EL James, movie dominatrix: how the Fifty Shades author cracks the whip in Hollywood
Source: Telegraph.co.uk.
USA – HOLLYWOOD – When EL James thrust her Twilight fan fiction into the laps of erotically-malnourished readers in 2011, spurting all kinds of wonky metaphors and baffling inner monologues into the literary world, she created a monster. But it wasn’t until the reclusive author had her smash-hit Fifty Shades books adapted into films that she exposed a little monstrousness of her own.
Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel to 2015’s whips-and-chains blockbuster, plunges into cinemas next week, but it will be the first film in the franchise to be entirely dictated by EL James herself, the author having carefully removed every element of its predecessor that made her face (as the author might put it) angrier than the colour of the Communist Manifesto.
For while Fifty Shades of Grey earned surprisingly strong reviews, particularly for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s directing, a hotbed of tension erupted off-screen, spurred on by an author with an incredibly specific vision for the adaptations of her books and a cast and crew powerless to stop her.
James, real name Erika, was positioned in a sweet spot from the very beginning, the rampant success of her Fifty Shades trilogy granting her unique power when it came to selling off the film rights. While it’s not unusual for multiple studios to pursue bestsellers, the sheer buzz of James’s trilogy had at least 10 studios and dozens of Hollywood producers on their knees, begging the author to sign over her material.
James subsequently executed her dominance over negotiations, the author informing prospective studios that she must have full veto power over the film’s director and writer, its cast, marketing materials, sets and locations. After immediately walking away from a $3 million offer from New Regency Films, and later a $5 million offer from Sony, James partnered with Universal Pictures and Focus Features for an undisclosed sum – reportedly seduced by Focus’s back catalogue of prestige adult drama, something she felt mirrored her novels.
While Universal producers Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca knew they had a bountiful property at their fingertips, they also weren’t stupid — what only semi-worked on the page needed a vigorous tune-up before it could be adapted for the big screen.
Their safe word turned out to be Saving Mr. Banks, or more specifically its screenwriter Kelly Marcel. Despite the Emma Thompson starrer being about as sexy as a saggy girdle, Marcel knew about characterisation, and was considered the perfect writer to flesh out the novel’s protagonists.
Marcel has revealed that she was drawn to the novel because of its bare bones story, even if much of what the characters actually said to one another was atrocious. “I wanted to remove a lot of the dialogue,” she told the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast in 2015. “I felt it could be a really sexy film if there wasn’t so much talking in it.”
Universal executives sparked to Marcel’s ideas for the screenplay, which included a non-linear narrative full of sexy flash-forwards and unexpected spanking.
“I wanted to remove a lot of the dialogue. I felt it could be a really sexy film if there wasn’t so much talking in it.”
Kelly Marcel, screenwriter
“I very much wanted to do something different with the screenplay, and when I spoke to the studio and the producers and made that quite clear, they were very enthusiastic about that and kind of loved the things I wanted to do,” she continued. “I didn’t want the story to be linear; I wanted it to begin at the end of the film, and for us to meet in the middle. So you start with the spanking, and you have these sort of flashes that go throughout the film.”
But once Marcel and James bashed themselves together, spending a week tirelessly scribbling in Marcel’s London home, they rapidly came apart at the seams. James was unhappy with Marcel’s altercations to the source material, and reportedly wanted more sex — she was already unhappy that the novel’s infamous “used tampon” scene wouldn’t make the cut.
“When I delivered that script was when I realised that all of them saying, ‘Yeah, absolutely this is what we want!’, and, ‘You can write anything you like and get crazy and artistic with it’ — that was utter, utter bulls—,” Marcel continued. “Erika was like, ‘This isn’t what I want it to be, and I don’t think this is the film the fans are looking for.’”
Meanwhile, casting for Christian Grey hit a bump. The studio’s pick, Ryan Gosling, quickly passed, along with James’s personal choice for the role: somewhat inevitably, Twilight’s Robert Pattinson. James also vetoed both Matthew Bomer and Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder, deeming neither talented enough to portray her protagonist. Eventually James and the studio settled on Sons of Anarchy actor Charlie Hunnam, but he was reportedly eager to have the Christian character reworked.
“I know that Charlie had a lot of notes,” Marcel has said. “I know that he felt that the character of Christian wasn’t there for him in the way that he needed him to be.”
To placate Hunnam and in response to the Marcel/James fallout, studio bosses welcomed a third party into the metaphorical bedroom. Following a suggestion from Taylor-Johnson, Universal hired playwright Patrick Marber to polish off the script, reportedly to improve characterisation. Marber, best known for writing Closer and Notes on a Scandal, was good friends with Taylor-Johnson, having worked with her on a short film titled Love You More.
“The producers said it was wonderful. ‘You’ve saved our asses, you’re a hero’. And then I was fired.”
Patrick Marber, playwright
But once the new script was thrust her way, James reportedly erupted. According to the Daily Mail’s Baz Bamigboye, James despised Marber’s rewrites, screaming “Nothing he has written is in my book!”, and threatened to disown the film on her Twitter account if his polish wasn’t tossed. Within days, Marber was discharged from the project.
“[The producers] said it was wonderful. ‘You’ve saved our asses, you’re a hero’. And then I was fired,” Marber told The Independent. “I felt a bit sad because I thought I’d written a good script. But I totally understood. If you take on a rewrite job – it’s whore’s money and don’t expect them to love you for being a whore.”
Reportedly, as a result of the drama, Hunnam tensed, sighed and pulled out of the project. Jamie Dornan came on board in his place, and a final, James-approved, script rolled before the cameras.
But as shooting began, James reportedly paid daily visits to the set, micro-managing everything from set design (she immediately scrapped Taylor-Johnson’s more arty ideas for Christian’s “playroom”) to costumes (double-breasted suits “weren’t sexy”).
She also overruled much of the cast and crew when it came to the film’s final line. When Anastasia Steele succumbs to Christian Grey’s spank frenzy at the novel’s climax, she utters “Stop” and flees. But Taylor-Johnson’s preference was for Anastasia to whimper “Red”, which is otherwise used as a ‘safe word’ between the couple.
“It ended on a really smart note and Erika wouldn’t allow it,” an insider told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s just a bummer.”
“Erika feels so protective over the initial novel, and the way fans are going to react to [the film],” producer DeLuca told Vanity Fair. “She’s the keeper of the flame, really, for her fans…. [But] a picture is worth a thousand words, so sometimes what works in a novel doesn’t work in a movie, and vice versa. There were some spirited debates.”
Meanwhile, Taylor-Johnson was eager to add elements of artistry to the film. But barriers seemed to be placed in front of her at every turn, particularly when it came to her artistic magnum opus: a lingering shot of erotic jellyfish.
“We went to a beautiful aquarium and there were these jellyfish. They’re so sexual, jellyfish, when you look at them in tanks – just the way they move, the fluidity,” she told The Guardian. “So there was a scene when we go into Anastasia’s world and her head, and we just had these jellyfish on the screen. It was beautiful, very impressionistic. Everyone went, ‘What the f— are those jellyfish doing there?’”
“I wasn’t happy to let them go. I could see they weren’t going to work for a wide audience, but I could also hear Sight & Sound magazine going, ‘The jellyfish were amazing’, and because I care about the Sight & Sound review, I was hanging on to them for dear life.”
“After a while,” she continued, “the studio realised ‘OK, we’ve hired a slightly anarchic artist. How are we going to rein her in a bit?’”
“It’s very difficult to come on as a director and to be handcuffed that way,” Marcel has said, “and not be able to fulfill your creative vision because there are certain restrictions on you.”
“I kept trying to remind myself that they hired me for a reason,” Taylor-Johnson recalled to Vanity Fair. “Some people said to me, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t quit.’ I was like, ‘Why would you think I’d quit?’ I never quit anything. Not without a fight.”
“[James and I] battled all the way through. She’d say the same. There were tough times and revelatory times. There were sparring contests. It was definitely not an easy process, but that doesn’t mean to say that it didn’t come out the right way.”
In the end, Taylor-Johnson has suggested the pair reached something of a compromise, even if her quotes have a slight tinge of exasperation to them. “I truly believe I’ve done absolutely the best job I could possibly do under so many circumstances, and that I could stand next to it and feel proud,” she told The Guardian.
Marcel has still not seen the film. “My heart really was broken by that process,” she told Bret Easton Ellis. “I don’t see it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that. I just don’t feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote.”
While stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan were contractually obligated to come back for two sequels, Taylor-Johnson and Marcel were only signed up for one film. They made it clear they were not interested in returning, not that James was flustered. As pre-production geared up on Fifty Shades Darker, it became increasingly clear that James herself wished to write the film’s screenplay.
I truly believe I’ve done absolutely the best job I could possibly do under so many circumstances, and that I could stand next to it and feel proud.
Sam Taylor-Johnson, director
“There’s an Erika who is fun, fancy-free, and enjoying her success a lot, and the Erika who is obsessively controlling the property,” a friend of James’s told Vanity Fair. “She truly believes that she has to control it because of the fans, because she’s the only one they trust.”
Universal, unwilling to allow a novelist with no screenwriting experience anchor their blossoming franchise, sought a compromise: they subsequently signed up screenwriter Niall Leonard to adapt the sequel. While his credits, among them BBC soaps Ballykissangel and Monarch of the Glen, don’t exactly scream “spank me with a riding crop”, Leonard’s pre-existing connection to the Fifty Shades phenomenon is decidedly intimate in nature: EL James is his wife.
Reactions to the upcoming sequel remain under tight lock and key, leaving a lingering mystery as to whether it will conjure the same surprisingly positive reaction that greeted its predecessor. But regardless of quality, the story of Fifty Shades of Grey’s hyper-controlled production indicates that as much as her novels describe Christian Grey as the tortured, spanking dominant, it’ll be EL James who eternally cracks the whip.
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Comment tom verhoeven (BDSMradio.EU)
Mmmm let me be one evening te slave from EL James 
