
at Brad Pitt’s sprawling compound in The Oaks, a neighborhood beneath the Hollywood sign. They had the code to the gate, would clatter their way into the kitchen, and wake the heartthrob actor by banging pots and pans around. After smelling the coffee brewing, Pitt would eventually show up in a ratty, worn bathrobe to work on the script. That’s how Tyler Durden ended up wearing a ratty robe in the film. The three gradually made Tyler more sarcastic and gave him more of an identifiable voice, something he didn’t really have in the book. They started with the scene of Tyler Durden meeting Jack on a plane and Tyler’s quick undercutting of Jack’s confidence.