Rebels on the Backlot (46 page)

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.”

A
LL THIS HAPPENED TOO LATE TO HELP
B
ILL
M
ECHANIC
, 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.

S
oderbergh 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.

“M
Y 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.”

A
S 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.

At USA Films, Greenstein and Schwartz were neither a major nor an independent, saying they aimed to make movies in the $10 to $25 million range. They were tied inexorably both to the media mogul who created them (Diller) and the conglomerate (Seagrams and then Vivendi) that had significant ownership. In February 2000
Variety
wrote, “USA is hunting for smart thrillers, franchiseable stories, and the occasional superstar vehicle—provided the superstar in question takes a salary cut.” Nobody knew what that meant, and USA had so far failed to show much in the way of examples. But both Russell and Greenstein had the sensibilities of the independent movie world and were eager to put their new studio on the Hollywood map. Said Schwartz, “There was a sense of quiet desperation between Scott and myself. At that point in its young life, USA needed something big to get on the map. We didn’t have that many opportunities.”

So when Laura Bickford met Scott Greenstein for a drink on New Year’s Day, 2000, at the Belage Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, she was meeting with someone who was more than a little motivated to green-light something edgy and interesting (why else would you be working on New Year’s Day?). Bickford was eager, too. She wanted to get this movie set up at a studio before the whole thing slipped through her fingers.

G
REENSTEIN WAS A LARGE, LOUD, AND NOT-VERY-WELL-LIKED
executive in Hollywood. He’d been trained at the Harvey Weinstein School of Etiquette and tended to bellow when talking would do, and to call twenty times when a couple of phone calls might get the job done. One producer in Hollywood—one who likes him—said
that Greenstein had been scarred by the Weinstein method, calling him “an abused-child executive.” He made a passionate pitch to be given a shot at making
Traffic
and said he would make it one of the centerpiece films of his new film studio.

Bickford was thrilled to have found a movie executive who got the significance of the film and was willing to defend it. MGM was showing interest, too, and put an offer on the table. Miramax wanted to get involved, but neither Soderbergh nor Bickford wanted to be in the Harvey Weinstein business. Miramax had changed dramatically since the days of
sex, lies, and videotape
and now looked and acted more like a major studio than a scrappy art-house distributor. Weinstein was a genius at winning Oscars, and he loved to dominate cocktail parties and endless award dinners that drew Hollywood stars and players like homing pigeons to the swank restaurants of Los Angeles from January through March. Weinstein always had several possible Oscar movies in the pipeline. Come the fall, he would decide which ones would be backed with major marketing campaigns to win awards. Those that didn’t find immediate critical support were usually jettisoned fast. Weinstein liked to bet on winners. Remarked Bickford, “We didn’t want to be at Miramax and be one of eight movies at Oscar time.” A foreign partner was being brought in to help with financing. They were Fifty Cannon, the British company run by Cameron Jones that had made a pocketful of cash from the romantic comedy
Four Weddings and a Funeral.
That helped, but Soderbergh and Bickford needed an American studio to get the film made. Both of them liked what Scott Greenstein had to say. They were leaning toward making the movie with him at USA Films.

T
HEN OUT OF THE BLUE
, H
ARRISON
F
ORD CALLED.

Bickford was in her house, brushing her teeth in early January 2000 when the phone rang. It was Pat McQueeney, Ford’s longtime agent/manager.