Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  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.

  JONZE WENT BACK TO PROPAGANDA FILMS, 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?

  Boogie Days and Nights

  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.

  FOR PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON, $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—ironi
cally, 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 …”

  ANDERSON 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 tak
e 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.

  THERE 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.