Rebels on the Backlot (30 page)

That public remark was a way of explaining Malkovich’s deep misgivings about doing the film. He later said privately, “I kind of felt like it was a lose-lose situation…. So naturally I said yes.”

D
ISCUSSIONS OVER MONEY BEGAN BETWEEN
S
TEVE
G
OLIN
and Malkovich’s agent, Tracey Jacobs. Golin knew Malkovich since he had just produced the Jane Campion movie
Portrait of a Lady
, based on the Henry James novel, in which the actor played the evil and remote (naturally) Gilbert Osmond to Nicole Kidman’s Isabel Archer. While Jonze and Kaufman continued to polish the script, Golin had been working on a budget, and had come up with a price tag of $12 million. He called Jacobs; she said her client was going to want a million dollars to do the movie. Golin said that didn’t sound unreasonable, and “in Hollywood that means yes,” Golin acknowledged.

But over at PolyGram, Golin was not making a lot of headway on getting a green light for the movie. The monthly meetings continued, and Michael Kuhn kept finding one reason after another
to pass on the project. “I was trying to figure out how to get out of it,” Kuhn later admitted. First he said, the budget was too high. Get it under $10 million, and then maybe we can make the movie. Landay and Golin squeezed and cut; within two months they submitted a new budget. Kuhn said fine, now get Malkovich. The actor had more or less given his approval. Now the problem was his fee; with the funding pared back to $9.1 million, Malkovich would have to accept a pay cut, a big one. When Golin told Tracey Jacobs that, she was furious; she’d already told Malkovich his fee would be a million dollars. The deal was off.

Golin and Jonze scrambled to save the situation. He and Jonze and Sofia Coppola were down in Calima, Mexico, on a fancy retreat for PolyGram, supposedly to meet and bond with other artistic talents at the studio and talk, over margaritas, about creative synergies. They ended up spending most of the time in Jonze’s hotel room, talking on the telephone with Malkovich, trying to convince him to stay with the film. A month later Malkovich finally signed on at a salary of $350,000, about a third of the initial offer. The other good thing that came out of the retreat was that Kuhn got to know Spike Jonze a little bit and liked him. It was becoming harder and harder for the executive to refuse the project.

Even so he had more conditions: Get another movie star before we green-light, he said. There again Jonze had a stroke of good fortune. He and Landay were in London making a commercial (with Jonze skidding around town on a skateboard) when they ran into John Cusack at a restaurant. Cusack, who they’d never met, went berserk. He’d read
Being John Malkovich.
He loved it, he
had
to be in the movie. Having read the script months before, Cusack warned his agent that if the movie got made and Cusack wasn’t up for a role, there would be consequences. “I said, if I found out I wasn’t up for this, you’re not going to be my agent anymore,” the actor remembered. “It was a famous script. As a piece of writing it’s the wildest, craziest thing ever.” Second movie star: check. Then Kuhn said we need to know who the female leads are. Catherine Keener, an indie veteran and Jonze’s first choice for the role of Maxine, the nasty vamp who thinks up the scheme to sell visits inside Malkovich,
agreed to do the role. Finding a second lead, the role of Lotte, the dowdy innocent married to puppeteer Craig, was more difficult.

The clock was ticking. It was early 1998, a few weeks before filming was set to commence. Jonze had already interviewed scores of actresses, both known and unknown, and still hadn’t found the person he envisioned for the frumpy Lotte. Keener was good friends with Cameron Diaz and suggested her for the role. The sexy star of
There’s Something About Mary
hardly seemed the kind of actress Jonze envisioned for the character. “When I first met her I was really skeptical,” said Jonze. “She’s so comfortable in her body and so confident and so extroverted. That’s not how I saw the character. Cameron’s very comfortable with her physicality, her sexuality—that wasn’t right.” He agreed to meet her for lunch, and found she was funny, engaging. But still, “she was not Lotte.” The next day Diaz called to ask if she could read for the part. Jonze said fine—a couple dozen actresses already had—and the next day Diaz came in with Keener to Jonze’s office at Propaganda. They sat there reading through the script, with Keener playing all the different roles opposite Diaz. Jonze finally asked Diaz not to be Diaz. He kept asking her to subtract elements of her personality; not to pucker her lips, not to perch on her hips—things she leaned on to emphasize her sexuality.

“We started pushing the character,” said Jonze. And Diaz was willing. Jonze found that he could see a common thread between Lotte and Diaz. “What Cameron is that Lotte is is this very caring person that’s very open with herself emotionally. She’s not driven by her neuroses as much as she’s driven by wanting to make sure everyone’s happy.” Lotte’s physical plainness wasn’t the point to him. Later when everyone remarked on how Diaz uglified herself for the role, Jonze was disappointed. “I loved how Lotte looked,” he said. “I thought there was something really endearing about her as a character.” When you’d see Jonze—small, sincere, endearing, and physically plain—you could see why he found Lotte so appealing. She was a reflection of him.

T
HE SECOND FEMALE ROLE WAS CAST BUT STILL
P
OLY
G
RAM
wouldn’t approve the movie. Kuhn was not convinced it would ever make a profit. It was crunch time. “This movie will never get made,” he kept telling Golin. And Golin wouldn’t go away. “I was so stubborn,” Golin recalled. Desperate, Jonze got his future father-in-law, Francis Coppola, on the job again. The director called up Kuhn to lobby on behalf of Jonze.

Finally Kuhn relented, reluctantly. “I couldn’t think of any more excuses, so I said okay,” he later said. On April 22, 1998, he sent Golin an official memo confirming his green light of the movie—“good, bad, or indifferent”—making it clear that the decision came under duress. He gave him the following four conditions:

Essentially this meant that if the movie failed, Golin would be out of a job. “Fire him? Who cares about that. I was going to castrate him,” said Kuhn later. “I don’t think anybody felt confident,” remembered Tom Pollock, who was in the meetings about upcoming projects. What Kuhn had wanted from Golin was a big movie, more like a blockbuster, to bulk up his slate. But maybe, Kuhn decided, there was room for something offbeat. Pollock recalled, “When they were making the movie they were taking a chance on something weird, weird and unusual. Its unusualness is what’s appealing. It is different. If you’re PolyGram you’re looking for a big slate. If we’re doing a teen comedy, Ted Field doing an action movie, it might be nice to balance that with a more unusual movie.”

As it happened, the memo became irrelevant in just under a month. On May 20, 1998, PolyGram was sold to the Seagram Company for $10.4 billion. Michael Kuhn was instantly thrown into career limbo.

Being John Malkovich
went into production on July 29, 1998.

The effect of
Boogie Nights
on New Line was revolutionary. In the space of a single movie release, the studio became a place that appreciated artistic talent, that was a magnet for emerging young directors, that made movies that could compete for the Oscars.

And overnight, Paul Thomas Anderson became a visionary director with whom every serious actor wanted to work. Not just anybody could make a serious artist out of Marky Mark. Brad Pitt called Anderson’s agent and said, “Tell Paul I’ll sweep the floors in his next movie.”

Tom Cruise, the number-one box office star in the world, had been shooting
Eyes Wide Shut
in London with Stanley Kubrick when
Boogie Nights
came out. Kubrick screened the film at his home for himself, Cruise, and Cruise’s then wife, Nicole Kidman; they all loved the film and wanted to meet the young filmmaker. Anderson happened to be in London for a film festival, and he and agent John Lesher went to the set of
Eyes Wide Shut
, Kubrick’s epic two-year project that turned out to be the director’s last film. Cruise purred that he loved to work with good directors, and he’d love to work with Anderson. That was all the filmmaker needed. He returned to Los Angeles and worked on a script for eight months, then flew to William H. Macy’s cabin in Vermont to churn out most of the work in a two-week spurt. He created the part of Frank T. J. Mackey—the woman-hating, ponytailed motivational speaker for men in search of their libido—for Cruise, a part that would later win him an Oscar nomination. (Meanwhile Cruise’s performance in the Kubrick movie was universally panned and the movie ridiculed; it preceded the end of his marriage to Kidman.)

Boogie Nights
also amazed and inspired other directors trying to fight their way through the studio system. David O. Russell saw
Boogie Nights
and was smitten. “I thought it had amazing energy in it, amazing testosterone and all this other stuff going on,” he said. Both Anderson and Tarantino’s work, Russell thought, had “vitality and life. There was so much life in their movies.”
Boogie Nights
helped inspire him to make his next film,
Three Kings.

And none of this did anything to quell the raging ego of the young Anderson, who continued to bully and demand things from people as if it were his due. In the aftermath of the film, he called up music coordinator Danny Bramson, a longtime collaborator and friend of writer-director Cameron Crowe who had done the sound track to
Almost Famous
, looking to work with him on his next project. He left the following message: “If you can get Cameron Crowe’s dick out of your mouth, call me.”

A
LTHOUGH
B
OOGIE
N
IGHTS
MADE VERY LITTLE MONEY, THE
executives at New Line wanted to continue to be in business with Paul Thomas Anderson. They made a blind deal to buy his next script, which turned out to be, once Anderson wrote it,
Magnolia
, another multicharacter, multistory, complex, psychological drama set in the San Fernando Valley. The characters this time weren’t porn stars, but instead were average denizens of the Los Angeles urban sprawl. There was a trophy wife, a motivational speaker, a male nurse, a cop, and a desperate thirty-something single woman. Magnolia is a flower that grows in Southern California; more important, it’s the name of a main drag in the strip-mall center of the San Fernando Valley, Anderson’s home turf. After the conflict over
Boogie Nights’s
length—and comments by movie critics that the film was too long—Anderson had told Joanne Sellar that he intended to make a short film; but he appeared to be incapable of doing so. When he finally gave her the script, it was more than 190 pages—longer than its predecessor. And this time, Anderson—age twenty-eight—had final cut.

Anderson understood that he was being handed a unique chance. “I was in a position I will never ever be in again,” he said later. “For that moment I was lucky, and I could get the opportunity to make a movie like
Magnolia.
Truly, truly. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but my argument to them was, ‘You didn’t hire me to take your trailers and test them in Albuquerque. You hired me to be cool. You didn’t hire me to make money, New Line has Mike Myers and the
Austin Powers
movies to make them tons of
money. If I make a good movie, it will help you get at that cool niche of the world.’” And he was right.

Once again, the ambition was epic, his imagination sweeping. Sellar thought it read more like a novel than a movie, with its depth of character and complexity of emotion. For Anderson
Magnolia
was hugely cathartic. Like
Boogie Nights
, it was an intensely personal story, dressed up as tales of random characters on a broad canvas. One very personal story was that of Earl Partridge, an elderly man dying from cancer, struggling with an unresolved relationship with his son, Frank Mackey. Anderson’s own father had died of cancer a year before the film was shot. And there was the Frank Mackey character, who was avoiding his deepest anger over rejection by his mother and father, which could be read as a reflection of Anderson’s own life. The emotions these characters brought so intensely to the screen were Anderson’s—a love for his father and a simultaneous resentment, a desire for love and acceptance, denial and anger in their place. John C. Reilly played a sensitive cop character, Anderson as an idealist and a humanist. And William H. Macy played a gay, former game-show whiz-kid, a subject Anderson knew about from working as an assistant on game shows as a teenager. “I see Paul in all the characters,” observed Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played a touchingly compassionate nurse caring for the dying Jason Robards. “The selfish Paul, the caretaking Paul, the little-kid Paul, the mature Paul—he is all those things at a given time, and I see him telling a story about all aspects of himself.” Anderson said himself later of the story, “I consider
Magnolia
a kind of beautiful accident. It gets me. I put my heart—every embarrassing thing that I wanted to say—in
Magnolia.”