Fight Club (1999): 27 SECRETS Hidden for Decades

A bruised writer walked into work one Monday, and nobody asked what had happened. That silence became the seed of Fight Club, the 1999 David Fincher film that a major studio paid tens of millions of dollars to make, nearly buried at the box office, and then watched turn into one of the most talked-about movies of its generation. This video covers 27 behind-the-scenes stories from the production. It follows the novel from Chuck Palahniuk's Portland prank club to a $10,000 studio option, and Fincher's uneasy return to the studio he had sworn off after Alien 3. It looks at how Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were cast as two halves of one man, why the first screenplay dropped the famous narration, and how Helena Bonham Carter talked herself into playing Marla in the middle of a long fax. On set, Pitt had pieces of his front teeth chipped, Norton landed a real blow on Pitt's ear, and Meat Loaf worked inside a heavy fat suit. The Paper Street house was put up on an empty lot in the Los Angeles harbor district and torn down afterward, while two-dollar work lamps lit the basement fights. The video also explains the single-frame Tyler flashes hidden in the early scenes, the Starbucks cups planted throughout, the computer-built journey through the Narrator's brain, and a line of dialogue the studio asked Fincher to change, only to end up with something far cruder. It closes with the release delay after Columbine, a marketing campaign Fincher fought, the DVD that rescued the film's reputation, and the studio chairman who asked for Fox's own tower to come down in the finale.