Metallica: This Monster Lives (46 page)

Lars was actually not completely alone in his opinion that the auction scene belonged in
Monster.
A few weeks after the Lucas screening, Lars set up a conference call with his father, Torben; David Zieff; Bruce; and myself. We were really nervous, recalling how frank Torben had been about the music Lars had played for him. The first thing he said to us was, “Guys, this is a film, not a movie. This is something special, not just a Metallica movie.” I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Torben’s one big note on the film applied especially to the art auction. “If you’re going to use personal stuff, you have to go deeper and make it more personal, or don’t use it at all. Show what the art really means to Lars. Either go deeper or remove it.”

The requests we heard from the others at HQ after the Lucas screening were minor and easy to execute. James asked us to include Pepper Keenan in the bass auditions segment. Rob, clearly proud of his past, asked us to identify
him as a former member of Suicidal Tendencies and Infectious Grooves, not just of Ozzy’s band. Rob had one other minor, though puzzling, request. He asked us to remove a quick shot, in the closing montage of the film, of a very well-endowed makeup artist bending over to apply makeup to Rob’s face before a European television interview. Considering that this was his only note, we were happy to comply,
¹
although I confess I’m still not sure what he was uncomfortable with—the world seeing him being made-up or the close proximity of his face to the woman’s breasts.

TOO MANY BEARS

A few weeks after the Lucas screening, Lars told me he was showing the film to his pal Sean Penn. This made me a little nervous, because I knew that Lars valued Sean’s opinion, and I figured he was looking for Sean to provide some validation for the project. During the times when Sean was at the studio hanging out with Metallica, he always made it clear to us that he didn’t want to be filmed. That was fine with us, since we wanted viewers to forget for most of the movie that the guys in Metallica were world-famous rock stars—plus, we didn’t want to give the false impression that the band liked to hang out with celebrities. But knowing Sean didn’t want to be filmed now made me wonder what he would think of a raw and honest portrayal of his buddies. So it was a huge relief to us when Lars called with Sean on the line, and Sean said he thought the film was “groundbreaking.” His only comment, oddly enough, was that he thought we had one too many shots of the photos James took of the bear he had killed in Russia. Sean thought that animal lovers would find the shots exploitative and that we’d wind up alienating the sensitive cineastes that we were trying to attract for this film. (Sean did not mention that he thought Phil came off looking unsympathetic in
Monster
, an opinion Sean related to Phil a few months later, at Lars’s birthday party.)

After we hung up the phone, Bruce and I high-fived editor David Zieff. As a fan of the films Sean has directed [especially
The Pledge
). I thought that if his biggest problem was one too many shots of a dead bear, we were in great shape. We decided, however, to let the extra bear shot stay. When Lars got the final cut of the film, he noticed we hadn’t taken Sean’s advice and lessened the dead-bear quotient. I told him Bruce and I had reviewed the scene several times and didn’t think it should be changed. Lars said okay, and that’s the last we ever talked about it.

Before everyone left HQ, we handed out VHS tapes of the cut we’d just screened.

“We don’t expect you to have all your thoughts together now that you’ve just seen the film,” I told them. “Take a tape home, watch it sometime over the next week or so, and write down any suggestions you have, any reservations, parts you think are out of context or shouldn’t be there at all. Just give us a cohesive set of notes within the next week to ten days, since we have to lock the rough cut by the end of the month and submit it to Sundance.”

James slid his tape back across the table in our direction. Uh-oh.

“Nah, I don’t really want to watch it again,” he said. “It’s pretty painful to watch.”

Bruce and I glanced at each other, unsure how to interpret this.

“But you did what we asked—it’s truthful,” James quickly added. “I’m not a filmmaker, so I don’t know how to cut this down to a shorter length. You guys are the pros. I trust you to know what works and what doesn’t.”

Coming from someone who’d once reflexively rejected the very idea of making an intimate film about Metallica and who had so much to lose by allowing the world to see him in a different light, what James said we took as a huge vote of confidence.
²

CHAPTER 22

THE END THAT WILL NEVER END

Back in March, when it looked like
Monster
might become a VH1 miniseries. Cliff Burnstein had raised some valid concerns in response to our increasingly vocal opinion that we were sitting on a potentially great feature film.
He pointed out that no matter how good our material and how skillfully we turned it into a film, we would still be dealing with something speculative, whereas what we had with VH1 was tangible. Also, a feature film would come out long after
St. Anger
and would therefore greatly diminish the original goal of creating a promotional vehicle for the album. Cliff wanted to know how we could be sure we’d get a decent distribution deal, something that could make or break the film. The truth was, we couldn’t guarantee it. But we had been down that road before and knew how to deal with the vagaries of the film-distribution system. As a last resort, we could always distribute the film ourselves.

Most big-budget Hollywood movies are made under the auspices of a studio, such as 20th Century Fox or Warner Bros. The studio funds the film and uses its resources to get the film into theaters. Independent film producers who
work outside the studio system typically make deals with distribution companies, which buy the rights to films and are therefore responsible for taking care of all the details, from marketing and promotion to shipping the prints, that go into getting a film on a screen in front of an audience.

When
Brother’s Keeper
won the Audience Award at Sundance in 1992, Bruce and I fully expected to leave Park City with a nice distribution deal—nothing that would make us rich overnight, but something that would compensate us for all the hard work and personal sacrifice that had gone into making
Brother’s Keeper
At that point we had spent about $200,000 of our own money, raised mostly through ten credit cards and second mortgages on our homes. We had been able to finish the film thanks to a $400,000 deal from the PBS show
American Playhouse
, which would air the film once it had gotten a theatrical release. That money had been a lifesaver, and Bruce and I figured other deals would materialize from the Sundance buzz, but the only ones that did were terrible arrangements that paid us no money up front. This was back in the days when the audience for independent films was still thought to be small. It was very rare to give independent documentaries a theatrical release. Apparently, the great response we got from the Sundance throngs only confirmed to distributors that our film was of no interest to anyone besides like-minded aesthetes, cineastes, and elitists.

We got back to New York feeling dejected and unsure what to do next. Then it hit me: Why not just distribute
Brother’s Keeper
ourselves? After all, I had a marketing background. If we acted as our own distribution company, we would retain more rights to the film and have greater control over how it was promoted. The fact that very few documentary filmmakers had ever achieved much success with self-distribution somehow didn’t deter us. We formed a corporation called Creative Thinking International.
American Playhouse
lent us $85,000 and gave us free office space. With the help of my wife and another assistant we hired, Bruce and I set about getting
Brother’s Keeper
into theaters. He contacted theater owners, talked up the film to them, and made sure prints got to them, while I handled marketing and promotion duties. It was hard work, but it paid off.
Brother’s Keeper
eventually grossed $2 million worldwide.

I told Cliff that as a last resort, if we didn’t get a satisfactory distribution deal, there was the self-distribution option. But with Metallica’s resources, we could do it ourselves with some crucial help, by making a “service deal” with an established distribution company. In a typical distribution deal, a film company acquires a movie for a certain number of years, usually paying the film maker
a fee up front; the company assumes all the risks and pays all the distribution costs. At the end of the day, when the company has recouped its expenses and paid itself a fee, the filmmaker theoretically receives royalties, but the movie industry’s creative accounting practices often ensure that filmmakers receive no royalties at all. With a service deal, the filmmaker retains all the rights to the film and basically rents the services of the distribution company. That’s exactly what we wanted. In exchange for the use of a company’s infrastructure—its staff, offices, and relationships with exhibitors—Metallica would give the company a cut of the box office. Metallica would put up all the “P&A” (prints and advertising) money and therefore assume all the risk. Metallica would also retain all the rights to the film and make all outside deals, such as international television and DVD rights. The band would be investing its own money, but the potential payoff would be greater. Metallica could also control how the film was marketed, so that, for example, nobody would put out a poster calling
Monster
“the
Spinal Tap
of the new millennium.”

If you can afford the cost of a decent P&A budget and you’re willing to take a big risk, a service deal can be remarkably lucrative, because the film is yours to exploit. (It’s the reason Mel Gibson made a few hundred million dollars from
The Passion of the Christ
). But it can also lead to catastrophic losses, which is why these deals are so rare. Metallica had the resources to make a service deal worthwhile. I gave Cliff a guide to self-distribution that I’d written a few years back for the filmmaking magazine
The Independent
While he was still hoping for the VH1 deal, Cliff acknowledged that the freedom of a service deal would be the way to go should
Monster
become a feature film. He liked the way this sort of modified self-distribution fit Metallica’s reputation for playing by its own rules and running its own well-oiled machine.

When the band nixed the VH1 idea, we knew we’d eventually start looking for a service deal. We decided to finish the movie first and then figure out how to release it. In early October, following the Skywalker Ranch screening, we submitted the film to Sundance. I thought that
Monster
was a summer movie, because I figured fans would want to see it more than once, which usually only happens in the summer. But in order to plan for a summer release, we needed to begin our search for a service deal before Thanksgiving. I also didn’t want to wait until we heard from Sundance, because if we didn’t get in, I didn’t want the film to look like “damaged goods” and have its value drop. Our plan, assuming we got into Sundance, was to work out a tentative service deal with a company but not sign on the dotted line until after the festival, in case the film
generated such a huge buzz that we’d get competing offers. There was always the chance that a company would like the film enough to buy it outright for what’s called the film’s “negative cost,” meaning the entire amount spent to produce the film (for
Monster
, just over $4 million). If we thought the company would do a great job marketing the film, this might be even better than a service deal (although the chances of anyone offering us such a large advance for a documentary were very slim), because Metallica would have its costs covered and the film would get the attention it deserved.

Throughout October and November, we met with every company in the distribution business, from big players like Miramax to small boutique companies like ThinkFilm. We decided that the company that fit our needs best was IFC Films, the theatrical releasing division of the Independent Film Channel. We liked the fact that IFC was based in New York, and I was also able to get them to accept the lowest fee for their services. They made it clear that they were more than willing to listen to the band’s input on questions of marketing and promotion.

The next stop, hopefully was Sundance.

While we were waiting to hear from Sundance, I got a deal from St. Martin’s Press to write this book. The demand for the book was actually the first sign that other people thought the film was as intriguing as Bruce and I did. I never even wrote a book proposal. Instead, my agent invited reps from several publishing houses to a rough-cut screening, and a bidding war ensued. These people were the first real “intelligentsia” to praise the film, further suggesting that it had crossover potential and wasn’t just a fan love letter.