Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  Bruce and I spent much of that time getting acquainted with the special needs and excesses of rock stars. Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, hired us to do a television special for ABC commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the magazine. We pitched him on the idea of doing interviews with real people from a cross section of American subcultures, intercut with interviews and performances from rock-and-roll icons. The show was excruciatingly difficult to make. Wenner hired us late in the game, so we had very little lead time. The show was also a real eye-opening experience. I learned a lot about how wildly extravagant and difficult some rock stars could be and how cool and normal others were. Bruce Springsteen, for example, could not have been warmer or more down-to-earth. He pulled up to Sony Studios in New York City, driving his own vehicle, a modest Jeep Cherokee, without an entourage, and played his heart out for us. After giving us an extra song, he asked if we got everything we needed, and said he’d be happy to play some more. Marilyn Manson was also great to deal with. He invited us up to his bedroom and gave us a sneak preview of his new album, Mechanical Animals, while he sat on his knees like a little boy. Fiona Apple, on the other hand, was late, surrounded by handlers and sycophants, and generally difficult to work with. At her insistence, we flew in her own personal and ridiculously expensive hair and makeup person, whose work on Fiona, as far as I was concerned, did not justify the outrageous expense.

  The hassle of putting together the Rolling Stone show cooled some of my ardor for making a movie about rock stars. But by 1999, we were once again thinking about Metallica. We found ourselves back in Arkansas to make Revelations, the sequel to Paradise Lost. The West Memphis 3 were still rotting in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. An international West Memphis 3 support network had arisen as a result of Paradise Lost. Bruce and I were very proud that our film had finally gotten off the entertainment pages and was actually affecting some social change. We thought the activities of the WM3 activists, which included the hiring of a new forensic expert to re-examine the crime, would make an interesting sequel. Creatively, we were a little weary of treading the same ground, but we felt that Damien, who was on death row, needed our help. In the editing room, we realized the film, like its predecessor, cried out for Metallica music. We weren’t shy this time: we asked for thirteen songs and got all of them. It’s standard for musicians considering film requests to ask to see the footage that will include their music, but Metallica said they trusted us completely Once again, we were impressed with how easy it was to deal with Metallica.

  We seemed to be establishing an actual productive relationship with the Metallica organization. Cliff Burnstein even brought up the film idea with us that summer. Of course, it wasn’t really the type of film we had in mind, but surely we could work something out. It was with high hopes that we made our way to the Four Seasons.

  “This ain’t gonna happen.”

  “No shit.”

  This was the sort of terse exchange that was becoming increasingly common for Bruce and me. We always seemed to be getting on each other’s nerves. We didn’t speak as much these days, and the less we spoke, the more we needed to. Long-standing problems with our working relationship were reaching a crisis point. Our renewed eagerness to make a movie about Metallica was one of the few things holding us together. After having our idea shot down for what looked like the last time, our relationship got progressively worse over the next several months.

  My problem was that I was tired of feeling like we were joined at the hip as filmmakers. We did such a good job of marketing ourselves as a filmmaking team that it was increasingly hard for one of us to get hired for a job without the other. Clients would be afraid that if they didn’t get both of us, the project wouldn’t have that Berlinger-Sinofsky “magic.” The more we stayed together and sold ourselves as a team, the more individual careers seemed unobtainable. I thought it was bad for business to be in this situation; I didn’t want to have to rely on someone else to be able to get gigs.

  There were also deeper emotional reasons for my unrest. First of all, although we billed ourselves as a team and shared all the profits, I was the one who really ran our business. I put in a lot of extra hours and was starting to resent it. Because Bruce and I weren’t able to grow our business beyond a handful of underpaid junior staffers (documentaries aren’t exactly a gold mine), I was stuck with a lot of extra duties—some I loved, others I resented. I was largely responsible for developing and pitching ideas in the concept stage. Once we got the work, I dealt with all of the legal, marketing, and financial work that comes with running any company. At the end of the creative day Bruce would go home and have dinner with his family, while I was stuck in the office. To be fair to Bruce, he always said that he wanted to do more but felt like I was too much of a control freak to let him take on more responsibility. The truth is somewhere in the middle. I am a control freak, but Bruce lacked the business and marketing skills that I had absorbed during my years in advertising. Truth be told, I also enjoyed running the show. Looking back on that period, I think I even got off a little on being a martyr.

  I also became obsessed with trying to put a value on the creative input each of us brought to our work. Years later, eavesdropping on Metallica’s therapy sessions, I realized that when a group comes together to create something, there’s a collective alchemy that can’t be reduced to a straightforward accounting of who does what. But in 1999, I was still a long way from that epiphany. Bruce and I found ways of quantifying our respective contributions. We agreed that the intellectual depth and complex structuring of our films generally came from me, while his contributions tended to give the films then emotional resonance and humor. Bruce likes to say that I’m a “type-A-plus” personality and he’s a “type-B-minus.” I’m high-strung and obsessive, he’s relaxed and “big picture.” This is true, as far as it goes. My temperament is such that I agonized over every detail, closely examining every cut we made. If I complained that he wasn’t as engaged, Bruce would tell me that my attention to detail had a downside—that I’d get lost in minutiae, and that it was he, with his knack for seeing the forest for the trees, who often brought me back to the middle. These sorts of explanations just weren’t working for me anymore. I became obsessed with trying to determine a way to credit both Bruce and me for our respective contributions to our work. The fact that I sweated the creative details and got stuck running the business made me feel like my contributions were greater—a dangerously egotistical assumption. Bruce started to resent my control-freak personality and my whining about all of the extra time I was putting into the company, since it implied that his contributions were not as significant as mine. In short, we were headed for a breakup, but we didn’t know how to face it.

  Part of the problem was my reluctance to deal with confrontation. Having spent my childhood trying to make volatile situations within my home go away, I have always tried to avoid disputes. Further complicating the situation was that Bruce and I were the best of friends; we cared deeply for each other and our respective families. We had had some of the most incredible experiences on the road that any two friends could have. My reluctance to break away stemmed in part from a guilt complex; I didn’t want to abandon my friend and cause him financial problems. Since I was the guy who was the primary rainmaker, the one who squeezed every drop of profit out of our jobs, I feared that I would be inflicting financial and emotional damage on my friend if I dissolved our business.

  My concerns weren’t limited to issues of ego and credit. I also became convinced that each of us should make films that expressed our singular voices. The vague solution I came up with was that we should just start looking harder for projects we could do independently of each other. My thinking was that this would be an organic solution to the problem, one that didn’t require us to actually talk to each other about it. I was ostensibly exploring ways for our production company to work at full capacity, using the logic that two directors working on two projects was a more efficien
t allocation of resources than two directors working on the same project. I also figured that if we each looked for our own gigs, we might grow apart naturally and with no resentment. In my heart, I knew I was laying the eventual groundwork for dissolving our business partnership, one way or another. I told myself that I wanted to give Bruce plenty of time to start developing his own individual career. That way, when and if we parted ways (and I knew that really meant “when”), it wouldn’t be a sudden shift. The only problem was that I didn’t bother to tell Bruce the real underlying reasons why I thought we should both look for separate work.

  I quietly went about establishing my own career, and it looked to me like he was doing the same. I landed a few TV gigs, including directing an episode of Homicide and a short-lived drama called D.C. Bruce was also gaining traction on some projects, including Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records, which he made for the PBS series American Masters. (It was hard to turn down Bruce’s offer to work on the film with him, because it promised to be a lot of fun.) So, as the elevator doors opened on to the Four Seasons lobby, and we walked through the lobby where we’d just recently wasted four hours waiting to talk to Metallica, it felt like one of the last strands holding us together was being severed.

  For me, Metallica would not go away In the fall of ’99, a few months after the Four Seasons meeting, I pitched an idea for a TV show to Lauren Zalaznick, then head of programming at VH1, a really bright executive who had coproduced the movie Kids and then gone on to revitalize the moribund VH1 with some very original shows. My idea was for a show called FanClub, which I envisioned as the flipside of Behind the Music. Rather than focus on the history of rock groups, my show would tell the story of their fans. Each week, we’d profile a few of the most hard-core fans of a particular group, then intercut those profiles with performances and interviews with that band. A pilot was green-lit.

  Since I already had a relationship with Metallica, I turned to them. I told Q Prime that this would be a good way for all of us to work together. Since the archival documentary wasn’t happening, the VH1 show would also help keep Metallica in the public eye during the following year’s planned hiatus. They went for it. I caught up with them on tour and filmed some hotel interviews and live performances. For the latter, I had to deal with the Metallica road crew. Their attitude made me realize that Metallica were no strangers to being in front of the camera; if I ever really wanted to make a personal film about the band, I’d have to really make clear how ours would be unique. The vibe I got from the road crew was basically: “You’re no different than the thousands of other video guys, reporters, photographers, and assorted hanger-ons who get in our way on a daily basis. Here are the rules. Don’t break them and don’t fuck with our jobs.” (Winning over the road crew was one of the major challenges we faced while making Monster.)

  The making of the FanClub pilot went well. Bruce and I continued to drift apart. I sensed my big break was right around the corner. I had no idea it would break me.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE WITCH’S SPELL

  For a brief moment, the cameras are turned. Lars and I really bonded over the making of this film. (Courtesy of Bob Richman)

  04/21/01

  INT. ROOM 627, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO - DAY

  LARS (to Phil): Do you feel that me, Kirk, and James are in any way different right now than we have been in the last couple of months, because of either Bob being in here or the cameras being in here?

  PHIL: There’s been a transformation. I’m anxious to see how you guys take what you’ve been working on in here, and take it into the studio and into your performances and your personal lives. I think you guys now seem very natural.

  LARS: It feels better. It doesn’t feel forced.

  PHIL: What’s cool is that I don’t feel like there’s been any concern about the cameras. I wasn’t thinking people would be shy, but I did think there might be a little showboating. But I think this has been a real natural expression up to now. I really like it.

  LARS: Yeah, I agree. (to James) Do you feel the same way?

  JAMES: Yeah, cameras, fine. But microphones, though, I’m, uh …

  BOB: Well, what we’ll try and do is, we’ll try and get rid of all the microphones at the studio.

  JAMES: Great!

  LARS: There you go!

  JAMES: The silent album. Laughter

  PHIL: Then you’re done. That’s stretching the boundaries, right? You had the Black Album, and we now have the–

  JAMES: The Blank Album.

  PHIL: The Blank Album, that’s great.

  JAMES: From black to blank.

  As 1999 drew to a close, the world braced itself for the “year 2000 problem,” the possibly catastrophic series of chain reactions that would occur when computers worldwide ticked from ’99 to ’00, forgot what year it was, and crashed en masse. I was too busy to worry about such trivialities. I was hard at work setting the stage for my own millennium bug. I was about to make a series of decisions that would crash my career.

  It all started just before Thanksgiving. I was putting the finishing touches on the Metallica pilot of FanClub and looking forward to putting together the eight additional episodes VH1 had ordered1 when I got a call from Artisan Entertainment, the little studio that had made a fortune with The Blair Witch Project. On the line was a smart young executive named Cybelle Greenman, to whom I’d recently pitched an idea for my first feature film, The Little Fellow in the Attic. I knew that as someone known for making documentaries, I would probably have only one chance to make a big splash crossing over to feature films, so I wanted to be very careful about my first fiction feature project.

  Little Fellow was a true-crime story about a secret liaison between a married woman and an employee of her wealthy industrialist husband in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles. The affair began when the boy was seventeen. The woman stashed him in the attic, and that’s where he lived for the next seventeen years, unbeknownst to the woman’s husband. The boy would hide in his attic lair when the husband was home and come out to do chores and have sex with the woman when the man was at work. In 1932, the husband discovered the secret attic hideaway A fight ensued, and the “little fellow” shot and killed the husband. A huge, sensational trial ended in a hung jury because some jurors felt sympathy for the kept man, a virtual slave denied access to the outside world by the love-starved woman.

  At the time I was developing this movie, I, too, felt like a slave. With two young kids at home and a Westchester County mortgage, I wasn’t making the kind of money I thought I should be making, and I felt trapped running a business in which I saw no future. So I was really excited that Artisan was flying me out to talk about a feature film that I desperately wanted to make, not just for creative reasons but also to make a change in the direction of my career.

  It looked like Artisan loved my idea. Over two days, I had three meetings, each with a successively higher tier of executives, all patting me on the back and telling me how wonderful this film was going to be. It seemed surreal, almost too easy. Before I knew it, I was sitting down with Amir Malin and Bill Block, two of the three heads of Artisan. Boy they must really like my little noir thriller, I thought. I launched into my pitch for the fourth time in two days. Amir abruptly held up his hand, as if to say, “Hold your breath, kid.” Then he spoke: “Actually we’re not interested in your attic movie. We want you to make the sequel to The Blair Witch Project.”

  Cybelle, the executive who brought me to L.A., turned and gave me a big smile. I felt a knot in my stomach. Little did I know it would stay there for 14 months.

  It turned out that my pitching sessions were just a pretense to see if I would be the right person to make a sequel to the highest-grossing film of 1999 and what was then the biggest independent film of all time. Blair Witch had come out of nowhere to take in an astounding $50 million in its first week alone. During that summer, Blair Witch even managed to steal some thunder from The Phantom Menace, the highly
anticipated first episode in George Lucas’s new Star Wars trilogy The three previously unknown stars of Blair Witch became overnight sensations.

  As anybody with even a passing interest in popular culture knows, the film was promoted as the edited version of real footage shot by a trio of amateur documentary filmmakers who had disappeared into the woods near Burkettsville, Maryland, while researching a film about the legend of a local witch. According to the legend, the filmmakers were never found, but their footage, which documented their grisly demise, was salvaged and turned into a documentary about their final days.

  Cybelle noticed my stunned look. “We think you’d be perfect,” she said, really laying it on thick. “We really believe in you.” Amir added, “We really want this to be different. We’re a filmmaker’s studio, and we want to help you achieve your vision.” The attention was flattering, but I should have recognized that the duplicity of the pitch meeting was a sign of things to come. I was disappointed that my Little Fellow project would have to sit on a shelf for a while longer, but by the end of the meeting, I was convinced that they wanted me to make something with artistic merit. I figured their attitude was, Who better to make a fake documentary about murders in the woods than a guy famous for making a real documentary about murders in the woods? I didn’t realize it then, but they probably also thought an indie filmmaker would add a patina of indie cred to this crass Hollywood exercise.

  The irony of my involvement was that, although I thought Artisan would respect my vision of Blair Witch 2, I didn’t have much respect for Blair Witch 1. In fact, I hated what the movie represented. From a storytelling standpoint, The Blair Witch Project certainly had a lot of merit. It was highly engaging and original. My scorn came from the message I thought the film sent about people’s relationship with the mass media. As someone who considers himself as much a journalist as a filmmaker, I have observed, with great concern, how the blurring of the line between fiction and reality has increased over the years. TV news has become much more oriented toward entertainment. “Reality” TV shows, although unscripted, depict completely contrived situations. Blair Witch went one step further. Artisan successfully marketed the film as a real documentary A guerrilla marketing campaign, including a fantastic Web site packed with “facts” about the legend and the doomed filmmakers, was enough to convince huge numbers of people that they were witnessing real life. The film generated $140 million in ticket sales in the U.S. alone, much of that money spent by people who were essentially tricked into buying tickets to something they thought was an actual documentary