October 19, 1999
Web posted at: 2:23 p.m. EDT (1823 GMT)

'Fight Club' | page 1, 2, 3

A movie executive who had read "Fight Club" in galleys remembered Uhls and guided his spec script to Fox 2000, where the novel had landed. Before Uhls began his adaptation, one of the producers, Ross Grayson Bell, got him and Palahniuk in a room together for a creative bonding session. Uhls didn't share Palahniuk's hard-knocks background, but he did identify with the emotions in the book.

"It's been a while since I've been in a physical fight," Uhls says, "but I do remember that a lot of strange emotions come out, not all of them bad. It's an adrenaline experience. When I read the novel I warmed to it, not because I have exactly the same sensibility as Chuck but because I felt a connection to the emptiness and the numbness of the lead character's life. I think everyone's gone through periods like that, and has questioned the overlay of consumerism and commercialism in the society around them. The book is more of a dream than the movie, in the way it establishes the emotional logic of why something would follow something else. But Chuck was enthusiastic about us trying to create a more realistic structure. And he was very complimentary later about the way we had aligned the story."

For example, in the film, as Tyler veers crazily into non-fight-club activities, he terrorizes a convenience-store clerk at gunpoint. "In the book, it was the narrator who does it," says Uhls, "and he does it at a time when cause-and-effect wouldn't necessarily lead him to that point. We thought it was more powerful for Tyler to do it, to affect the other character. And when Tyler does it, it's part of an escalation. Especially in the second half, we wanted Tyler to be pushing things further and further."

When Fincher left to do his post-"Seven" picture, "The Game," Uhls found time between "Fight Club" rewrites to tackle his next big script: an adaptation of "Last Train to Memphis," the first part of Peter Guralnick's two-volume Elvis Presley biography. Uhls comes from Cape Girardeau, Mo., a small city on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Memphis that is flavored with Delta culture. Uhls wound up writing "essentially an original script about Elvis Presley, drawing heavily on Peter's research and on his feel for the people." He contrasted Presley's relationships with his nurturing Sun Records producer Sam Phillips and his glitzy breakout manager, Col. Tom Parker.

"Elvis really wanted to be a movie star, and he needed Tom Parker to make that happen," says Uhls. In his script, there's "a sad transition" from Presley's authentic music-making with Phillips to his association with Parker, "who represented the slickness of show business, and if you got right down to the core of him, the carnival. That's where he came from. The carnival influenced how Parker thought of merchandizing Elvis Presley." Uhls uses the death of Presley's mother after he went into the Army "as the closure to this part of his life. That devastated him psychologically and changed him as a person and emptied him out emotionally." But in Uhls' vision, Presley is less a victim than a tragic hero -- he participates in his own diminishment from grass-roots sensation to hound-dog-man in a gilded doghouse.

Working on "Fight Club," Uhls found Fincher to be a "terrific" writer's director, "focusing in on the story and the philosophy of it, and the tone." Uhls and Fincher wouldn't touch some of Tyler's misdeeds -- not because they were too extreme, but because they muddied the issues. "We thought Tyler wanted to get rid of the construction of society, but not kill people; we wanted him to have a clear philosophy, and it was not about killing people but about creating a world to leave behind for people."

In general, the adapter's task was one of aesthetic refinement, not wholesale invention. Uhls took Palahniuk's pungent first-person prose and supplied a narration as torrential -- and modulated -- as that of "Trainspotting." "We didn't want the voice-over simply to help support the narrative or to bridge one part to the next. We wanted it to be ironic commentary and maybe even somewhat of a counterpoint to what you see take place in the scenes." Did the finished film have the tone they'd wanted? "Oh yeah -- at least for me, there was nothing so dark it couldn't be funny. It's got a harsh, edgy, textured sort of feel."

Adapting Palahniuk's powder-keg of a novel, Uhls had to be sure where to place the detonations. "I think that fight club begins as a simple empowerment of the individual. People who have elected to do this with each other get together in basements and fight. It starts out as a natural magnet, picking up people however they happen to hear about it. But after Tyler realizes what fighting can do for you, and that going back to a sterile, consumer-driven society is purposeless, he decides that society has to be dismantled, and he changes course. Basically, when Tyler forms an army to generate whatever the verb for anarchy is, he and the narrator separate.

"Everything happens in slow increments. But at one point the narrator says, This has gone too far. When you go out and blow up a building, you're not doing it in agreement with the people who own the building. Even if care is taken that no one is in the building, it's a destructive act to civilization as we know it. One way this might work for an audience, is: If you come a certain distance with Tyler, and continue to follow his logic, you realize at a certain point that he's going to have to tear everything down -- and you may not be ready to tear everything down. What should be done? What is the answer? In the end, the movie leaves the questions in the air."

Michael Sragow's column about moviemakers appears every Thursday in Salon.

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