The summer buying season came and went. By Thanksgiving, Bruce and I assumed Elektra had abandoned the idea, since it would be nearly impossible to meet the necessary deadline. That was fine with us, since by now we were absolutely convinced that we had an incredible feature film on our hands. We’d known for a while that we had great footage, but in the last six months, as Metallica found its strength again, we now had an actual dramatic arc. We assumed that some of our footage would be used for its original promotional intent—electronic press kits, TV clips, maybe a bonus DVD packaged with the album—but we also figured that since nobody had really pitched the series, our material would become a feature film by default. On December 19, we were jolted back to reality.
I was in the editing room when I got “the call.” It was from the Elektra executive who had day-to-day responsibility for Metallica and therefore this film. Marc Reiter of Q Prime was also on the line. “We need to start thinking about turning your footage into the series we talked about so it coincides with the album release date,” the exec said.
I didn’t say anything for a second, wondering if I’d heard wrong. If the album was coming out the first week in June, our series would have to be delivered by the beginning of March. My vision got blurry. “To be honest,” I said, “I thought that idea had gone away—at least the idea of timing it to coincide with the album’s release. The pitching season has come and gone, and HBO passed. We haven’t been cutting a series, just gradually whittling our material down. Isn’t it too late to sell this thing for a March delivery?”
“We have some interest from Showtime.”
I began to break a sweat. What I was feeling wasn’t disappointment—it was panic. A high-profile cable series could be interesting, but this deadline was insane.
“Okay Is it a done deal? Do we know how many episodes?”
“We need to go in after the holidays, show them some material, and talk about all of this.”
I tried to maintain composure, wondering if my voice was shaking. “Guys, it’s almost January I am very concerned about the timing of this. We haven’t been cutting TV episodes. I’m not sure we can deliver a series by March. We are swimming in footage. Besides, if this is going to happen, we need to immediately know how many episodes and the length of each episode. We need to hear some thoughts from the programming execs about their take on what kind of show they want. We need to know that we are not going to be inundated with editing notes.”
I paused and willed myself to take a deep breath. Reiter must have sensed the panic in my voice. “Joe,” he said, in a tone that said, “Get a grip.” “This is Metallica. I hate to play this card, but Metallica gets things done against all odds. We always have. Make this happen—that’s why we’re paying you guys. It won’t be easy, but we know you can do this.”
The anxiety made my armpits ache. I called Bruce to fill him in. He agreed that what Elektra and Q Prime wanted was highly unusual, almost unheard of. What network still has a six-hour hole in its spring schedule in the winter? The only possible explanation for Showtime’s supposed interest was that some other programming had been canceled at the last minute. Or maybe we had underestimated this band. Marc Reiter’s words rang in my ears: “This is Metallica.” Was Metallica some sort of illuminati, a secret society with enough influence to get what it wants, even if that meant rewriting the rules of an entire industry? As for us, we had been treated so well by Metallica and Q Prime that we felt obligated to do whatever it took to make this happen, since it was apparently what the band members wanted. I just wasn’t sure how we were going to do it.
The next day, I called an emergency meeting of the entire production staff. Bruce and I dropped the bomb that we needed to morph this production into a television series on a “crash” schedule, just as everyone was looking forward to a much-needed Christmas break. To create six hour-long episodes, we decided that we needed to hire three additional editors to work with David Zieff. The four editors would be connected by an Avid Unity system, which would allow them to share the same digitized media. Each editor would begin by tackling one episode. But before they could do anything, we’d have to redigitize our footage—by now, it had ballooned to nine hundred hours—for the new editing system. The process of redigitizing and logging just one hour of footage would take about 120 minutes, which meant we’d have to hire an army of digitizers to work around the clock through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, so that we could begin editing in January. The editors would then have to work six- and even seven-day weeks, racking up serious overtime.
We put together a budget and realized this was all going to cost close to an additional million dollars. All because Showtime had expressed an amorphous “interest.” We couldn’t afford to wait for the network to give the green light before starting the emergency editing process. What if Showtime passed? January is the worst month to pitch new programming to the networks. For that matter, even if Showtime bought the show, who was to say that they would want the show in the form we’d rather arbitrarily chosen, six one-hour blocks? Maybe they’d want four one-hours or eight half-hours. When you’re editing at this pace, those kinds of changes make a huge difference.
Meanwhile—and this was the killer—Bruce and I would have to continue shooting. All of this furious editing would be in the service of a story that was still very much in play. When working on this scale, it’s difficult to put together something coherent without knowing how it ends. There are themes that you want to introduce early in a series that pay off at the conclusion, but we didn’t have the luxury to pursue that kind of nuance. The TV series also complicated our narrative arc, because we’d have to quit filming entirely in March. Many of the artistic considerations we had for the project were now completely unworkable. We had been toying with the idea of making the film nonlinear, beginning in the present, flashing back to the events of 2001 through 2003, and building to the “triumphant return” of the summer tour. But now we’d have to edit and complete each episode before finishing the next, so we’d be shackled to a rigidly chronological unfolding of the story—far less interesting, we thought. Elektra thought we could achieve the same emotional impact by building to a special live concert in front of a television audience, but we didn’t think their ending would be nearly as powerful as the more organic one that we envisioned: Metallica taking the stage on its summer stadium tour, after being out of the spotlight for so long.
As independent filmmakers, Bruce and I were disappointed in this turn of events. Even if we pulled off a successful reality series, the fact is that even the most revered TV shows don’t have the cultural cachet of great movies. But we weren’t indie filmmakers on this project. This wasn’t really our film. We were hired guns, and this is what our client wanted. They had been good to us over the last two years, and we knew we had a responsibility to create what they wanted us to create. If Some Kind of Osbournes was what they wanted, that’s what we’d give them. The businessman in me could appreciate where Elektra was coming from. If I were in the business of selling records, I would probably be dead set on making this a TV show, too. I knew firsthand how perilous a feature film can be, in terms of financing and distribution. Meanwhile, the music business was mired in a slump. The last time Metallica released an album of original studio material had been in 1997, which just happened to be the last year the industry experienced any kind of expansion. There were no sure things anymore; even an act as big as Metallica wasn’t guaranteed a huge album. I knew this project could help boost Metallica’s sales, so the film producer in me vowed to get the job done. But I was also one of the project’s executive producers, and that guy wasn’t convinced this was physically possible.
Two days before Christmas, Q Prime approved the new budget. We canceled our holiday plans and worked nonstop. We were anxious to have our Showtime meeting to nail down the creative approach and confirm the number of episodes. January and February passed with no meeting with the network. We kept telling Elektra that it would be highl
y unusual, if not outright unthinkable, for Showtime to air this in two months, especially since there had been no talk whatsoever about how to promote the thing, nor had the format of the show been decided. How could a network still have that kind of hole in its spring schedule?
Courtesy of Bob Richman
Finally, in early March, we met with people from Showtime’s New York office. It wasn’t a good sign that we were meeting in New York, since I knew the people with buying authority were in Los Angeles. We were meeting with mid-level executives in charge of corporate strategic planning and sports/events programming; in my mind, these weren’t people who could green-light a reality series. But at least we were meeting. And even though we felt there was a better feature film, Bruce and I were going to go in there and pitch our hearts out—if for no other reason than that we really needed our marching orders.
When I arrived at the lobby’s security desk on the day of the meeting, I ran into the Elektra exec who had instructed me to start turning our footage into a TV series. I seized the moment to tell him that, should the Showtime thing not work out, we had the makings of a great feature film.
He wasn’t impressed. “Over my dead body will this be a theatrical film,” he said. “We need to set up the album. That’s why we hired you. Documentaries just don’t do business at the box office.”
“Look, I don’t think you realize how great this material is—”
He shook his head and cut me off. “We want this to be a reality TV series.”
We rode the elevator in silence.
Bruce and I did a great job of pitching the show during the meeting. The whole time I was talking, I kept thinking, We are actually having a serious conversation about airing these shows in May. We don’t even have the first episode edited. By the rules of the entertainment industry, this is about as fucked up as it gets.
After two hours of discussion, we got up and shook hands. The Showtime guys said they’d get back to us soon. My armpits were really tight again.
During these cold months, Bruce and I traded off between filming in San Francisco and supervising the editing in New York. Whenever I was at our New York office, I willed myself to put on a brave front. The four editors were all pissed at us, thinking this was the most ridiculous assignment they’d ever been given. They had taken to throwing darts at the delivery schedule posted on the bulletin board. Even as I told them to soldier on, I spent a lot of nights in March unable to sleep, staring at the ceiling, convinced we were headed for a shipwreck. I was starting to think there was no way we could make this happen. By the third week of March, I was practically pleading with Q Prime and Elektra to get Showtime to make a decision and to show the project to other prospective networks. There were so many technical issues that were still unresolved—we didn’t even know how long these shows should be. We were now six weeks away from the show’s supposed debut, and we hadn’t finished one episode.
Finally, Showtime put us out of our misery by passing on the project. It was the best news I’d heard in a long time. “Dodged that bullet,” I said to myself as I hung up the phone. Unfortunately, the sense of responsibility that had led me to urge Q Prime to contact other networks now ensured that things were about to get much worse, and that our editors were about to hate us even more. Enter VH1.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that VH1 was interested, even at this absurdly late date. Of course they would jump at this material. VH1 budgets usually max out at about $150,000 per hour, and here we had millions of dollars of some of the most intimate and authentic rock-and-roll footage ever captured. However, it just never occurred to me that anyone involved with Metallica—including Elektra and Q Prime—would actually want this to premiere on VH1, when there were potentially much better opportunities. I didn’t think VH1’s core audience was comprised of Metallica fans. Although Q Prime disagreed with me on that point, I thought we could all agree that VH1’s ratings were unimpressive. I also felt that showing Monster on a basic-cable station, interrupted by commercials, cheapened the material. I could talk myself into getting excited about a mini-series on a premium cable channel like Showtime, but the thought of winding up on VH1 with a project of this magnitude (our budget was now five times what we would have gotten for a show that originated with VH1) just made an already dispiriting situation even more demoralizing. VH1 was calling Elektra and Q Prime practically every day, promising round-the-clock promotion and serious rotation of the St. Anger music videos. I couldn’t believe it. It looked like this was going to happen. I felt like I had just entered Dante’s fifth ring of hell.
The prospect of shifting gears and turning this into a VH1 series seemed beyond daunting. All the work we’d done over the last few months toward creating six one-hour shows for Showtime, although not worthless, would have to be overhauled entirely. For instance, how would we handle expletives? Our film was full of language that would not be acceptable on a basic cable network like VH1. (The constant bleeping on The Osbournes was part of the show’s campy humor, but did we really want to show the world the “f—” meeting?). We also had to consider frequent commercial breaks. That would dramatically change the length of each episode. Also, a show with commercials needed to be structured differently, to create natural breaks and also to repeat certain crucial information that viewers might forget during commercials. As if this weren’t enough, I almost had to laugh when I heard that VH1 was considering asking us to change the structure of the series to eight half-hour episodes.
There was a selfish element to my desire to make Monster a feature film. I fantasized about making a great film as a comeback from my Blair Witch debacle. A classy HBO or Showtime series would have been cool, but attaching my name to a hacked-together (because we had no time) basic-cable series could make my reputation as a filmmaker even worse. No matter how good a job we did, I feared that our series would look like just another attempt to cash in on the reality-TV trend. The irony was that we had something much more “real” than any contrived reality show. Ozzy picking up dog shit was nothing compared to James Hetfield picking apart his psyche.
But unlike Blair Witch 2, a project that I considered walking away from and probably should have, I couldn’t quit this time. I really had no moral justification; we were merely being asked to deliver what we’d been hired to make. So I bit the bullet even harder, and prepared to take this project to whatever conclusion fate and VH1 dictated.
Oh yeah, we weren’t the only ones struggling to finish a Metallica project. The members of Metallica were, too.
On their first day back in the studio after the Christmas break, the guys took stock of their progress. They had four songs that were almost ready to go—“St. Anger,” “Frantic,” “Dirty Window,” and “Unnamed Feeling”—as well as several in various stages of completion. Everyone was in a buoyant mood. “I realized yesterday that I hadn’t heard the stuff since before Christmas,” Lars said. “What really hit me yesterday afternoon after not hearing it for close to two weeks was just the sonic side of it. I think it plays a big part in how you interpret it. Do you know what I mean? Just the raggedness of it. There’s a lot of energy that comes from that, and that to me is really precious.”
“All the people I play it for have commented on how raw it sounds,” Kirk said. “And how good it feels to hear us playing raw sonics, because the last few albums have been a bit polished.”
James was beaming. “I don’t know if you guys feel this way, but for me this is not like we’re writing songs to put out. This is a product of what we’re doing, hanging out. These are songs that we are going to take with us, like a diary, of this time that we’re having together. That’s what it is. This is for us. This is ours and will forever be ours, our memories on CD. There are things that we’re coming up with together and discovering ourselves. During interviews, if someone asks Kirk what a song is about, you don’t have to say, ‘Ask James’ or ‘Ask Lars.’ We all know what it means to us. It’s really cool.”
It was during this period
that I realized the music was cohering into a very special document. I could tell that St. Anger would be an album of contradictions. Metallica was going “back to basics,” but these were basics that never really existed in the first place—even in the early days, they hadn’t made an album that reflected the equal input of all band members. Not only had Metallica never really made an album that captured the band in a raw, unmediated state (the Garage Days records being the exception, and those were all, tellingly, cover tunes)—Metallica had never even really existed in that state. St. Anger is the sound of old dogs teaching themselves a trick they didn’t even think to try when they were young dogs. It’s a record meant to sound spontaneous, but it was created in the midst of Metallica’s most self-conscious soul-searching period. Though predicated on the notion of unbridled creativity, much of St. Anger was made within the confines of James’s noon-to-four schedule. “There have been eighteen years of just letting the creative energies dictate,” Lars said one day in the studio. To which Bob Rock wisely replied, “Yeah, but there’s been a lot of bodies lying in the ditches because of living that way.”
Of all the people in Metallica’s orbit, Bob knows the most about where the bodies are buried and how they became casualties of Metallica’s artistic process. He began working with Metallica on the Black Album, a time during which Metallica second-guessed every musical decision without aiding one another in making those decisions. “St. Anger was the opposite,” Bob says. “The music on the album almost sounds like purging. It doesn’t take the traditional view of what pop music is supposed to sound like. It’s probably the most honest record I’ve ever worked on, in terms of sound. I’m more proud of St. Anger than anything else I’ve ever done.” What we captured by documenting the making of St. Anger was Metallica coming full circle. As Bob put it to James one day, in a discussion about lyrics, “It’s easy to say ‘fuck fuck kill kill’; it’s harder to say ‘fuck fuck kill kill’ for a reason.” James picked up the thread: “‘Fuck fuck kill kill and here’s how you dispose of the body’” (He later integrated the line in “All Within My Hands.”) It’s a nice way to look at Metallica’s journey since the Bob came onboard. If the Black Album was about Metallica finding the most rocking way to kill ’em all, St. Anger is about the toll all that destruction takes on a human being.
Metallica: This Monster Lives Page 29