20 facts you might not know about 'Fight Club'

Sometimes a book adaptation takes a while before it happens. That was not the case with Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. In fact, a potential adaptation was already being bandied about before the book was officially released. Fight Club the novel came out in 1996, and it was announced Fincher would direct an adaptation in 1997.

Fight Club feels very Generation X, so naturally, the first name considered to write the screenplay was a man born in 1930. Buck Henry is a comedy legend. He was one of the first popular Saturday Night Live hosts and co-created the sitcom Get Smart with Mel Brooks. On top of that, he had quite a successful movie writing career, as he wrote The Graduate, among others. Producer Laura Ziskin considered Henry because she felt Fight Club and The Graduate had similar vibes, but Jim Uhls got the role. By the way, don’t think Henry didn’t have a dark streak that extended into the ‘90s. He wrote the 1995 film To Die For.

The studio’s first choice to direct Fight Club was Peter Jackson, now best known for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. However, at the time, he was too busy working on his film The Frighteners. After a couple of other names were considered, Fincher was approached. He was hesitant because his feature film debut was Alien 3, which he had made for Fox. Fincher also hated working with the studio on that movie, so it took them some time to convince the director to finally sign on.

Brad Pitt was a big star by the time he was cast as Tyler Durden, the anarchic figure at the center of Fight Club. He was such a star that he could command $17.5 million coming off the flop of Meet Joe Black . For Edward Norton’s part, the first name considered was Norton’s Rounders costar Matt Damon. Eventually, Pitt and Damon would get to work together in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films.

You can’t deny that Pitt was dedicated to the role of Tyler Durden. Believing that the character would not have perfect teeth, Pitt took it upon himself, unprompted, to have his front teeth chipped for the film. Sure, he had his teeth restored after filming ($17.5 million can buy you some nice dental work), but that’s still pretty crazy.

It’s not surprising that Pitt and Norton learned boxing and martial arts for a movie called Fight Club, which features a literal fight club. However, soap-making also plays a role in the film, and the duo learned that process to add some verisimilitude to the movie. Hey, if Pitt was willing to chip his teeth, why wouldn’t he learn to make soap?

Carter plays Marla Singer, and she is quite good in the film. However, given how grimy Fight Club is, the role that inspired Fincher to cast her may surprise you. Carter was hired based on her work in 1997’s The Wings of the Dove, a British romantic period piece based on a novel by Henry James. James and Palahniuk don’t exactly have a lot in common.

Meat Loaf plays a man that Norton’s character meets at one of the many support groups he attends. The singer is supposed to be playing a man who is large in height and girth. To make that happen, Meat Loaf had to wear a 90-pound fat harness and shoes with eight-inch lifts to tower over Norton.

Norton’s character may refer to himself as “Jack” a few times and adopts some other names for his various support groups, but none of them is his actual name. Instead, the main character is just known as “Narrator.” Given that the early drafts of the film didn’t include a voiceover, we wonder what he would have been called if not for that fact.

Fight Club made its debut at the Venice Film Festival, one of the most prestigious movie festivals. The premiere left audiences divided. In fact, according to Brian Raftery’s book Best. Movie. Year. Ever., the man who ran the festival walked out of the movie after a certain line from Marla. You probably know the one. However, there were two big fans there that night: Norton and Pitt. Pitt is quoted in Raftery’s book as saying, “Edward and I were still the only ones laughing. You could hear two idiots up in the balcony cackling through the whole thing,” and Norton recounted Pitt telling him Fight Club would be the best movie he would ever be in.

Another person who enjoyed the film? The book’s author. Palahniuk stated that he was impressed with how the film streamlined the plot of his novel. Considering how often novelists complain about adaptations, this was probably reassuring to the filmmakers.

OK, we’ve waited a bit, but we can’t put this list together without spoiling the movie's end. It turns out Tyler does not exist. He’s a persona adopted by the unnamed protagonist. At the end of the movie, Norton is able to escape the grasp of his Tyler persona by shooting himself in the head (and surviving). He overcomes his Durden-esque impulses, though the ending isn’t a cheery one. In the book, the Narrator ends up in a mental institution.

Given that Durden doesn’t exist and the twist is not revealed until later in the movie, Fincher had to be sure to adhere to the reality of the movie. Shots had to conceal the fact that Durden is only seen as a projection/hallucination of Norton’s unnamed protagonist. Pitt is never seen in “two shots” in group scenes, and he is also never seen in over-the-shoulder shots with the Narrator.

A lot of money went into making this gritty, dark little movie. The budget for Fight Club was $63 million. Fox made it, so it wasn’t exactly a feisty, independent flick. Despite having two stars headlining the film, Fight Club did not do great at the box office. While it was the top movie at the U.S. box office on its first weekend, it saw a 42 percent drop in money for its second weekend. When the movie ended its run, it earned $100.9 million. Sure, that’s a profit, but not the one the studio expected. It also didn’t get any awards love.

DVDs were still somewhat new at the turn of the millennium, but Fincher was happy to go all-in for the DVD release of Fight Club. From the get-go, they had two versions: one for the film and a “Special Edition” version. They packed the DVDs with content. Even the pared-down version had four different commentary tracks. The Special Edition had commentary tracks, publicity material, music videos, deleted scenes, and more. The Online Film Critics Society gave it awards for Best DVD and Best Special Features, and in 2001, Entertainment Weekly ranked it first on its list of “The 50 Essential DVDs.” No wonder it sold over six million copies in the first 10 years of its release.

In a memorable scene in the movie, the Narrator and Tyler get drunk (to the extent a mental projection can get drunk) and hit golf balls. That scene is as close to a documentary as this film gets, as Norton and Pitt were indeed drunk in real life and hitting those golf balls.

Spoilers. Some people fear them and detest them. Others don’t mind. Still, you always want to be careful what you say in a public space. Don’t tell that to Rosie O’Donnell, though. Rosie was not a fan of the film and proceeded to spoil the Tyler Durden twist and then told her viewers not to see the movie. This created a lot of discontent among both spoiler haters and Fight Club fans. Pitt even called O’Donnell’s spoiler unforgivable.

In Fincher’s mind, Fight Club is a satirical film about a lot of things. The marketing team had different ideas. They highlighted the whole “guys wailing on each other” aspect of the film. Additionally, they placed ads on programming like pro wrestling and UFC, believing that was the target audience. Fincher was particularly annoyed by this, feeling that it did not understand his intent with the movie.

Tyler Durden’s business card states that he works for Paper Street Soap Company. He also later gets a package sent to 420 Paper Street. A “paper street” is a term used to describe a street that is included on maps and in city planning documents but then never gets built.

Fight Club remained dedicated to the at-home experience when the Blu-ray was released in 2009 for the 10th anniversary of the film. However, when the Blu-ray loads up, you first see a menu screen for the Drew Barrymore romantic comedy Never Been Kissed. While it eventually became the Fight Club menu that was included as a goof on Fight Club fans. Fincher got the OK from Barrymore to use her film for the joke.