Rebels on the Backlot (23 page)

Even David Fincher, a man who rarely disguised his contempt for the studios and the people who ran them, was mystified when Twentieth Century Fox finally handed him a green light, with a budget more suited to a summer blockbuster. When he got the call he turned to his producer and said, “Those idiots just green-lit a $75 million experimental movie.”

I
T WAS
R
AYMOND
B
ONGIOVANNI, A BOOK SCOUT AT
T
WENTIETH
Century Fox in New York, who got Chuck Palahniuk’s book
The Fight Club
, when it was still in galleys, and sent it to Fox creative executive Kevin McCormick, who gave it to Laura Ziskin, head of a boutique division at the studio called Fox 2000. It was a slim first novel by a completely unknown writer from Portland, Oregon. Palahniuk was working as a diesel mechanic.

A studio reader wrote coverage of the book, and it was unequivocal: Do not make this into a film. It is unconventional. It will make people squirm.

There was good reason for the reader to feel this way. Palahniuk’s tersely funny book was a dark satire on twentieth-century consumer culture, the story of a young man who seeks relief from the emptiness of materialist society by posing as a victim in various
survivor groups: melanoma, breast cancer, prostate. Then he meets Tyler Durden, a kin spirit who acts on his anarchic urges. Durden initiates the narrator into an underworld of mischief and mayhem, underground clubs where desperate men engage in open-ended, bare-knuckle fistfights for the mere purpose of feeling something, anything—even and especially pain. Eventually the groups evolve into cadres of urban terrorists, alienated middle-class white men who sabotage civil society and blow up buildings out of an inexplicable desperation, a need to assert themselves and rebel against a passive culture numbed by crass acquisitiveness. By the time the reader finds out that Tyler and the narrator are the same person and that one must kill the other in order to survive, the message is unrelentingly bleak.
Fight Club
can be regarded as a fable about the rage of the emasculated white American male—something Tarantino would know something about—and about his search for meaning and self-respect. It was a powerful message likely to resonate with young men particularly and thinking moviegoers more generally, especially given Palahniuk’s biting prose and subversive humor:

It was hard to tell when Palahniuk was joking, or if he was at all.

D
ULY CHASTENED BY THE READER’S MEMO, THE
F
OX
executives sent the galleys on to a couple of producers to see if they were interested. Lawrence Bender and Art Linson both dealt in dark, violent material, but they passed. (Linson temporarily so, though he didn’t know it yet.) Kevin McCormick also sent the galleys to Josh Donen
and his new partner Ross Bell: Donen, a former executive at Universal Studios, was the son of the famed musical director-producer Stanley Donen; Bell was a young Australian striver who had worked with Hollywood veteran Ray Stark. He read the galleys and, until halfway through the book, agreed with the studio’s coverage. But when he discovered that Tyler and the narrator were the same character, “my heart started racing. I had never had an experience like this,” said Bell. “Everything I read had to be reassessed.” He went back to Kevin McCormick and told him that all the reasons the studio reader said not to make the film were exactly why they should make it. It is unconventional, he said, and it will make people squirm. But it is also a groundbreaking piece of material that holds up a mirror to our society. He recognized it as a zeitgeist film, a movie that would define its era. Zeitgeist is a word that came up often with those who fell under the spell of
Fight Club.

At first, McCormick was still not that interested.

But Bell pursued his quest, deciding to try to see how to turn the book into a movie. He and Donen gathered a group of actors to read the book. It took six hours, and both realized that the book, though slim, was far too long for a movie. They began cutting out sections, especially the most cringe-worthy parts—when the characters burn themselves with cigarettes, for example. The actors, who never got paid for their efforts, continued to read for Bell through each new edit.

At the time Bell was broke, living off his credit cards and the belief that he could someday be an independent producer. Already $50,000 in debt, he spent another $300 to rent sound equipment and record the book on tape. Fox was still unenthusiastic, but Bell thought “fuck it,” and sent the tape to Laura Ziskin. She popped the cassette in her car as she drove up to Santa Barbara for a weekend. On Monday she ponied up $10,000 to buy the rights to Palahniuk’s book.

Z
ISKIN WAS THINKING ABOUT ASKING
B
UCK
H
ENRY, A SIXTY
-something comedy and acting veteran who had written comic
classics in the 1960s like
What’s Up, Doc?, The Owl and the Pussycat
, and
The Graduate
, to adapt Chuck Palahniuk’s dark manifesto. She thought the book had a lot in common with
The Graduate
, the brilliant coming-of-age movie starring Dustin Hoffman. But a young screenwriter named Jim Uhls—who’d never written anything that had actually been made—had gotten his hands on the book and began lobbying the producers for a chance to translate it for the screen. Bell and Donen thought the material needed a younger eye, and Uhls was given a shot.

Meanwhile, Bell started trolling for directors, he had four on his list. The first was Peter Jackson, an Australian best known at the time for the off-beat
Heavenly Creatures
, a true, bizarre story about two inordinately close girlfriends who conspire to kill the mother of one of the girls (Jackson, of course, would later make the epic
Lord of the Rings
fantasy trilogy). The other choices were Bryan Singer, who had directed the gripping, Oscar-winning crime thriller
The Usual Suspects;
Danny Boyle, who had made the gritty, violent, and critically lauded
Trainspotting
(another from the Tarantino school); and David Fincher, who had made
Se7ven
, a hit;
Alien 3
, a bomb; and lots and lots of top-notch commercials.

Bell thought Jackson was the best choice of the four. When he called Jackson’s agent, Ken Kamins, to pitch the project, Kamins told him to forget it. Jackson was in Wellington, New Zealand, editing a new film called
The Frighteners.
Undeterred, Bell got on a plane to Auckland and called up the editing room. Jackson’s assistant answered and said, “Don’t bother coming, Peter doesn’t have time to see you.” Bell said thanks but he was coming anyway, and got in a car to drive the three-hundred miles to Wellington. It was a lot of miles for nothing. Jackson did finally meet Bell, but never read the book. Later, when Fincher got the project, the same assistant sent Bell a note saying, “Peter thanks you for your visit, and I should have read the book sooner.”

On the same trip, Bell swung through Sydney to visit Russell Crowe, a friend. Bell thought that Crowe was perfect to play Tyler Durden. In his mind, the masculine, rough-edged Crowe was about as close to the character written on the page as any actor was
likely to be. They went for a long walk in a Sydney park, and threw a football back and forth, feeling one another out. Bell made a pitch and gave Crowe the book. Later he found himself in conflict with Art Linson over his negotiations with Crowe. Linson was a powerful coproducer whom Fox later brought on board to keep Fincher and the budget in line. Linson was meeting with Brad Pitt to discuss the title role while Bell was meeting elsewhere with Crowe. It was a sign of Bell’s increasing marginalization that Crowe had to fall out of the picture (and tantalizing to consider how Crowe might have interpreted the role).

Bell also gave the book to Bryan Singer’s producing partner, but the director never read it. Danny Boyle and his producing partner, Andrew Macdonald, met Bell; they read the book but found another project.

That left Fincher. Donen and Bell sent him the book ahead of Christmas 1996, via his assistants. Bell got both of Fincher’s assistants to read it first, and they loved it. One of the assistants, Doug Friedman, called Bell several times to enthuse about one line or other in the book. Finally Fincher got curious and picked up the phone during one of these calls and said, “Okay, what’s everybody talking about?” Donen urged Fincher to read it, which he did quickly. He had a visceral reaction. He felt he was built for this movie. “It’s sardonic, it’s sarcastic, and naïve, and cynical and funny,” he said later. “I know Marla. I know the Narrator, I know the Narrator’s attraction and repulsion to Marla, I know his need for Tyler. I know why he looks up to Tyler. I just knew it.”

His next thought was, “There’s not a movie studio in the world who’s gonna make this.” Studios were antithetical to this sort of film, he thought. They made product designed to make the corporate media conglomerate look good. This was the very antithesis of that. Either way, he told his agent he wanted to direct it, definitely.

The very next day Josh Donen called Fincher on the phone and said, “It looks like Twentieth Century Fox is going to buy it.”

“If Fox buys it, I’ll never have anything to do with it,” Fincher responded. He had no intention of working with Fox again.

He was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1962, but raised from the age of two or three in posh Marin County, north of San Francisco, in the San Rafael Valley.

Northern California in the 1970s was an idyllic niche of comfortable American life, and Marin a well-to-do suburb that flourished in the wake of the turbulent sixties—a leafy community attracting urban exiles, lefties gone bourgeois, hippies turned organic farmers, and drug dealers. The Fincher family—father Jack, mother Claire, sister Emily, and David—lived in San Anselmo, an upper-middle-class community just beside the town of San Rafael, practically down the street from the local architectural landmark, the futuristic, massive pink-and-blue Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Civic Center in Marin.

The Finchers fit right in. They were intellectuals and social liberals living in a cozy three-bedroom, ivy-wrapped house on Park Way, a tiny street in downtown San Anselmo where traffic whizzed noisily past along Redhill Boulevard. One day Hollywood moved in. Director George Lucas became the neighbor practically across the street, buying an incongruously huge estate at number 52 Park Way, across the narrow alley lined by modest houses that
made up Park Way. The estate, a big, white Victorian mansion with formal stone balustrades leading up the steep driveway, had been built by a successful (and somewhat overzealous) general contractor. Lucas became a local celebrity, having made his ode to Americana,
American Graffiti
, in San Rafael, at the local high school, and downtown on Fourth Street. For Fincher and his friends, it was one of their favorite movies; they saw it probably fifteen times at the local theater in nearby Novato. A couple of years earlier, a few classmates showed up in the second grade with shaved heads, having served as extras in a shot for Lucas’s
THX 1138
at the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center. When Fincher later lived in Oregon, he made a special trip back to Marin to see
Star Wars
in home territory.

Lucas remained a mystery, a tiny guy wearing glasses in his bathrobe, picking up the paper at the end of his driveway. But it was an eye-opener for Fincher. “Suddenly the patina was sort of off movies. It was not like movies were made in Hollywood, what we considered to be Hollywood movies,” Fincher recalled. “It was also a time when movies that we considered to be Hollywood movies—big movies—were being made by a guy down the street.”

Lucas wasn’t the only reason. For a time, Marin and nearby San Francisco served as a base for the artistic rebels of 1970s cinema. Francis Ford Coppola was shooting
The Godfather
at the Marin Art and Garden Center. Philip Kaufman
(Henry and June, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
relocated to San Francisco. Michael Ritchie shot
The Candidate
in the area with Robert Redford. Fincher’s sister did a voice-over for John Korty cartoons for Sesame Street (he later directed
Oliver’s Story
and
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman)
, while Ritchie was known to be cutting his film
The Bad News Bears
in Lucas’s basement. Movies were part of the natural ebb and flow of life.

F
INCHER’S FATHER HAD BEEN THE BUREAU CHIEF FOR
L
IFE
magazine in San Francisco, but he later retired and became a freelance magazine writer, spending a lot of time around the house.
Fincher’s mother worked as a methadone maintenance nurse, helping in rehab centers, which were filled with the strung-out refugees of the peace-and-love generation. Her son grew up familiar with the look, sound, and mood of junkies.

Fincher was artistic and solitary as a youth. From an early age he did not live up to his own exacting standards. He spent hours drawing in his room, copying from comic books, trying to put on paper the images he saw in his fervid imagination. He hated that they never came out on paper the way he saw them in his mind and determined that one day he would find a way of translating those pictures in the real world. He gave up on drawing, then tried painting, then sculpture, then acting, and then photography—even getting his parents to build him a darkroom. Colleagues in later life remarked, always, on Fincher’s edginess and demanding nature. “He’s got a bitterness to him,” observed Steve Golin, who cofounded Propaganda with Fincher in the 1980s. “It works for him. I’ve known him for twenty years, and I don’t know where it comes from. There’s a whole group of guys like him—the Jim Camerons—with a little bit of a mean streak. They take it out on everybody.”