Best. Movie. Year. Ever. PROLOGUE "LOSING ALL HOPE WAS FREEDOM." DECEMBER 31, 1999 It was New Year''s Eve, and on a private beach resort in Mexico, a handful of couples had gathered to celebrate the end of the century. Brad Pitt and his then girlfriend, Jennifer Aniston, were there. So were director David Fincher and his partner, the film producer Ceán Chaffin.
For the last few months, they''d watched the world react with fury to Fight Club, Pitt and Fincher''s bruising new tale of chaos-loving alpha-maniacs. The movie was an assaultive big-budget takedown of late-nineties values with a catchphrase so recognizable--"The first rule of fight club is: You do not talk about fight club"--that Aniston had spoofed it while hosting Saturday Night Live that fall. But although people had talked about Fight Club, often angrily, few moviegoers had actually shown up to watch it. The film had barely earned back half its budget at the box office, making it among the biggest commercial failures of the two men''s careers. By the time the group arrived in Mexico, says Fight Club producer Chaffin, "we were still licking our wounds." Joining them on the getaway was Marc Gurvitz, a high-powered manager who worked with Aniston and who''d come to the island with his then fiancée. He remembers the early moments of their trip as being largely relaxed--so much so that he felt comfortable enough to prank his companions, putting fake snakes and scorpions in their beds. But Gurvitz was also a bit nervous about the decade coming to a close.
Like millions of others, he''d heard the warnings: about how at midnight that night--just as the twenty-first century was grabbing a rave whistle and starting its hundred-year party--a global cataclysm would supposedly reboot civilization. Skylines would dim. Bank accounts would flatline. Things would break down. It was a save-the-date disaster with a strict deadline and a catchy name: Y2K, short for "Year 2000." "Everyone was afraid that the world was going to end," says Gurvitz. "It was pretty scary." Even Fight Club had picked up on that premillennial tension, its final scene consisting of a series of credit card company headquarters crumbling to the ground--a chance for society to start anew.
As Pitt later recalled, the mood in 1999 was one of uncertainty: "What was going to happen?" the actor asked. "People weren''t gonna go on trips, even, because they were afraid." Pitt and his fellow vacationers had nonetheless braved it to their island resort, where they''d be hours away from the nearest city. No matter what went down when the clock struck twelve, they''d largely be on their own. As the moment drew closer, Gurvitz and the others assembled for margaritas near the beach. Just as the new year was about to arrive, though, the group was thrown into darkness. "It was three . two .
one . and then all the power in the entire place went out," says Fincher. "There was nervous laughter, like, ''Y2K, ha-ha-ha!''?" The group decided to relocate to a nearby bonfire. "All of a sudden," remembers Gurvitz, "two jeeps in the distance come out of the dark with their lights flashing." It was a team of local federales, many traveling in a large black vehicle with the word policía on it. "There were three nineteen-year-old kids with M16s in the back," says Fincher. "They came over the hill, pulled in, and got out and went running into the main lobby." Eventually the hotel concierge emerged, saying there was a problem with the plane the group had chartered to the island, and that someone needed to come with the police.
The task would fall on Gurvitz, who was confused--in the dark in every way. Before he knew it, Gurvitz''s hands were being pulled behind his Hawaiian-print shirt and placed in cuffs. The federales were speaking to him in Spanish, which Gurvitz couldn''t understand. But he realized they were taking him to jail. "Pitt walks up to the guys," Gurvitz recalls, "and gets in their face: ''Hey! You can''t come into a resort and take an American citizen!''?" Unimpressed, the officials threw Pitt to the ground. "Brad''s saying, ''This is outrageous! You''ll hear from my attorneys!''?" says Fincher, who volunteered to go with Gurvitz. As they pulled away from the beach, Gurvitz looked back at his party, unsure of what would happen next. "His fiancée''s freaking out, in tears," Pitt said.
"They''re driving off with him into the pitch blackness, and he''s surrounded by guys with [guns]." Gurvitz watched as his friends grew smaller in the distance. Just as he''d feared, something had gone wrong. Something had broken down. Oh my fucking God, he thought. * * * In the final months of the twentieth century, millions of Americans believed we were headed toward a reckoning--so much so, they spent what was left of the nineties gearing up for a meltdown. Some converted their homes into DIY fallout shelters, stocking them with canned chow mein, toilet paper, or three-hundred-gallon waterbeds (which they could pop open and drink from in the event of a drought). Others prepared by buying guns--lots of guns.
Less than two weeks before the arrival of the new millennium, the FBI received 67,000 gun sale background check requests in a single day, setting a new record. Many of those applicants had no doubt become obsessed with the "millennium bug"--a data hiccup that would supposedly cause thousands of computers to simultaneously collapse, unable to recognize the changeover from 12/31/99 to 01/01/00. The US government, along with several corporations, had spent an estimated $100 billion combined to upgrade their machines in time. In Silicon Valley, Y2K worries were so pitched that Apple head Steve Jobs commissioned a Super Bowl ad featuring HAL, the creepily sentient computer system from Stanley Kubrick''s 1968 sci-fi trip 2001: A Space Odyssey. The commercial finds HAL speaking from the future, where he apologizes for the chaos caused by the changeover. "When the new millennium arrived," HAL says coldly, "we had no choice but to cause a global economic destruction." (The only computers to avoid the meltdown, according to HAL, were made by Apple.) The famously private Kubrick would later call Jobs, telling him how much he had enjoyed the spot.
Yet some in the tech industry didn''t find the prospect of Y2K funny. There was a real fear that, no matter what we did to prepare, Prince''s famed pop prophecy was bound to come true: "Two-thousand-zero-zero/party over/oops/out of time." "I''ve seen how fragile so many software systems are--how one bug can bring them down," a longtime programmer told Wired. He''d retreated into the California desert and built a solar-powered, fenced-off New Year''s Eve hideaway (he also bought his very first gun, just in case). Others saw Y2K as a potential biblical event: in Jerry Falwell''s home video Y2K: A Christian''s Survival Guide to the Millennium Bug, available for just under $30 a pop, the smug televangelist--last seen warning his flock about the gay agenda of the Teletubbies--cautioned that Y2K could be "God''s instrument to shake this nation, to humble this nation" (he also advised loading up on ammo, just in case). Whether they were freaked out by technology or theology, many of the end-timers shared a common tut-tutting anxiety: namely, that we''d advanced a bit too much during the twentieth century, sacrificing our humanity in favor of ease and desire. And now retribution was due, whether it took the form of an act of God or a downloadable rapture. As one mother of three sighed in the December 31, 1999, edition of the New York Times, "It just seems like the end is getting closer.
" If the collapse of civilization was upon us, the timing couldn''t have been worse. In 1999, the United States was in the midst of an unexpected comeback. The decade had begun with a recession, pivoted to a foreign war, and nearly culminated in a president''s removal from office. Now, across the country, people were indulging in a wave of contagious optimism. You could see that giddiness on Wall Street, where, throughout 1999, the Dow Jones, the NASDAQ, and the New York Stock Exchange had all experienced hypercharged highs. You could sense it on the radio, where the gloom raiders who''d soundtracked so much of the decade had been replaced by teen cutie pies and loca-living pop stars. You could even experience it via the digital dopamine rush of the internet, which was still in utero--and still populated by weirdos--but which had the potential to make everyone smarter or richer than they''d ever imagined. In just a few years, Jeff Bezos had transformed Amazon.
com from an online bookseller to an all-encompassing twenty-four-hour shopping mall (Bezos''s awkwardly smiling face would be stuffed into a cardboard box for Time''s 1999 Person of the Year cover). And before the year was over, the recently launched movies-by-mail company Netflix would raise $30 million in funding, and introduce its first monthly DVD-rental plan. But the surest w.