Finger joints crack open expectantly as Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) greets the male pack in the gloomy cellar vault: "Welcome to the Fight Club!" One takes off his belt, another brushes the ring off his finger. "The first rule of the Fight Club is: You do not say a word about the Fight Club, the second rule of the Fight Club is: You WILL NOT LOSE WORD about the Fight Club!" Nervous laughter goes through the ranks as he explains the rest of the rules: no time limit, fight to the knockout or tapping. Just a fight at once. No shirts or shoes. And above all: "Who is new in the Fight Club, must fight!"
Enthusiastically, they thrash at each other, the waiters, office workers, insurance clerks, who are always on the lookout for meaning in this dark cellar. By beating up until blood flows, and going back to work the next morning. With damaged faces - but happier.
Twenty years ago, "Fight Club" hit the cinemas - a film about a nameless man (Edward Norton) who seems to be breaking the futility of his staid life until he meets the charismatic and dangerous soap merchant Tyler Durden. He introduces him to a world of illegal fist fights and anarchic pranks that are increasingly becoming a terrorist campaign against consumer society. Until the Nameless One begins to suspect that Durden is not who he seems to be.
His sombre aesthetic and socio-critical message made "Fight Club" one of the greatest cult movies of the 90's. Although the film initially flopped on the big screen and only as a DVD was a success, many quotes and images of the film are so ubiquitous today as its message controversial. Was it a statement about the crisis of masculinity? A wide-legged testosterone spectacle? Or a pitch-black consumption satire?
Whatever "Fight Club" made such a phenomenon, it is clear: its author had not guessed this success.
Porn snippets in family movies
Chuck Palahniuk had had a rather dreadful summer vacation when he came up with the idea of "Fight Club" in the mid-nineties: he had been in a brawl and had to take good care. With a thick black eye he returned to his workplace - and was stunned that absolutely no one spoke to him about his obvious injury. So you could lead a double life, Palahniuk thought, as long as you return so damaged that no one dares to ask.
The former journalist worked at a truck company and wrote repair instructions. But one afternoon after this summer, he sat down and wrote a seven-page short story about an evening in an illegal fighting club, "Fight Club." Seven pages because his writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer, once joked that was the perfect length for a short story. Palahniuk sold the story for publication in an anthology called "The Pursuit of Happiness" - for $ 50.
photo gallery
21 pictures
20 years Fight Club: Bone breaker from the soap factoryBut he sensed that the anarchic idea was still expandable. Around the core of the short story Palahniuk arranged anecdotes about border crossings that friends and colleagues had told him. Like the story of Mike, who cut porn snippets into family movies. Or that of Geoff, who peed as a waiter in the soup. In the end, there were enough little stories for a book about an unnamed philistine drifting into utter chaos that he sold in 1996 for $ 6,000 in advance.
5000 copies had the first edition. It took years before they were sold. On Seattle, Portland and San Francisco's first reading tour, Palahniuk recalled in the Fight Club note, "there were never more than three people in attendance, book sales did not even cover the cost of minibar drinks in my hotel room." But that should change soon.
Company satire to dance
Namely, when the book fell into the hands of producers Ross Grayson Bell and Joshua Donen. For $ 10,000, they secured the rights, though Bell admits in Brian Raftery's "BEST MOVIE YEAR EVER: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen." "I did not know how to make a movie out of it, but maybe There was somebody who knew that. "
This someone was David Fincher, director of "Seven" (1995) and "The Game" (1997). He developed the script with screenwriter Jim Uhl. They added a spectacular finale, in which not only the storyteller's world in chaos, but also some skyscrapers ends in rubble and ashes.
But Fincher's coup was to hire one of the biggest movie stars of the day: Brad Pitt. He was currently shooting the romance "Rendezvous with Joe Black" and had already worked with Fincher on "Sieben". With Edward Norton he should form a congenial duo in the "Fight Club" filming. For weeks, Pitt, Norton, Fincher, and Andrew Kevin Walker, hired as a script doctor, hung out together and came up with additional ideas for the film.
Fincher and Norton wanted to make a satire, but were often disagreeing on how obvious that should be in individual scenes. This led to many debates on the set, but drove both to peak performance. The look, the cut, the rhythm, everything fit, as well as the soundtrack of the Dust Brothers, who had produced albums of the Beastie Boys and Beck among others.
The premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 1999 caused mixed reactions, and the marketing people at Fox knew little about it. "Men do not want to see Brad Pitt without a shirt, they feel bad, and women do not want to see how he bleeds, so I do not know who they made the movie for," Fincher said of a marketing expert. So the movie flopped in the cinema. It cost $ 65 million and grossed only $ 37 million in the US.
Broken bones in the youth camp
Only on DVD, the film developed to success. Six million copies sold Fox. In many rooms of guys between 15 and 35 were soon hung the "Fight Club" posters. Many were content with the secret thought of peeing somebody in the soup or polishing their faces. Others actually started their own fight club.
It was all much less spectacular in reality. For example, at Silicon Valley Gentleman's Fight Club, software developers and data analysts beat each other by invitation every few weeks to feel like a superhero for one night, as the Associated Press said , As face protection fencing masks were allowed, but the participants were also allowed to use weapons such as tennis rackets. The police never intervened because the fighting took place on private land by consensus between adults.
It was a different story a few years after the film in a camp of the youth organization "4 H" in Virginia. There, youthful caregivers forced younger camp participants to fight and even bet on them. The other children had to pay one dollar each. They were discovered only when parents picked up their children and had these blue eyes, bruises and even partial fractures. The three 15- to 16-year-old caregivers were charged in 58 points.
Self-development in chaos
All because of a book? After each of his readings, writes Chuck Palahniuk in the afterword of the "Fight Club" paperback edition, he is asked where in the area the next Fight Club can be found. The battles, the violence, that had been only a minor matter in his story. In the story, he says, it's about empowering every human being to realize and reach his potential and abilities, whatever he wants to achieve in the world.
How could he have guessed, then, when he sold the seven pages for $ 50 that many fans of the "Fight Club" whose rules even more than 20 years later can quote by heart? Although most of them are more likely to have Brad Pitt than Chuck Palahniuk in mind, as the author found out. Once on a tourist tour called "Haunted Tunnel" in Portland, the guide just quoted the first two rules: "You're not talking about the Haunted Tunnel Tour!
Palahniuk tapped him on the shoulder, "I wrote the book, Fight Club."
The guide was amazed: "There was a book?"