Read Online Metallica: This Monster Lives by Joe Berlinger, Greg Milner - Free Book Online

secret liaison between a married woman and an employee of her wealthy industrialist husband in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles. The affair began when the boy was seventeen. The woman stashed him in the attic, and that’s where he lived for the next seventeen years, unbeknownst to the woman’s husband. The boy would hide in his attic lair when the husband was home and come out to do chores and have sex with the woman when the man was at work. In 1932, the husband discovered the secret attic hideaway A fight ensued, and the “little fellow” shot and killed the husband. A huge, sensational trial ended in a hung jury because some jurors felt sympathy for the kept man, a virtual slave denied access to the outside world by the love-starved woman.
    At the time I was developing this movie, I, too, felt like a slave. With two young kids at home and a Westchester County mortgage, I wasn’t making the kind of money I thought I should be making, and I felt trapped running a business in which I saw no future. So I was really excited that Artisan was flying me out to talk about a feature film that I desperately wanted to make, not just for creative reasons but also to make a change in the direction of my career.
    It looked like Artisan loved my idea. Over two days, I had three meetings, each with a successively higher tier of executives, all patting me on the back and telling me how wonderful this film was going to be. It seemed surreal, almost too easy. Before I knew it, I was sitting down with Amir Malin and Bill Block, two of the three heads of Artisan. Boy they must really like my little noir thriller, I thought. I launched into my pitch for the fourth time in two days. Amir abruptly held up his hand, as if to say, “Hold your breath, kid.” Then he spoke: “Actually we’re not interested in your attic movie. We want you to make the sequel to The Blair Witch Project. ”
    Cybelle, the executive who brought me to L.A., turned and gave me a big smile. I felt a knot in my stomach. Little did I know it would stay there for 14 months.
    It turned out that my pitching sessions were just a pretense to see if I would be the right person to make a sequel to the highest-grossing film of 1999 and what was then the biggest independent film of all time. Blair Witch had come out of nowhere to take in an astounding $50 million in its first week alone. During that summer, Blair Witch even managed to steal some thunderfrom The Phantom Menace, the highly anticipated first episode in George Lucas’s new Star Wars trilogy The three previously unknown stars of Blair Witch became overnight sensations.
    As anybody with even a passing interest in popular culture knows, the film was promoted as the edited version of real footage shot by a trio of amateur documentary filmmakers who had disappeared into the woods near Burkettsville, Maryland, while researching a film about the legend of a local witch. According to the legend, the filmmakers were never found, but their footage, which documented their grisly demise, was salvaged and turned into a documentary about their final days.
    Cybelle noticed my stunned look. “We think you’d be perfect,” she said, really laying it on thick. “We really believe in you.” Amir added, “We really want this to be different. We’re a filmmaker’s studio, and we want to help you achieve your vision.” The attention was flattering, but I should have recognized that the duplicity of the pitch meeting was a sign of things to come. I was disappointed that my Little Fellow project would have to sit on a shelf for a while longer, but by the end of the meeting, I was convinced that they wanted me to make something with artistic merit. I figured their attitude was, Who better to make a fake documentary about murders in the woods than a guy famous for making a real documentary about murders in the woods? I didn’t realize it then, but they probably also thought an indie filmmaker would add a patina of indie cred