Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  The flat plains appealed to me, the blue sky overhead startling by its vastness. Most coastal Americans don’t like the Midwest, but I love it. But then I love farming.

  Each region of our country is distinct but the people are good. Didn’t matter if I was in Kansas or the sparse expanse of New Mexico, people are good.

  I’m so busy now I can’t drive across America or Canada like I used to do. About once a year I’d take a train or the car. It’s the old story. When you have the time you don’t have the money, and when you have the money you don’t have the time.

  Baby Jesus rode in my lap. Sometimes she’d sit on the pillow next to me so she could gaze out the window. When we finally dropped down through the San Bernadinos, the megalopolis spreading before us, I was amazed at how much we’ve done and how fast. In 1910 California’s population was 2,377,549. Los Angeles had 102,479 people.

  It was about to be bumped up in 1973 by one human and three cats.

  Californians like to think they’re worlds apart from Florida; they are not, at least not in southern California, because northern California is a different state. The architecture surviving from the turn of the century and the twenties is identical. Those small wooden bungalows with big awnings to ward off the harsh sun, the Spanish haciendas with red tile roofs, the nasty ranches from the fifties. In Los Angeles you have mountains behind you, whereas in Florida you have alligators, armadillos and cottonmouths. In California the cottonmouths were people.

  The sun bleaches out color quickly in both places, but California, semi-arid, luxuriates in crystal-cool nights.

  While I belong in the Blue Ridge Mountains, certainly no farther west than Lexington, Kentucky, I like southern California. I wish I could have seen it in the teens and the twenties when Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford rode through the orange grove on La Brea.

  Despite the grotesque development, the callous disregard for flora and fauna, remnants of the early beauty remain tucked away in canyons or in parts of Griffith Park.

  Aunt Mimi worried that the Big One would hit and I’d sink into the Pacific.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “the fish will reject it.”

  She thought I was making light of the San Andreas Fault, but people worry too much. If it hits, it hits. There are worse things that can happen to you than a natural disaster. Granted, the natural disaster might kill you, but in the long run the things people do to themselves are far more damaging than what nature dishes out.

  The film business is sui generis. You can be a big noise in real estate or newspapers or ball bearings, but it won’t prepare you for film or TV.

  Nor will all the film classes at all the schools in America, including my alma mater. New York University, one of the best, or USC or UCLA. Until your ass is on the line you’ll never feel the heat. You’re sitting on a stove.

  The first person I met, pure serendipity, was Ronnie Shedlo, a producer who had been Errol Flynn’s last secretary. He wore around his neck a gold button from one of Flynn’s jackets with a beautiful inscribed E emblazoned on it.

  He regaled me with tales of his boss and the studio days in Hollywood, which I quickly began thinking of as “Hollyweird.” He trooped me through 20th Century—Fox, Marion Rosenberg in tow, as they were old friends. He even drove me out to Flynn’s last house up in the hills.

  I loved Fox. I secured a pass thanks to Ronnie and cruised in with my Rolls-Royce. I drove an important car, therefore I had to be important.

  The soundstages do to me what Westminster Abbey does to tourists. I get chills in a soundstage, empty or working, and my mind can write and shoot a film in ten minutes. If only the body could keep up with the mind—or more accurately, if only the money men understood that to make money you take risks, in material and in people.

  They never will get it. I learned with lightning speed that everyone can say no in the film industry but fewer than five people have the balls to say yes.

  This town runs on fear. In the beginning, Mack Sennett, D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Mabel Normand, the Gish sisters—they were young. They made it up as they went along. There were no rules. Even the producers, the money men like Goldfish (later changed his name to Goldwyn), Lasky and Zanuck—they were young, too, for the most part. Their energy exploded out across the country. You can’t watch the silents without feeling that energy. Even the producers loved the process. They knew how to make movies. Today, once the camera is rolling most producers are lost, and I guarantee you the boys at the studio are more than lost. They couldn’t find their way around a shoot if you put a compass in the heel of their boot.

  Ronnie Shedlo told me, “They can all read but they can’t shoot. That means they chew up writers. They take it out on the writer. Cover your back.”

  It was blue-chip advice.

  The second person who helped me was Ernest Borgnine and his beautiful wife, Tova, whom I had met at a party. Mr. Borgnine hasn’t a snobbish bone in his body. I’d written three novels by that time, the last of which, Six of One, had made it onto best-seller lists, but I was hardly on anyone’s A-list. He could have cared less. I interested him and Tova. They’re thinking people.

  “The better prepared you are, the more flexible you can be,” he once said to me.

  I always thought that Borgnine was born to play Mussolini. I saw the cable movie about Mussolini with George C. Scott in the title role, and while Mr. Scott is a grand actor, Borgnine should have played Il Duce.

  But then again, Ernest Borgnine can play anything. He’s a real actor. So many others are only stars.

  While I was learning the ropes and sometimes hanging on them, I found a house on Outpost Drive thanks to Delphine Mann at Jon Douglas Realty Agency.

  The cats liked it. That sealed the deal. Better to be west in Los Angeles than east, but I liked the hills and Outpost felt more like an older California, the one I missed by virtue of birth.

  Since I had next to no furniture I pioneered the minimalist look. I really hate that look but when money’s tight you might as well make a virtue of necessity.

  Stairs in the back led to the top of the canyon, where I could sit and watch the blue Pacific. Baby Jesus walked with me and we’d sometimes sit there until the big fog bank rolled across the waters at about five in the afternoon. Frip and Cazenovia, too lazy for the climb, reposed in the gazebo below.

  The funny thing is, I don’t think I could afford that same house today, prices are so outrageous.

  The hunger in Los Angeles for product makes you feel like the main course at a vampire’s banquet. I knew I could write terrific screenplays but I had to learn to translate my ideas. I pitched and pitched until I could do it without wanting to throw up.

  At first I resisted the idea that a movie story should be reducible to one sentence. For instance, War and Peace could be pitched as “A man can’t understand women but learns to understand war in Russia of 1812.” How about Bambi? “Little fawn learns man is evil and grows up to protect his own.”

  You can probably come up with better ones than I can. Reducing a complex novel to one sentence shocks those of us who revere texts. In Hollywood they revere nothing—not even money, because they waste too much of it to really love it. If I ran a studio or a mini-major like Orion they’d be running in the black pretty damn fast because I know where the slush funds are flowing. I hate waste as much as I hate penny-pinching. You can make a profit and treat your people to some luxuries without being wasteful. When you wind up writing a contract for a star that requires you to pay for his or her twenty-person entourage, you’re wasteful and stupid. Stupid because if you do it for X, then Y has got to have it, too. Waste in capital letters, and honey, that’s not the half of it—but you didn’t pick up this book to find out how to run a studio efficiently and profitably.

  It all comes down to trust. If you don’t trust your talent, you can’t maximize your assets, and in film the assets are the talent. It’s so simple.

  Bac
k to the one-liner. A movie, unlike a novel, cannot be complex. A great novel can have a main story line and three to six subordinate story lines with characters developing and changing in each one.

  The absolute best you can manage in film—and this is pushing it—is one main story line and two subplots. You’re much better off with one main story line and one subplot.

  I finally did learn how to reduce the story. It’s harder to reduce the main character but you can do that too. Writing for film, then, is like an accordion. Once the bandleader nods at you, you can open the instrument.

  Where was my nod? I was ready, willing and able.

  It came from exactly where you would think it would: Roger Corman. If Academy Awards were presented for giving people a start in this business, one would go to this remarkable Oxford scholar. He makes cheap movies. They have strong stories, appealing unknown actors and first-time directors. The product does not look like a 1940s MGM film, with a focus so deep you fall into Arizona. But you watch them because of the story.

  Frances Kimbrough, his right-hand assistant, convinced him to take a chance on me. I was cheap—I worked for scale. We all did. I think even George Lucas, Jack Nicholson, and the list goes on and on, at one time worked for scale. In my case it was $12,000 minus 10 percent to Nancy Hardin, who was my film agent for five minutes. She left the Ziegfield Agency and I landed in the lap of Maggie Field, who was even younger than I was but took good care of me.

  Frances, the Mother Teresa of fledgling screenwriters, taught me the format. My first screenplay, Room to Move, was about a truck driver who wanted to be Fred Astaire. My second screenplay for Roger was Sleepless Nights, a spoof of horror films, which years later was taken off the shelf and made as a straight slasher movie, no humor, called Slumber Party Massacre. I wish they’d had the guts to do the send-up version because it was pretty funny, on the page anyway.

  Then I wanted to do a film set in a small southern town about four girls graduating from high school. Think of it as a female Diner, since the only way you can describe a movie not made is to describe one that has been made. It isn’t Diner, of course, but has the same kind of feel, only in my case lots more sass. After all, Mack Sennett is my favorite director.

  This project didn’t get off the ground. I still don’t know if Roger lost interest or if I wanted too much money.

  I figure I’ll make it one of these days because it’s a timeless story: coming of age.

  While I piloted muddy waters, Wendy Weil in New York remained my chief navigator. She offered a sane and classy counterpoint to the ruthless self-aggrandizement washing over me in California. Huge egos floated into meetings daily, egos unrelated to accomplishment. Worse, this was the time when middle-aged men started attending meetings in expensive workout clothes. They looked as though they were swaddled in parachute cloth. I resented the hell out of that. Business is business. Just because you’re in southern California doesn’t mean you don tennis warm-up clothes for a meeting. Putzes.

  Putz is the operative word. I found to my dismay that I would be in a room full of men, yet be the only person with balls. If that doesn’t kill your libido, nothing will. Much as I love women, I am not immune to the charms of the opposite sex—if they act like men.

  Then came the purses. I’d walk into a meeting and some twit with a skinny leather tie would be rummaging through his purse, a rectangular leather affair a bit like a messenger’s pouch from World War I.

  This has nothing to do with being straight or gay. In truth, the straight men acted nellier than the gay men. It was quite confusing to a country girl.

  Once I understood that no one knew what the hell they were doing, life became easier. I didn’t expect anyone to exhibit even the minimum of taste; I certainly didn’t expect them to read anything other than synopses (called coverage) of novels plus, of course, the trades. Variety and Hollywood Reporter. If somebody’s name appeared in George Christy’s column, they were in heaven.

  Few places in America are as vulgar as Los Angeles. Even Dallas shows more restraint. The more vulgar it was, the more I loved it. It truly was funny because so much energy was expended on being so tacky. I conjured images of my cotillion drill sergeants swooning with the vapors on Little Santa Monica Avenue. It’s not just people who are garnished; the architecture appears to have been designed by children: giant hot dogs for roadside eateries, pink elephants over a bar and so on.

  What’s funnier than the looming hot dogs or pink elephants is Rodeo Drive. There’s nothing more idiotic than this attempt at aristocracy. Because everything is offered to you at ten times over cost—and sometimes more—it’s supposed to be high-tone. Add to that the hilarity of people tiptoeing along the sidewalk as though they were in church. Money doesn’t talk, it tiptoes.

  The ultimate aphrodisiac: a suntanned bullshitter cruises up to Cartier in his rented (although we don’t know that) Corniche, top down. He double-parks, dashes in, dashes out, big Panther watch glistening on his wrist. The whole point of Rodeo Drive is not just that you spend money but that other people must see you spend money. Commerce is confused with power. The power to buy is only that. Real power is saying, “Three hundred thousand troops will be shipping out to Bosnia.” If they ship out, you have power.

  I’m not sure anyone in Hollywood understands this, which may explain why they stay in their enclave. Leave and the illusion of power is shattered. The movies aren’t just about an illusion on the screen, they’re about the illusions of the people who make them: people who couldn’t make it in Omaha.

  Now, the fact that most people in the film business are rejects of one sort or another provides the fluctuating energy. Los Angeles, continually washed over by America’s rejects, misfits and erratic geniuses, beats to a zigzag pulse. Whereas New York City, undergirded by old families as well as waves of immigrants from within the country and without, pulses with a much steadier energy.

  I’d like to think I’m one of those erratic geniuses, but I may be a misfit. In that case, it’s Miss Fit to you.

  No one really belongs. Even if you’ve made ten hit movies or written ten, you can be replaced, and in time, you can count on being bounced out. When you define yourself by your work, then you’re a product. For better or for worse, everyone is a product, everyone has a shelf life, and most relationships are about what you can do, not what you are. There’s freedom but there’s no stability. Los Angeles is the exact opposite of Japan.

  If you have strong internal values, you’ll survive. If not, you’ll disintegrate and no one will give a damn except the tabloids.

  While everyone in Hollywood gives lip service to celebrating individuality, they run with the pack. If Westerns make money, everyone makes a Western. Since no one has the balls to try something new or reinvent something old, they exhaust the genre. Those guys then get bumped off and a new set comes in and repeats the process. Nobody learns from film history.

  The pack mentality makes for interesting encounters. My first big meeting at 20th Century—Fox involved three producers in their thirties. They had offices on the lot but were not 20th employees. I listened as they discussed a thriller. Four small dishes, like soy sauce dishes, were filled with what I thought was salt. They drank their morning coffee and sniffed this salt like snuff. I was so dumb I didn’t realize they were jamming cocaine up their noses and had thoughtfully provided some for me. The thriller never materialized. None of these men were addicts but cocaine was the hip thing. The pack mentality was not invented by Los Angeles, but it’s so over the top there.

  One thing I picked up pronto was that there was an “in” drug crowd opposed to those who did not take drugs. Since I didn’t take drugs I was hired only once by the “in” crowd. It was a harrowing experience. These two young men, the producers, never shut up, they contradicted themselves constantly, they sweated profusely and their emotions flew around like a balloon losing air.

  I hope these boys have grown up. There are a lot of people in Hollywood who have cleaned up an
d have created better work because of it. But the drug crowd usually won’t hire someone who isn’t one of them. Anyone who thinks otherwise is smoking opium, forgive the pun. And anyone who thinks drugs still aren’t a part of the business isn’t looking. The people taking them have gotten better at hiding their problems.

  Another worrisome habit was sex as metaphor. No matter what meeting I went to, bragging rights became part of the exchange. I listened. They bragged. There I’d be, talking about the project, focused on the task, and the producer would say something like, “This scene is a dry hump, let’s get more juice in it.” This coming from the mouth of a chub who couldn’t hit a baseball if it was pitched underhand to him.

  Perhaps because these men assumed I was exclusively gay, they felt compelled to treat me like one of the boys. If so, no wonder the boys made such bad movies. When you’re that insensitive to the people around you, chances are you’re also insensitive to material. Or maybe they were serving notice about how potent they were. If so it failed. Men who yak about sex betray their fragility.

  The women I met were incredible, though. Sherry Lansing had just taken over 20th. She was good enough to see me and I was impressed by her directness, her ability to communicate clearly and her knowledge of the world she lived in. She was able to succeed without succumbing to the bullshit.

  Joan Tewkesbury wrote Nashville and other films, too. She is funny, warm and technically skilled as well as imaginative (the latter two rarely are twined), and I adored both her and her husband. Watching Joan watch a movie is almost better than watching the movie itself.

  Cruising up the coast to see polo matches helped me keep life in perspective. As long as I can be near a horse, I won’t mess up too badly.

  As I sat on the sidelines I had no idea that a few miles north, in Montecito, lived a woman who would be one of the great loves of my life and who would teach me not just about television but about myself.