Rebels on the Backlot (38 page)

When it came to filming the torture scene with an Iraqi interrogator, played by Moroccan actor Saïd Taghmaoui, the studio balked again. Not at the torture, but at the reference to Michael Jackson. Russell had written some dialogue that had the torturer asking about Jackson’s apparent predilection for little boys. Warner Brothers told him to take it out, but Russell resisted until the day the scene was to be shot. Finally the studio produced a legal document that the director had to sign, promising the scene would not be offensive to Michael Jackson. The reference remained, but the part about little boys was removed.

As the shoot drew toward its close, relations had badly deteriorated on the set. Hoping to clear the air, Clooney scribbled a three-page, single-spaced letter to Russell, venting his anger, desperately attempting to salvage things.

“At every step of the way, from my voice, to my gestures, to my interpretation, to my slurring words, you have made it your mission to change me of my bad habits,” he wrote. “Now it’s my turn. Since I’ve logged around 6,000 work days on a set and you’ve had in the neighborhood of 110 days, I’m going to give you a few pointers.”

Clooney then let loose his fury against Russell for all the bad behavior: yelling at the camera car driver; telling the cinematographer his shot “sucks.” “You have created the most havoc-ridden, anxiety-ridden, angry set that I have ever witnessed,” he wrote. Clooney said he was struggling with his performance because he didn’t know what the director wanted. “You didn’t get Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson or Nick Cage. You got me. Be glad. Because they would have walked long ago,” he wrote. “You use me when you need me, working the budget, the film processing, even to keep them from pulling the plug. But when it’s time for my input the answer is no. Every time.” Clooney urged Russell to try and start over, to communicate, to be patient, to provide a shot list. “I’m holding out my hand and offering you an olive branch,” Clooney concluded. “And to take it, all you have to do is reach.”

That seemed unlikely because by this time, the relationship was unsalvageable. Those who’d watched the tension ratchet up between Russell and his leading star thought it came from a mutual frustration. Clooney believed he was giving all he had artistically to the role and was making a considerable physical effort by working on both his day job and the movie simultaneously. But Russell thought Clooney wasn’t going deep enough as an actor, wasn’t taking the journey of the character. He thought Clooney was masking his acting inadequacies by horsing around with the crew, using them as a wedge. “I’m convinced that had George given it up, things would have been different,” said Goodman, who takes Russell’s side. “George gave as far as he went, and he went as far as he could, but he resented David asking him to go further.”

The tension came to a head a few days after the letter during one of the last days of production. It was the end of a long day shooting a complicated scene in which a group of Iraqi refugees was trying to make it to the safety of the Iranian border as U.S. troops pursued them. In the scene, Mark Wahlberg’s character, who had been shot in the chest, was struggling to breathe. The actor kept hyperventilating and blacking out. Helicopters were flying overhead; a hundred extras milled about.

In the scene, a soldier—played by a young ROTC recruit from the area—was supposed to throw Ice Cube down on the ground, but did so too timidly for Russell. According to one version, Russell physically took the extra and moved him, to show him what to do. According to Clooney and others, Russell took the man and threw him on the ground. “He went nuts on an extra” was Clooney’s version. Others disagree. “An extra was supposed to attack Cube and bring him down to the ground,” said producer Edward McDonnell, who was among the several dozen present. “He tried it three or four times and didn’t get it right. David was slightly frustrated and showed him exactly how he would like Cube to be brought down.”

Either way, Clooney had had enough. He thought what Russell did was over the line. All the pressure of the moment, and the tension of the previous weeks, erupted. He took Russell aside. “Don’t you push those people around!”

Russell was confused. “What are you fucking talking about? Why don’t you do your job?”

“You’re being an asshole. Don’t you fucking touch those people!” The two were shouting nose to nose.

“Hit me, pussy!” yelled Russell.

“I’m gonna fuck you up!”

“Oh yeah? You’re gonna fuck me up? Mr. Bad Ass?”

At that point Russell head-butted Clooney. Clooney grabbed Russell by the neck amid the chaos of the heat, the dust, the extras, the cameras, and the fading light of the day. The second assistant director, Paul Bernard, quietly quit, setting down his camera and walking off the set.

The two were broken up and each went to cool off, though not before shouting a few “fuck yous” in each other’s direction. When things cooled down, Russell returned and apologized to the cast and crew. They picked up the threads of the day and made the shot.

“I thought things were better after that,” said Russell. It seemed better to have lanced the boil, to get the tension out in the open, and the two shook hands.

The security detail shut down the set for the day. Immediately Warners sent a physical production executive, Bill Draper, to the set as an enforcer, to make sure the movie wrapped on day seventy-three, five days late. By that time, everyone’s nerves were raw. Russell was quiet for days—contrite even.

He and Clooney agreed not to talk about it, but of course it did get talked about. Everyone on the set and everyone in production at Warner Brothers knew about it. On the record, Russell and Clooney both concluded it was behind them. “George and I are friends now,” Russell told
Premiere.
Clooney told the magazine just ahead of the movie’s release: “It’s a movie and part of the process is that there’re gonna be misunderstandings…. It’s not a problem. It was really nothing.”

But then in interviews with
Entertainment Weekly
and
Premiere
, Clooney described the dispute in detail. And he didn’t hold back his feelings about Russell. “He’s a weirdo, and he’s hard to talk to,
but that’s what makes his writing unique,” said Clooney to
Entertainment Weekly.
“Will I work with David ever again? Absolutely not. Never. Do I think he’s tremendously talented and do I think he should be nominated for Oscars? Yeah.”

For whatever reason—pique, resentment—Clooney continued to talk about the fight with friends and acquaintances in the clannish Hollywood community. With Russell unknown to many, the popular Clooney’s comments quickly hardened into fact: Russell was a “weirdo” and unpredictable. The impression was supported at Warners, whose executives were alarmed to hear that their director had been in a fistfight with their star. Clooney insists that it was Russell who first started talking publicly about the dispute; it is hard to trace such matters. For a long time Russell refused to publicly respond to the jibes. But if anything, Clooney got more peeved over time, bringing it up yet again in a cover story with
Vanity Fair
magazine in October 2003. “I would not stand for him humiliating and yelling and screaming at crew members, who weren’t allowed to defend themselves,” he told Ned Zeman five years after the fact. “I don’t believe in it, and it makes me crazy. So my job was then to humiliate the people who were doing the humiliating.” Russell’s response: “George Clooney can suck my dick.” Russell’s camp—there were now two camps—was convinced it was Clooney who was feeding the controversy. They said the actor’s persistence in hanging on to the dispute was ridiculous. “It doesn’t reflect well on him. It’s like some stupid sandbox quarrel,” said Goodman, who noted wryly that Clooney didn’t mind borrowing some of Russell’s filmmaking techniques when he directed his first film,
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
He added, “There was way too much pressure on David to ‘perform’ in the classic studio sense—‘Don’t fuck this up. You better do good on this.’ We producers should have done a better job protecting David so he could do his job.”

Clooney insists that he was not the one picking this scab, but that he wouldn’t stand for Russell not admitting to his misbehavior: “Ultimately he’s a good director, but I’m not sure what that means,” said the actor in 2004.

A
FTER
C
LOONEY HAD HIS SAY
, R
USSELL THEN GOT
another blow: John Ridley scored a long interview in
Entertainment Weekly
(the same issue), in which he expounded on writing
Spoils of War
as an experiment in churning something out quickly. Ridley boasted, “I came up with the most commercially and visually interesting story I could think of. It worked. I wrote it in seven days and sold it in eighteen.” Ridley talked about how wounded he was to be sidelined by Russell in
Three Kings.
“This is a guy who every step of the way has tried to grab credit,” Ridley said. “I never heard a word while he was shooting the movie. Never saw any of the script changes.” The journalist who wrote the article gave Russell a perfunctory chance to respond; he countered that Ridley was blocking publication of the
Three Kings
screenplay “because he’s embarrassed by how little of his screenplay ended up in my movie.”

Russell was right, which any reading of the scripts will reflect. Ridley was a television writer who’d started on
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
and in 1997 had written and directed a regrettable bomb,
Cold Around the Heart.
Even Clooney acknowledged that Ridley’s script bore no resemblance to Russell’s; he’d read
Spoils of War
and passed the first time around. (Years later, Clooney was playing cards in a backroom of a Las Vegas bar while shooting the Soderbergh film
Ocean’s Eleven.
A manager came back to say that someone at the front door said he’d written
Three Kings
and wanted to come back and say hello. Clooney said, “If it’s David Russell, he probably doesn’t want to see me, and if it’s John Ridley, he didn’t write
Three Kings.”)
Indeed, there is little in Ridley’s work before or since that suggests the unusual sensibility of
Three Kings.
Ridley told the magazine, “Russell may have rewritten it word for word. But it’s still my story.” So why was the writer whining? He had the “story by” credit from the start. Clearly Russell wasn’t too adept at fighting the public relations battle.

The coup de grâce came when Russell, angered that he didn’t know about the article in advance and that his side of the story became an afterthought, called his publicist, Bumble Ward, and
demanded to know what happened. It turned out there was good reason: Ward was also representing John Ridley. Russell and Ward parted ways after that. (The publicist insists that she let Russell go. She considered him an oddity, having once caught Russell lying on the floor, staring up her skirt during a photo shoot. She was perplexed when he shouted on another occasion that she cared more about her own children than her director clients. Russell hasn’t worked with a personal publicist since.)

T
HE
C
LOONEY MATTER HAD MUCH BROADER REPERCUSSIONS
, and not just for the director and the movie star. Hollywood, particularly young Hollywood, is a close-knit universe of personal acquaintances and working relationships. You were never more than one or two people removed from someone else. The fight, the media attention, and the subsequent gossiping set off a feud between the director and the star that was only further stoked by Clooney’s growing friendship and partnership with Steven Soderbergh, a longtime rival of Russell’s. That Clooney and Russell should not be friends was somehow understandable. But it was odd, and more than a bit of a shame, to see two of the leading filmmakers of their generation trash each other. Russell would run down Soderbergh to his friends, saying his movies lacked humanity. Soderbergh, while pretending to be above it all, would get in the occasional well-placed dig. When courting actors at the Cannes Film Festival who were committing to a Russell project, Soderbergh made snide remarks about the director’s moodiness and odd personality. More significant, when Soderbergh and several other rebel directors attempted to create an independent directorial company in mid-2001 backed by USA Studios, it included Spike Jonze and Alexander Payne, two close friends of Russell. But Soderbergh didn’t want Russell in the club. Jonze in particular found this offensive, because he was on the set when the dispute broke out with Clooney and thought both sides had been responsible. Similarly the fight caused discomfort for Mark Wahlberg, a close friend of both Russell and Clooney.

The rivalry between Russell and Soderbergh went back to the
1980s, when both were still young and struggling. Four years younger than Russell, Soderbergh rose to prominence early with
sex, lies, and videotape
, but they both traveled in the same indie film circles and knew the same people. Producer Nancy Tenenbaum was a friend and mentor to both, and found it ultimately impossible to maintain the dual relationships. “For two years David spent every weekend at my house,” said Tenenbaum, who was also a close friend of Russell’s wife, Janet Grillo. “That was what pulled our friendship apart—he was jealous of my friendship with Steven Soderbergh.”