Metallica: This Monster Lives (48 page)

The one dissonant moment occurred when I checked my e-mail from the ski lodge on the second day. Donna was giving me a routine update on which publications had expressed an interest in covering the film. One name leapt out at me: Dennis Harvey. I felt a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Harvey was the
Variety
writer who had reviewed
Blair Witch 2.
Reading his review, which had come out the afternoon of the film’s premiere, marked the precise moment when my year-long depression began. I called Donna, who told me that Harvey was apparently really eager to review
Monster.
This couldn’t be good. The nightmare was beginning anew. Bruce, as usual the calmer and more optimistic half of our duo, told me to relax: Why would Harvey have such a vendetta against me that he would look forward to panning another one of my films? And wasn’t he a Bay Area guy? Maybe that’s why he had an interest in Metallica. Whatever the reason for Harvey getting the assignment, Bruce was right—the review, which came out a few days later, was glowing.

The three screenings of
Monster
were a big success, if for no other reason that people actually got up early to see them. After premiering in front of a sellout crowd at 9:00
P.M.
, the film showed two more times over the next two days, at screenings that began at 8:30 and 9:00
A.M.
Although this was a strange hour to view a rock-and-roll movie, the morning screenings also sold out. Metallica was on tour in Australia, but Lars asked that I check in with him every day to give him a progress report on how the film was being received (“If I can’t be there, you have to make me feel like I am”). The band members were represented by their spouses, Francesca Hetfield, Skylar Ulrich, and Lani Hammett, as well as Q Prime’s Cliff Burnstein, Peter Mensch, and Marc Reiter, plus Bob Rock and Phil Towle. Phil seemed to be in much better spirits regarding his presence in the film.

After every screening, we did a brief Q&A session with the audience. The first question after the first screening was from someone who wanted to know why the film didn’t contain more details about Phil’s personal and professional background.

“Well, Phil is right behind you,” I said. “Why don’t you ask him?” The audience laughed as heads swiveled to find Phil in the audience.

Bruce invited Phil up to answer the question himself. Phil made his way to the podium, gave us each a hug, and then turned to the questioner and said, “Go ahead, what was your question?” Phil ended up bouncing the question to me. I responded, “We had 1,600 hours of footage and many threads of a huge story, and we feel we gave the audience as much information as it needed. But we think this guy did an incredible job with the band. I believe if it wasn’t for the therapy sessions, Metallica wouldn’t exist.” We took a few more questions. The final one came from a guy who thanked Phil for being Metallica’s therapist, since the band had been therapeutic for so many of its fans.
⁴

At Sundance, the Q Prime managers began to adopt a different attitude toward
Monster.
They had always been cautious about our film, questioning whether these crazy filmmakers had a better idea than making an infomercial or reality TV series. Even when it became clear that we had made a worthwhile documentary, they only let their guard down slightly. I think Sundance was a real revelation for them. When they saw the buzz we attracted and realized that we weren’t just blowing smoke when we said
Monster
deserved a theatrical release, they started getting excited about the film’s prospects. For the first time, I felt like they were fully embracing our vision of the project.

The deal we wound up negotiating was unusual. Paramount was interested
in a straightforward acquisition of the film, but knowing that we were more interested in a service deal for the theatrical release, it offered to distribute the film through Paramount Classics, the division of the company that handles smaller, art-house films. Paramount was also offering a $3.5 million advance for the video and worldwide television rights. The Paramount people thought they were giving us the best of both worlds: the theatrical service deal we wanted plus a significant advance for the ancillary rights. But I thought we could do a better job selling the TV rights ourselves, and Bruce and I still wanted to go with IFC for the service deal. IFC was offering a lower fee for its service deal than Paramount, with the added bonus that we wouldn’t have to schlep out to L.A. for meetings. I also disagreed with Paramount Classics’s plan to wait until late summer to release
Monster.
This film would live or die by reviews and publicity, and I was concerned that it would be overshadowed by the Olympics in August. I convinced Paramount to take only the video rights (the company cut its advance by a million dollars) without requiring us to use Paramount Classics for the theatrical release. Since Paramount Classics had brought this deal to the table, this was a real coup for us. Now we really had the best of both worlds: a big studio to release the DVD and our first choice, IFC, for the theatrical service deal. This is the kind of complex deal that usually requires a lawyer to parse, so I was proud that I’d gotten Paramount to agree to this unusual arrangement.

I did have some help, though. A few weeks before the festival, I got some frantic calls from Jeff Dowd, a freelance “film rep” who helps filmmakers navigate the complicated process of securing deals with studios and distributors. He really wanted to get involved with
Monster.
Jeff is a fixture at film festivals. He’s a guy who can schmooze with distributors and the press and do it in a way that somehow makes you laugh, although you’d want to slug almost anyone else who operated with the same methods.

Now, the first thing you need to know about Dowd is that he was the Coen Brothers’ acknowledged inspiration for Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, the laconic, aging, mild-mannered hippie-slacker played by Jeff Bridges in
The Big Lebowski.
The second thing you need to know is that he is in fact nothing at all like the Dude. I mean, superficially he’s definitely the Dude. He’s a heavyset guy with an unkempt mop of curly gray hair who favors ratty baggy jeans and, at Sundance, was sporting a bright green-and-yellow Neil Young baseball jacket. Like the Coens’ Dude, you can imagine Dowd writing a check for a carton of milk and listening to Creedence on a crappy car stereo. He looks like he
should have a Ben & Jerry’s flavor named after him. And he’s quite a presence. When we met with Paramount at the kitchen table, he got up every few minutes to stalk across the room, grab a hunk of salami from the refrigerator and shove it in his mouth, without breaking the flow of whatever complicated deal points he was discussing.

One day during the festival he came to our condo to talk about a new offer I had received from New Line Cinema. Bruce and I had advised Metallica to forgo a service-deal arrangement if a company offered the full production cost of the movie. Now, New Line had done just that. They would buy
Monster
from Metallica for $4.3 million, but there was one crucial catch: the deal would only go through if we agreed to cut twenty minutes from the film.

Dowd ambled into our living room, made himself comfortable on the couch, and mentioned that the night before he’d been locked out of the condo across town he was sharing with some of the crew from
Monster.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“Aah, it was no big deal—this is Sundance,” he said by way of explanation. “I can always find a place to crash. I always carry a toothbrush.”

“Who did you stay with?”

“I don’t kiss and tell.”

It seemed like a good time to change the subject and get down to the business at hand.

Monster
’s length had been an ongoing topic of debate since we’d locked the film a few months earlier. Some people who saw it remarked that they thought it was a bit too long. There’s no getting around it—at 140 minutes, it’s a long film. But it’s also a very tightly constructed film. We had chipped away and chipped away and had concluded that we’d reached the optimal length. The copious amount of intercutting, one of the structural aspects of
Monster
I’m most proud of, meant that making what might seem like an innocent cut actually risked causing entire sections of the film to unravel. We could tighten some things up here and there, perhaps take out one of the archival concert sequences, which would
maybe
trim the overall length by three to five minutes. But twenty? No way, not without a mammoth effort. And it wouldn’t be cheap. We’d have to make cuts in each of the film’s eight reels, which meant that the entire negative would have to be reassembled. That would wind up costing a few hundred thousand dollars more. The Q Prime guys were among those who thought the film should be shortened. Metallica was willing to put up the extra cost if it made the film better.

This was a real dilemma. It was difficult to turn down a deal worth the entire cost of the film, but we felt really strongly that cutting the film, except for small changes, was a mistake. One new member of the
Monster
family decided to weigh in on this decision.

“Well, Joe,” Dowd said from the couch, “I think it would be much better shorter.” He grabbed a Ricola cough drop from a bag on the coffee table.

“Look, we’re not cutting twenty minutes out of the fucking film!” I replied. “
Five
minutes, maybe …” I had had this conversation with so many people by now that I was a little defensive. It wasn’t that I was repulsed by the very idea of cutting one of our films (“slay your babies” and all that). When we showed
Brother’s Keeper
at Sundance in 1992, there had been a general consensus, even among those who loved it, that it was too long. Because we had no distribution interest, we listened to the advice and took out fifteen minutes—and we
still
didn’t get a distribution deal. It was hard for me now to take seriously the need to cut
Monster
so drastically when we were presiding over a Sundance premiere, getting great press, and fielding various offers from companies vying for a piece of a hot film, with no other distributor asking us to shorten it.

Dowd bit down hard on the cough drop and swallowed the shattered pieces. “Joe, you just got an angel, not a devil, flying down onto your shoulder and saying—” He paused, staring straight at me. “—we can make this film better!'” What Dowd meant was that the Metallica organization’s willingness to spend money to improve the film was the kind of luxury few filmmakers experience.

I was startled by his choice of metaphor. As you may recall, I had decided that my decision to make
Blair Witch 2
, when there were so many good arguments against taking on the project, was due to an inability to distinguish between angels (
you’re making this film for the wrong reasons and throwing away a great partnership
) and devils (
a big paycheck! the glorious world of feature films!
) whispering in my ear. I had vowed to listen more closely and only make decisions that felt right. Cutting twenty minutes didn’t feel right. Bruce and I had gone through so many obstacles in order to make
Monster
the way we wanted to—why back down this late in the game? Now Dowd was telling me I still couldn’t tell the difference between devils and angels. Was the universe speaking through the Dude?

“We can make this film better,” Dowd continued, “not because you
have
to, but to bring out the emotion, Joe,
the fucking emotion!
” He was almost falling off the couch at this point.

“I don’t know …”

“Don’t let the fact that you’ve been butt-fucked before influence you, Joe,” Dowd said, alluding to Artisan recutting
Blair Witch 2.
“I’ve worked with the Hal Ashbys and the Francis Coppolas. Whenever there’s an angel, they always want to treat it like a devil. Trust me. I’m not gonna let you get butt-fucked!”

Sage words, indeed. I had no interest in being butt-fucked. However … “We’ve worked this film to death …”

“I want to do with you what I did with Coppola. You have to sit down with the public. You have yet to have a real public screening of this film! I’ve never met a critic as brilliant as the public. They have no
agenda!
”

I sighed. “But we’ve learned from experience that our films are ambiguous and filled with double meanings.”

I was losing some of my conviction. On the subject of the public, Dowd was half right. Besides the Sundance audiences, hardly representative of the hoi polloi, we had done a screening for members of Metallica’s fan club and one for members of DocuClub, a New York organization for people involved in the documentary world. For the fans, I’m sure the movie couldn’t be
long enough.
The documentary aesthetes are more minutely critical than your average movie audience but also more willing to tolerate documentary conventions that require more patience than the strictures of feature films. In other words,
Monster
had not been screened for the type of general audiences everyone seemed excited it could attract. But still …

“I don’t want to do that Orange County test-screening bullshit, Jeff.”

“I’m not talking about that,” he said, calmer now. “I mean, showing audiences this film and asking them specific questions: ‘What did you think of the art-auction scene?’”

I had heard the auction scene brought up by several people as a possible cut. It’s true that the film wouldn’t unravel without that scene, but it was such a great sequence. How often do you get to see a heavy-metal drummer root for a Basquiat painting to hit $5 million? On the other hand, New Line, the studio that had grossed close to $3 billion from the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy, was offering what every filmmaker wants: a substantial release, serious money, and a chance to recoup Metallica’s entire investment.

I felt like the Dude had worn me down. I just didn’t know what to think anymore. From the very beginning of this project, we’d walked a fine line with the Metallica organization, subtly abandoning the task we’d been hired to do. It was a
gambit that turned out great. But were we now, at this final hour, being irresponsible? With Metallica’s help, we’d managed for three years to make art supercede commerce. But maybe at this eleventh hour, commerce deserved a break.