Rebels on the Backlot (42 page)

The film comes full circle to its opening moment: the narrator talking with the barrel of a gun in his mouth. In the book, Tyler says, “The last thing we have to do is your martyrdom thing. Your big death thing.” But as the moments count down to Tyler-Jack’s self-destruction, Marla comes in and Tyler disappears. Palahniuk writes:

In the next, final chapter, the narrator is in a mental hospital. Tyler Durden has survived.

That’s the book. There was an early draft of the script that had Marla confessing her love for Tyler-Jack but it was “too Hollywood” for Fincher. Nor did he go for Palahniuk’s version of having Tyler-Jack surviving in a mental hospital. He wanted to be able to vanquish Tyler Durden completely. The shooting script gives a sense of how Fincher and Uhls took Palahniuk’s spare prose and amped it up to a more gory, visceral experience:

And Jack, the narrator, survives to watch the credit card buildings explode.

All this precedes Fincher’s final subversive wave, the barely perceivable frames of a penis, in close-up, before the credits roll.

O
PEN WARFARE HAD NOW BROKEN OUT BETWEEN
S
HERAK
and Fincher. Sherak’s pleas to cut down on the violence just made Fincher add more frames into his cut. Sherak would say something like: “When you go to the MPAA, cut it to what you really want it to be, because we don’t want to have to advocate for something that’s over the top. It puts us in a difficult position.” Fincher would nod and then add in twelve more frames of bloody fistfighting. In the summer of 1999, Sherak visited Fincher in his trailer on the Fox lot. As Fincher recalls, Sherak entered the trailer and said, “Hey buddy, I’ve got some bad news.”

“Really, what’s that?”

“That scene with the gun in the mouth at the end, it’s not going to fly.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. All right, listen, I was going to say something, but I didn’t want to be the one—this is not going to fly at the MPAA.”

“Really. That’s unfortunate, Tom.”

“Yeah, you know—it’s just not gonna happen. No hard feelings.”

“Okay. Tell you what, make my life easier. That shot cost four hundred thousand dollars to do. It’s in the book Fox purchased for sixty thousand dollars. It’s in every iteration of the screenplay. It was, for lack of a better word, approved by the studio. The money that it cost to execute was certainly approved by the studio. I want you to go to Bill Mechanic’s office and tell him that that half-million dollars has to be thrown away because you can’t get this done at the MPAA.”

“Hmmm. Okay. Let me take one more shot at it with the MPAA, and I’ll get back to you.”

Sherak called the next day and said, “Okay. I went on the line for you. They’re gonna let us do it.”

The incident only hardened Fincher’s contempt for the studio.

L
IKE ALL
F
OX FILMS, THE MOVIE WAS SCREENED FOR A
test audience, who would give the studio a sense of how it was likely to be received and how to market the film. Fincher resisted the process;
Se7en
had been screened before a recruited audience ahead of its release by New Line and had scored very poorly. But this was the way of doing business in the studio world. National Research Group, the ubiquitous Hollywood research company, bused in a group of mainly teenagers from Orange County to see the movie on the lot. A studio executive was late, holding up the start of the screening, and Fincher stood, steaming, in the back of the room as they waited; ten minutes passed, fifteen minutes, twenty. Forty minutes later the executive came; Fincher was sure the rhythm had been killed already. But he was surprised. The audience members wrote on their response cards that they liked the intelligence of the film and its look. They also got what more conservative executives like Sherak (and Rupert Murdoch) didn’t—the subversive humor in the film. But many were troubled by what they considered excessive violence. Several said they liked the movie but felt they couldn’t recommend it to their friends, the key element of word of mouth. They thought friends wouldn’t get the humor or would be offended by the violence. Fincher thought, “You had people who felt a sense of, you know, ‘I’ve got to protect people from this.’” The same sense of “I got it, but I don’t know if other people will get it” had pervaded the editing room, where people working on the film said, “I don’t know if my friends could handle this. I’m the smartest person in my peer group and it was a little much for me.”

Sherak and Harper were not terribly impressed by the numbers, which were not disastrous. And again they noted the conflict
between the theme and the movie star. “There was one audience for this movie—men,” Sherak concluded. “And Brad Pitt gets girls, not guys.”

Whatever the best strategy might have been, there was no realistic way to sneak into the marketplace with a movie with this large a budget and two major movie stars. Fox opened on 1,963 screens, and took in a very disappointing $11 million in its opening weekend. Still, none of the market research could have prepared them for the scathing media reception that would follow.

S
pike Jonze was juggling a grueling schedule. He was acting in
Three Kings
six days a week in Arizona. Then he would race back to Los Angeles on his one day off, work on
Malkovich
with editor Eric Zumbrunnen in an editing room on the Warner Brothers lot for a few hours before heading back to Arizona. Over nine months Jonze and Zumbrunnen whittled the assembly from three hours and fifty-two minutes down to two hours. (Jonze didn’t learn to hurry over time:
Adaptation
took eighteen months to edit.)

The process was mainly guided by ad hoc screenings with friends of friends and people recruited off the street, drawn into screenings every other week at PolyGram’s screening room on Crescent Drive, in Beverly Hills. Spike would sit in the back of the room, and afterward producer Vince Landay would throw questions at the audience: What did they have trouble understanding? What did they like? What bothered them? “It was the single most important tool in shaping the final product of the movie,” said
producer Sandy Stern. Unlike the dreaded research screenings run by the studios, this did not involve response cards with their formulaic questions or mumbo jumbo statistics over who liked the movie and who didn’t. Instead, Jonze took the remarks back to the editing room, and reemerged two weeks later with a new cut, which he showed to a new audience. “They’d made connections you’d never imagine, incorrect connections. We’d say, ‘Why are they thinking that?’” recalled Landay. The screenings eventually led to the cutting of much of Dr. Lester’s bizarre speechifying, distilled to a single moment in the movie, and to shooting several new scenes that emphasized the emotional connections between the characters played by Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, and John Cusack. Most of the scenes consisted of telephone conversations, and by the time they were done, Keener was pregnant, so she had to be filmed from the shoulders up. The movie got progressively shorter, and the producers progressively more nervous.

Throughout the editing process, Jonze had almost no contact with Universal. For the studio, the film was a relatively low-budget affair, green-lighted by a company that had preceded them. “Nobody really cared about the movie,” recalled producer Steve Golin. One of the reasons Zumbrunnen and Jonze kept editing the movie was that no one told them to stop. “We didn’t know anyone there,” said Zumbrunnen. “No one took anything away from us. The checks kept cashing. So we kept working on the movie.” With the movie complete, Golin screened
Malkovich
for Russell Schwartz, the executive who came from Gramercy to run the distribution unit at USA Films. He showed it to Casey Silver, the head of Universal Pictures. “Nobody cared. At this point there was total ambivalence,” Golin said.

A
T THE SAME TIME
S
OFIA
C
OPPOLA
, J
ONZE’S
FIANCÉE, WAS EDITING
her first film,
The Virgin Suicides
, on the other side of the Warner Brothers lot. They’d visit each other occasionally, and there was usually some creative rivalry between them. “You have your movie, and I have mine,” Coppola would tell him. Coppola
was making a lyrical, moody tragedy about a houseful of teenaged sisters, restricted by a severely Christian mother, who commit suicide. Coppola had a distinctly different but equally singular sensibility than Jonze. Later she was wounded when Jonze did not invite her to be part of the directors-only production company that was announced in October 2001 with Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Alexander Payne, and Sam Mendes.

By June 1999, Jonze—still editing
Being John Malkovich
—and Coppola—having just finished
The Virgin Suicides
—were married at the sprawling Napa Valley vineyard of iconic 1970s director and larger-than-life papa, Francis Ford Coppola. (Sofia Coppola described how the magnetic irresistibility of Daddy’s enthusiasm finally pushed her into a career in film: “Every time my dad talks about the movies you just feel like jumping in.”) At the wedding some old seventies movie rebels, like Coppola and George Lucas, met some of the nineties rebels, like Jonze and David O. Russell. Tom Waits, that unmusical genius, sang. Jonze’s crew from
Malkovich
were there, including Vince Landay, K. K. Barrett, and Eric Zumbrunnen. The wedding was large and joyous, but the union was an odd one. The couple would suffer under the pressures of constant work and long separations.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER 1999
,
B
EING
J
OHN
M
ALKOVICH
PREMIERED AT
the Venice Film Festival. Jonze was apprehensive: Would the staid European festivalgoers get a movie like his? Unexpectedly, the reaction was almost immediately delirious. No one had ever seen a film like
Being John Malkovich
before, and the media embraced the film as an unselfconscious, brilliantly original piece of work. Kenneth Turan in the
Los Angeles Times
began his review by saying the film “is a clever and outrageous piece of whimsical fantasy that is unique, unpredictable, and more than a little strange. You could see a lot of movies over a lot of years and not hear a line of dialogue as playful and bizarre as ‘I’ll see you in Malkovich in one hour.’ What the heck is going on here?”

The same month
Malkovich
screened at the New York Film
Festival. The
New York Times
review landed on producer Landay’s door at the SoHo Grand Hotel at 2:00
A.M.
the next morning. He tore through the paper to see Janet Maslin’s passionate endorsement. He called Jonze at the Mercer: “Have you seen this?” Jonze, Kaufman, and Landay were amazed. “We had hoped it wasn’t something that would get lost or buried,” recalled Landay. “We hoped for some critical praise. But we wondered how broad an audience would appreciate it.”

The critics continued to weigh in, getting positively giddy. “The Oscar nominating committees huddle behind closed doors. There is much wringing of hands, pounding of foreheads. ‘Do we have a category for Least Likely Screenplay to See the Light of Day?’” wrote Jan Stuart in
Newsday.
In
Esquire
magazine Tom Carson called
Malkovich
“the last great movie of the century ….
Being John Malkovich
is the kind of breakthrough that leaves every other movie around looking clueless; it’s about all the things that they don’t know they’re saying.” The reviews were more or less unanimous: The movie was a masterpiece. And the critics wondered how it slipped through the system: “I don’t know how a movie this original got made today, but thank God for wonderful aberrations,” wrote David Ansen in
Newsweek.

The reception encouraged Universal to devote some money to promote the film, eventually spending $18 million on prints and advertising. Russell Schwartz had worked with the writer-directors Ethan and Joel Coen, who had done
Fargo
and
Blood Simple
, and had a feel for Jonze’s offbeat tone. The director and his production crew set up Web sites with teaser posters and trailers put up on the Internet. One Web site was for a company called J.M. Inc., and it claimed to allow customers into another person’s mind; it had a link to the movie’s official Web site. They devised TV spots that said: “If you want to change your identity, become anyone you want, go to the J.M. Inc. Web site,” and ran them on late-night cable channels.

The studio set up a junket to introduce the film and the filmmaker to the entertainment media, but it was problematic since nobody connected to the film felt comfortable representing it.
John Malkovich was afraid the movie would be too closely identified with him, and what if it bombed? Cameron Diaz didn’t want the media interest to be all about her. Catherine Keener hated publicity and interviews. John Cusack didn’t want to overshadow the film. And when it came to this sort of thing, Charlie Kaufman was usually hiding under a couch. “That’s a class in marketing,” observed Schwartz wryly.