Metallica: This Monster Lives (8 page)

JAMES:
Great!

LARS:
There you go!

JAMES:
The silent album. Laughter

PHIL:
Then you’re done. That’s stretching the boundaries, right? You had the Black Album, and we now have the–

JAMES:
The Blank Album.

PHIL:
The Blank Album, that’s great.

JAMES:
From black to blank.

As 1999 drew to a close, the world braced itself for the “year 2000 problem,” the possibly catastrophic series of chain reactions that would occur when computers worldwide ticked from ’99 to ’00, forgot what year it was, and crashed en masse. I was too busy to worry about such trivialities. I was hard at work setting the stage for my own millennium bug. I was about to make a series of decisions that would crash my career.

It all started just before Thanksgiving. I was putting the finishing touches on the Metallica pilot of
FanClub
and looking forward to putting together the eight additional episodes VH1 had ordered
¹
when I got a call from Artisan Entertainment, the little studio that had made a fortune with
The Blair Witch Project.
On the line was a smart young executive named Cybelle Greenman, to whom I’d recently pitched an idea for my first feature film,
The Little Fellow in the Attic.
I knew that as someone known for making documentaries, I would probably have only one chance to make a big splash crossing over to feature films, so I wanted to be very careful about my first fiction feature project.

Little Fellow
was a true-crime story about a secret liaison between a married woman and an employee of her wealthy industrialist husband in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles. The affair began when the boy was seventeen. The woman stashed him in the attic, and that’s where he lived for the next seventeen years, unbeknownst to the woman’s husband. The boy would hide in his attic lair when the husband was home and come out to do chores and have sex with the woman when the man was at work. In 1932, the husband discovered the secret attic hideaway A fight ensued, and the “little fellow” shot and killed the husband. A huge, sensational trial ended in a hung jury because some jurors felt sympathy for the kept man, a virtual slave denied access to the outside world by the love-starved woman.

At the time I was developing this movie, I, too, felt like a slave. With two young kids at home and a Westchester County mortgage, I wasn’t making the kind of money I thought I should be making, and I felt trapped running a business in which I saw no future. So I was really excited that Artisan was flying me out to talk about a feature film that I desperately wanted to make, not just for creative reasons but also to make a change in the direction of my career.

It looked like Artisan loved my idea. Over two days, I had three meetings, each with a successively higher tier of executives, all patting me on the back and telling me how wonderful this film was going to be. It seemed surreal, almost too easy. Before I knew it, I was sitting down with Amir Malin and Bill Block, two of the three heads of Artisan. Boy they must really like my little noir thriller, I thought. I launched into my pitch for the fourth time in two days. Amir abruptly held up his hand, as if to say, “Hold your breath, kid.” Then he spoke: “Actually we’re not interested in your attic movie. We want you to make the sequel to
The Blair Witch Project.
”

Cybelle, the executive who brought me to L.A., turned and gave me a big smile. I felt a knot in my stomach. Little did I know it would stay there for 14 months.

It turned out that my pitching sessions were just a pretense to see if I would be the right person to make a sequel to the highest-grossing film of 1999 and what was then the biggest independent film of all time.
Blair Witch
had come out of nowhere to take in an astounding $50 million in its first week alone. During that summer,
Blair Witch
even managed to steal some thunder
from
The Phantom Menace,
the highly anticipated first episode in George Lucas’s new
Star Wars
trilogy The three previously unknown stars of
Blair Witch
became overnight sensations.

As anybody with even a passing interest in popular culture knows, the film was promoted as the edited version of real footage shot by a trio of amateur documentary filmmakers who had disappeared into the woods near Burkettsville, Maryland, while researching a film about the legend of a local witch. According to the legend, the filmmakers were never found, but their footage, which documented their grisly demise, was salvaged and turned into a documentary about their final days.

Cybelle noticed my stunned look. “We think you’d be perfect,” she said, really laying it on thick. “We really believe in you.” Amir added, “We really want this to be different. We’re a filmmaker’s studio, and we want to help you achieve your vision.” The attention was flattering, but I should have recognized that the duplicity of the pitch meeting was a sign of things to come. I was disappointed that my
Little Fellow
project would have to sit on a shelf for a while longer, but by the end of the meeting, I was convinced that they wanted me to make something with artistic merit. I figured their attitude was, Who better to make a fake documentary about murders in the woods than a guy famous for making a real documentary about murders in the woods? I didn’t realize it then, but they probably also thought an indie filmmaker would add a patina of indie cred to this crass Hollywood exercise.

The irony of my involvement was that, although I thought Artisan would respect my vision of
Blair Witch 2,
I didn’t have much respect for
Blair Witch 1.
In fact, I hated what the movie represented. From a storytelling standpoint,
The Blair Witch Project
certainly had a lot of merit. It was highly engaging and original. My scorn came from the message I thought the film sent about people’s relationship with the mass media. As someone who considers himself as much a journalist as a filmmaker, I have observed, with great concern, how the blurring of the line between fiction and reality has increased over the years. TV news has become much more oriented toward entertainment. “Reality” TV shows, although unscripted, depict completely contrived situations.
Blair Witch
went one step further. Artisan successfully marketed the film as a real documentary A guerrilla marketing campaign, including a fantastic Web site packed with “facts” about the legend and the doomed filmmakers, was enough to convince huge numbers of people that they were witnessing real life. The film generated $140 million in ticket sales in the U.S. alone, much of
that money spent by people who were essentially tricked into buying tickets to something they thought was an actual documentary

To my surprise, I couldn’t find one article, amid the reams of glowing press, that criticized the way the film’s marketing campaign toyed with journalistic values. The clever marketing plan was even celebrated on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek.
But what was even more disturbing was the fact that even after the “trick” was revealed in countless articles and TV shows around the country, a good 40 percent of the audience, according to Artisan’s market research, still believed the movie was nonetheless real. The film, and the reception that greeted it, spoke volumes about the power of moving images to convey “truth.”

The fact that this poorly produced, grainy film was accepted as real by many people also bothered me on an artistic level. One of my biggest aesthetic pet peeves is that fiction films, from Woody Allen’s
Husbands and Wives
to
The Blair Witch Project,
often wallow in the worst clichés of bad documentary making in order to sell the idea of “reality”—excessively grainy footage, shaking the camera to the point of absurdity, and disjointed editing. Somehow bad shooting has become a visual reference for real life. (Sometimes this reality style is done well. For example, the TV show
Homicide
knew how to execute it with some artful restraint.) In addition, our society simply accepts video as real—the more amateur the video, the more we accept its credibility without questioning its provenance.

Why does this bother a real documentarian like me? Because most documentary makers don’t purposefully shake the camera or try to impose jump cuts in the editing room. Bruce and I pride ourselves on paying as much attention to craft as any fiction-feature director. We shoot our films in a very cinematic way and we make sure we have sufficient coverage so we can avoid jump cuts and incongruous editing whenever possible. Instead of purposefully shaking the camera, we aspire to a very lyrical, highly evocative cinematography. It’s offensive to those of us who pride ourselves on craft that bad shooting and jarring editing has been equated with documentary making—and that the American public buys it.

Prior to my arrival in the Artisan corner office, the studio’s development brain trust had simultaneously commissioned three different scripts for
Blair Witch 2,
a highly unusual move for a studio. They sent me back to New York, asking me to read all three, pick the one I like best, and tell them why. They wanted a decision by Monday. I would then immediately start prepping the movie, which was to begin shooting in February 2000 on a rush schedule. The film would be released worldwide on Halloween later that year. I spent most of that Thanksgiving break immersing myself in the three scripts and agonizing over what to do. On the one hand, here was a golden opportunity to finally get a feature film under my belt. On the other hand, it was an extremely risky proposition: Sequels often fail, I was not a fan of the first film, and the idea of making a
Blair Witch
sequel was already drawing venom from fans of the original and from film critics. This was no small art movie that I could make under the radar.

As I slogged through all three scripts over the long weekend, I came to a sobering conclusion: They all really sucked. The main problem I had was that each screenplay took up the story where the first movie left off. They all continued to rely on the conceit that the viewer is watching actual “found” documentary footage by “real” documentary filmmakers. I thought this was a huge mistake, because the sequel, unlike the original, would not have the advantage of emerging seemingly out of nowhere. The actors had been all over the airwaves and were now quasi celebrities. Although some people were still convinced
The Blair Witch Project
was a real documentary the media gatekeepers had widely dissected and celebrated the marketing hoax. After conferring with my wife, Loren, and my manager, Margaret Riley I decided to pass. I told Artisan that I thought it was a huge mistake to be traveling down the shaky-cam road for a second time. I said they needed to put the production on hold and come up with a fresh approach—no matter how long that took. “Thanks, but no thanks,” was the message I gave them. Figuring that they would not abandon three scripts that they probably shelled out big bucks for, I assumed that was the end of my involvement.

To my surprise, they actually listened to what I had to say and asked me what approach I would take. Although I was not prepared to pitch an idea, I mentioned a thought I had while reading the three scripts. “Look, a lot of people don’t like the idea that you’re doing a sequel. Besides, the jig is up—most intelligent moviegoers and certainly all of the critics now know that the first movie relied on a hoax. The ‘found footage’ shtick just won’t work a second time.” I also explained that
Blair Witch
had become one of the most parodied films of all time, by everything from
Saturday Night Live
to dozens of TV-commercial send-ups. I didn’t want to risk making a film that would be seen as
just one more self-conscious takeoff of an already self-conscious movie. There was no way I was making another “fake” documentary So, instead of doing a sequel to the movie, I suggested, why not do a sequel to the real-life hoopla surrounding the movie’s success? “Let’s make fun of the whole
Blair Witch
phenomenon: the mania that attended the movie’s release, the media participation in the marketing hoax, and the fact that many people left the theaters still thinking they saw a real documentary.” My way of playing with reality would be to satirize the reality of the
Blair Witch
craze, as opposed to pretending that the movie itself was real.

They went for it.

I sketched out the idea over the next twenty-four hours. The film would follow five “real” obsessed fans of the first
Blair Witch
film as they go back to Burkittsville to determine if the first movie was a hoax or a real documentary. In the end, they get entangled in some real-life murders because they, like America, can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality. It would be an edgy, adult satire with a horrifying twist at the end.

Again, to my surprise, Artisan liked the pitch. I was starting to warm up to the idea of actually doing it, and I assumed that by buying my pitch, they would push back the production’s start date at least six months so I could write a script—after all, this was an idea that I was tossing out off the top of my head on December 1, 1999. The shoot was to begin in just two months.

I was wrong. “We love the idea,” John Hegeman, the marketing guru at Artisan said. “But we need to start shooting in February no matter what. So if you think you can write this script in six weeks, you have the job.”

Now, you may be asking yourself why, if I felt so righteous about the wrongs
The Blair Witch Project
committed against the noble art of documentary filmmaking, I didn’t refuse to have anything to do with the sequel. Good question. I felt like Larry Kroger, the Tom Hulce character in
Animal House,
in the scene where a devil and an angel perch on his shoulders, each vying for his soul. As I was pondering whether to take this job, the angel kept reminding me that making this film was a risky proposition, for all the reasons I’d already given Artisan. The devil whispering in my ear kept telling me that this was a cool way to enter the feature world, to break with my partner, and earn some quick cash. I was offered a generous directing fee and some attractive box office “bumps” (bonus money for hitting certain box office benchmarks.) Also, I knew the film would do very well on video, so my Directors Guild of America residuals might take care of my kids’ college education. But I also really believed
the hot air Artisan was blowing up my ass, about how eager they were to do something unique with this film. So I quickly cowrote a script with screenwriter Dick Beebe for a movie called
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,
and showed it to the people at Artisan. They liked it, and I got the green light.