Rebels on the Backlot (26 page)

While ignoring his studies and detaching himself from an upwardly mobile career path, Jonze had already begun freelancing for a skate magazine called
Freestyling
when he was just seventeen years old. After his senior year Jonze was offered a slot to be an assistant editor at the Los Angeles–based magazine. He bought a camera and moved into an apartment in Torrance, Tarantino’s neighborhood, with a group of other guys working on the magazine.

With his skateboarder friends Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman, Jonze set out to record the emerging skateboarding culture, a lifestyle that was much more urban and immediate than skate park culture. In the early 1990s the trio (they called themselves “Master Cluster”) came up with
Dirt
, a smart and irreverent magazine that
was not long for this world. The magazine published seven issues and collaborated with ESPN2, a twenty-four-hour sports network geared toward a younger audience, before its publisher, Lang Communications, pulled the plug.

But then came Jonze’s first skate video,
Blind Video Daze
, which was considered a landmark, showing skaters for who they really were, something Jonze was able to do because he actually was a part of the culture. The video was raw, and showed skaters driving around in Cadillacs, drinking booze, capturing the essence of the movement, which was about youthful rebellion. Jonze carried his camera on his skateboard and followed the person he was shooting. In the video Jonze shows the skaters riding in a 1970s low-rider car; they go drinking in Tijuana, then they drive the car off a cliff. The video makes it appear as if they all died, giving the dates of their deaths in the video credit. Even Jonze’s mother worried that the skaters had actually been killed.

Recalled Rudy Johnson, who skated in the
Blind
video, “We went from Vegas to Tijuana to Huntington Beach to Hollywood. I did technical tricks, handrails, all that stuff that’s big now. We got hassled in Vegas. We were trying to skate down the Strip, in front of Caesar’s Palace. The cops started coming. We scattered and they caught us. Spike said his name was Arthur Spiegel, so I said a fake name because I didn’t know that wasn’t his fake name.” Jonze had a slightly different recollection of that time, less glamorous, more slackerlike. “It’s a lot like shooting photos,” he recalled about trying to make the videos. “For one, it’s getting guys together. I’d go to their house in Huntington Beach, pick them up. They’d be asleep. I’d spend an hour getting them up, they’d take a shower. Then somebody would be hungry…. We’d drive to Santa Ana and pick somebody up. Then Mark [Lewman] would know a spot in Alhambra and we’d go up there. Somebody would need shoelaces. So we have to stop and get shoelaces, or new grip tape. Finally we’d get to Alhambra, then we’d get kicked out after twenty minutes, before we got anything.”

The skate videos led to the music videos, which led to Jonze’s joining Propaganda in 1993. Advertising agencies that were dying
to be hip sought him out, and he didn’t let them down. Jonze’s ads for Nissan, Wrangler, and Levi’s were droll and observant comments on American society. They often featured office-geek men in spectacular car crashes. And often they had little or nothing to do with the product. One classic Jonze ad showed a man in the wake of a car crash being wheeled into surgery to the tune of “Tainted Love,” with the entire surgical team joining in the song. Another memorable ad featured a man and a dog in a recliner racing downhill through a maze of traffic, coming to a stop in front of a new Nissan truck.

Jonze’s work often seemed imbued with a joyous innocence, however absurd the conceit. And he observed that the common elements between his early work and his later films are spareness and simplicity. “If it can be small, I try to keep it small, try to keep it as bare bones as it was when we were shooting skate videos,” he said. “In the ‘Sabotage’ video, we ran around the streets of L.A. and shot it with a handheld camera, just like I’d shoot a skate video. It’s so stripped-down that all that it’s about is me, the camera, and what’s in front of the camera…. It’s the same thing with the two movies: the more specific information you can give an actor, what they’re thinking about, [and] what they’re thinking about the person they’re reacting with, the better.”

In retrospect it seems likely that Jonze’s off-kilter gifts didn’t shine in a traditional academic environment and that his teachers had no clue how to tap into them. Whatever the reason, reading was and remains a chore. He didn’t drive, either. The first time Jonze finished reading
Malkovich
, slowly, he found himself, late at night, riding in a cab. “So the first guy I told about it was a cab-driver. It was a half-hour drive from Hollywood to Santa Monica, and I was telling him about the story. And by the time I got to Santa Monica I was only about, you know, like 20 pages into it. So I spent another 20 minutes trying to finish it,” he said.

Sandy Stern, meanwhile, had flown to New York to meet Charlie Kaufman. He felt the movie was makeable, but needed considerable reworking in the third act, which was mainly about Dr. Lester descending into devil worship. Stern was also more optimistic than
most because he had met John Malkovich before and found the famously intimidating actor to be “goofier, more fun” than expected. “I thought, ‘He’ll totally get this script,’” Stern said. He and Kaufman went to lunch at Mangia on Fifty-seventh Street and ordered food, which Kaufman declined to eat. “He sat there with his arms crossed, looking at me like I’m from another planet,” recalled Stern, a skinny, nervous sort with a heavy Long Island accent. “I felt like I was a stand-up act.” Later he learned that Kaufman was struck dumb that anyone in Hollywood was considering making his script at all. Lunch, uneaten, was wrapped and taken in a doggy bag.

Given Stern’s and Stipe’s interest and Jonze’s enthusiasm, Sandy Stern went to Mike De Luca at New Line, where they had a development deal, and asked him to option the script for Jonze. There was a reason Jonze was so intent on making
Malkovich:
his attempts to make a feature film up to then had been wholly frustrated. In 1995 Jonze had been attached to make
Harold and the Purple Crayon
, a part-live-action, part-animated film for TriStar Entertainment at Sony. Jonze seemed perfect for this project. His own sensibility seemed so much like the famous wide-eyed boy with a crayon, and he’d worked for a year on the screenplay with Michael Tolkin and then David O. Russell, who became a close friend. The project had gotten as far as having completed multiple scripts, casting, and storyboards when Sony, going through one of its periodic executive reshuffles, pulled the plug. Frustrated by the studio endgame, Jonze then turned to write an independent film with some friends called
We Can Do This
, featuring a series of outrageous stunts. The movie was to star the Beastie Boys, the rock band that Jonze had first helped catapult to prominence in 1994. But just a week before filming was to start, the Beastie Boys bowed out, saying they didn’t feel comfortable starring in the film. Jonze was too discouraged to rewrite it for a different cast. When he came across the
Malkovich
script in 1996, it was his third stab in a row at a movie, and he was determined to make this one happen.

Without even reading the script, New Line’s De Luca made the deal, though it took weeks to make things final. At the time De Luca was president of production and busy making another risky
movie called
Boogie Nights.
New Line chief Bob Shaye wasn’t thrilled with that movie, and De Luca felt he couldn’t take on
Malkovich
, too, though he loved the script. (Shaye didn’t. He said of
Malkovich
, “I just didn’t get it.”) He sent it to the studio’s art house, Fine Line. The executives there passed, too. “I just couldn’t get it through the system,” said De Luca.

One weekend in the midst of these negotiations Michael Stipe happened to be in Los Angeles. On Saturday night Bob Shaye invited him and a few others—De Luca, executive Lynn Harris, and Stern—to dinner at his spectacularly modernist home, perched on the edge of Coldwater Canyon. The mogul loved showing off his glass-walled marvel, with its endless views and paintings by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Egon Schiele (nudes, mostly) and photos by Diane Arbus.

In the kitchen, while Shaye grilled some sausages for the guests, De Luca said, “Say Bob, we’re just optioning a script for these guys,” referring to Stipe and Stern.

“What’s it called?” asked Shaye

Stipe responded, “It’s called
Being John Malkovich.”

Shaye stopped cooking the sausage and turned to Stern:
“Being John Malkovich?
Why the fuck can’t it be Tom Cruise?”

The following Monday the script was put into turnaround, and handed back to Stern and Stipe.

J
ONZE WENT BACK TO
P
ROPAGANDA
F
ILMS, WHERE HE HAD A
development deal. The head of that company, Steve Golin, who had worked on David Lynch’s
Wild at Heart
, had been trying to develop a feature for Jonze to direct, and so far they’d come up with a low-rent Evil Kneivel–style, daredevil movie. Then Jonze walked into his office one day and said, “I read this script, and I really love it,” referring to
Malkovich.
Golin told him he’d already read it. “I don’t think there’s a movie there,” he said. “It’s too difficult, too weird.” But Jonze was insistent. He started describing his vision for the film; he said he felt he knew how to translate the oddities in the story by keeping it as rooted as possible in the real world.

Still, even Jonze’s producing partner Vince Landay, who’d made a score of music videos with him, was skeptical. “I was worried,” he recalled. “I thought it was one of the most unique things I’d ever read. I interpreted the comedy more broadly than Spike would play it. I saw it more as David Lynch. Spike loves to take fantastical ideas but put it in a very realistic, almost banal world. …I knew Spike’s sensibility, and I was trying to match it with this script. The jokes felt big and broad. The ideas felt very stylized. I thought, What is Spike seeing in this?” But Jonze could not be talked out of it. He was sure he had a way into Kaufman’s odd world. On a plane on their way to the MTV Awards in New York, where one of Jonze’s music videos had been nominated (and won), the director talked his producer all the way through the script. Jonze’s primary interest was not in the surreal concept of Malkovich’s brain, but in the characters themselves, making them believable.

Landay decided to trust his partner. Jonze had a gift that way—the
We Can Do This
vibe at work. “Spike has this energy of ‘Let’s go do this,’” said Landay. “And like the merry men, we follow him down the path, never thinking of the problems involved. He’s got a golden touch.”

Golin too allowed himself to be swayed by Jonze’s enthusiasm. He never quite grasped whether Jonze was an innocent spirit blithely trying the impossible, or just playing cleverly with the people around him, even with his learning disability. “He turns it into an asset. He gets his way. He’s a genius at it,” says Golin. “Spike has a very childlike manner. But he’s clever as a fox. Some of it may be an act. I don’t know the answer.”

Golin went to a few meetings with Jonze, Kaufman, and Landay where they talked about what the film would look like. They all took the leap. Then they had to pitch it to Michael Kuhn, the head of PolyGram. Golin and Jonze came in. Kuhn recalls, “I thought it was a piss-take [a joke]. They come in, I say, ‘What’s this movie about?’ ‘Well, there’s this guy, he’s an out-of-work puppeteer, there’s this girl, she has pet monkeys. He finds a hole in this thing, ends up on the Jersey Turnpike, it turns out to be the head of John
Malkovich.’ I thought they were joking.” When he found out they weren’t joking he thought, “Golin needs his head examined.”

Propaganda bought the script in turnaround from New Line for just under $100,000, with Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern staying attached as producers. The movie didn’t yet have financing or distribution, but at least it had a toehold.

The merry “we can do this” men plunged into developing the screenplay for
Being John Malkovich
without knowing two critical facts: One, would PolyGram finance the script once it was done? Two, would John Malkovich let a twenty-six-year-old first-time director he’d never met play around inside his brain?

Paul Thomas Anderson initially wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to play Dirk Diggler in
Boogie Nights.
DiCaprio was one of the hottest young talents in town, having just been in Baz Luhrmann’s rock version of
Romeo and Juliet.
The filmmaker and the young actor hung out together, but a few weeks before shooting in the summer of 1996, DiCaprio dropped out, choosing instead to make
Titanic.
Instead Anderson was urged to consider DiCaprio’s costar in
The Basketball Diaries
, an actor previously known as a Calvin Klein underwear poster boy and for making forgettable hip-hop music. Mark Wahlberg read only thirty pages before meeting with Anderson. Anderson was insulted; couldn’t he be bothered to read the whole script? Wahlberg said, “Listen, I love these thirty pages, and I know I’m going to love the rest of it, but I just want to make sure you don’t want me because I’m the guy who will get in his underwear.”

Many of the other actors who had already committed to the film came from the close group Anderson had met and would work with again and again—Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall. He didn’t know Julianne Moore but admired her and wrote for her the role of Amber Waves. She read the script and signed on, becoming part of his loyal group.

Anderson tracked down Sam Jackson at ShoWest in Vegas—Jackson had been in
Hard Eight
—to offer him the part of Buck
Swope that ultimately went to Don Cheadle. Jackson was gracious but otherwise committed.

A lot of actors were wary of the movie’s subject matter. Agents warned their clients to stay away. Several people were considered for the role of Jack Horner, the porn producer. Warren Beatty was in talks with Anderson until the director realized after several conversations that Beatty was actually more interested in the Dirk Diggler role. But with a wife and three young kids in mind, Beatty passed on the part of the producer. Sydney Pollack’s agent sent him the script with the warning, “You’re probably going to think this is weird.” Pollack—he of the big studio Oscar movies
Out of Africa
and
Tootsie
—balked. “I was unsure about the subject matter. I don’t mind some sexuality. I’m not a prude. But having a family and kids and everything—I couldn’t tell.” Actually he was unsure about the filmmaker. The actor-director later saw Anderson after an early screening of the film and told him flatly, “‘I was a dope for not doing this.’” Beatty said the same. The iconic 1970s playboy called Anderson and said he’d been concerned about the film’s morality, but after seeing it, he saw the “moral center” clearly, Anderson recalled. Producer John Lyons, a former casting director, had cast Burt Reynolds in the 1996 movie
Striptease
with Demi Moore; Reynolds had been on Anderson’s mind during the script-writing process, and Lyons was able to reel him in. Sort of. Reynolds was reportedly incensed when he finally saw the film and fired his agent. But when he got an Academy Award nomination for the performance he felt better about the whole thing.