Metallica: This Monster Lives (24 page)

I was upset by his negative opinion of the footage and our subjects, but I also empathized with his situation, so I decided to give him some direction by laying out a rough structure. Instead of creating a linear, time-based outline, something we did with
Paradise Lost
, I broke the film down by themes. David and I had very different sensibilities when it came to the footage. David is a musician himself, which I think helped him really get a handle on the music scenes that Bruce and I had a harder time recognizing. He was masterful at taking hours or even days of studio noodling and condensing it so that you really felt a song coming together. The first sequence he cut was the evolution of “Some Kind of Monster” from its earliest riff into the finished song. “Congratulations,” I told David when he showed it to me. “You broke the back of the beast.”

Although he was more cynical about the therapy than I was, he teased out a lot of the humor that I missed. I saw the material in much more humanistic terms and thus reined in David’s initial instinct to make fun of the band and especially Phil. Bruce served as a buffer between David and me, dragging us both toward the center.

In March, we emerged with a twenty-six-minute trailer. The first people to see it were Metallica’s managers at Q Prime. Bruce and I were extremely nervous about this screening. We were acutely aware that we had not been making the film we had been hired to make. Q Prime and Elektra Records still held out hopes for a TV-ready documentary about the history of Metallica and the making of the new album. Although the Q Prime managers knew how much time we’d been spending with Metallica, there was a strong possibility that seeing actual footage would be the wake-up call that would make them shut us down.

From the beginning of this project, these guys had been in a precarious position. Q Prime is one of the most powerful management companies in the business, with a very specific management philosophy They aggressively
manage
their clients, but without a lot of hand-holding. Other managers act more like “reps” for their clients, but Q Prime assumes its clients are adults—at the end of the day, Q Prime will make strong suggestions, but the clients call the shots.

Realizing that Metallica was going through a crisis period, management recommended that the band hire Phil. But because of Q Prime’s non-hand-holding philosophy, the managers didn’t come to the meetings themselves. “We missed out on some pretty intense stuff, and it was somewhat to our detriment,” Q Prime’s Marc Reiter says now. “The band was reinventing itself and certainly reforming itself. In hindsight, one of us should’ve been there for some of the meetings. That said, many of those meetings were private. We wouldn’t have been welcomed the way Phil was—not even the way Joe and Bruce were. I think we realized, in the midst of the process, that we needed to be out there more.”

Initially thinking they had hired a temporary stopgap in Phil, the managers saw him becoming more of a band confidant, and even, it seemed at times, a surrogate manager. It’s not like Phil forced himself on Metallica; they, and especially Lars, wanted him around to talk about all things Metallica. Q Prime’s first obligation was to its clients, so if Metallica wanted Phil there, the managers had to respect the band’s wishes, even if it meant being temporarily consigned to the sidelines while Phil became part of the inner circle. Phil’s apparent inclination to be involved with discussions that were probably best left for the managers occasionally became a problem for the band members. In one scene that didn’t make it into
Monster
, Phil was asked to distribute some faxes at the start of a therapy session for an upcoming conference call. The documents contained the details of Jason’s financial demands as an ex-member of Metallica. My understanding was that Phil was just supposed to distribute them, that they weren’t meant for him to review, but he took a look at the faxes and struck up a conversation about them with the band. James politely interrupted Phil to say he wasn’t comfortable talking about this with him. “I’m sorry, man,” Phil said. “I just get so excited about participating, I overstepped my bounds.”

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 comment 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.