Rebels on the Backlot (35 page)

When Bickford met Gaghan for lunch in June 1998 at the popular industry deli Kate Mantolini, on Wilshire Boulevard, the writer was depressed. And strung out, though only he knew that at the time. Gaghan was still in the throes of his addiction and had been virtually unable to put anything coherent down on paper. “I am the perfect person to write this,” Gaghan said about
Traffik.
Gaghan had already done a year’s worth of research on the drug wars. He spent time in Washington interviewing key figures. He’d met the folks from the legalization movement. He’d read everything he could get his hands on. But then—nothing. “I haven’t written a word,” he confessed. “It’s not funny. I owe them a script.” Gaghan, who at the time was getting treatment for his addiction, hadn’t figured out a way to turn his research into a filmable story.
Traffik
offered him a road map. He called Zwick in a panic: What should they do?

Looking for a way to free Gaghan from the obligation to Fox so he could write
Traffic
, Bickford met with Ed Zwick. (Zwick recalls that Soderbergh initiated the contact.) The producer-director, who had committed to his partner to work for a year on a new television series,
Once and Again
, agreed to let Gaghan write the adaptation and thus fulfill the obligation to Fox, on condition that Soderbergh would direct the project and Zwick and his partner Herskovitz would get lead position as producers on the finished
product. It meant Bickford, despite her work, would have a lesser credit as producer. Bickford agreed. Ziskin agreed. The movie was set up at Fox.

For Bickford, it was a worthwhile trade-off. “I’d have been an idiot not to make that deal,” she said later, about reducing her own credit. “The only thing that mattered was getting the movie made. This meant it was mine and Steven’s show. Ed and Marshall had nothing to do with production of the movie. That’s what it’s about.” For Zwick it was an act of artistic generosity, giving up the work he’d done so the movie could be made. “I was giving up creative vision of that movie to Steven Soderbergh,” he later said. “I didn’t make that call lightly.” On July 7, 1998, all the parties signed on to the deal, and Soderbergh, Gaghan, and Bickford got to work in earnest.

Steve Gaghan had the ten-hour mini-series
Traffik
to go by in writing the screenplay, but he had plenty of participants in the process. Soderbergh contributed constant notes, and the
New York Times
writer Tim Golden contributed his own comments throughout.

Much had to be shifted and significantly pared down from the British story. One big decision was shifting the focus of the drug wars from Colombia to Mexico. Golden told them that Colombia had been the legitimate heart of the drug war when the British producers made their series, but the drug cartels, under pressure from the government and Washington, D.C., had set up shop in the more permissive and kickback-happy host of Mexico. Golden explained that once Washington had shut down Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord, the Mexican cartels found an entrée into the drug market. In the 1990s drug money had flooded into Mexico.

They also made the painful decision to cut out one entire story line of a Pakistani opium farmer and jettisoned an early decision to replace him with a Colombian farmer who grows coco leaves; there just wasn’t enough time in a two-and-a-half-hour Hollywood movie.

But the essence of the British series was there. Gaghan’s script was a multicharacter, multilingual, multilevel story that tried to encompass the many facets of the drug war. The closest thing to
a lead character was Robert Wakefield, a conservative Ohio judge named by the president to be the national drug czar, a can-do believer determined to make a difference in the war on drugs. But Wakefield finds out that his job is far more complicated than he first believes, and his job touches close to home in a horrifying way. His own teenaged daughter, an honors student in a private school in Cleveland, Ohio, has become addicted to drugs and begins a downward descent into a world of depravity and violence in her quest to feed her addiction. This part of the story drew directly on Gaghan’s own experiences at private school in Kentucky. Gaghan had been a high-achieving prep school student, on the allstate soccer team in Kentucky, who started using pot and cocaine in high school. He was arrested many times, including once on felony drug charges when he was caught with heroin and cocaine. Gaghan hit bottom in 1997, the year before getting the
Traffic
assignment, and finally got help to kick his two-decade addiction as he turned to write a screenplay—about drugs.

Another story line involved Benicio Del Toro’s character, a cop working the streets of Tijuana, where the drug cartels run rampant over the corrupt city government and military. In the first draft, the corrupt cop rises to the top of the heap as a drug kingpin. A third story line followed the bourgeois lifestyle of a narcotrafficker and his family who live in San Diego, just over the border with Mexico. The narco-trafficker is under surveillance by federal agents and arrested, but his very pregnant wife—determined to protect her life and her kids—bloodlessly steps into his role, negotiating drug deals and ordering hits on inconvenient federal witnesses. The story would be told in discrete sections, in distinct tones and colors, with the Mexican portions in Spanish, the American portions in English.

In August 1999 Gaghan, Soderbergh, and Bickford went with Golden on a research trip to San Diego and Tijuana to see firsthand what the drug war was about. They met a whole series of people who would end up, one way or another, incorporated into the screenplay, among them a straight cop in a corrupt police force and the sister of a drug dealer who’d been kidnapped as part of a
financial dispute. They met officials with the district attorney’s office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, criminal defense lawyers, prosecutors, and the retired head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Craig Chretien (they hired him to be a consultant, too). Much changed in Soderbergh’s attitude after the excursion. “I had a totally different idea about the law enforcement side of the issue going into this movie than I had coming out,” he said later. “Just about every one of the people I met on the enforcement side was committed, smart, and very hip to what was going on. And they cared, they really did. I mean they weren’t these jingoistic crew-cut jarheads so many of us think they are. They have a lot of professional pride in what they do, which is something else I wanted to get across. But they’re frustrated. They don’t make the laws, they just enforce them.” Initially disdainful of the establishment, Soderbergh questioned his own questioning.

A
MID THIS ACTIVITY
, S
ODERBERGH SHOT
T
HE
L
IMEY
,
A LOW-BUDGET
drama about an aging ex-con (Terrence Stamp) who goes to Los Angeles to find out who murdered his daughter. And he was getting started on
Erin Brockovich
, the big-budget Universal movie starring Julia Roberts. Bickford and Gaghan would trek out to Barstow, California, the dusty town that stood in for the real-life place poisoned by toxic chemicals, to talk about the
Traffic
script with Soderbergh.

By November 1999 there was a second draft and a budget—$25 million—handed to Twentieth Century Fox with a copy of the screenplay to read over the Thanksgiving holiday. No one was attached to play the lead, nor was it clear who that would be. More than the script, though, was the style in which Soderbergh intended to make the movie. On the heels of
Brockovich
, Soderbergh wanted to make a movie that was infused with the anarchic spirit of
Schizopolis.
He would be his own director of photography, and he wanted to use numerous experimental techniques with special filters to alter the look of the film. Soderbergh wanted to shoot with a small crew, handheld cameras, and natural light. “The
whole movie should feel as though we showed up and shot and there was no design. By the end of the film the more real it feels and the less it feels like a Hollywood movie, the more the audience will connect with it,” he said.

So, an experimental Hollywood movie. This was the point where the studio would decide whether to make it.

Fight Club
, with its one-hundred-day, June-to-December schedule, quick cuts, extended fight sequences, and about 270 scenes, was a brutal shoot in more ways than one. Just about everyone who participated in the fight sequences ended up with one injury or another. Stunt doubles did large segments of the bare-knuckle fighting, but plenty of it had to be done by the actors themselves. To make bareknuckle fighting look realistic, it had to be done with actual bare knuckles. Actors and stunt doubles ended up with dislocated fingers, broken ribs, and more than a few scratches. Edward Norton got beaten up worse than most in a scene where he actually pummels himself. In the last extended fight sequence with Tyler Durden, Norton’s character got kicked and dragged across the floor. It ripped the skin off his palms, tore his fingernails, and bruised several of the actor’s ribs.

It didn’t take long for the studio to be nervous. The rock singer Meat Loaf Aday had a small role in the film as a member of a cancer support group; there’s a scene in which he shows massive man-breasts. After the dailies were sent up to the executive offices, a note came back to Fincher: Do the breasts have to have nipples?

The actors themselves found the making of the movie terribly fulfilling, a near spiritual experience. Norton and Pitt, whose roles were merely different aspects of the same person, found that they kept getting the same injuries. Pitt was badly bruised under his left ribs, and the same thing happened to Norton. They both hurt their thumbs. On the other hand, perhaps this was natural with a director who insisted on thirty takes of each fight scene.

Meanwhile, the violence of the movie could hardly be kept
secret on a lot where hundreds of people crisscrossed the property. Pretty soon the word got out that every day on sound stage sixteen Fincher was shooting huge, endless fistfights. At lunchtime in the commissary the stunt actors would show up wearing black trench coats and black jeans with shaved heads, covered in fake blood. Tongues began to wag: What were they making over there?

Earlier, one of the stunt trainers working with the actors ahead of production had been given a top-secret, eyes-only script. It was printed on red paper to make it difficult to photocopy. The veteran trainer was alarmed at what he thought was over-the-line violence in the script, the urban terrorism, the bare-knuckle fighting, the recipes for bombs. (The script language was pretty raw, too.) He showed it to Michael Cieply, a friend who at the time was a producer at Columbia Pictures. Cieply was appalled and thought it went over the line.

Cieply was a former journalist who had many contacts in the media, and he took the unusual step of photocopying the script (there are ways to photocopy from red paper, but it takes effort) to send to several select journalists. “There was something in it that kicked my head back and made me say, ‘This is a new point in the downward spiral,’” said Cieply. “I was reading a lot of scripts at [the] time, and I’d read a fair number of fairly violent scripts.” Cieply was shocked when not a single journalist responded, something he attributed to a herdlike embrace of the Tarantino culture that Fincher inherited after
Se7en.
Perhaps, too, it was a generational thing. Cieply was more than a decade older than the Tarantinos and Finchers. He was as upset at the lack of outrage by journalists as by the script itself. “At the time there was kind of a hipness around the whole enterprise, particularly around the director,” Cieply later said. “‘If they’re doing this, this is the next turn of the screw, then it’s pretty cool.’”

E
ager to change his image from television stud to serious actor, George Clooney was determined to land the lead
Three Kings
role of Major Archie Gates, a Special Forces officer with an eye on a retirement income in the form of gold bullion. Warner Brothers loved Clooney. The actor had helped make the Warners-produced ER a cash cow, and the studio had signed a huge development deal with the actor. Studio executives were eager to prove that spending millions on having a “relationship” with Clooney would pay off by getting him to star in their blockbuster films. But Russell hated Clooney’s style of acting, which he considered a lot of head-bobbing and mugging for the camera.

Casting Clooney was the start of many long, involved tugs-of-war between Russell and Warners, a big studio unused to dealing with an auteur like him. From the start Russell had wanted any number of other actors. He liked Clint Eastwood, who was too old for the role, but he passed. Mel Gibson was briefly a possibility. Principally Russell wanted Nicolas Cage, but the actor passed, opting
instead to do Martin Scorsese’s
Bringing Out the Dead.
John Travolta read the script and said he didn’t get it. Russell was so desperate to get someone who was acceptable to Warner Brothers that he approached Dustin Hoffman, who was a star but not exactly box office A-list and not exactly the right age to play the army major. Hoffman got very excited about the idea and started interviewing experts about military policy, but Warner gave a thumbs-down on Hoffman as well, citing the recently failed, big budget dud
Mad City.
Hoffman was upset that Russell had to back out of the offer, and the director went to apologize. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get the movie made with you,” he told Hoffman.

Hoffman replied, “That’s it?”

“What do you mean?”

Hoffman said, “No, you’ve got to do it the Jewish way, you’ve got to bring me something.” Later Russell brought him the role of an existential detective in his film
I Heart Huckabees.

Meanwhile Clooney pursued the director with unabashed zeal, sending him a handwritten note pitching his talents. In March 1998 he sent this: