Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  As word about Phil’s increased involvement filtered back to Q Prime’s New York office, alarm bells went off. “Look, this situation was not a common one,” Reiter says. With what little information they had about Phil’s involvement with the band, the managers were afraid Phil could become something akin to Eugene Landy, the psychologist who basically took over Beach Boy mastermind Brian Wilson’s life—and perhaps even took advantage of Wilson’s mental illness—for several years. Phil was no Landy, of course—not even close. But early in his tenure, when all the managers knew was that he was sticking around a lot longer than they had expected, they were concerned Phil had the potential to take advantage of Metallica’s collectively fragile emotional state.

  Bruce and I also presented a conundrum for Q Prime. As Marc points out, we were granted access to therapy sessions where the managers might very well not have been a welcome presence. Not that Q Prime was afraid we’d meddle in the band’s affairs. We presented a more complex problem. A band’s managers are charged with protecting their clients’ finances and image, and we were a threat to both. We had been hired to produce a mostly archival piece with a tightly proscribed budget. Now we were producing who knew what. Each passing day meant two things: the cost of this film to the band grew, and the likelihood that there would even be a band at the end of it shrank. And if something did come of this, Q Prime was very concerned that it would not be in the band’s best interest to have the world see it. Would Metallica’s fans want to see their heroes getting weepy with a shrink? Q Prime didn’t think so. “We were absolutely 100 percent scared shitless,” Reiter says. “We were showing the soft white underbelly of the beast, the monster. When you’ve made a name for yourself as the baddest asses in all the land, and then you show yourselves carrying on and talking about all the love in the room, it’s a concern. I mean, people lambasted Metallica for writing a ballad.1 For some people, this band has been ‘selling out’ since Kill ’Em All.”

  By the time Monster was finished and garnering raves from film festivals, Reiter and his colleagues had adopted a guardedly optimistic attitude toward the film. (“It’s meeting all my highest expectations,” Reiter said a few months before the film opened nationwide. “Metal people will come out with a new respect for Metallica, but I don’t see it getting us many new fans. The art-house film crowd doesn’t have many metal albums.”) In the middle of the process, however, they were understandably skeptical, but they also had more important things than the film to worry about, such as the state of James Hetfield. What’s impressive about Q Prime during this period is that they didn’t make any rash decisions. A less secure company, with less faith in its clients, might have pitched a fit or gummed up the process in any number of ways, making it nearly impossible for us to do our jobs. The managers put an amazing amount of trust in our ability to not make things worse for the band.

  On an early spring morning, Bruce and I trekked up to Q Prime’s Times Square offices with our twenty-six-minute trailer. We went into the company’s tastefully appointed “media room” with Reiter, Cliff Burnstein, and Peter Mensch. The three of them sat on the couch while Bruce and I perched ourselves on either side of the television. “We really need to know what you guys think,” I said, sliding in the tape.

  What they thought was … well, they clearly had mixed feelings. They were impressed with the emotional depth of the material. On the other hand, they were also alarmed by the emotional depth of the material. That is, they were concerned about the therapy footage and thought there was too much of it.

  Every few minutes, we’d stop the tape and hear their comments. After Lars said something about how the band members were reevaluating their relationships with one another after twenty years together, we hit Stop. Cliff said he thought the comment sounded artificial. “Sure, it’s what he said, but …”

  “Why don’t you think it’s real?” Bruce asked.

  “It seems very contrived to me.”

  “Do you think they’re performing for the camera, telling us what we want to hear?”

  Cliff didn’t hesitate. “Yes, exactly”

  Peter looked like he was sucking on a lemon. “And even if they’re not, it just doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s that new-agey kind of crap,” Cliff continued, “the kind of thing you might say at one time, and then a year later you’re going, ‘Goddamn, I can’t believe I said that.’”

  “It’s like when you go out with a girl for the first time, and you say anything you can to get a second date,” Peter said. “And I’m saying that right now, this is early on in ‘the process,’ as Phil likes to call it….” The lemon got sourer.” ‘If only Jason were here today,’” he said, paraphrasing one of Kirk’s comments from the trailer. “Oh, god …”

  I knew Bruce and I were thinking the same thing. He said it first. “If what you’re seeing is real, if those are the emotions they were feeling at the time, are you concerned, as managers, that this image of Metallica is not the image you want to be presenting to your fan base?”

  “I don’t think you would want to present that image to anyone you know,” Cliff said. “Would you want your friends to see you talking like that?”

  “I’m not James Hetfield of Metallica.”

  “I know we’re only talking about a trailer, but for me as a—” Cliff paused as though choosing his words carefully. “—viewer of music stories, I would go, ‘This is crap.’”

  We watched about thirty seconds more before Cliff spoke up again. “There’s no context to these sessions. It’s just guys spouting platitudes—for the camera—in some new-agey way. To me, it comes off terribly.”

  “I don’t think Lars would think he comes off as a flake,” I said. “Are you guys maybe being too cynical?” I took a quick breath.

  Cliff laughed the laugh of someone who’d been in the music business for a few decades. “Can you ever be too cynical, Joe?”

  A few minutes later, we all watched Lars call James a dick, and James get up and slam the studio door.

  “So do they come back the next day?” Peter asked, as if these sorts of fights were business as usual for Metallica.

  “No, James goes into rehab,” I said. “That’s the last time we saw him.”

  Phil appeared on-screen. “How will this change the music?” he asked an unseen interviewer. “Will there be any music?”

  Cliff Burnstein rarely raises his voice. He’s one of those guys who can draw all the attention in the room and make everyone realize he means business by simply speaking slowly and clearly. That’s what he did now. “I don’t want Phil Towle commenting—”

  Peter, more keyed up, finished the sentence. “—on the music changing.”

  “I mean, he doesn’t know,” Cliff said. “Phil is the last guy on Earth at this point who has something [meaningful] to say about it. If there’s something Phil is qualified to talk about, like how this compares to dealing with pro athletes, let him talk, okay? Or what the course of treatment is here—whatever. Put him in a context where he’s a professional. Don’t put him in a speculative role. Let it either go unsaid or let the band say it.”

  I nodded. “If that’s your wish, we’ll respect it. But I look at that footage, I see Phil commenting on this, when he’s supposed to be mediating the band’s interpersonal dynamics, and I say, ‘Whoa.’ I like the fact that he’s stepping on the band’s toes.”

  “It’s scared the hell out of me seeing him listening to the music with the band on the couch,” Marc said. “He’s one of them.”

  “For exactly the reason it rubs you the wrong way, I think there’s documentary legitimacy to it,” I said. “But we’re in a funny position. This isn’t an independent film we’re making. You’re our subjects, but you’re also the clients. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if [Metallica and Elektra] weren’t paying for the film. You have the right to shape it how you want, but to me, this is so legitimate. I like Phil, but I’m surprised by how much he’s overtaken the band, and his com
ment says that.”

  “Just so you know,” Cliff said, “we’re not trying to shape your film. We’re giving you our opinions.”

  When the trailer ended, Cliff made it clear that, whatever he thought of it, he was impressed by what we’d accomplished. “What’s important is that you went out there and you seemingly have the cooperation of the group to [take this] to another level.” Then, to my surprise, he urged us on: “It could be that there’s some really good emotional stuff in the Phil meetings. That’s the kind of stuff I’d like to see, not platitudes like ‘I’m so glad you shared that with us.’ Fuck that. Let’s hear what someone is sharing on a heavy level.” He grimaced. “‘My personal life is intruding on your professional life.’ Big fuckin’ deal—everyone goes through that! Let’s get some fuckin’ revelations out of the Phil stuff.”

  It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was the closest thing to a pep talk we were gonna get. Besides, Cliff was right. Although I didn’t agree that the therapy seemed contrived, there was definitely too much of it. I realized that we had been lulled into a false sense of security about our footage. After being concerned during the early days of filming that the therapy sessions were too meandering and the jam sessions too dull to make a decent documentary, we had let ourselves be seduced by all the drama that had happened in the meantime. But a group of guys in a room talking is still a group of guys in a room talking—not very cinematic. The more I thought about what Cliff and the others said, the more I realized that we’d have to redouble our efforts to film anything remotely Metallica-related, so that we wouldn’t have to rely so much on the therapy As for the therapy material we did use, we would have to find a way to make the sessions seem more substantial and less like a series of platitudes. Turning Monster into a movie would be more challenging than I thought.

  Besides his implicit blessing to continue, I was impressed that Cliff went out of his way to reassure us that management had no interest in telling us how to construct our movie. I was also impressed that Cliff was urging us to make the therapy material more meaningful, even as his managerial side worried that such footage might be damaging to the band’s image if not handled properly While I don’t think he’d admit it to himself, much less to us, I think the film buff in Cliff (he even knew which episode of Homicide I had directed) subconsciously saw an interesting filming opportunity that might just push this project to another level.

  The execs at Elektra who saw the trailer were less charitable. They wanted it recut so that it included no therapy whatsoever. We handed over a tape of selects from which we had culled the final version of the trailer, and Elektra hired someone else to cut a new version, which we saw a few weeks later. As we expected, without the therapy the project looked a lot less interesting. It hurt to see what was shaping up to be a very unique project watered down into something more ordinary, but part of me was pleased: there was no way anyone was going to be interested in airing this. Elektra was basically sabotaging its own efforts to get even a useful promo piece, which bought us a little time to get everyone more comfortable with the idea of us filming therapy. I asked the Q Prime guys to trust us, assuring them that therapy would not be all we had, that ultimately it would be one narrative thread among many. As with all our films, I was hoping against hope that those threads would emerge.

  Meanwhile, it looked like we were still in business—that is, if Metallica was. There were rumblings in the Metallica camp that James’s return was imminent. It had been nearly a year since I’d guiltily hoped that something bad would happen to Metallica to liven up our film. Now I was hoping for something good—for the sake of the film, obviously, but also because, like Phil, I found myself really pulling for these guys. As Bruce and I walked out of Q Prime’s building into the sensory overload of Times Square, I thought about the last line of dialogue on our trailer, courtesy of Lars: “I don’t know how the fuck it’s gonna play out.”

  CHAPTER 14

  WELCOME HOME

  Despite James’s return from rehab, there were still a lot of unresolved tensions. (Courtesy of Bob Richman)

  As Bruce notes in this book’s foreword, Brother’s Keeper and the Paradise Lost films are about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, while Some Kind of Monster is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. This crucial difference influenced our filmmaking methods while making Monster. One of the reasons my questions to the Wards are heard in Brother’s Keeper is that the brothers’ near illiteracy and thick accents made it difficult to adhere to the verité convention that subjects speak in complete sentences, to downplay the interviewer’s presence. To clarify certain things for the audience, Bruce or I had to augment and explain what the Wards were saying by making our comments audible. Unlike the Wards, whose understanding of the outside world was largely limited to what they saw on TV, James Hetfield is a celebrity, and therefore media savvy. When he returned from rehab, he had a new understanding of the effect a verité Metallica film could have on his life. Our job was to convince him that we did, too.

  Bruce and I were in New York in April 2002 when we got a call from Lars. “Hey, Metallica is back in business!” he said. We were ecstatic. We had a quick meeting with the Q Prime managers, who urged us to check in with James to see how he felt about continuing the filming. When we reached James, he was cordial but distant, so we did our best to be assertive without seeming presumptuous. We told him we wanted to address any concerns he had about the movie, and he replied that he definitely had mixed feelings about continuing to film. Sensing that our project was in danger, Bruce and I took the bold step of suggesting that if we were going to stop shooting and assemble a film with what we had so far, we would need a scene to use as an ending. Why not have us come to San Francisco to film the band watching footage and discussing the film’s future? James sounded wary, but he said yes.

  As soon as we hung up, it occurred to us that we should have filmed ourselves speaking with James, and recorded James’s end of the conversation. Our exchange provided exactly the type of moment that warrants a self-reflexive scene. Since he sounded pretty negative about the whole thing, that phone conversation might turn out to be the point at which the fate of this film was decided. Whichever way it turned out, we should have had a camera rolling. Oh well, I figured, at least we’d have an opportunity to film James watching the footage and deciding if he wanted to be filmed some more.

  A few days later, Bruce and I were back in San Francisco. With us was Bob Richman, our new director of photography. Bob had shot both Paradise Lost films. He was our original choice for the Metallica project, but at the time he thought he had a heart problem that prevented him from working, so we tapped Wolfgang Held, who had shot my Metallica FanClub episode. Once we’d begun shooting, Bob discovered that his heart scare was a false alarm. The Metallica project went on longer than Wolfgang expected, so when he told us he wanted to step down, Bob came onboard. Bob’s shooting instincts are amazing, so we were thrilled to have him back.

  That Bob’s return to our filmmaking team coincided with James’s return to Metallica was a coincidence.1 We kind of threw Bob to the wolves. His first day on the job was the day we were trying to convince James that he should let us continue. Metallica had just completed construction of its own recording studio, HQ, an unassuming building in an industrial section of San Rafael, a town in Marin County. When the band was recording at the Presidio, all therapy sessions were held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Now that HQ was open, all of Metallica’s musical and psychological activity would occur under the same roof. Therapy became more prevalent and more casual. Phil seemed to always be there. They began each day with an hour-long informal chat at a table just off the kitchen. (Hanging over the table was an especially appropriate piece of décor, considering the emotional battles that would soon be fought there: a poster for Deliverance, the 1972 film about a group of friends who go camping and find themselves terrorized by locals.) Phil usually stuck around for the rest of the day to monitor Me
tallica’s writing and recording sessions. Although his near-constant presence erased the clear boundary between therapy and recording, which eventually became a problem, it was easy to understand why he, like us, enjoyed spending time at HQ, his professional commitment notwithstanding. There was a real fun clubhouse atmosphere at the studio. Each band member had his own room (we even had our own production office), there was a Ping-Pong table, a pinball machine, two fully stocked refrigerators (with no alcohol—not so much as a beer), and an overall atmosphere of male bonding. One day when former Marilyn Manson bassist Twiggy Ramirez was hanging around HQ, Phil mentioned how great it was to come to the studio and feel like part of “this family” Lars agreed. “We all go through struggles with our different partners,” he told Twiggy. “We all find that when we come here, we feel better. It’s like, we’re with all these guys who can relate to us. Sometimes we feel like our respective partners aren’t up to speed on this type of connecting.”