To my surprise, I couldn’t find one article, amid the reams of glowing press, that criticized the way the film’s marketing campaign toyed with journalistic values. The clever marketing plan was even celebrated on the cover of Time and Newsweek. But what was even more disturbing was the fact that even after the “trick” was revealed in countless articles and TV shows around the country, a good 40 percent of the audience, according to Artisan’s market research, still believed the movie was nonetheless real. The film, and the reception that greeted it, spoke volumes about the power of moving images to convey “truth.”
The fact that this poorly produced, grainy film was accepted as real by many people also bothered me on an artistic level. One of my biggest aesthetic pet peeves is that fiction films, from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives to The Blair Witch Project, often wallow in the worst clichés of bad documentary making in order to sell the idea of “reality”—excessively grainy footage, shaking the camera to the point of absurdity, and disjointed editing. Somehow bad shooting has become a visual reference for real life. (Sometimes this reality style is done well. For example, the TV show Homicide knew how to execute it with some artful restraint.) In addition, our society simply accepts video as real—the more amateur the video, the more we accept its credibility without questioning its provenance.
Why does this bother a real documentarian like me? Because most documentary makers don’t purposefully shake the camera or try to impose jump cuts in the editing room. Bruce and I pride ourselves on paying as much attention to craft as any fiction-feature director. We shoot our films in a very cinematic way and we make sure we have sufficient coverage so we can avoid jump cuts and incongruous editing whenever possible. Instead of purposefully shaking the camera, we aspire to a very lyrical, highly evocative cinematography. It’s offensive to those of us who pride ourselves on craft that bad shooting and jarring editing has been equated with documentary making—and that the American public buys it.
Prior to my arrival in the Artisan corner office, the studio’s development brain trust had simultaneously commissioned three different scripts for Blair Witch 2, a highly unusual move for a studio. They sent me back to New York, asking me to read all three, pick the one I like best, and tell them why. They wanted a decision by Monday. I would then immediately start prepping the movie, which was to begin shooting in February 2000 on a rush schedule. The film would be released worldwide on Halloween later that year. I spent most of that Thanksgiving break immersing myself in the three scripts and agonizing over what to do. On the one hand, here was a golden opportunity to finally get a feature film under my belt. On the other hand, it was an extremely risky proposition: Sequels often fail, I was not a fan of the first film, and the idea of making a Blair Witch sequel was already drawing venom from fans of the original and from film critics. This was no small art movie that I could make under the radar.
As I slogged through all three scripts over the long weekend, I came to a sobering conclusion: They all really sucked. The main problem I had was that each screenplay took up the story where the first movie left off. They all continued to rely on the conceit that the viewer is watching actual “found” documentary footage by “real” documentary filmmakers. I thought this was a huge mistake, because the sequel, unlike the original, would not have the advantage of emerging seemingly out of nowhere. The actors had been all over the airwaves and were now quasi celebrities. Although some people were still convinced The Blair Witch Project was a real documentary the media gatekeepers had widely dissected and celebrated the marketing hoax. After conferring with my wife, Loren, and my manager, Margaret Riley I decided to pass. I told Artisan that I thought it was a huge mistake to be traveling down the shaky-cam road for a second time. I said they needed to put the production on hold and come up with a fresh approach—no matter how long that took. “Thanks, but no thanks,” was the message I gave them. Figuring that they would not abandon three scripts that they probably shelled out big bucks for, I assumed that was the end of my involvement.
To my surprise, they actually listened to what I had to say and asked me what approach I would take. Although I was not prepared to pitch an idea, I mentioned a thought I had while reading the three scripts. “Look, a lot of people don’t like the idea that you’re doing a sequel. Besides, the jig is up—most intelligent moviegoers and certainly all of the critics now know that the first movie relied on a hoax. The ‘found footage’ shtick just won’t work a second time.” I also explained that Blair Witch had become one of the most parodied films of all time, by everything from Saturday Night Live to dozens of TV-commercial send-ups. I didn’t want to risk making a film that would be seen as just one more self-conscious takeoff of an already self-conscious movie. There was no way I was making another “fake” documentary So, instead of doing a sequel to the movie, I suggested, why not do a sequel to the real-life hoopla surrounding the movie’s success? “Let’s make fun of the whole Blair Witch phenomenon: the mania that attended the movie’s release, the media participation in the marketing hoax, and the fact that many people left the theaters still thinking they saw a real documentary.” My way of playing with reality would be to satirize the reality of the Blair Witch craze, as opposed to pretending that the movie itself was real.
They went for it.
I sketched out the idea over the next twenty-four hours. The film would follow five “real” obsessed fans of the first Blair Witch film as they go back to Burkittsville to determine if the first movie was a hoax or a real documentary. In the end, they get entangled in some real-life murders because they, like America, can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality. It would be an edgy, adult satire with a horrifying twist at the end.
Again, to my surprise, Artisan liked the pitch. I was starting to warm up to the idea of actually doing it, and I assumed that by buying my pitch, they would push back the production’s start date at least six months so I could write a script—after all, this was an idea that I was tossing out off the top of my head on December 1, 1999. The shoot was to begin in just two months.
I was wrong. “We love the idea,” John Hegeman, the marketing guru at Artisan said. “But we need to start shooting in February no matter what. So if you think you can write this script in six weeks, you have the job.”
Now, you may be asking yourself why, if I felt so righteous about the wrongs The Blair Witch Project committed against the noble art of documentary filmmaking, I didn’t refuse to have anything to do with the sequel. Good question. I felt like Larry Kroger, the Tom Hulce character in Animal House, in the scene where a devil and an angel perch on his shoulders, each vying for his soul. As I was pondering whether to take this job, the angel kept reminding me that making this film was a risky proposition, for all the reasons I’d already given Artisan. The devil whispering in my ear kept telling me that this was a cool way to enter the feature world, to break with my partner, and earn some quick cash. I was offered a generous directing fee and some attractive box office “bumps” (bonus money for hitting certain box office benchmarks.) Also, I knew the film would do very well on video, so my Directors Guild of America residuals might take care of my kids’ college education. But I also really believed the hot air Artisan was blowing up my ass, about how eager they were to do something unique with this film. So I quickly cowrote a script with screenwriter Dick Beebe for a movie called Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, and showed it to the people at Artisan. They liked it, and I got the green light.
This wasn’t my dream film, and I knew it ran the risk of being compared unfavorably to its blockbuster predecessor. But up to that point, everything I’d ever done had been so critically acclaimed that I felt like the odds were in my favor. Surely the critics who were the biggest supporters of my work would respect the fact that I was trying to do something different with this sequel. Truthfully, I have always enjoyed the challenge of creating a worthwhile film when the odds are against me. As someone who’d documented stories that unfolded in front of the ca
meras, I was accustomed to spending large amounts of time and money to make a film without knowing if there ultimately would be a film. If Delbert Ward had been acquitted, or if no charges had been filed against him in the first place, Brother’s Keeper would never have been made. If James Hetfield had never gone into rehab, if the therapy with Phil had just ended abruptly and the new music Metallica was making was mediocre, there might not be Some Kind of Monster.
So I threw myself into making Book of Shadows. It took just six weeks to write the screenplay, three weeks to cast the film with unknown actors, and then—boom—there I was, on the set of a $15 million feature film, with a mile of trucks and a crew of hundred people. I spent several months shooting it in and around Baltimore. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. I was sending the dailies to Artisan and getting nothing but praise back from them. The crew was happy and the cast loved it. I was making a movie that made fun of the idea of making a movie, and I thought I’d nailed it.
The studio saw and approved some early cuts in May and June 2000. Finally, at the end of July, I turned in my director’s cut. We had a very tight postproduction schedule—the movie was scheduled to open in two months—so I assumed the studio wouldn’t demand many changes to my final cut, especially since my early cuts had been approved. But now Artisan had a new marketing executive. Judging by her reaction to the film, she probably hadn’t looked at any of the earlier material. According to her, I had made the wrong movie.
“We don’t want an edgy adult satire that takes a twist at the end,” she said. “We want a teen slasher movie. We need blood.” She paused and added, “And lots of it.”
“But I didn’t shoot a teen slasher movie.”
“Well, then we’re going to turn it into one.”
What happened next is every director’s nightmare. In the span of two months, Artisan managed to turn Book of Shadows into a hackneyed horror movie. Among other things, they inserted ridiculous scenes of gore that really had no place in my movie. I argued that the beauty of The Blair Witch Project was that all of the violence happened off screen, a narrative device perfected by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. “Our audience has never seen Rear Window or Vertigo—it hasn’t even heard of Hitchcock,” my pal Amir Malin responded. I spoke with lawyers and the Director’s Guild about taking my name off the movie and walking off altogether, and asked several people for advice. They all told me that doing so would just make things worse. I think I was even told that if I did, I’d never work in this town again. (Yes, people actually said that.) I would just have to ride this one out.
Two weeks before Book of Shadows came out, I was a critical darling. By two weeks after its release, I was a critical pariah. The reviews weren’t just bad. They were personally vindictive. I had my big Hollywood premiere at the legendary Mann’s Chinese Theatre. That morning, reviews of the film were published in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. The basic tone of both was, “How dare you, a celebrated documentary filmmaker, put out this commercial trash?” The consensus was that I had ruined not only a great franchise (people in the industry had assumed that Blair Witch would generate lucrative spin-offs for years to come) but also my own career. Dennis Harvey wrote in Variety that my involvement with the Paradise Lost films, about real-life murder in the woods, added a “queasy aftertaste” to my decision to make this “trashy genre exploiter.” He particularly hated the film’s opening five minutes, a “knock-off-jumble” of “frantically edited Real World-–style scenes” of the film’s new protagonists, and “Shining—like aerial sweeps over the Black Hills region, set to heavy-metal bombast.” This criticism was particularly galling, since much of this “knockoff-jumble” was the result of the studio drastically re-editing my cut.
I knew I was in for an onslaught of bad reviews, which made the premiere particularly difficult to get through. As I walked down the red carpet, hundreds of journalists calling my name and snapping my picture, I felt like a big phony. The movie opened a few days later (on my birthday) and with the exception of German audiences, who actually seemed to like it, Book of Shadows generated nothing but vitriolic press. Despite all the damage Artisan had done to my cut, I felt that some of my original ideas had survived, but the reviewers’ sheer hatred of the movie prevented them from seeing any of the social satire buried within it. I remember lying in a fetal position in my office all weekend as my fax machine spit out one horrible review after another in five different languages from around the globe.
The funny thing about Blair Witch 2, at least in retrospect, is that, although it took a critical drubbing, it was actually a financial success. The film cost $15 million to make and grossed nearly $50 million worldwide making it the second-highest-grossing film in Artisan’s history after the first Blair Witch, which raked in nearly five times that amount. It also did very well on video. Artisan, unfortunately had been banking on the sequel repeating the success of the original film, because the company was about to go public by selling stock in an initial public offering. When the numbers didn’t materialize, Artisan’s plans for an IPO fizzled, and the company was eventually purchased by Lions Gate Films for what many in the industry considered a fire-sale price.
For me, however, the period after the film came out was the nadir of my career and my life. I was basically paralyzed with depression and self-recrimination. I really thought my filmmaking career was over. My outlook on the future got so bad that just before Christmas I mustered up enough energy to go to Macy’s to buy some dressy clothes, the kind of things I wore when I was in advertising, because I figured it was back to the ad world for me. My wife and Bruce rescued me from this funk. Bruce had every reason to enjoy the backlash against me, and I’m sure part of him did, but he acted like the great friend he is. (Although whenever there was a bad review or piece of press, I would generally find out about it from him.) Bruce called me almost every day He and Loren reminded me that we had made some incredible films during the past decade, that this was just a temporary setback.
I’m not one to watch my own work much after it’s done, but I think after two months of beating myself up, I needed to be reminded that what they said was true. It had been three years since I had watched Paradise Lost. One day in January, I settled into a comfortable chair, popped open a beer, and started the film. The first thing I heard was Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” playing over our opening title sequence, a sweeping aerial shot over the murder site.
Oh yeah, didn’t I once think about making a Metallica movie?
Our failed pitch meeting at Metallica’s Four Seasons suite in the summer of ’99 had seemed, at the time, like the last word on that idea. But I had kept in touch with Lars over the past year and a half; before scheduling conflicts prevented his involvement, he was even going to serve as music supervisor for Book of Shadows. At that time, I had sensed that he still had some interest in making a Metallica movie, so I decided now to make a few tentative calls to Lars and Q Prime. I had no high hopes for the project—especially given James’s obvious aversion to us getting too personal—but I thought they still might be interested in some sort of archival film. If a historical, clips-driven film was what they wanted, I was their man. Frankly, I just wanted to work again.
As it happened, my inquiries coincided with a brewing crisis in the Metallica camp. Jason Newsted had announced he was quitting the band, and Metallica had hired Phil Towle to help mediate the situation. At that point, that’s all I knew. “Yeah, we brought in this guy to help us deal with Jason leaving,” Lars told me. Assuming that meant the band had bigger things to worry about than making a movie, I was astounded by what he said next: “Why don’t you come out and film one of the meetings? I think we’re gonna start making our new album, one way or another.” (Thanks, Lars.)
I made Book of Shadows for all the wrong reasons: easy money, the chance to put some distance between me and my partner, and the desire to enter the world of feature films by any means necessary. I had dreams of following in the footsteps o
f people like Werner Herzog and Michael Apted, great directors who managed to move between the worlds of fiction and nonfiction films. Now I was thankful for the chance to film anything, even a corporate film for a rock band.
A few days later, I was sitting with Metallica and their new therapist in Room 627 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco. The camera was on. It didn’t get turned off for more than two years.
CHAPTER 5
SAFE AND WARM
In a moment of weakness, I sat down for my own therapy session with Phil, compromising my own journalistic standards. (Courtesy of Bob Richman)
04/21/01
INT. ROOM 627, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO - DAY
KIRK: Outside of this room there’s a million distractions flying at you. Being in this room is kinda like being in a womb. You know, it’s all nice and warm–
LARS: It’s really safe in here.
KIRK: –and cozy, and we have, like, perfect communication. Then you go out there, and you have all these things coming at you, and it just really hurts it.
JAMES: “Womb service.”
Metallica: This Monster Lives Page 6