Rebels on the Backlot (43 page)

So the marketing wizards were left with Spike Jonze, who wasn’t the most talkative of interviews. More to the point, there was no getting him to behave. Jonze was used to staging pranks at the expense of his friends—or himself. He liked to impersonate studio chiefs when he phoned filmmaker friends. Once when visiting David O. Russell on Martha’s Vineyard, Russell had to rescue Jonze within an hour of his arrival when Jonze was caught spinning 360-degree circles with the rental car. Jonze was cornered by the cops, and Hertz came to take away the keys. This was all fun, but playing pranks on the national and international press was another matter. Zumbrunnen overheard Jonze tell an interviewer over the phone that he’d started out making videos for an agricultural company. In a British television interview, Jonze presented himself as a Corvette-driving loudmouth, dressed in a tank top and a ghetto do-rag. While promoting
Malkovich
in London in March 2000, Jonze told a writer from the prestigious
Sunday Times
how he’d met Charlie Kaufman: “My old friend Ray served in Panama with Charlie’s brother, Donald. Charlie sent it to Donald to read, then Donald gave it to another soldier, Larry, who then gave it to my friend Ray, who gave it to me.” The writer, Christopher Goodwin, dutifully reported the facts as invented by Jonze. (Charlie’s “brother” Donald was in the midst of being created for
Adaptation;
Donald eventually won an Academy Award nomination for cowriting the screenplay of that film.) Jonze also repeated a story he liked to tell journalists, of how he got into the business: “My step-dad sells juicers to a lot of people in Hollywood and he knows Jim Carrey through his juicing connections.”

Jonze simply refused to talk about anything personal—his background, his childhood, his marriage to Sofia Coppola. He chose
not to confirm or deny the ubiquitous, false story that he was an heir to the Spiegel catalogue fortune, with the result that it was reprinted constantly. Even a writer for
New York
magazine who had several personal connections to Jonze tripped on that bit of mythic lore, calling Jonze a “Bethesda, Maryland–bred heir to the $3-billion-a-year Spiegel catalogue business.” By 2003 the fact was deeply entrenched in Nexis-Lexis. A
New York Times
story in November 2003 about the children of the super-rich made note of Spike Jonze as an exception to the rule of indolence and paralysis. (The story was later corrected.)

For Jonze, saying little or nothing was an excellent tactic that reinforced his aura of effortless cool. He gave the impression that he didn’t need to suck up to the entertainment press, but in truth he was not that self-confident. The impulse to be a prankster and a teller of tall tales masked an intense, almost painful shyness. His inventions for the media machine belied the very real emotions that the filmmaker expressed so touchingly in his work. Jonze created an air of mystery and quirkiness with his unpredictable interviews, but in truth he had no desire to revisit the academic and social awkwardness of his youth. The most obvious example of that was the creation of Jonze’s alter ego, Richard Koufay, the leader of the “Torrance Community Dance Group” who appeared in a Fatboy Slim video made by Jonze. When accepting an MTV award for the video in 2000 it was Koufay who appeared onstage in a shaggy beard, talking trash about Jonze (to whom Jonze later sent an injunction to cease and desist). He gave one gullible journalist an entire interview as Koufay. It was a joke, surely, but it was no less importantly a way for Spike Jonze to avoid revealing any of his real self.

The result was a strange concoction of media hype about Jonze that had little to do with the real person. “Jonze has always been blessed with killer taste, a good eye, and near perfect timing,” wrote
Harper’s Bazaar
breathlessly in November 1999. “There’s no disputing that his résumé reads like a time line of cool.” Time line of cool? Jonze had been a nerdy kid, scrawny and most definitely not part of the cool crowd, destined for a career in dirt bikes. By not saying a word, Jonze had managed to reinvent his past into a
seamless continuum of silver spoon privilege and effortless cool. Talk about revenge of the nerds.

Not that it mattered much to Jonze, but
Being John Malkovich
didn’t make much money. It opened on October 29, 1999, in thirty theaters and expanded up to six hundred screens for a few weeks. Even after being nominated for three Academy Awards in January, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, the movie took in only $22 million—hardly a blockbuster of
Pulp Fiction
proportions. But in its own way,
Malkovich
became a landmark of the decade, a signature for the deadpan humor and absurdist sensibility that would imbue the work of Jonze and his contemporaries.

Warner chief Terry Semel sat in the back of the hall for the first test screening of
Three Kings
at a Los Angeles theater. Afterward he walked over to David Russell and extended his hand, saying: “I was wrong. I didn’t get it. Congratulations, it’s a wonderful film.” He had opposed the making of the film, but at least he was willing to admit when he was wrong.

Still, Warner Brothers didn’t really know how to promote or market something so unusual. The marketing executives weren’t accustomed to selling a thinking person’s action movie about war and human conflict. So they sold it the same way they sold all of Warner Brothers’ products, with a gangbang-style press junket—hundreds of journalists taped five-minute interviews for a quick sound bite, and picked up a gift bag before being sent out the door. The more discerning critics still managed to find the movie and tell readers about it. The influential Richard Schickel, in
Time
magazine, said the film was “a brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism…. This is how combat appears to us in the new technological age—no terrible beauty, just absurdity’s flat, deadly record keeping.”
Entertainment Weekly’s
Owen Gleiberman described the film as “
The Man Who Would Be King
meets
Salvador,”
with elements of
M*A*S*H, The Killing Fields, Catch-22, Raiders of
the Lost Ark
, and
Saving Private Ryan.
The
Los Angeles Times’s
Kenneth Turan recognized the arrival of a major, if subversive, talent within the heart of the studio system.
“Three Kings
is Hollywood with a twist,” he wrote, “demonstrating how far a film can stray from business as usual and still deliver old-fashioned satisfactions.” Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
, who loved Russell’s two earlier films, was one of the few to be less than thrilled by
Three Kings
, saying that only in its second half did it wake up to the “political and moral conundrums that were always at the heart of this material. …Too little, too late,” she clucked.

But the overwhelming response was positive. The movie sparked a buzz within the Hollywood creative community. Russell had proved he could pull off a big-budget action movie, that he wasn’t limited to quirky indie comedies. Other filmmakers noticed, too. David Fincher, who had met Russell just once, at Spike Jonze’s bachelor party in a bowling alley, was envious. He had hoped that
Fight Club
, which came out at around the same time as
Three Kings
, would be greeted as a subversive, compelling studio film. Instead
Fight Club
was attacked as immoral and irresponsible, and it was
Three Kings
that critics were calling brilliantly subversive. When Fincher finally saw
Three Kings
for himself, he was admiring and floored by the casting. “Mark Wahlberg?” he wondered. “Who’da thought?” And George Clooney? It was a rare time the star showed that he could act, Fincher believed.

Three Kings
sparked a buzz in broader circles, too. When Russell was invited to a fund-raiser in 1999 at Terry Semel’s house for Republican candidate George W. Bush, he decided to tell the candidate about the movie. Bush was wearing a suit; Russell had on a pair of shorts and a Windbreaker. After Bush’s remarks to the crowd, the director approached and mentioned that his upcoming film would not reflect favorably on Bush’s father and the Gulf War of 1991. “You could see this look of uncomprehending concern and panic wash over his face,” Russell recalled. “Then he immediately snapped into presidential mode and said, ‘Well, am I going to have to go finish the job?’”

At the time, Russell could have had no idea that President Bush would do exactly that.

But there was an enduring disappointment to
Three Kings
, besides Russell’s endless feud with George Clooney. Despite all the glowing reviews and the admiring press, Three
Kings
was not nominated for a single Oscar. The studio did not lobby for the film, which had become critically necessary to snagging nominations. Some thought the snub was deliberate. Clooney and others were sure that Russell’s bad behavior on the set had hit the industry gossip circuit, and no one wanted to reward it. Perhaps; but many were mystified to see one of the year’s best films ignored. Harvey Weinstein, who had movies competing for the Oscars that year, was among those most surprised. When he saw Three
Kings
, he called George Clooney and told him it was the film that worried him most in the upcoming Oscar race. Lucky for Weinstein—and unfortunately for Clooney and Russell—Warner had no clue how to compete in this arena. Apparently it had been too long since they had had something to work with. Or maybe Semel really was angry over Russell’s tantrums. Whichever, Three
Kings
was shut out of every other award, too. It was ignored by the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild. Lorenzo di Bonaventura was crestfallen. Russell tried not to care. Alexander Payne, who barely knew Russell and whose
Election
screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, called him to commiserate.
Three Kings
should have been nominated, he insisted. Said Harvey Weinstein, “I thought it was the best movie of the year.”

I
N 2000 ANOTHER EXTREMELY ORIGINAL AND VERY NON-ACADEMY
film,
American Beauty
, won Best Picture at the Oscars. That movie, written by a young screenwriter named Alan Ball, could easily have been considered another rebel project and was part of the explosion of young talent and the new sensibility defining the end of the 1990s.

The executives who ran the youngest studio in Hollywood, DreamWorks SKG, founded in 1994 by director Steven Spielberg, movie executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and music mogul David Geffen, had taken a chance on the project. They bought the script for $400,000 and cast about for a director. At Spielberg’s insistence,
the studio gave the project to an untested director named Sam Mendes, who had made a name for himself on the London stage; he made the film a haunting meditation on alienation and desperation in American suburbia. The movie starred Kevin Spacey as a suburban husband—already dead by the movie’s start—going through a midlife crisis; Annette Bening was his striving, real estate agent wife. The recurring motif of the film was Spacey’s daydream about a nubile young teenager, naked, surrounded by rose petals. After the film Ball, who came from suburban Georgia and went on to create the acclaimed
Six Feet Under
series for HBO, kept a massive, framed canvas of rose petals in his office.
American Beauty
cost just $15 million and took in some $350 million worldwide. Some thought it was a turning point in Hollywood moviemaking.

Magnolia
was shot in the San Fernando Valley, of course. Being a Paul Thomas Anderson project, it went over schedule. Orginally planned at seventy-nine days, the shoot went to ninety days, with an additional ten days for secondary scenes and background shots. The budget rose with the overages. Anderson was a man on a mission. He talked about the film as the start of a revolution in filmmaking, a spark to a wildfire of artistic independence. “It’s a revolution, and it’s just not happening well enough or fast enough,” he later complained to the
New York Times.
He worried that
Magnolia
didn’t cost enough to get the attention of executives at New Line. It was a counterintuitive logic that he’d adopted since
Boogie Nights:
Spend a lot, and the studio would have to spend more to guarantee a big audience. “New Line loves the movie, but I’m nervous about the fact that
Magnolia
only cost $35 million,” he said. “It didn’t cost enough to scare them in a marketing way. If it cost $50 million or $60 million, it would be scaring them, but it didn’t cost that, and it’s got Tom Cruise in it. So they’re thinking, ‘We’re okay, guys. We’re okay.’”

Actually the executives at New Line weren’t thinking that at all. They were watching dailies back at the West Hollywood offices,
and they liked the film. They felt confident they could sell the Tom Cruise material.

Anderson’s nervousness manifested itself to many as arrogance. All the way through the shoot, he took comfort in the knowledge that he had final cut. And as the movie’s length quickly began to become an issue, he began to use it as a bludgeon, dissing the New Line executives who were paying the bills.

In a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of
Magnolia
included on the DVD, Anderson appears during the shoot—lanky, chain-smoking, dressed in loose black trousers and a white button-down shirt—on the set of
What Do Kids Know
, the game show in the film. The director pretends to be the emcee, asking, “What will the final running time of this movie be?” Various shouts are heard from the crew: Three hours and twenty-five minutes. Three hours and eight minutes. Five hours. Anderson shouts, “Eighty-eight minutes for the prologue!” He asks, “How much money will it make?” and answers, “A dollar.”

William H. Macy was interviewed on the set for the same documentary. “What did you think of the script?” asks the interviewer. Macy said, “I thought it was astounding. I went to Paul and said, ‘It’s amazing. It’s a little long.’ He said, ‘You fucking cocksucker. I’m not going to cut one word.’ So I asked Julianne [Moore]. She said, ‘Amazing. It’s a little long.’” The interviewer asks, “What did Paul say?” Macy replies, “You fucking cocksucker. I’m not going to cut it.”