Claim:
The audience booed at "Fight Club" during its premiere at the 1999 Venice Film Festival.
Rating:
True ( About this rating? )
In September 2024, thanks in part to the 25th anniversary of the film's release, trivia about David Fincher's 1999 film "Fight Club" became fodder for social media.
One claim, shared on Reddit , asserted that "when 'Fight Club' premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival, it got booed hard by the audience."
While Snopes does not have audience audio from the festival to verify that claim first hand, reports of audience boos are credible.
The claims originated directly from the film's stars, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, who have told essentially the same story of the movie's Venice Film Festival premiere several times to multiple people. The film, which polarized critics and failed financially, would go on to become a cult classic.
The claim stems in part from a March 2019 feature story on the history of "Fight Club" published in The Ringer by Brian Raftery. In the feature, an excerpt from his book about the films of 1999, Rafterty quotes Pitt and Norton discussing the premiere, and the reception it received by the festival audience, with Norton noting the boos:
The world premiere of Fight Club was held in early September at Italy's prestigious Venice Film Festival. It was the first indicator that not everyone found Mr. Fincher's Opus especially funny. "It gets to one of Helena's scandalous lines—'I haven't been f*cked like that since grade school!'—and literally the guy running the festival got up and left," recalled Pitt.
"Edward and I were still the only ones laughing. You could hear two idiots up in the balcony cackling through the whole thing." Adds Norton: "It got booed. It wasn't playing well at all. Brad turns and looks at me [and] says, 'That's the best movie I'm ever gonna be in.' He was so happy."
Pitt told a similar version of this story, later featured in various popular YouTube shorts , regarding the same moment in the film, albeit without directly mentioning booing, on a January 2020 episode of the podcast "WTF with Marc Maron":
I remember when we first aired at the Venice Film Festival … It was Edward and I. For some reason, we thought it'd be a good idea to smoke a joint beforehand. … We sat next to the guy who was head of the festival.
The movie starts out and it's dead silent, and I see that the festival head, I see him start to go [scrunches face and winces] with bits that I think are really funny. Edward and I are laughing out loud we're the, we're like the obnoxious Americans laughing at our own movie. And there's a particularly offensive joke from the Marla character: "I haven't been f*cked like that since grade school" …
It was dead silent, and we proceeded to howl even harder in it. We had a great experience. We thought we were onto something.
Brad Pitt at the 1999 Venice Film Festival
In a earlier episode of the same podcast from October 2019, Norton told Maron what is clearly the same story, reiterating the fact that some people booed:
I remember going to something with Brad and the gang, and I remember him giving me this funny look and going … "How do you think this is going to go?" And I said, "I think it's going to go very badly." And he said, "I do too. Let's get high." And he had a joint, which he always did then.
And I remember we went to this thing at some film festival and people booed it. It got booed. And some people walked out and we sat in the back and we watched it and there was all this negative feeling in the room.
And he turned to me in the dark and he goes, "that's the best movie I'm ever going to be in." And I said, "I think so too." And we were hugging each other, kind of weepy. We were really happy.
Because this story has been told consistently, by multiple people who were there, to multiple sources, and because it is consistent with the polarizing reception the film received at the Venice Film Festival, we rate the claim as true.
Sources:
"Episode 1066 - Edward Norton." WTF with Marc Maron Podcast, 28 Oct. 2019, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1066-edward-norton .
"Episode 1086 - Brad Pitt & Leonardo DiCaprio." WTF with Marc Maron Podcast, 6 Jan. 2020, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1086-brad-pitt-amp-leonardo-dicaprio .
"How Could Brad and Helena Do It?" Evening Standard, 10 Sept. 1999, p. 273. newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/article/evening-standard-how-could-brad-and-hele/155611917/ .
Lim, Dennis. "'Fight Club' Fight Goes On." The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2009. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/movies/homevideo/08lim.html .
Raftery, Brian. Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. Simon and Schuster, 2020.
---. "The First Rule of Making 'Fight Club': Talk About 'Fight Club.'" The Ringer, 26 Mar. 2019, https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/3/26/18281406/fight-club-davis-fincher-making-of-brad-pitt-edward-norton .
"When Brad Pitt and Edward Norton GOT HIGH before Fight Club's DISASTROUS Premiere in Venice." YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hkMqMZkza2Y . Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.
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