Rebels on the Backlot (41 page)

Fincher and Linson agreed that marketing wizards would always find reasons why a movie was a major challenge to open. Fincher said the attitude was always: This movie’s a tough nut; possibly, if they got lucky, they would find a way to crack it. “If a movie worked, it was a goddamn great campaign. If a movie failed, well, you get the drill, the movie had an incurable cancer,” observed Linson.

But Fincher did nothing to make matters easier. On his best day he was not what anyone would consider a warm people-person, and he was barely civil to executives he thought were drones and half-wits. He seemed to think that if you had a studio job it was impossible to have a creative bone in your body. Among filmmakers Fincher was known as being one of the quickest wits in town, but he was just as quick with a cutting put-down. He talked very little in meetings with Fox executives. He did not schmooze. For Fincher, the studio system was a necessary evil, a financial means to an artistic end. Around the Fox marketing department, executives began to refer to him as “Doberman Fincher.”

Gradually Fincher ended up in open war with Harper and Sherak, and the bitterness lasted. “I’ve been through the Robert Harper experience…. I’ve seen cluelessness at its most refined,” he later said. He was similarly dismissive of Sherak: “What is the career of somebody who’s in fucking distribution?” asked Fincher. “What are we talking about? We’re talking about someone who is like, ‘Look, I supply popcorn to theaters, and I need to know that those theaters aren’t showing things that I would find morally objectionable.’ What does that have to do with the movies? That’s all this guy’s job is, his relationship with the exhibitors. He’s got a product that he’s got to get to those exhibitors. They don’t have to like it…. What is the added value of the head of distribution?”

Harper provided the following statement: “The very qualities that made
Fight Club
a unique moviegoing experience made it a difficult sell to a broad audience. Despite an aggressive marketing campaign, the general public wasn’t ready for a gritty take on the world of semiorganized bare knuckles street fighting. Whatever the film’s flaws, I personally enjoyed it, particularly Brad Pitt’s extraordinary performance.”

Sherak had this to say about working with Fincher: “You can blame anybody you’d like to blame. The bottom line is everyone worked very hard on the movie. If you think the director and the producer didn’t have input into the marketing campaign—that’s wrong. Fincher is a visionary, an incredible filmmaker. He tried to tell a story that the majority of people who go to movies didn’t necessarily want to see. There’s enough credit to go around and enough blame to go around.”

T
HE DECISION TO DELAY THE MOVIE FROM
J
ULY OR
A
UGUST
to October resulted in some publicity confusion. Norton was on the cover of
Vanity Fair
in August, because the article was timed for the original planned release date, and Pitt and Norton appeared on the cover of
Premiere
that same month, talking about a movie no one would see for weeks and weeks.

There was nothing to be done about those missteps, but Sherak and Harper had other problems. Sherak didn’t think anybody would buy the notion that this movie was a profound statement of any sort. He wasn’t even sure what the movie was trying to say. The best he could muster was that this was a black comedy from the mind of a director with a twisted imagination. He spoke out at a meeting after the first screening. “We got problems,” he said simply. “How are we gonna sell this thing?”

The marketing experts at the studio felt there were several problems at work. The theme of the film was clearly geared to appeal to male audiences. The next problem was the title, which wasn’t exactly enticing to women. But the star of the film was Brad Pitt, a magnet for female moviegoers. Pitt was not a neutral element to guys; he was a turn-off, the kind of pretty boy who their girlfriends lusted after. Generally men were jealous of him. As one marketing executive put it, “The core audience from the book was paper thin, and the title sounded stupid to people. Plus, it exacerbated the problem for women.”

Saddled with the theme, title, and star, the studio quickly decided to focus on drawing men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Even with Brad Pitt, Fox marketers ruled out women moviegoers. They believed that if a woman happened to buy a ticket and wander into the theater, she’d head right back out. There was an additional complication. Research testing had confirmed that
Fight Club
appealed to teenagers, but in the post-Columbine furor over violence in entertainment, studios were under serious scrutiny not to market their R-rated movies to teenagers under seventeen. Technically this wasn’t illegal, but it was clearly not what a socially responsible studio ought to do.

The other option was to go the intellectual route, and market
Fight Club
as an art film, starting in a few theaters and widening the release slowly. This might have broadened the audience base, but the art-house audience was not terribly big. Still, some within the studio thought this was the way to go. “We could have platformed it, tried to get reviews. It was for a thinking audience. It was social commentary,” said one Fox marketing executive. If that thought
occurred to the marketing staff, it never got very far in the actual planning for the film.

Whatever the options for marketing the film, there was little interaction with Fincher. There was never any discussion allowed about the title. Fincher and Laura Ziskin, head of Fox 2000, “were in awe of the property,” an executive noted. The director refused to consider posters or trailers that emphasized the movie’s most obvious marketing hook, Brad Pitt. Instead, Fincher insisted the studio hire a cutting-edge advertising firm, Weiden + Kennedy, based in Seattle, to come up with a marketing plan (they devised Nike’s advertising campaigns). Their main contribution, many billable dollar–hours later, was to use a bar of pink soap as the main marketing image. The veterans at Fox thought this was like a bad joke. The image “was an interesting icon, but it didn’t tell the movie,” said one executive involved. “It was too smart for itself, too in-the-know.” But the director believed in it and would not be moved.

The tag-lines beneath the bar of soap may as well have said: “No women moviegoers expected for this film.” They were pithy, Fincherian lines intended to intrigue: “Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.” was the main tagline, but there was also: “Wash your feminine side clean off”; “Works great even on blood stains”; and “Creates a thick, rich lather. Like rabies.” Said the marketing executive, “That poster lost any chance to get at an upscale, intelligent audience.” But the marketing and publicity department went along. They sent out mailers to the media, one of an actual bar of pink soap, and another of one feather with a piece of paper in the box that read: “Just because you stick a feather in your ass doesn’t mean you’re a chicken,” a line from the movie and audacious by Fox’s standards. When the studio held its press junket, the set for interviews with the cast—despite being located in a luxury suite at the Four Seasons Hotel—was spare, light green walls, “like in a mental institution,” remembered one publicity executive.

The Fox staffers hated the fact that Fincher had done two early trailers for the film that were faux public service announcements. One showed Pitt ending a fire safety spiel by saying, “Did you know
that urine is sterile? You can drink it!” Another was of Norton telling people to turn off their cell phones and pagers before saying, “And remember, no one has the right to touch you in the bathing suit area.” Some thought Fincher was just plain sick—a “repressed sadomasochist with torture fantasies,” as one executive put it. Fincher, along with Norton and Pitt, thought it was a hilarious way to set up a misinformation campaign.

The studio was not amused. And it wasn’t going to use trailers like that to open the movie ahead of its release. Instead it used the press junket, a poster and billboard campaign, and buying TV time with the trailers highlighting the fight scenes. It was a large-scale campaign that cost $20 million, giving the film an even higher hurdle to pass into profitability.

Fincher was convinced that the studio could not sell a movie its own executives despised, and that was essentially the task before them. When they’d showed him a poster with a huge picture of Brad Pitt, he deep-sixed it. The trailer that was finally released gave away three of the best jokes in the film and focused exclusively on the boxing; and in the unkindest cut of all, Fox advertised the film on cable during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts. Fincher believed that his movie needed to be explained and placed in context by the more intelligent movie critics. Fox never set that up. They just sold it like any other product, in this case as a movie about underground boxing that would appeal to testosterone-heavy guys—which to Fincher wasn’t what the movie was about at all.

“The problem for me with Twentieth Century Fox when we were trying to get
Fight Club
released was that they had an intense contempt for creativity and an intense disregard for any kind of intellect that the audience might bring to it,” Fincher said later. “You can’t sell something that you don’t like. You just can’t do it. What do you offer as a reason for somebody to go see it? How do you sell it? I think they gave up on trying to be able to understand it.”

A
S
P
AUL
T
HOMAS
A
NDERSON HAD DONE WITH
B
OOGIE
Nights
, Fincher intentionally larded
Fight Club
with overlong fight sequences, knowing that the studio would pressure him to cut it back and knowing the MPAA was also likely to raise objections. Even before the MPAA saw the film, Fincher cut the violence back in response to pressure from Fox. Among the scenes reduced in length were Ed Norton pounding a guy in the face at the fight club, punching him over and over until the man’s face was pulverized. In the original cut Jared Leto, playing Angel Face, gets pounded so badly that his nose splits and you see the bubbling blood over the bone (it was a prosthetic). It was removed. The studio also objected to the how-to scenes for making a bomb out of soap. The original cut showed an actual recipe; Fincher had made sure that all of the film’s home-science experiments were accurate. The studio would not let Fincher give moviegoers an audiovisual presentation about how to make a bomb in their own kitchen. The recipes were changed. Sherak also had a problem—and he was sure the MPAA would, too—with the final scene in which Ed Norton shoots Tyler Durden, that is, himself. Fincher trimmed a bit to make the shooting slightly less graphic. But he wouldn’t budge on trimming a scene when Durden deliberately crashes a car.

Ziskin was an enthusiastic supporter of Fincher’s vision for the film. But even she had some limits. In the book, and in the script, after Marla and Tyler meet and have sex for the first time, Marla turns to him and says, “I want to have your abortion.” The line made Ziskin cringe. She thought it crossed the line of good taste—though one could argue that the point of the film was to do just that—and would alienate viewers. It alienated her. Fincher refused. He told her: “You approved the script, you approved the cast and the budget. We’ll shoot it, and if it’s too offensive, we’ll let the audience tell us that.”

The line was shot as written, and at the test screening, it got a big laugh from the audience. Still, Ziskin came back to Fincher. “Look, it got a laugh,” she said. “I don’t have a leg to stand on. But I’m begging you, please. It’s too offensive. You have to take it out.”

Fincher seemed to take perverse pleasure in tormenting studio executives. “Okay, here’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I will shoot something else to replace that line, but you have to promise me that I have the final say on whatever that is. I get to come up with the replacement.”

Ziskin replied, “Anything. Nothing could be worse than ‘I want to have your abortion.’ Go ahead.”

Fincher reshot the moment, in which Marla says instead, “Oh my God, I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.” He cut it into the movie, and when it was screened for an audience it got an even bigger laugh than the abortion line.

Ziskin approached him after the screening. “Please, my God,” she begged. “Put the abortion line back in.”

Fincher relished the moment. “Nope. We made a deal.”

T
HE ENDING OF THE FILM WAS ALREADY DIFFERENT FROM
Chuck Palahniuk’s book. In the novel, the skyscraper that has been wired for detonation never explodes. Both Fincher and Jim Uhls, the screenwriter, thought that was too esoteric. They wondered what they could blow up that wouldn’t hurt people but would still bring about the collapse of civilization? They decided on credit card companies, though watching the film in the wake of September 11, it seems only to evoke the attacks on the World Trade Center. An early draft had people dancing in the streets and the narrator and Marla driving away in a van with their underground henchmen (called space monkeys even in the script) while credit card bills floated down on them from the collapsed buildings. In the final cut the viewer sees only the buildings collapsing, an end to capitalism-based, consumerist civilization.