Rebels on the Backlot (27 page)

F
OR
P
AUL
T
HOMAS
A
NDERSON, $15 MILLION WAS A LOT OF
money to make a movie. It was a lot for his producer Joanne Sellar, who was used to making much smaller productions in her native England. Sellar had been making movies with Richard Stanley—ironically, the same director who Mike De Luca had fired from
Dr. Moreau
—before coming to the United States in 1991 to make Hollywood movies. Her first experience was a nightmare. The film was
Dark Blood
, and its star, young heartthrob actor River Phoenix,
dropped dead in mid-shoot, with drugs in his system. That nearly killed Sellar’s desire to ever make any movies again, but when she came up for air her husband, Daniel Lupi, who had coproduced
Hard Eight
, introduced her to Anderson. In Anderson, Sellar found the religion she badly needed, a reason to make movies again. “He struck me immediately as having a huge amount of talent, a strong voice,” she said, echoing what so many said on first meeting Anderson. “So many directors are wishy-washy. He knew exactly what he wanted, and was going out to get that.” In Sellar, Anderson found the mother figure he needed, someone who would support him physically and emotionally. Sellar moved to the Valley to work with Anderson, a role that John Lyons, who no longer wanted to live in L.A., couldn’t play anymore. “I know it sounds corny, but there is a sense of community” to the people around Anderson, said Lyons. “Paul needed someone all the time.”

The
Boogie Nights
shoot in the San Fernando Valley was challenging, with dozens of cast members, extras, music integrated throughout the shoot, and a script that called for dozens of scenes. After fighting so hard for the green light, De Luca didn’t visit the set once, which was good, because Anderson preferred it that way after his miserable experience at Rysher Entertainment on
Hard Eight.
That was part of the reason
Boogie Nights
was so long; Anderson shot every scene in the screenplay, and his style was often uncompromising and tyrannical. That much hadn’t changed since
Hard Eight.
Anderson was utterly convinced of his own brilliance; it often translated into harassment of those around him. “It was the boy genius with the electrons orbiting around him” is how one close colleague on the set described Anderson’s often imperious attitude. “He could be very angry, abusive, thoroughly insulting to people. Everybody got it.” Mostly this was a result of Anderson’s intense focus, and his driven nature to perfectly execute the vision in his head. But he often ended up ignoring close collaborators while muttering in response to their latest question, “Yeah, right, whatever the fuck …”

A
NDERSON SCREENED THE FINISHED FILM FOR ABOUT TWENTY
New Line executives, and the reaction was ecstatic: This is the greatest movie we’ve ever made at New Line, they told him.

And it was. But it was also too long. Anderson’s first cut was two hours and forty-five minutes, and Shaye—who was one of those less enthusiastic in his praise—insisted that it be shortened. Several times in staff meetings he told De Luca: “We never should’ve made a three-hour movie.” Privately he griped: “I presumed 150 pages wouldn’t mean three and a half hours. I was led to believe it would be a normal motion picture length.” But De Luca was convinced the movie was a masterpiece, and never passed along the directive to Anderson. He even regretted that some classic footage of Mark Wahlberg and Don Cheadle in Evil Kneivel jumpsuits had been taken out of the first cut. “I drank the Kool-Aid with Paul,” he later confessed.

Finally Shaye had to take his complaints to the director himself. In a meeting a few days after the screening for the New Line executives, Shaye delicately tried to nudge Anderson toward reason. Shorter was better, he argued. He tried to convince Anderson that cutting the film by twenty minutes or so would improve it. This was about as productive as asking the director to burn the master print. Anderson was not inclined to have his movie changed by a guy in a suit. Some of Anderson’s own crew believed the film was too long and had suggested trims. Anderson wouldn’t hear of it. With each suggested cut, he’d hang his head and say, “I really don’t want to mess with that scene.”

Shaye refused to play the heavy in public. He assured Anderson at the meeting: “In the end, we will do what you want to do. You’re the artist. I’m not going to force you.” But the chairman had no intention of sitting back and letting a twenty-seven-year-old director have his way with New Line’s product. Instead he hired an outside editor to cut his own version of
Boogie Nights
that was about twenty-five minutes shorter than Anderson’s. He showed Anderson the film at the New Line screening room on Robertson, though the director denied to his friends ever having seen it. Afterward Anderson then proceeded to harangue De Luca that the studio had taken his film away—again—and that he felt violated and hurt.

After an initial research screening of Anderson’s cut, Shaye tested his as well, and got a lower score—though just barely—than Anderson’s. (Shaye does not recall testing the film, but Anderson’s team recall seeing the scores.) This in itself was amazing, because Anderson’s cut tested about as bad as any movie could—in the thirtieth percentile—and the scores didn’t even include the people who walked out. Most people who came to the screening thought they were seeing a comedy about porn in the 1970s. When it turned out to be a drama, and a dark one at that, the audience didn’t get it. Those who did found it disturbing. Audiences complained that it was a “feel-bad” movie that they would never recommend to their friends.

Shaye quickly dropped the idea of using his cut, but that didn’t help the prospects for Anderson’s version. The director tinkered with his movie and it was tested again. The studio recruited audiences in malls around Los Angeles and Pasadena, luring them to a free screening with a one-paragraph explanation of the film and a list of the cast. But the reaction was the same. The focus groups didn’t like the idea that the movie’s hero met with such a tragic ending.

The movie was trimmed, and they tested it again, this time at the Beverly Center, where a more urban audience might respond more favorably. They didn’t. The next screening didn’t go any better, nor the next or the next. Anderson recut the movie slightly each time to accommodate the recommendations, and the scores did not improve in the slightest.

At each screening Anderson paced in the lobby of the theater and chain-smoked cigarettes while a group of twenty people picked his movie apart. They were idiots, what did they know about his vision? he raged to anyone within earshot. He argued with Shaye and Lynne that he had to show the repercussions of a life in the porn industry, that if he portrayed only the warm, supportive, side of the porn stars, the movie would have no emotional underpinning. It would not be honest. He explained, “I remember being confused. The audience went crazy during the screening, laughing, cheering, applauding. And the scores came back, and they were not good. I felt down and confused. You think, ‘This felt good.’ And this
piece of paper with a number comes back and the math doesn’t say what you were feeling.”

Marketing chief Mitch Goldman, for one, thought the research numbers were misleading. He believed that audiences were enjoying the film, but just refused to admit it. “The truth was—people didn’t want to say they liked it, even if they did. That’s the fallacy of testing a picture like this,” he recalled. “They’d applaud, laugh, cry in the right places. Then the [response] cards would come in shitty. When they put pencil to paper they’d say, ‘I don’t know anyone I’d recommend this to,’ because it was a distasteful subject. But you could tell they loved it.” As a result of the lousy test numbers Goldman made sure to emphasize the sex (which was not terribly erotic) and the seventies sound track in the advertising campaign.

Over the course of each subsequent test screening, the air began to leak out of the enthusiasm of top executives at New Line. Insiders who saw the movie began telling Shaye that the ending—with the frontal nudity of Dirk Diggler—was too jarring, too explicit. Support for the film within the studio began to waver. They were convinced audiences hated the film. “Everyone backed away from the movie,” remembers De Luca. Panic began to set in. De Luca was frustrated. There were hysterical arguments in the executive suites. “The movie’s going to tank,” said one of the heads of marketing, De Luca recalled. De Luca retorted, “You can’t trust the test numbers.” He tried to remain calm, urging Anderson, “I know it’s a good movie. Keep working.”

By the fifth research screening, Anderson couldn’t take it anymore. When the sheet of paper came back with the same terrible numbers, he grabbed it from the market researcher, thrust it into his mouth, chewed it up, spit it out, and stomped on the shreds.

Lesher subsequently made sure to build into Anderson’s contract the proviso that Paul Thomas Anderson movies would not be subject to research screenings;
Magnolia
was not tested.

T
HERE WERE MORE DIFFICULTIES TO FACE WITH THE RELEASE
of
Boogie Nights.
After getting a look at the director’s cut, the Motion
Picture Association of America (MPAA) informed New Line that the film, as is, would get an NC-17, meaning that no one under seventeen could see the film. This was considered a certain death warrant for any film, since the rating had the same social taint of the rating it was meant to replace, the X. It was also not an option to go without any rating because many theaters would not book the film unrated while many newspapers—particularly in less urban areas of the country—would not run advertisements for it.

Anderson submitted a cut to the ratings board with far more sex and violence than he felt it needed, so he would have negotiating room. Surprisingly, the conservative MPAA ratings board told him they liked the film, but couldn’t tolerate any sex combined with violence, and they said they hated the “bare, naked, humping butts everywhere,” as editor Dylan Tichenor recalled it. The film print went back and forth between the director and the ratings board six or seven times, each time after Tichenor and Anderson had shaved three frames here, three frames there. They cut a key, carefully choreographed scene in which William H. Macy walks in on his wife, Nina Hartley, having sex in the broom closet with another man, and then shoots her. “The MPAA broke it down like this: you can either hump or talk. You cannot hump and talk,” Anderson explained. He had to reshoot the scene. “I said, ‘Nina, hump once, stop, say two lines, and then we’ll move on.’ It took two hours. We put it in the movie, got the rating.” He replaced much of the scene with a long shot in which the action is suggested rather than seen. They also had to reduce some frames of the blood-splattered wall when moments later Macy then shoots himself.

Boogie Nights
clocked in at two hours and thirty-seven minutes and got the needed R rating. Bob Shaye was still pushing to make the film shorter, but Anderson had a final card up his sleeve. He quietly showed his version to
Newsweek
critic David Ansen, who published a rave review—“enthralling” was in the headline and “gloriously alive” in the first few paragraphs—before the movie opened. Shaye no longer had the leverage to push Anderson further; with Ansen and the New York cognoscenti watching, he’d look like a philistine if he tinkered with it. It was a move similar to
the one that saved Anderson’s version of
Hard Eight
, when the Cannes Film Festival suddenly accepted Anderson’s original cut after the studio had already taken the movie away from him.

No matter how much the critics loved his film, no one was more in love with his work than Anderson himself. There is a beautiful moment in
Boogie Nights
near the end when Anderson fixes the camera on Mark Wahlberg after a drug deal has gone sour; Wahlberg doesn’t move, and neither does the camera, as the 1980s pop anthem “Jessie’s Girl” plays noisily in the background and firecrackers go off. But the moment goes on forever: forty-five full seconds of Wahlberg’s empty, defeated face. “Someone actually mentioned cutting that scene,” said Anderson. “What can you say?”

At the opening screening in Pasadena, Anderson was like a kid, jumping up and down in his seat and clapping his hands delightedly once the lights came down. But New Line wasn’t thrilled about
Boogie Nights
, and in truth Anderson never felt that the studio had supported it properly after the dismal test screenings.

Resuscitation, of a sort, arrived at the Toronto Film Festival. It screened there, and both audiences and critics were surprised by and enamored of the film. The movie was a similar hit at the New York Film Festival, where Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
called it “this year’s fireworks event.” And other critics began to weigh in, with some comparing Anderson with Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Quentin Tarantino. Wrote Ansen in
Newsweek
, “Like Spielberg’s
Sugarland Express
or Scorsese’s
Mean Streets
, Anderson’s mesmerizing movie announces the arrival of a major career.”
Boogie Nights
is a startling film,” enthused Kenneth Turan in the
Los Angeles Times
, “but not for the obvious reasons. Yes, its decision to focus on the pornography business in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s and 1980s is nerviness itself, but more impressive is the film’s sureness of touch, its ability to be empathetic, nonjudgmental, and gently satirical, to understand what is going on beneath the surface of this raunchy
Nashville-esque
universe and to deftly relate it to our own.” He added that Anderson “is definitely a filmmaker worth watching, both now and in the future.” The snobby
Cineaste
magazine marveled ironically at the film’s “triumph of style over substance,”
admiring the Altmanesque sweep of the thing, along with Anderson’s attention to detail, his fluid camerawork, and the cutting-edge seventies sound track.
Esquire
actually thanked him for making the film. “I feel I should thank you on behalf of movie lovers everywhere for increasing the sum of human enjoyment,” said the interviewer.