Metallica: This Monster Lives (9 page)

This wasn’t my dream film, and I knew it ran the risk of being compared unfavorably to its blockbuster predecessor. But up to that point, everything I’d ever done had been so critically acclaimed that I felt like the odds were in my favor. Surely the critics who were the biggest supporters of my work would respect the fact that I was trying to do something different with this sequel. Truthfully, I have always enjoyed the challenge of creating a worthwhile film when the odds are against me. As someone who’d documented stories that unfolded in front of the cameras, I was accustomed to spending large amounts of time and money to make a film without knowing if there ultimately would
be
a film. If Delbert Ward had been acquitted, or if no charges had been filed against him in the first place,
Brother’s Keeper
would never have been made. If James Hetfield had never gone into rehab, if the therapy with Phil had just ended abruptly and the new music Metallica was making was mediocre, there might not be
Some Kind of Monster.

So I threw myself into making
Book of Shadows.
It took just six weeks to write the screenplay, three weeks to cast the film with unknown actors, and then—boom—there I was, on the set of a $15 million feature film, with a mile of trucks and a crew of hundred people. I spent several months shooting it in and around Baltimore. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. I was sending the dailies to Artisan and getting nothing but praise back from them. The crew was happy and the cast loved it. I was making a movie that made fun of the idea of making a movie, and I thought I’d nailed it.

The studio saw and approved some early cuts in May and June 2000. Finally, at the end of July, I turned in my director’s cut. We had a very tight postproduction schedule—the movie was scheduled to open in two months—so I assumed the studio wouldn’t demand many changes to my final cut, especially since my early cuts had been approved. But now Artisan had a new marketing executive. Judging by her reaction to the film, she probably hadn’t looked at any of the earlier material. According to her, I had made the wrong movie.

“We don’t want an edgy adult satire that takes a twist at the end,” she said. “We want a teen slasher movie. We need blood.” She paused and added, “And lots of it.”

“But I didn’t shoot a teen slasher movie.”

“Well, then we’re going to turn it into one.”

What happened next is every director’s nightmare. In the span of two months, Artisan managed to turn
Book of Shadows
into a hackneyed horror movie. Among other things, they inserted ridiculous scenes of gore that really had no place in my movie. I argued that the beauty of
The Blair Witch Project
was that all of the violence happened off screen, a narrative device perfected by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. “Our audience has never seen
Rear Window
or
Vertigo
—it hasn’t even heard of Hitchcock,” my pal Amir Malin responded. I spoke with lawyers and the Director’s Guild about taking my name off the movie and walking off altogether, and asked several people for advice. They all told me that doing so would just make things worse. I think I was even told that if I did, I’d never work in this town again. (Yes, people actually said that.) I would just have to ride this one out.

Two weeks before
Book of Shadows
came out, I was a critical darling. By two weeks after its release, I was a critical pariah. The reviews weren’t just bad. They were personally vindictive. I had my big Hollywood premiere at the legendary Mann’s Chinese Theatre. That morning, reviews of the film were published in
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter.
The basic tone of both was, “How dare you, a celebrated documentary filmmaker, put out this commercial trash?” The consensus was that I had ruined not only a great franchise (people in the industry had assumed that
Blair Witch
would generate lucrative spin-offs for years to come) but also my own career. Dennis Harvey wrote in
Variety
that my involvement with the
Paradise Lost
films, about real-life murder in the woods, added a “queasy aftertaste” to my decision to make this “trashy genre exploiter.” He particularly hated the film’s opening five minutes, a “knock-off-jumble” of “frantically edited
Real World-
–style scenes” of the film’s new protagonists, and “
Shining
—like aerial sweeps over the Black Hills region, set to heavy-metal bombast.” This criticism was particularly galling, since much of this “knockoff-jumble” was the result of the studio drastically re-editing my cut.

I knew I was in for an onslaught of bad reviews, which made the premiere particularly difficult to get through. As I walked down the red carpet, hundreds of journalists calling my name and snapping my picture, I felt like a big phony. The movie opened a few days later (on my birthday) and with the exception of German audiences, who actually seemed to like it,
Book of Shadows
generated nothing but vitriolic press. Despite all the damage Artisan had done to my cut, I felt that some of my original ideas had survived, but the reviewers’ sheer hatred of the movie prevented them from seeing any of the social satire buried
within it. I remember lying in a fetal position in my office all weekend as my fax machine spit out one horrible review after another in five different languages from around the globe.

The funny thing about
Blair Witch 2,
at least in retrospect, is that, although it took a critical drubbing, it was actually a financial success. The film cost $15 million to make and grossed nearly $50 million worldwide making it the second-highest-grossing film in Artisan’s history after the first
Blair Witch,
which raked in nearly five times that amount. It also did very well on video. Artisan, unfortunately had been banking on the sequel repeating the success of the original film, because the company was about to go public by selling stock in an initial public offering. When the numbers didn’t materialize, Artisan’s plans for an IPO fizzled, and the company was eventually purchased by Lions Gate Films for what many in the industry considered a fire-sale price.

For me, however, the period after the film came out was the nadir of my career and my life. I was basically paralyzed with depression and self-recrimination. I really thought my filmmaking career was over. My outlook on the future got so bad that just before Christmas I mustered up enough energy to go to Macy’s to buy some dressy clothes, the kind of things I wore when I was in advertising, because I figured it was back to the ad world for me. My wife and Bruce rescued me from this funk. Bruce had every reason to enjoy the backlash against me, and I’m sure part of him did, but he acted like the great friend he is. (Although whenever there was a bad review or piece of press, I would generally find out about it from him.) Bruce called me almost every day He and Loren reminded me that we had made some incredible films during the past decade, that this was just a temporary setback.

I’m not one to watch my own work much after it’s done, but I think after two months of beating myself up, I needed to be reminded that what they said was true. It had been three years since I had watched
Paradise Lost.
One day in January, I settled into a comfortable chair, popped open a beer, and started the film. The first thing I heard was Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” playing over our opening title sequence, a sweeping aerial shot over the murder site.

Oh yeah, didn’t I once think about making a Metallica movie?

Our failed pitch meeting at Metallica’s Four Seasons suite in the summer of ’99 had seemed, at the time, like the last word on that idea. But I had kept in touch with Lars over the past year and a half; before scheduling conflicts prevented his involvement, he was even going to serve as music supervisor for
Book of Shadows.
At that time, I had sensed that he still had some interest in
making a Metallica movie, so I decided now to make a few tentative calls to Lars and Q Prime. I had no high hopes for the project—especially given James’s obvious aversion to us getting too personal—but I thought they still might be interested in some sort of archival film. If a historical, clips-driven film was what they wanted, I was their man. Frankly, I just wanted to work again.

As it happened, my inquiries coincided with a brewing crisis in the Metallica camp. Jason Newsted had announced he was quitting the band, and Metallica had hired Phil Towle to help mediate the situation. At that point, that’s all I knew. “Yeah, we brought in this guy to help us deal with Jason leaving,” Lars told me. Assuming that meant the band had bigger things to worry about than making a movie, I was astounded by what he said next: “Why don’t you come out and film one of the meetings? I think we’re gonna start making our new album, one way or another.” (Thanks, Lars.)

I made
Book of Shadows
for all the wrong reasons: easy money, the chance to put some distance between me and my partner, and the desire to enter the world of feature films by any means necessary. I had dreams of following in the footsteps of people like Werner Herzog and Michael Apted, great directors who managed to move between the worlds of fiction and nonfiction films. Now I was thankful for the chance to film anything, even a corporate film for a rock band.

A few days later, I was sitting with Metallica and their new therapist in Room 627 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco. The camera was on. It didn’t get turned off for more than two years.

CHAPTER 5

SAFE AND WARM

In a moment of weakness, I sat down for my own therapy session with Phil, compromising my own journalistic standards. (Courtesy of Bob Richman)

04/21/01
INT. ROOM 627, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO - DAY

KIRK:
Outside of this room there’s a million distractions flying at you. Being in this room is kinda like being in a womb. You know, it’s all nice and warm–

LARS:
It’s really safe in here.

KIRK:
–and cozy, and we have, like, perfect communication. Then you go out there, and you have all these things coming at you, and it just really hurts it.

JAMES:
“Womb service.”

KIRK:
Yeah, womb service! (laughter)

PHIL:
I like that. Could be the new album title.

Before we go any further, I want to make it very clear that I think Phil Towle is an enormously empathetic individual, a quality that makes him a fantastic therapist. He is a warm and caring human being who wears his emotions on the sleeves of his colorful sweaters. That’s his blessing as well as his Achilles heel, especially regarding his involvement with Metallica. Some reviewers have described Phil as
Monster
’s “fall guy”—one writer even called him the film’s “villain.” I strongly disagree with these characterizations and can honestly say that was not our intention. This 65-year-old Kansan, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a younger, laid-back version of the farmer in Grant Wood’s famous painting
American Gothic
and who does not possess one hard-rocking bone in his body, is responsible for keeping the biggest hard-rock band of all time from splintering apart.

That said, Phil’s relationship with all of us was complicated. When Q Prime first learned of the worsening Jason situation, they suggested bringing in Phil as a mediator. Phil was a former gang counselor and had more recently shifted to “performance-enhancement coaching” and made a name for himself working with the St. Louis Rams the year they won the Super Bowl. Q Prime knew him because he’d worked with Rage Against the Machine, another Q Prime band that had experienced a crisis of interpersonal dynamics. Phil hadn’t been able to prevent Rage from breaking up, but the managers hoped he’d have better luck with Metallica and assumed his tenure with the band would be brief. They figured he’d stick around for a month, maybe six weeks, just enough time to get the band through the Jason crisis, whether that meant figuring out a way for Jason to stay or making sure his departure was as amicable as possible. They didn’t count on Jason’s vehement opposition to Phil, that he would see Phil’s arrival as part of the bigger problem, not a means to solve it. Conversely, they never dreamed that the rest of Metallica—especially Lars—would gravitate toward Phil. It didn’t take long for Q Prime to become alarmed at how much time Phil was spending with them. Before James left for rehab, Phil would fly to San Francisco every other week for two or three days at a time to conduct sessions that would last from two to four hours. His time with the band increased dramatically after James returned. The managers, who were in New
York, became very concerned that Phil was usurping some of their influence. Bluntly put, Phil had the potential to become, for Q Prime, a “monster.”

Phil took the Metallica job thinking he would encounter a bad situation that could be remedied. It couldn’t—at least not as far as Jason was concerned. Phil was like a marriage counselor who discovers during a couple’s first session that one of them is deadset on a divorce. The question quickly became
how
Metallica would deal with Jason leaving, not whether or not they’d ultimately have to. Phil felt that the situation called for him to establish an atmosphere of trust immediately, and adopted what he calls an “interactive” stance, meaning he would conduct himself not as an impassive, neutral counselor but rather as a participant who discusses his own biases and baggage. In other words, he would become something like a friend and confidant.