THR
9:16 AM PDT 10/2/2013 by Stephen Galloway
On the morning of Aug. 30, a nervous
Brad Pitt boarded a private plane in Los Angeles for the hourlong journey to Telluride, Colo., where his company's new film,
12 Years a Slave, was about to debut.
Bringing
Slave to a close -- while dealing with the roller-coaster ride leading to his June release,
World War Z -- had left the star and partners
Dede Gardner and
Jeremy Kleiner exhausted, uncertain and at times publicly vilified.
PHOTOS: Exclusive Portraits of Brad Pitt and His '12 Years a Slave' Stars
The three had worked together intimately for more than a decade, but
they never had endured a year like this. The negative reports about
Z had been constant, including a
Vanity Fair article that implied its producers didn't know what they were doing. One Wall Street analyst, Cowen and Co.'s
Doug Creutz,
had even predicted doom before the $170 million-to-$200 million zombie
thriller opened, estimating it would take in a mere $85 million and
calling it a "likely candidate for a big write-down."
Pitt, rather than giving in to his critics, dug in his heels and
thought, "Game on, f---ers." But Gardner, 45, a thoughtful executive who
had cut her teeth at Paramount during the
Sherry Lansing regime before joining Pitt's Plan B Entertainment in 2003, found the whole experience far more painful.
"It's still hard for me to talk about, to be totally honest," she
says. "The criticism resonated with me on several different levels.
There's the purely professional level, which involves feeling acute
responsibility for this film and the investment these people made in it.
Then there's the more personal concern: 'How have I failed? Have I
failed?' And I was disappointed by the absence of comrades or just
people reaching out and saying, 'Hang in there. It's gonna be OK.' "
Despite
Z's success (it would go on to earn $539 million
globally), an air of uncertainty hung over Plan B. It had gained a
reputation for artiness in a town where that was something of a dirty
word. Several of its best-known movies had been critical hits but
commercial disappointments, including 2007's
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and 2012's
Killing Them Softly. Now insiders were grumbling that Plan B was being coddled by
Brad Grey, the powerful Paramount Pictures chairman who had launched the production outfit with Pitt and his then-wife
Jennifer Aniston a decade earlier and who helped maintain it through a first-look deal with his studio.
Given all this, the fact that Pitt, 49, was about to present a bleak
period piece about a real-life 19th century black man kidnapped from New
York and sold into slavery hardly seemed cause for celebration; in
fact, the only thing that looked good about
Slave was its budget -- $16 million, or $4 million less than Paramount had spent on reshoots for
Z.
All this was in the air as Pitt and Kleiner landed in Telluride,
where they joined Gardner, who had driven in from her Wyoming vacation,
for an early dinner at Cosmopolitan restaurant before they strolled to
the Galaxy Theatre and waited anxiously for
Slave to unspool.
The movie's triumph at Telluride, where it was met with an ovation
before receiving a rapturous reception at Toronto, not only has
positioned the film -- which opens Oct. 18 in limited release -- as a
major Oscar contender, but it also has vindicated the work done by
Pitt's small staff of seven for more than a decade.
Years after Hollywood cognoscenti dismissed Plan B as a "vanity
deal," it has emerged from these festivals as a major force for some of
the most challenging material around, Pitt's mandate when he started the
company in 2002.
"From the outside looking in, it's easy to reduce this to, 'Here's a
fabulously powerful A-list movie star who is now going to be a
quote-unquote producer,' " says
Damon Lindelof, who wrote a new ending for
Z
when the reshoots became necessary. "Whereas Plan B seems to be exactly
the opposite: They are using their clout and Brad's notoriety to make
movies that wouldn't be made otherwise."
Those movies have included
Year of the Dog,
The Tree of Life and
Running With Scissors, though Plan B also has made more mainstream fare such as the
Julia Roberts starrer
Eat Pray Love,
Kick-Ass and its sequel. (While Plan B was a producer on
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and
The Departed, others handled most of the production chores.)
Now, helped by a blockbuster and an awards front-runner, the company
is moving forward with a host of film projects and also is entering the
television field with
Resurrection, a supernatural drama that debuts on ABC in March.
Plan B also is developing a sequel to
Z, which still is in its nascent stages, though director
Marc Forster
won't be back. "We are talking about it," says Pitt. "We are going to
investigate a script. We have a lot of ideas we will cull from. Nobody
is writing just yet, but we are compiling our ideas."
Plan B came into being when Grey (then an owner of management company
Brillstein-Grey Entertainment) approached Pitt about joining forces.
The actor was in the early stages of creating his own production entity
with Aniston.
"I decided I wanted to start focusing on producing movies," recalls
Grey. "Brad had been trying to build a small company with Jennifer. I
called Brad, who's an old friend, and he and I had a long talk, and I
told him what I wanted to do with the company and said, 'We should
really think of doing this together.' "
Pitt, whom Gardner calls a "lifelong cineaste," had wanted to move
more actively into producing, aiming to make the type of films he always
had admired. "I'm a fan of film first and was since I was a little boy
sitting in Missouri," he notes. "I go back to
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and
All the President's Men. And
Dr. Strangelove is still the funniest film I have ever seen." As to more recent work, he adds: "
There Will Be Blood is one of my absolute favorites; incredible, a whole film dedicated to someone's hatred."
At the time Grey approached him, Pitt was riding high with the blockbuster
Ocean's Eleven,
and he was being paid between $10 million and $15 million a picture. He
and Aniston had been married since 2000; they were a golden couple
whose relationship had yet to collapse.
The duo agreed to pool forces with Grey, and their incipient
production outfits merged. It was Grey who came up with the Plan B
moniker in recognition of his and his new partner's first initials.
With Warner Bros. committed to a first-look deal that would cover overhead and some development costs for projects including
A Mighty Heart (later to be made at Paramount) and screenwriter
Eric Roth's
Hatfields & McCoys
(still in the works), Grey and Pitt embarked on a search for executives
to head the company. They landed on Kleiner, who had worked for Donner
Shuler Donner and who joined Plan B as a junior executive in June 2003;
and Gardner, who initially was refused an "out" on her Paramount
contract but came on board later that year. The two currently serve as
co-presidents.
Gardner soon found that Pitt "is tireless and very astute at
identifying the ways in which a filmmaker's voice and intention are
expressed -- and then protecting those things. Brad's also incredibly
[aware of] how the business works, which is not to say he always agrees
with its results. But he always gets the game."
Within months, however, his company was plunged into turmoil when
Grey exited for Paramount, and Aniston and Pitt split, leaving Pitt the
sole owner.
Gardner remembers her shock at hearing of Grey's late-2004 departure
when she had just given birth. "Brad called at 10:30 at night, and he
was on a plane coming home from Hawaii. I was asleep, and my mother took
the message," she says. "And then I woke up an hour later and came
downstairs to feed the baby, and she said: 'Brad Grey called. I told him
you were asleep.' I just thought, 'Are you kidding me?' I said, 'Mom,
it doesn't work that way.' "
Soon after, Gardner started getting calls from all over Hollywood
warning that the company wouldn't last. "There was a lot of chatter
about [the company folding]," she says.
She and Kleiner, now 37, both were nervous about their future but
decided to stay, especially when Pitt gathered his handful of troops at
their offices in Brillstein-Grey's Beverly Hills headquarters and told
them how committed he was to Plan B, emphasizing that he had no
intention of closing the company even though he would be paying his
staff's salaries himself.
"I left with the feeling that this was somehow a central part of his
understanding of himself as an artist and a business person," says
Kleiner. "It was very confidence-inspiring."
Still, uncertainty shrouded the Plan B executives' lives, especially in terms of who would replace Grey.
"When someone as formidable as Brad Grey leaves, you just assume an
equally tenured person will come in," explains Gardner. "I thought,
'This will never stick.' But Jeremy and I put our heads down and, in the
most organic way, kept riding the bike."
Eventually, in spring 2005, Pitt sat down with her and Kleiner and
said he liked the way things were going and the films they were
developing -- including
Year of the Dog and
The Time Traveler's Wife -- and they would be running the company.
Grey's exit left a tangled legal situation with Warner Bros.,
however. Now the executive wanted to move the company to Paramount and
approached then-Warners president
Alan Horn to discuss
which projects Plan B would take and which would remain at Horn's
studio. "It wasn't as crystal clear as it should have been in the
contract," acknowledges Grey, "so it became one of those negotiations."
While Plan B was extricating itself from Warners, it also moved forward with
Running With Scissors and
Jesse James.
Those films solidified the company's reputation as a champion of
original material; but their box-office inconsistency left a question
mark about its commercial taste.
Slave, when it began, seemed even less commercial.
The idea of making a picture about the "peculiar institution" (as
slavery euphemistically was known in the 19th century) first was
broached in summer 2008, when Gardner and Kleiner met at the Chateau
Marmont with a young British director,
Steve McQueen, shortly before his first feature,
Hunger, debuted at Toronto.
McQueen, who keeps a family tree at his home in Amsterdam going back
hundreds of years to his slave ancestors in the West Indies, was
intrigued that there had been no major movie about slavery from an
African-American point of view. He also was fascinated by "just the
extent of it, the scale of it," he says. "You think you know that, but
when you get into the details, it's a factory, an institution which is
bigger than most industries you could think of. And what's interesting
about it for me was how much it was the norm, in a way. There was no
humanity; they were cattle."
After the Chateau Marmont meeting, Pitt arranged to sit down with
McQueen separately. "We met in London over a couple of bottles of wine,"
recalls Pitt, "and ended up talking until the wee hours of the night
about art and history -- he was a video artist first." (McQueen, 43, is a
recipient of Britain's Turner prize, its most prestigious award for an
artist under age 50.)
Encouraged by Plan B, the helmer began to work with screenwriter
John Ridley (
Red Tails),
who agreed to write a screenplay on spec. At the beginning, they had a
theme but no story. "What I wanted was the idea of a free man who had
been kidnapped and put through the assault course of slavery," explains
McQueen. "I thought that was a great 'in' to the subject."
Soon McQueen's wife,
Bianca Stigter, a writer and art historian, discovered
Solomon Northup's memoir,
Twelve
Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York,
Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton
Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana.
The book, a best-seller that sold 27,000 copies when it was published
in 1853, is one of a mere 101 "fugitive slave narratives" written
before the Civil War, says Harvard University professor
Henry Louis Gates,
a consultant on the film. Of those, only this one "is the narrative of a
free man who was kidnapped and manages in this case to be liberated."
McQueen was stunned by the memoir's drama and fablelike quality. "It read like
Pinocchio," he says. "I was shocked, I was thrown."
That combination appealed to Pitt. "This particular story, these
transformative experiences from visceral filmmakers are the things that
truly excite me," he says.
He and his partners studied the book and other original slave stories
in depth. Gardner rejects allegations that the Northup account might
have been somewhat fictionalized. "We have had numerous conversations
with 'Skip' Gates,
Ira Berlin, tons and tons of historians who all vouch for its authenticity based on numerous pieces of evidence," she says.
While the script was progressing, Plan B strove to find the money for
what was envisioned as a $30 million film. Even with Pitt committed to
play a small part as an itinerant laborer who comes to Solomon's aid,
that wasn't easy. Few wanted to tackle a film of
Slave's
bleakness, with its harrowing scenes showing children torn from their
mother and a young woman brutally whipped; nor was there any great
conviction that a large enough audience existed for a film about the
African-American experience -- though the subsequent success of
The Help,
Lee Daniels' The Butler and
Fruitvale Station would appear proof positive.
Bill Pohlad's production and
financing company River Road Entertainment joined the project early and
helped in its development. "We had done
Tree of Life with
Brad," he notes. "That was a trial by fire, and Brad was
super-committed. He is very passionate, and sincerely passionate, a
great quality and a surprise."
Following Pohlad, Fox Searchlight agreed to pay for some of the production's cost, with
Arnon Milchan's
New Regency footing the rest, and Summit International handling foreign
sales -- all drawn by Pitt's stature and his team's conviction.
"We were able to put something together, but it had to be done for a
price," says Pitt. The film finally would cost a gross $20 million and
receive $4 million in rebates from Louisiana.
Early on,
American Gangster's
Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British native, signed on as Solomon;
Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti and
Alfre Woodard
all followed. But one pivotal role remained uncast: Patsey, a young
slave who works for the slave owner Edwin Epps (Fassbender) and is the
subject of his wife's jealousy and both characters' brutalization.
"We auditioned over 1,000 people for the part," says McQueen. "It was
like looking for Scarlett O'Hara. I thought we would never find her" --
until a tape came from an untried actress of Kenyan descent, born in
Mexico and about to graduate from the Yale School of Drama. The actress,
Lupita Nyong'o, had heard about the film from her manager.
"[My manager] put me on tape with a camera in her house against a
plain background," recalls Nyong'o. "I did two scenes from the movie --
the scene where Patsey asks Platt [the name Solomon is given by his
master] to kill her; and the scene right before the whipping" -- when
Fassbender attacks the young woman. "It's pretty difficult to do in a
room with fluorescent lights."
When McQueen saw her tape, he flew her to the set: "She came down to New Orleans, and that was it."
With Gardner and Kleiner on hand, and Pitt there for a while, a
seven-week shoot began in June 2012 in and around New Orleans. The cast
suffocated in heat that regularly topped 100 degrees and then had to
deal with a hurricane that destroyed part of the set, but otherwise the
shoot was trouble-free.
The hardest thing, says McQueen, was dealing with "the violence. I
think the biggest challenge was for the actors, going to these dark
places, and for me keeping things together, having to be captain of the
ship where you have to make people insane, then come out the other end
and be sane again."
While McQueen was dealing with one kind of insanity, Pitt was dealing with another on
Z.
Five years after Paramount had bought
Max Brooks' novel
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War for Plan B (following a 2006 bidding war with
Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way) and after writers
J. Michael Straczynski and
Matt Carnahan
had gone through multiple drafts, a difficult shoot had taken place in
which one line producer had had to be fired and another brought in.
When a rough cut was assembled, it became clear the ending wasn't
working. After the picture was screened for all the producers and
Paramount execs
Adam Goodman, Marc Evans and
Geoff Stier, they and the Plan B team huddled over what to do.
"The conclusion that we needed to reshoot was immediate and uniform,"
says Gardner. "We were obviously dealing with an enormous
responsibility. Paramount was a great partner, but I can't say any of it
was calm, and it wouldn't be calm until we made a great movie."
Reports began to circulate that Pitt and director Forster weren't
speaking. "The idea they were not speaking was not my experience," says
Lindelof, who was brought in to rework the ending. "And more
importantly, the way Brad talked about Marc and Marc talked about Brad
was entirely respectable, as if they were both creative partners trying
to fix a problem."
Admits Grey: "Those were fairly intense times for all of us as
filmmakers. But having been in this business some time, both of us know
if you put yourself in the arena, it comes with the territory."
The group turned to Lindelof, a longtime Gardner friend, who now
suggested rewriting the third act altogether, abandoning an extravagant
battle and closing with a more suspenseful, intimate sequence in which
Pitt must infiltrate a laboratory riddled with zombies. No other ending
was explored. "Damon always felt there needed to be a very kind of
personal context for this as opposed to the instinct to scale up," says
Kleiner.
Reshoots meant that
Z's release would be delayed from late
2012 until summer 2013; but Paramount agreed this was the right way to
go, even though it meant Pitt would be promoting two films back-to-back.
Five weeks of
Z reshoots commenced in fall 2011 and continued through November, with Pitt juggling that movie and
Slave.
With both movies wrapped, Team Pitt hunkered down to complete
postproduction on both pictures. After McQueen showed Gardner his cut of
Slave in Amsterdam, he flew to Los Angeles and worked with Pitt, who shuttled between the Paramount lot, where
Z was being edited, and the San Fernando Valley, where McQueen was finishing his film.
"Brad [juggled the two] with great dexterity," says Gardner. "There
was a sense that every minute counted, and if that meant we were there
till midnight, we were there till midnight. We would cobble every minute
we could. [Brad handled it] gracefully, very conscious of solving the
problems we were currently looking at. If we had made a list of all the
problems we didn't yet know, it would have been easy to crumble. But if
you look at the problems at hand -- it was very methodical. Being
methodical is a real muscle, and he has it and knows when to use it."
Given that Pitt, Gardner and Kleiner have children, they were
"dependent on the patience of loved ones," says Gardner. She and Kleiner
sometimes brought their kids to the editing room, but Pitt always came
alone. "We'd have many a night when everyone would say, 'I am going home
to have dinner with the kids' or 'I'm going to give the kids a bath and
I'll be back in the cutting room,' " says Gardner. "It was just our
lives."
Pitt's absorption with the work to some degree gave him immunity from the dozens of nattering nabobs, particularly where Z was concerned.
"I have done this long enough and have sat in editing rooms with
enough talented people that I have a grasp of, 'How do we shape things
when they are not working?' " he reflects. "The idea was, let people see
it and let them talk."
Producing seems to enrich Pitt more than acting at this point, he
admits, though he gives no indication he might step away from his career
as a performer: "As I get older, I am enjoying more the producorial
side of things -- not being so forefront in the camera -- the creativity
of putting the pieces together."
The company now is moving forward with projects including an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' Marilyn Monroe novel Blonde, with Andrew Dominik (Jesse James) to direct; The Last Family of England, with Taika Waititi directing the story centered on a talking dog; and Black Hole, a project that teams Plan B with David Fincher and is adapted from the Charles Burns
graphic novel about a virus that infects a group of kids living in the
northwest, manifesting itself in strange, supernatural ways (one kid,
for instance, develops a second mouth that always speaks the truth).
Plan B also is developing The Operators, based on the book by the late Michael Hastings, which Gardner describes as an expansion of his Rolling Stone article that led to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal,
the U.S. commander in Afghanistan from June 2009 to June 2010 whose
impolitic remarks about the president -- during time spent with Hastings
-- caused a media firestorm.
Pitt says his company's strategy will remain the same as it has been
from the start: "We follow the storytellers, and our little garage band
of a production company's mandate was [always] to help complex films get
over the hill if they need a little push. We are in a fortunate
position to do that."
At the same time, the actor-producer says Plan B -- whose money is
raised on a per-film basis -- now is starting to look at outside sources
of finance. "We have been talking about the next evolution of what we
do," he continues. "Do we stay in the same construct as now? Are there
new constructs we can investigate?"
As to Plan B's long-term future, Pitt says he wants to maintain the
same mix of big-budget and low-budget, always with pictures that strive
to push boundaries. "I wouldn't want to change anything," he says. "I
like extremes."
