Rebels on the Backlot (25 page)

Ziskin too saw
Fight Club
as something that could make an important statement about society and the role of men in it. Once she finally read the book, she sat up in bed at night and read passages to her screenwriter husband, Alvin Sargent. She found in Palahniuk’s harsh language what she considered the “shock of truth. He was someone who had captured a moment in our culture.” Later, she noted that the same year that
Fight Club
came out, a book called
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
was published. The book was a vast survey of men across America by a feminist writer, Susan Faludi, and chronicled the feelings of inadequacy, marginalization, and emasculation suffered by American men who felt threatened by the culture of political correctness and were confused about their purpose in society. The book, she felt, came to the same conclusion as Palahniuk’s book, with the difference that he was a diesel mechanic in Portland, Oregon, while Faludi was a journalist who had traveled the country talking to people before drawing her conclusions.

Ziskin still didn’t really know how to make a movie out of
Fight Club;
much of the book was an interior monologue by a narrator.
The ending, with the narrator esconced in a mental hospital, confounded her. But she wanted to try.

The newly existentialist Mechanic saw the film as a dark little movie he could keep on his slate as long as the budget didn’t go much above $23 million or so. Ziskin agreed; the budget should be about in the mid-twenties. Ziskin figured she could draw movie stars to the smart, risky script and get them to cut their fees, as they did on independent productions that had smart, risky scripts and good roles for actors accustomed to working with weak scripts or against green-screens shouting: “Nooooo!” and “Aaaaaargh!”

Cheap and dirty. “That was my plan,” she said later. “It was naïve of me.”

Fox wasn’t an independent studio, and no decent Hollywood agent was going to let them get away with paying independent studio prices.

B
y all accounts, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman had a unique chemistry. Jonze was a quiet prankster with a whimsical, almost naïve sense of the world. He was small and slight with a high, nasal voice, and seemed to have retained a child’s sense of wonder along with an ability to imagine impossible situations as a matter of course. Jonze was kind of shockingly uneducated, not well read, and not well versed in the history of his craft; he was raised on dirt bikes, sports magazines, and music videos. Jonze did know about the things he liked, however; for instance, he was an expert on
Star Wars
, which he’d seen three hundred times. By the time he made his first feature film in the mid-1990s, he hadn’t a clue about
Citizen Kane
, hadn’t even heard of D. W. Griffith or
Birth of a Nation.
Like most of the rebel generation, Jonze had no interest in film school—or any school for that matter.

But even by his contemporaries’ standards, Jonze’s aliteracy—ignorance of all history before Generation X, and proud of it—was pronounced and sometimes comical. On one of the first days
of shooting
Being John Malkovich
, the temperamental, erudite Malkovich was overacting a scene, laying it on for the cameras. Jonze walked over to him and said quietly, “Do the same thing, but do a lot less of it.”

Malkovich looked at him and nodded. “I was getting a little Blanche there, wasn’t I?”

Jonze stared back. “What?”

Malkovich said, “Blanche Dubois.”

“Who?”

“Tennessee Williams?
A Streetcar Named Desire?
Blanche Dubois?”

Jonze just stared, a blank.

Malkovich sighed deeply and glanced at producer Steve Golin helplessly. “What did you get me into?”

Golin laughed. “Well, at least it won’t be derivative,” he said.

C
HARLIE
K
AUFMAN, LIKE
J
ONZE, WAS SHY AROUND PEOPLE HE
didn’t know. But he had a much darker, more cynical outlook on the world. And unlike Jonze, Kaufman was entirely literate, a New York University graduate who was well read and well informed. In fact, by Hollywood standards, he was overeducated. He read several papers every morning. Jonze was clueless about world events. What they shared instead was a quiet understanding of one another and a kind of wordless synergy in their work. Neither liked to talk too much about their process, but they understood instinctively how to pursue it together. A few years into their collaboration, friends noted that on a transatlantic trip, Jonze slept with his head resting affectionately on Kaufman’s shoulder.

C
HARLIE
K
AUFMAN’S
B
EING
J
OHN
M
ALKOVICH
WAS ONE OF
those scripts that had been knocking around Hollywood for years. The movie was an odd antifantasy about a puppeteer who discovers a portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich and starts selling tickets to tourists who pay two hundred dollars to take a trip inside Malkovich’s consciousness, and are then ejected onto a
stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike. As a concept, it seemed pretty hard to imagine on screen. “It doesn’t pitch well,” noted Tom Pollock, a veteran studio executive who was in the meetings when
Malkovich
had been pitched to PolyGram chief Michael Kuhn. The plot gets still odder in the second act, when the entrepreneurs selling spaces in Malkovich start having sex while inhabiting the actor’s body. Meanwhile a group of senior citizens led by a strange Dr. Lester schemes a way to eternal life by inhabiting the bodies of others, like Malkovich.

The script was so outrageous, so wildly original, that it became famous around Hollywood. People read it, marveled at it, and put it on the pile of Things To Do As Soon As I Get Some Money. But no one ever got to around to making
Being John Malkovich.
It was just too strange.

Charlie Kaufman was a quiet, curly-haired, nebbishy-looking guy from Long Island who, after going to New York University Film School, headed to Pasadena to attempt a career in the movie industry. Kaufman had anything but a Hollywood sensibility. He hated most studio movies, with their mix-and-stir formulaic plots. He hated how everybody thought they could write a blockbuster screenplay by buying a software program. Kaufman later mocked the entire screenwriting process in a script called
Adaptation
, in which a character based on screenplay guru Robert McKee gives one of his seminars, instructing wide-eyed would-be millionaires on the first act, second act, third act structure. In 1999 Kaufman said, in a rare show of passion, that screenwriting seminars “feel like factories for people to make a product: ‘If I learn these rules, I’ll make a million dollars.’ I think that’s how they sell these seminars, and I think it’s crap, taking advantage of people, and I don’t think we need more people learning to write that way. Why would you want to impose those limits on yourself? I hate movies that lie to me. Should I sit there thinking my life sucks because it’s not like the ones on the screen, and I’m not getting these life lessons? My life, anyone’s life, is more like a muddle, and these movies are just dangerous garbage.”

Of course, some of that “dangerous garbage” got produced
and made hundreds of millions of dollars. And that made Kaufman, not the most people-friendly of beings, even more miserable. He was not at all sure there was a place in Hollywood for a writer like him.
Malkovich
was a story that had started out being about a married man who fell in love with another woman. The film evolved unexpectedly—“I just have certain things that I am anxious about, and they wind up in my script,” he later explained—and after finishing it in 1994, Kaufman used it as a calling card to get himself other writing gigs in town. Sometimes it won him strange looks from uncomprehending agents, and other times people were so delighted by his original voice that he felt encouraged to do more. But
Malkovich
itself was not considered make-able. “It got a lot of attention and it was fun for people to read, but nobody was interested in producing it,” Kaufman remembered.

Even the producer who finally developed the script, labored to get it financed, and then put his job on the line to get a green light never thought it would be made. At the time, Steve Golin was an executive running Propaganda Films, a small film company financed by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, owned by the Dutch electronics giant Philips. At monthly meetings at PolyGram, Golin would bring up the project. The executives sitting around the conference table from the various production companies owned by PolyGram—Interscope, Pollock’s Montecito, Working Title—would titter, and then Kuhn would say No. Pollock would belly-laugh. Golin would look sheepish, then go away for a month before bringing it up again at the following meeting.

“I did everything I possibly could to prevent the movie from happening,” said Kuhn.

In 1995, Kaufman was working in New York as a writer on a Fox television show,
Ned and Stacey
, a pre–
Will and Grace
show starring Debra Messing about a couple who gets married for reasons of real estate scarcity and—of course—start to fall in love. Kaufman was terribly unhappy. His agency at the time, William Morris, was only interested in paying gigs, or as Kaufman put it, “My former agent at William Morris was only interested in sure things.”
Malkovich
“wasn’t something he was going to put energy into, because it
wasn’t going to happen.” But a friend, agent Sue Naegle, introduced Kaufman to an energetic young agent named Marty Bowen, who loved the script. “I was laughing my ass off,” Bowen recalled. He vowed to stay with the script, even as Kaufman would call, desperate to be rescued from his hack television show. One of the many producers to whom he sent the script was Sandy Stern. He called Bowen back and said: “This script is half brilliant. I want to meet Charlie Kaufman.”

U
NDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES
B
EING
J
OHN
M
ALKOVICH
probably wouldn’t have had a prayer of being made in 1990s Hollywood. The fact that it was made was due to an accident of timing. The movie slipped through the cracks of the Hollywood system for reasons that had nothing to do with the movie itself. What made
Malkovich
possible, unexpectedly, was the continuing machinations of Hollywood’s endless mergers and conglomeration. At a key moment, just a few weeks after the green light was reluctantly given in 1998, PolyGram was bought by Universal, which had in turn been bought from Japanese owner Matsushita by the Canadian beverage conglomerate the Seagram Company in 1995. The $10.4 billion merger had a huge effect on the music business, as the industry giant PolyGram and all its record labels were immediately absorbed into Universal Music Group, creating (for a moment) the largest music company in the world. Seagram was less interested in PolyGram’s movie business—it already had its own operation, Universal Studios—and for the next six months the ultimate fate of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment was left dangling. The mini-major was finally sold to Barry Diller’s USA Networks (almost half-owned by Seagram) in early 1999. Michael Kuhn, the man with the power to green-light, no longer had a job. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, including its distribution arms Gramercy Pictures and October Films, ceased to exist. A new entity arose from their ashes, USA Films (which would disappear within four years into yet another new entity, Focus).

And amid the mergings, firings, transfers, and deal-making,
everyone forgot about an odd little movie being made on the back streets of downtown Los Angeles called
Being John Malkovich.

S
PIKE
J
ONZE READ
K
AUFMAN’S SCRIPT IN 1996
. B
ASED AT
Propaganda, Jonze had rocketed to the top tier of the music video and commercial industry with his whimsical, often nutty ideas. His first video, which made him a star in the music world, had the Beastie Boys dress up as cops from a seventies television show for their song “Sabotage.” For Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” he had the musicians turn up in a
Happy Days
episode. He made dozens of videos like these. One of them was for the rock band R.E.M., in which he hired a group of Japanese rockers to lip-sync the entire song. R.E.M.’s lead singer, Michael Stipe, had begun a film company with partner Sandy Stern. They kept sending Jonze scripts they wanted to produce that they thought he might like to direct. One of them, a black comedy called
Frigid and Impotent
, had Drew Barrymore attached to star. Jonze didn’t like that one, or any of them. Finally Stern asked, Wasn’t there anything Jonze wanted to make? He said there was:
Being John Malkovich.
A friend had recently sent the script to him, and reading it was a rare moment of epiphany (of course, reading anything was a rare moment for Jonze). “It was a completely original script, different from anything I’d ever read,” he said later. He felt he’d found a kindred spirit in Charlie Kaufman. “The sense of humor and the tone was exactly what I would have wanted to do if I could write as well as Charlie could.”

Jonze wasn’t a writer, to be sure. He was born in Bethesda, Maryland, and named Adam Spiegel. Somewhere along the path of Hollywood mythmaking Jonze became the scion of the Spiegel family fortune. It wasn’t true, but he never bothered to correct the record, or at least not very strenuously. His father, Arthur Spiegel III, was related to that Spiegel family, but was not an heir. He worked as a successful executive with a health care corporation, one of the first models for the managed care behemoths that would take over that industry in the 1990s. The filmmaker’s mother, Sandy, worked as a public relations expert in Washington, D.C.

Jonze’s parents divorced when he was in elementary school. (Arthur Spiegel moved to New York, where he had once served in city government under Mayor John Lindsay, and remarried.) Jonze attended a public high school, Whitman High, a sprawling brick campus for two thousand students in the wooded, residential district of Bethesda. The students here were handsome, privileged, and overwhelmingly white, the sons and daughters of the yuppie class serving Washington, D.C. (Burr Steers, the upper-class writer-director of
Igby Goes Down
, attended the school in 1983.) Jonze seemed to wander through school in a sort of daze, and early on was diagnosed with a learning disability. He hated his studies and spent all his time fanatically devoted to riding a BMX bike. He competed in dirt-bike contests and rode ramps. It was the Reagan years, and Jonze appears in the 1985 yearbook as a diminutive, smiling young sprite, looking more like a sixth-grader than a high school sophomore. The next year he appears in the yearbook as Adam Spiegel again, mugging in a French beret in a candid photo, posing in his BMX helmet, then lined up alongside his classmates. But in the index at the back of the book Adam Spiegel is nowhere to be found—at least not under his birth name. Instead he’s become “Spike Jones,” eleventh-grader. By twelfth grade his name and likeness are nowhere in the yearbook. He’d entered Whitman school as Adam Spiegel; by the time he graduated a new identity had emerged.