Brad Pitt Left A Studio Executive Furious Over One Fight Club Scene

It's worth remembering that David Fincher's 1999 film "Fight Club" was a commercial bomb upon its initial release. It made about $101 million at the global box office, but that wasn't enough to cover its $65 million budget and other expenses. It wasn't until Fincher's movie was released on home media that it found a larger following. "Fight Club" has since been closely studied at film schools and is now regarded as a provocative and important essay on the modern state of masculinity, as presented via a hyper-stylized MTV-esque montage. The movie's famous Tyler Durden character (Brad Pitt) is himself a satire of men's presumed desires, requiring violence and class revolution in order to feel anything (and hoping for the day the world ends and men can become hunter-gatherers in a post-apocalyptic landscape).

For those unfamiliar, "Fight Club," itself based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Pahalniuk, is about a nameless office wonk (Edward Norton) who suffers from insomnia and who can only find catharsis in weepy self-help groups. That changes when he meets Tyler, a mysterious stranger, on an airplane, and the two have an intense bonding experience when they later try out punching each other in a bar parking lot. They soon find that scads of other dissatisfied office wonks want to get in on their fights, and they form a Fight Club as a way to reawaken their flagging sense of masculinity. In time, however, Tyler slowly morphs into a legit cult leader, with his acolytes becoming bomb-building revolutionaries.

When Fincher was interviewed by Playboy Magazine in 2014, he was asked about the fineries and peculiarities of "Fight Club," along with his experiences working with Norton and Pitt. Notably, Fincher recalled a scene wherein Pitt, as Tyler, was asked to answer a door completely naked, something the execs behind "Fight Club" encouraged. (Pitt is a handsome man). Pitt, however, enraged the studios when he decided that Tyler should be nude ... except for a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.

In "Fight Club," Tyler begins having an affair with a character named Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), someone Norton's Narrator character meets at his self-help meetings. At one point, Marla calls the Narrator after having taken an overdose of chemicals, but it's Tyler who comes to her rescue. After that, they regularly begin having enthused, athletic sex that keeps the Narrator up at night. At one point, the Narrator knocks on their bedroom door, hoping to quiet them down, and Tyler answers in the buff, wearing a pair of rubber washing gloves. There is no full-frontal nudity in the scene, but the frame dips low enough for the audience to see that Pitt is wearing nothing below the waist.

As mentioned, the muckety-mucks at 20th Century Fox approved of a nude scene. But when Pitt decided, on set, to add the gloves, it kind of ruined the sexiness that the studio hoped for. As Fincher told it:

"When we did 'Fight Club,' the studio said, 'This is awesome; this is going to be great,' because we were going to have a scene with Brad opening the door naked. When it came time to shoot it, being Brad, he said, 'I should open the door and have a big yellow dishwasher scrub glove on.' I said, 'Perfect.' When the studio executive saw it, she said, 'You got him with his shirt off, and then you f***ed the whole thing up.' I was like: 'Excavate that line from 'Animal House': 'Hey, you f***ed up — you trusted us.”"

The scene stayed in the movie and is all the more memorable for the inclusion of the gloves. What sexual maneuvers are so involved they require scrub gloves? You'll have to let your imagination wander. Fincher noted that the only reason he was able to get away with that scene was because of Pitt's fame. Had it been any other star, the gloves would have come off. But people would have liked it less. No glove, no love.