Battles with Rupert Murdoch and gaining David Fincher's respect: How 'Fight Club' went from box-office bust to '90s cult classic

When Bill Mechanic was the chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, he had one simple operating principle: Get in trouble.

Though his tenure as studio head from 1996 to 2000 was filled with hits, including blockbusters like "Independence Day," "Titanic," and "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace," Mechanic was also known for being one of the few who listened to his gut and greenlit material considered uncommercial.

On his watch, the studio released the gory best picture winner "Braveheart," the Farrelly brothers' gross-out hit comedy "There's Something About Mary," and the now-beloved "Office Space."

Taking risks on offbeat movies gained Mechanic respect around Hollywood, but it also ruffled feathers among his bosses.

At the time, Fox was owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., and Mechanic said the Australian-born billionaire was rarely a fan of what his studio was releasing.

"I always thought what Rupert wanted was Page Six," Mechanic told Business Insider, comparing the mogul's movie tastes to what showed up in the gossip column of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. "He didn't think movies were there to challenge."

Mechanic would famously test his boss's patience when he gave the green light to adapt a book by a then-little-known author named Chuck Palahniuk. It was called "Fight Club."

The demented tale of a nameless narrator and his imaginary friend, who start an underground brawling club that morphs into a cult hell-bent that spirals out of control, wasn't exactly studio-friendly fodder.

"It's all first person. No action. All internal monologue. Brilliant. Darker than shit. But impossible," Mechanic recalled thinking when he first read Palahniuk's 1996 debut novel.

But he trusted his team, and Fox 2000 president Laura Ziskin, one of the film's producers, was adamant that the material could be turned into a fascinating big-screen dissection of masculinity and 1990s consumer culture.

Soon, acclaimed director David Fincher was on board. Hot off the success of the thriller "Seven," he brought along its star, Brad Pitt, as well as Edward Norton. The story Mechanic thought was unmakeable was shaping up to be as audacious as its storyline.

Mechanic knew making the movie would lead to a battle with Murdoch, but that wasn't his only hurdle. First, he had to gain the respect of his difficult director and figure out how to market the ultra-violent story — a task that became even more challenging when the Columbine High School shooting shocked the nation six months before the movie's premiere.

When the time came for Mechanic's showdown with Murdoch weeks before "Fight Club" opened, it was the beginning of the end of Mechanic's time at Fox. Less than a year later, Mechanic and Fox parted ways. Headlines at the time said he had resigned, but Mechanic told Business Insider he had been fired.

"I don't regret any of it," Mechanic said.

Upon its release, "Fight Club" was bashed by many critics and was a box-office disappointment, opening to a weak $11 million in October of 1999. But the movie's DVD release in the spring of 2000 changed its fortune, making "Fight Club" a sensation and buoying it to the cult-classic status it's enjoyed ever since.

Now considered one of the most daring and innovative studio releases of the late '90s for its complex plot, sharp satire, and knockout performances from Pitt and Norton, "Fight Club" marked a defining moment in genre filmmaking that has inspired countless imitators.

In honor of the movie's one-night 4K rerelease in theaters April 22 — digital and Blu-ray 4K versions are available May 12 — Mechanic goes deep on the twisty journey to bring "Fight Club" to the big screen.

Mechanic agreed to increase the movie's budget after Fincher pitched the opening credits sequence

When Mechanic greenlit the movie, it had a relatively small budget for late-1990s studio standards: $20 million.

By the time Fincher came on board with Pitt and Norton, the budget had ballooned to more than twice the original price tag.

"The budget is now $57 million? That's insane!" Mechanic recalled thinking when Ziskin gave him an update on the project.

Mechanic didn't panic, but he needed to understand Fincher's vision. So he went to the filmmaker's house for a sit-down. "I went into this meeting thinking, 'There's no fucking way this is happening,'" Mechanic said.

Fincher had made a lot of changes to Jim Uhls' script, but the one that blew Mechanic away was Fincher's ambitious plan for the opening credits sequence. He walked the studio head through an elaborate CGI-fueled journey through the narrator's brain, which would end with the camera coming out of his skull, revealing a gun in his mouth.

"What I thought he had done was take something great and give it the chance to not just be a really well-made little picture, but actually make something that could light the fire in the culture," Mechanic said, thinking back on the meeting.

Mechanic left Fincher's house approving the $57 million budget. The next time he had a face-to-face with Fincher, the stakes would be much higher.

Mechanic threatened to shut down the movie if Fincher didn't cooperate

Mechanic knew Fincher was difficult to work with — auteurs often are, but that never gave him pause in choosing to hire him. "Trust me, anyone that's good is difficult," Mechanic said.

But even Mechanic, who describes his producing style as laid-back, had his limits. And when he began getting reports from the Fox team during production that Fincher was not cooperating with people affiliated with the studio, he decided to step in.

Fincher had a complicated history with Fox. After making 1992's "Alien 3," which had a slew of budget issues and script rewrites, Fincher felt Fox was micromanaging him and did not support his vision.

So Mechanic arranged a breakfast with Fincher to talk it out.

"I sat down with him. It was just he and I, and I said, 'This is a come-to-Jesus meeting. You're fighting with everybody at the studio. We're not your enemy, and if you think we're your enemy, you should pull out. And if you don't pull out and still keep doing this, then I'm not going to make the movie — I'll shut it down,'" Mechanic recalled.

Mechanic had just spent two years helping James Cameron make "Titanic," a movie whose infamously difficult production process would thankfully be matched by its prowess at the box office. ("Half the time I thought Jim wanted to kill me," Mechanic said.)

He was not going to go through that again.

"So I said to David, 'I just lived through all of that… I'm not going to put my company through that. So you either treat us like we're in this together to make the best possible movie, or go away,'" Mechanic said. "From that point on, we were respectful. He never violated a single thing with me. He was the best director I worked with at the time."

Fincher didn't respond to a request for comment.

The Columbine shooting complicated the 'Fight Club' marketing campaign

The movie's edgy material posed a challenge for marketing. In addition to the violence, this is a film in which the main character attends support group meetings for people with testicular cancer, though he doesn't have it, and imagines an airplane he's on tearing apart mid-flight during dark, surreal fantasies.

Things got even trickier for "Fight Club" on April 20, 1999, when 12 students and one teacher were killed in a school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.

"When Columbine happened, I thought, 'I'm not going to let us be the poster child, but I know the press was going to come after us,'" Mechanic said.

In a proactive move, he went to Washington, DC, in hopes of calming the rhetoric surrounding the movie and gun violence. Ultimately, it wouldn't help much: scathing editorials about "Fight Club" were cropping up in the trades. By the end of the movie's disappointing opening weekend, six months after Columbine, it was clear that "Fight Club" came out at the wrong time.

"I didn't think through what the public's reaction would be; there was a resonance from Columbine," Mechanic said. "When you come out with a war movie and then all of a sudden you start blowing people up overseas, it's not good. People don't want real."

"So when Columbine happened," he continued, "it was a crusher. That's 90% of the reason why the movie didn't achieve its audience. I don't think people wanted to go into a theater to see violence."

Rupert Murdoch was not a fan of 'Fight Club,' to put it mildly, according to Mechanic

If "Fight Club" was a risk creatively, it was an even bigger one at the highest levels of the company.

Mechanic admitted that "Fight Club" was not the first time he had heard that Murdoch was displeased with a movie his company was releasing. In fact, Mechanic thought he would have been in more hot water over the raunchy 1998 comedy "There's Something About Mary" — except he said he'd heard Murdoch's son Lachlan, who's now the CEO of Fox, was a fan of it.

Still, Mechanic believed that Murdoch's purported dislike of "Fight Club" hastened his demise at Fox. The studio head said he learned exactly how Murdoch felt about the movie when the topic of "Fight Club" came up at a NewsCorp meeting he attended.

"He starts attacking, and he said, 'What kind of sick fucking human being would make a movie like this?'" Mechanic recalled Murdoch saying. "I said, 'Me. David Fincher. We're not embarrassed.'"

"I knew he hadn't seen the movie yet," Mechanic added, but he thought the movie's poor box-office returns ultimately sealed his fate in his boss's eyes. "That's probably the nexus of when he wanted to get rid of me."

Murdoch didn't respond to a request for comment.

Even before his tense chat with Murdoch, Mechanic said he felt his days were numbered at Fox, which prompted him to suggest an explosive ending to Fincher's movie.

Mechanic suggested blowing up the famed Fox Plaza Tower in the 'Fight Club' finale

At the end of "Fight Club," the narrator realizes his best friend, Tyler Durden, is his alter ego. After shooting himself in the face to release his hold, he watches as Project Mayhem's final act is accomplished: the skyscrapers that house credit card companies are blown up to erase all debt records.

If you look closely, you'll notice that the buildings that blew up were major Los Angeles landmarks — and one is the Fox Plaza Tower. (Fun fact: the building also famously stood in as the Nakatomi Tower in the first "Die Hard" movie.)

Many believed at the time that this was Fincher's doing, as a final middle finger to the studio by the maverick filmmaker, but actually, it was Mechanic's suggestion.

"David took me through the sequence. I think I was up in the actual building talking to him, and I asked David if he would put the Fox building in there for my tribute to Rupert," Mechanic said.

"I just realized I went to work for the wrong person," Mechanic added of Murdoch. "I think I got movies made that wouldn't have been made, and there's a price to pay."

Despite it all, Mechanic loved making 'Fight Club'

Mechanic would leave Fox in June 2000.

After the disappointing "Fight Club" box office returns and duds like 1999's Jodie Foster-led period drama, "Anna and the King," and Leonardo DiCaprio's 2000 "Titanic" follow-up, "The Beach," Mechanic knew he was on thin ice.

He said the first "X-Men" movie, released a month after his dismissal, was the final straw. "They saw it and thought it was a disaster — why would anybody make a Marvel comic into a movie?" he said.

The release would go on to launch the hugely successful X-Men franchise, which has brought in close to $6 billion in worldwide grosses to date.

Since leaving Fox, Mechanic has turned to producing movies like the beloved 2009 stop-motion animated feature "Coraline" and Mel Gibson's 2016 war movie "Hacksaw Ridge," which earned a best picture Oscar nomination, but he said "Fight Club" remains close to his heart.

"It's the movie I get asked the most about," he said. "It's one of the best experiences I had."