Fight Club (Filmmaking)

Script (doesn't match the movie exactly)

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Fight-Club.html

 - insomnia

- boring job dealing with a stranger he doesn't care about

- testicular cancer scene:
-- the first guy to share had his wife leave him b/c he had cancer
-- bob is bankrupt, divorced, kids won't return his phone calls

- "I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."
-- he was able to get sleep by crying at the self-help group
- "Every evening I died and every evening I was born again. Resurrected."

- the movie mixes humor and seriousness very well

- in the movie the guy and girl both engage with each other instead of walking away

MARLA
Why do you do it?

JACK
I... I don't know. I guess... when
people think you're dying, they
really listen, instead...

MARLA
-- Instead of just waiting for their
turn to speak.

JACK
Yeah.

- marla takes some clothes out of a laundromat and immediately takes them to a pawn shop

- he asks her for her number and she agrees

- "this is your life and it's ending one minute at a time"

JACK (V.O.)
If you wake up at a different time
and in a different place, could you
wake up as a different person?

Jack misses seeing TYLER on the opposite conveyor belt.
They pass each other.

INT. AIRPLANE CABIN - IN FLIGHT - NIGHT

Jack sits next to a BUSINESSMAN. As they have idle
CONVERSATION, we MOVE IN ON Jack's tray. An ATTENDANT'S
HANDS set coffee down with a small container of cream.

JACK (V.O.)
Everywhere I travel -- tiny life.
Single-serving sugar, single-serving
cream, single pat of butter.

[...]

JACK (V.O.)
The people I meet on each flight --
they're single-serving friends.
Between take-off and landing, we have
our time together, but that's all we
get.

[...]

TYLER
The spork. I get it. You're very
clever.

JACK
Thank you.

TYLER
How's that working out for you?

JACK
What?

TYLER
Being clever.

JACK
(thrown)
Well, uh... great.

TYLER
Keep it up, then. Keep it right up.

- The security guy at the airport is very well spoken and funny. Real people are neither.

- It shows Tyler Durden stealing a car while leaving the airport.

- His apartment getting blown up is a great example of the kinds of deus ex machinas that movies use to force the characters to stay together.

- the police don't seize him when he gets to his blown-up apartment
- he bends down next to his fridge and finds Marla's number on a burnt piece of paper

- Tyler's eating chips or cereal when he first talks to him on the phone (very informal)
- Tyler says he *69'd

- there's an exchange in the bar that I should transcribe

- "the things you own end up owning you."

- the "just ask" exchange is well worth transcribing. It's about how people nowadays have this habit of being very meek.

- "let me tell you about tyler durden" is worth transcribing. He's basically just pulling pranks

- it shows tyler as a dressed-up waiter with headphones on, which would never be possible in r/l. He does all kinds of things to the food.

- "how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I don't wanna die without any scars"

- "that really hurts...hit me again"
- it shows them bonding after

- as they're approaching tyler's house for the first time, tyler throws a beer bottle down the street and it breaks. Jack tosses his beer bottle to the side
a few seconds later, showing that he's starting to mimic tyler.

- jack's description of tyler's house is worth transcribing. It shows that guys don't value fancy living conditions as much as they value other things.

- it then shows jack and tyler fighting outside the bar again, which is kind of unnecessary given that they could fight anywhere. But it makes it the
perfect way to recruit new people, just like with 4-square in HS.
.
- "every time it rained we had to kill the power. By the end of the first month I didn't miss TV. I didn't even mind the warm, stale refridgerator."

- it then cuts to a clip of ~15 guys in the parking lot, with 2 in the middle, fighting. Exactly like 4square

- it shows tyler and jack hitting golf balls in front of their house. "At night Tyler and I were alone for half a mile in every direction."

- it shows their house and how interesting it is; it's packed with old books for jack to go through, it's falling apart with nails and rainwater.
- it shows tyler riding his bike through the house. Reminds me a lot of how much fun it was to shoot up frankie's kitchen with a paintball gun.

- "after fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down. You could deal with anything." - But you don't need to fight to do this. Working
out works too (eg rowing).

- tyler says he went to college. Now I'm 25 and I say, "Now what?" And he says, "I don't know...get married."
- Jack says, "I can't get married...I'm a 30-year-old boy."
Tyler: "We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need."

- "Most of the week we were Ozzie and Harriet. But every Saturday night we were finding something out. We were finding out more and more that we were not
alone."

- "Monday morning all I could think about was next week."
- It shows Jack make a face at some consultant making a presentation.
- "It was already in everyone's face. Tyler and I just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone's tongue. Tyler and I just gave it a name."
- In the bar, Tyler's wearing sunglasses.

- "This kid from work couldn't remember if you ordered blue pens or black, but he was a god for ten minutes when he trounced the maitre from a local food
court"
- It shows some guy getting up smiling after taking a pounding and having blood all over his face. If you watch real fights you know that's not what people
are feeling when that happens.

- "You weren't alive anywhere like you were there."
- "Fight Club only exists in the time when Fight Club startts and when Fight Club ends. Even if I wanted to tell someone he had a good fight, I wouldn't be
talking to the same man." --> Society forces men to suppress their aggression.

- It shows some waiter filling this guy's water and they exchange some secret glance like they're in a secret society.
- "After a few weeks, he was carved outta wood"

- It shows them talking about which celebrity they'd fight.
- "We starting seeing things differently. Everywhere we went, we were sizing things up."
- It shows Jack look around on a bus and make a disgusted look, like no one there was...able to fight? Not sure what he was supposed to be thinking.

- In one of the most obvious hypocrisies of the film, it has Jack ask Tyler about a Calvin Klein ad on the bus, "Is that what a man looks like?", and Tyler
laughs and says, "Self-improvement is masturbation." Meanwhile Brad Pitt had been working out and watching his diet EXTREMELY carefully to look good for the
part. And in the very next scene it shows Pitt without his shirt.

- "Fight Club wasn't about winning or losing. It wasn't about words. [...] When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. Afterwards we
all felt saved." [...] "Fight Club became the reason to cut your hair short or trim your fingernails."
- It shows Jack brushing his teeth in gross-looking water, and then pulling out one of his teeth.
- It shows Tyler practicing with nunchuks in a totally outlandish way, very lively and enthusiastic.

- On the phone call Jack says that it's been 8 weeks, so they'd only had ~8 sessions of the Fight Club up until that point.
Jack says to Marla, "I found a new one. It's for _men_only_."

- "Tyler's door was closed. I'd been living there for two months and Tyler's door was never closed." (how the living situation would work)

- It shows Tyler showing up at Marla's apartment with his sunglasses and red jacket.
- Marla is shown as horny and outgoing, which just isn't the way women behave. She has a big dildo on her dresser.
- Someone apparently called the police and they arrived at the very moment that Tyler got there (each of those is very unlikely)
- Marla says something outrageous: "God, I haven't been fucked like that since grade school."

- It shows Jack doing sit-ups in the living room (with a fire going...swanky.)

- Tyler swings open his bedroom door (he's naked); the door had been cracked open and Jack had been trying to see what they were doing that was making so
much noise. As Tyler closes the door Marla says, "Who are you talking to?" and Tyler replies casually, "Shaddup."

- Jack writes inflammatory haikus and sends them to his coworkers ("Worker bees can leave / Even drones can fly away / The queen is their slave")

- Jack goes to work with blood on his shirt, he smokes in the office. (He started the movie a nonsmoker. This movie shows the huge change in smoking in
films. You wouldn't see smoking portrayed the same way in a movie nowadays.)

- It shows Jack walking down a staircase at work, taking up space so that another guy needs to turn sideways around him, and knocking shoulders with a woman
carrying papers so that some of the papers fall off.

- Tyler spouts out some stuff while Jack is on the phone with the detective: "We reject the something something, especially the emphasis on material
posessions" (or something like that)

- Marla has some intellectual-sounding observation to make about condoms (most people have no interesting observations about the world)
- Jack responds brusquely: "_What?_"

- Marla says things that no woman I've ever met would say. You can tell her lines were written by a man.
- As she's leaving the kitchen she just tosses her cigarette on the floor without stamping it out.

- While stealing the human fat, Tyler Durden moves with quick, exaggerated (lively) movements.

- "Tyler was full of useful information"
- Tyler says all kinds of BS but there's no way to fact-check him, so his confidence sounds convincing.

- Tyler's speech during the lye thing is kind of h
-- "First you have to know, not fear, that some day you're going to die. It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.
Congratulations. You're one step closer to hitting bottom."

- The scene in the department store has Brad Pitt showing his body in the gap between his pants and his shirt.

- Jack is apparently copying the rules of fight club on the copy machine...?
- Jack speaks very aggressively with his boss: "I'd be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who wrote that is dangerous." He
then gives this talk about shooting up the office that would not be in any movie nowadays (since we've had so many more incidents like that).

- "Tyler's words coming out through me" (or something like that). Jack would've been fired way, way before he had the chance to do any of that.

- Marla calls and says she needs him to check for a lump in her breast. Again, it's very, very rare for a woman to act like that. No scripts written by
females (that I'm aware of) have women behaving like that. But lots of scripts written by men do. It's ironic that a movie about men learning to act more
manly has the female reaching out to the main character over and over again, instead of vice-versa. And the main guy is pushing off her advances, even though
she's clearly attractive. In r/l the it's uncommon for a single guy to turn away a female unless she's unattractive.
- Marla leaves the front door and rear door open to her(?) van and just leaves the van like that.

- Jack and Bob bumping into each other and both being members of the secret club makes it sound cool.
-- And Bob gives the first example of people sharing outlandish claims about the founder ("born in a mental institution and sleeps only one hour a night.
He's a great man."). But Bob goes to the original location, so he's presumably with people who know Tyler/Jack. It seems unlikely that such outlandish claims
would happen so close to the original location.

- In r/l I suspect something like fight club would result in deaths pretty soon, especially if you're fighting on a hard surface.

- "I look around, I see a lot of new faces. (laughter) Shut up. Which means a lot of you've been breaking the first two rules of fight club."
- "I see all this potential. And I see it squandered." "Has us working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."
- "No great war, no great depression" (lol just wait a few years) "Our great depression is our lives."

- The scene between Tyler Durden and Lou is Tyler Durden showing why he's the boss: he's tougher than everyone else. Some guy in the audience throws up just
watching the scene.
-- In r/l once he's on the floor the guy on top would switch to kicking.
-- We also get the first glimpse of Jared Leto's character.

- The scenes showing guys starting fights is hard to believe because:
-- Most people will not do an assignment like that without other people present and pressuring them.
-- Even if they tried, most people wouldn't know how to start the fight (people screw up the simplest instructions)
-- Even if they started the fight, most pedestrians would just run and call the police.
-- It'd be much easier to start a fight with some dude at a bar.

- Jack's monologue with his boss is a classic movie thing where he's allowed to speak without being interrupted.
- Jack's plan of beating himself up would never work in r/l because he's already established a pattern of deviant behavior. No one would believe him.
-- And the boss just watches instead of running out of the room or calling the police.
- "We now had corporate sponsorship. This is how Tyler and I were able to have Fight Club every night of the week."

- "Tyler was now involved in a class-action lawsuit with the hotel over the urine content of their soup." But this would never work in r/l because it would
be recorded that he had worked there, and so he would be suspected.

- It shows two guys finishing a fight and they both look so happy, like they're in ecstasy. More bullshit.

- "Tyler dreamed up new homework assignments. He handed them out in sealed envelopes."
-- It shows guys knocking over TV antennae and satellite dishes.
-- It shows guys putting up a billboard saying, "Did you know? You can use old motor oil to fertilize your lawn" It looks totally professionally made, way
beyond the capabilities of the kinds of doofuses that these movements attract at the beginning (eg brownshirts).
-- It shows guys in a video store, using powerful plugged-in magnets(?) to ruin(?) the videos. Again, beyond the sophistication of your average groupie.
-- It shows Jack and Tyler reversing the spike strips at some building, and hitting cars with baseball bats to make their alarms go off.
--- While they're doing that they mention the new fight clubs popping up, to the point where there are clubs they don't even remember starting.
-- It shows guys feeding pigeons outside a BMW dealership so that the birds shit all over the cars outside.
-- It shows an airport worker putting totally-professional-looking emergency instructions in an airline, where the instructions show the people panicking
(not sure what that's supposed to accomplish).
-- Tyler's shown cutting out news clippings, one of which says "Police seize excrement catapult", another says "Performance Artist 'Molested'", the words of
the article are totally generic, another says "Power Outage at Local Mall", another says "Fountain Befouled", "Missing Monkeys Found Shaved"
-- Two guys are shown breaking into a PC display and blowing it up.
-- Tyler's shown taking a store clerk hostage in the parking lot, but in r/l those clerks deal with that kind of crap all the time, and they often have
guns. The clerk is shown totally scared, where if you see surveillance video they're usually pissed off or neutral.
--- Tyler taps the clerk on the head with the gun
--- "If you're not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead."
--- The thing is, if you listen to people who came very close to dying, a lot of them say it didn't really change them.
--- Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those guys don't really have aspirations.
--- "Run, forest, run!" But Tyler also disdains movies / media?
--- "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of his life. His breakfast will taste better than any breakfast you or I have tasted."
---- That's a testable claim, and I'm not convinced it's true.

- "You had to give it to him. He had a plan, and it started to make sense in a Tyler-sort of way. No fear, no distractions. The ability to let that which
does not matter truly slide."

- "You are not the car you drive" (etc)

- Another scene with Jack talking tough with Marla...
-- "Why does a weaker person need to latch onto a stronger person, what is that?"
-- "This conversation is over."

- Jack goes into the basement and sees lots of bunks, 3 high, built out of 4x4s and 2x4s.

- "If the applicant is young, tell him he's too young. Old, too old. Fat, too fat. If the applicant then waits for three days without food, shelter, or
encouragement, he may then enter and begin his training." (This scene is worth transcribing. It's an interesting idea.) Tyler Durden tips his hand by saying,
"...because you are trespassing, and I will have to call the police." But he can't do that, and so the applicant will soon have no doubt that it's all a
show. And then Jack later does the same thing by saying, "I'm gonna go inside and get a shovel."
-- Jack hits the guy with a broom.
- "Sooner or later we all became what Tyler wanted us to be."
- Two black shirts, two pairs of black pants, one pair of black boots (the kid would be wearing them, duh), two pairs of black socks, one black jacket
(again, the guy was wearing it), $300 "personal burial money" (yeah, right)
- The interaction with Bob on the porch is a nice touch because it addresses something the audience may be thinking, which is "Most people wouldn't make it
through that..."
- It then shows the new guy buzzing all his hair off.
- "Space monkey ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good."
- It then shows the young guy doing the spiel.
- I should transcribe the stuff Durden says while it's showing the soldiers working in the house.

- They have a bus that stops immediately in front of their house...(yeah, right)

- Another thing I'm struck by is that Durden seems to drink a lot of beer, which IMO is the same kind of consumerist crap as TV and cigarettes.

- It shows a prank where they did a big smiley face on a building and had set fire to two rooms to serve as the eyes.

- "The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions."

- Durden's little speech to the police commissioner(?) is worth transcribing. The knife thing is a little unsettling. It's like a power fantasy.
-- And how would those guys have gotten in as waiters...?

- the whole blonde guy thing is a little weird

- Jack breaks the rules of fight club by continuing to hit the blonde guy after the fight was over.

- This also made me realize that all this punching

- Another thing about Fight Club is that all of the members are easily identified.

- Durden drives on the wrong side of the road. "Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat." "Stop trying to control everything and just let go." And they play
indian music. And then they all put on their seatbelts and crash into a car because...I'm not sure. I don't understand what he's trying to prove. And Durden
leaves

- "In the world I see, you're stalking elk in the forest around the remnants of Rockefeller center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest
of your life. (Really? Leather clothes don't last that long.) "

- Mission: "Trash a piece of corporate art and trash a francise coffee bar"

- The followers are shown as soooooo willing to follow. None of them seem to have any interest in having their own ideas.

- "you were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be--that's me. I look like you wanna
look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and--most importantly--I'm free in all the ways that you are not."

- "People do it every day. They talk to themselves; they see themselves the way they'd like to be. They just don't have the courage to run with it."
- "Little by little, you're letting yourself become...Tyler Durden."

- Jack leans out of the open door of a taxi while it's still moving.

- Status: Jack and Marla go into a random restaurant and their waiter is one of Jack's followers. The waiter says, "Anything you order is free of charge,
sir."
- Marla shouts at Jack in the restaurant loud enough that everyone turns and looks at them.
- Marla says, "You're amazing in bed". More fantasy.
- Jack walks into the middle of the street in front of a bus, which stops right in front of him, while Marla's watching. He tells the bus to wait and it
does (not in the real world), then a car honks at him and he points at it and yells, "Shut up! Shut up!". All a power fantasy.

- "Why these credit card companies?" "If you erase the debt record, then we all go back to zero." (Whaaaaaaat?)

- Jack getting into the building by shooting the glass and kicking the window once is a great simple example of the problem with movies: they make
everything look easier than it really is.

- "Have I ever let us down? How far have you come because of me? I will bring us through this. I will carry you, kicking and screaming, and in the end you
will thank me."

- The guys who show up have lots of cans of beer.
- The guys in the elevator say, "I can't believe he's standing", and the other says, "He's one tough motherfucker."
- Marla is there with Jack when all of the buildings get blown up. Yet another example of doing something outlandish / "impressive" in front of a girl. More
power fantasy.