Never mind that most powerful list, but …
Godalmighty, a screenwriter scoring A-list pussy?
That drove some people in Hollywood nuts, beginning with writers (usually film reporters and critics) who hadn’t sold a screenplay yet and ending with directors—directors!—who weren’t as famous as I, who were paid less to direct the film than I’d been paid for the script, and who, judging from the trophies on their arms at the wrap parties, weren’t scoring the quality pussy that I was, either.
Can you imagine the hubris of this?
I was a screenwriter who didn’t want to be anything else. I didn’t want my own production company. I didn’t want my own office at a studio. I didn’t want my own parking space on the studio lot. Hell, I didn’t even want to go on the damn lot.
I didn’t want to be reached. I was busy. I was writing! And I didn’t want to hear anybody else’s ideas while I was writing because I was the writer and they weren’t. I didn’t want to hear the producer’s ideas, the studio exec’s ideas, the star’s ideas, the director’s ideas—especially not the director’s ideas because it was usually the director who had the lamest ideas.
I understood why. Because the director felt pressured to be creative even when there was nothing for him to do yet—when he wasn’t shooting yet. He had to do something and there was nothing to do except make “creative” suggestions to the writer.
I sent a screenplay I’d written to the director Brian DePalma, whose work I sometimes admired.
He called me the next day and said, “You’ve written a perfect script. I love it. It’s ready to go.”
I was so happy. “You’re going to direct it then?” I said.
He said, “No.”
I said, “But why not?”
He said, “It’s done. There’s nothing for me to do.”
I said, “You can cast it, shoot it, direct it, edit it.”
He said, “But there’s nothing for me to write.”
I said, “But you’re not a writer.”
He said, “I’m the director. It has to be my baby. I have to feel that it’s my baby. I have to make it mine. I can’t make it mine when it’s perfect.”
I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have written the perfect script.”
He said, “You probably shouldn’t have.”
I said, “What if you run through it and make it less perfect and then you direct it?”
He said, “I’d always remember how it used to be. It’s too late to do that. Its perfection would be in my head.”
I said, “Maybe I should have sent it to you in its rough draft.”
He said, “Yes, before it was so good.”
I said, “Before it was too good for you to direct.”
He said, “Yes, next time send me the rough draft.”
I didn’t even want to go on the set of my movies. Most screenwriters begged and pleaded and groveled to be allowed on a set, but I’d never wanted to be there—because I’d learned that if I was there, producers and directors and even the actors—Jesus, even the grips!—would approach me with their script ideas—which I absolutely, categorically did not want to hear.
Because of my wild-eyed and frenzied notion that I was the writer and that my ideas—which were already in the script—were better than theirs and that my words on the page should be left the fuck unchanged.
So that when a grip approached me on the Betrayed set in Canada (I had to be there because the script I had written was too long and had to be cut), approached me in the lobby of my hotel as I was going up to bed after a long unhappy day eliminating my own words, approached me with “an idea” for the last scene of the script, I did what any screenwriter in that situation should do but none ever do.
I picked the pissant up by his shirt and bounced him off the wall and hit him with a beautiful left hook to the liver.
I didn’t view the screenplay as a collaborative process. I viewed it as my creation. The rest of the movie was a collaboration between the director and the actors and the editor and some of the technicians.
I viewed myself as the composer. The director was the conductor. The others were part of the orchestra.
It is true that with this attitude I had almost killed a couple of directors.
Robert Harmon was the idiot who directed Nowhere to Run. He turned my screenplay inside out and I wrote him a long memo explaining his genetic failings to him. He read the memo and suffered a heart attack afterward. Such a young man, too, tsk-tsk!
And Arthur Hiller, a very old man, sat next to me in an editing room as I recut the movie he had shot and edited, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. He was suffering chest pains as I did my cut and finally got up and drove himself to his cardiologist.
A very tough old man, Hiller took his name off the movie, turning an Alan Smithee Film into a real Alan Smithee film, and tsk-tsked jovially when the critics and the public hated my cut.
One director I’d worked with had died just before the release of the movie he and I had made. But I hadn’t killed him.
I’d urged him to forget the movie we’d just made.
“It’s only a movie,” I said to him, “it’s not worth all this pain.”
But Richard Marquand didn’t believe me and he had died at forty-eight.
Or maybe I had killed him after all, maybe I had indeed really killed Richard, one of my best friends.
Because the script I had written for him for Hearts of Fire was, in my estimation (not in Richard’s), awful.
XIII
I realize there is a distinct possibility that the most famous moment from any of my films will be that split-second viewing of Sharon Stone’s itty-bitty little hairs in Basic Instinct.
More than a quarter century and at least fifteen movies … all bubbling down to a few touched-up pubic hairs!
Even more amusing is that that moment—the most famous moment of any of my films—wasn’t even in the script.
Paul Verhoeven decided that the scene would be more fun if Sharon didn’t wear any underwear that day.
In other words, the most famous moment of any of my films … was Paul Verhoeven’s.
I am a militant … and militantly insufferable screenwriter … who insists that the screenwriter is as important as the director … who insists that the director serves the screenwriter’s vision … and whose most famous and most memorable screen moment … was created by the director, Paul Verhoeven.
That scene in Basic Instinct … the one I didn’t write … the one Sharon was now claiming Paul tricked her into, was picked as one of the one hundred greatest moments in the last fifty years of film by Entertainment Weekly.
“When Stone’s femme fatale uncrossed her legs during an interrogation,” the magazine wrote, “she went where few actresses had gone before—straight to Hollywood’s A-list.”
Other greatest moments: Brando bellowing in Streetcar; Kelly dancing in Singing in the Rain; Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments; the shark attacking victims in Jaws.
I loved that: Sharon’s itty-bitty little hairs had the same impact upon the world as the parting of the Red Sea.
I also loved this image: Sharon’s itty-bitty little hairs attacking other itty-bitty little hairs.
· · ·
I have no doubt that writing Basic Instinct helped speed up the end of my marriage to Gerri Eszterhas.
Most young women, I found, had seen the movie. Some liked it; others disliked it … but almost all of them were fascinated by and on some sexual level drawn to the man who wrote it.
If I was a cheating husband before I wrote Basic, I became a kind of sexual stuntman after it was released in the theaters.
It all led, finally, to what Evans considered his ultimate compliment: “I saw the movie and thought, ‘Damnit, this cocksucker knows more about pussy than I do.’”
(I don’t. No one will ever know as much as Evans.)
My advice to screenwriters: Be careful what you write. Because w
hat you write … can come back and rewrite you!
It’s possible that in that post-Basic period, I was trying to live up to the definition of the Hungarian word Eszterhás: “a vagabond who sleeps on a different roof each night.”
XIV
I couldn’t deny that I was a “rogue elephant” of a screenwriter (the Los Angeles Times). I not only didn’t respect most directors but didn’t respect most screenwriters, either.
Which screenwriters were worthy of respect? William Goldman maybe? The Bill Goldman who wrote Butch and Sundance, sure, but that was a long time ago and now Bill Goldman was advising young screenwriters to take notes during a meeting with a producer and pretend to like the producer’s ideas—even if they were imbecilic—just to get the job. That sounded a whole lot to me like the madam telling the girls how to turn tricks at her bordello, so I told the London Times that Bill Goldman was “a hooker from Connecticut.” (And Bill, a proud New Yorker, called the Times angrily after the piece appeared and said, “Did Joe really say I was from Connecticut?”)
Or, how about Ron Bass, who rewrote Barry Morrow’s Rain Man and earned a secondhand ricocheting Oscar? Ron was one of my first attorneys, working for one of the most powerful showbiz law firms in town. (It didn’t hurt to still be on the firm’s stationery when Ron was seeking screenwriting jobs; one way of looking at it was that studios could curry favor with the law firm hoping to get a break during the next Cruise negotiation by hiring one of its lawyers to write a script.)
Ron was a good lawyer when he had represented me, doing whatever I asked, and he had the same lawyerly attitude working with a director on a script. “My function is to service directors,” Ron told the press, “to help them realize their vision.
“I’ve got to make the director’s vision my own in some way,” Ron said. “I’ve got to find the thing in the director’s vision that I’m not just willing to help him with, but that really excites me, so that I can get inspired along his line of thinking. … The director was so generous to listen to me. … Once I’m commissioned I have a vision that squares with my studio executive’s and my director’s—whomever I’m working with—and then I’m relaxed. I’m on this job. … The director is the author of the film. … I wasn’t smart enough to get it right away but Steven Spielberg was extremely patient with me. He talked with me until I started to realize this was not only something to get behind but was really a much better way than I’d be doing. … These are like the nicest guys, these directors. They’re not only great directors, they’re also really great people to work with.”
As I reread all of Ron’s words, I realized that these were really not lawyerly terms: “Servicing … the director’s vision … the director was so generous to listen to me … the director is the author of the film … Steven Spielberg was extremely patient with me … these are like the nicest guys, these directors.”
No, to me these were words neither lawyerly nor writerly, these words were theatrical moans.
Were screenwriters like Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society) or Michael Blake (Dances with Wolves) or Michael Tolkin (The Player) worthy of respect? Sure, but they wrote one great script but didn’t have lengthy careers.
What about Robert Towne and Alvin Sargent? Were they worthy of respect? Yes, back in the day … although Bob, even then, had talked his stories to his pals and agents instead of writing them … and now he was a “script doctor,” a “fixer,” a scene assassin hired by the bosses weeks before a film begins shooting to replace the original writer’s scenes and ideas with their own. Bob found it relatively easy to do that because, at heart, perhaps he didn’t feel like a writer anymore, although way back he had written two masterful scripts: Chinatown and Shampoo. And Alvin Sargent? Way, way, way back in the day, Alvin was something … but he wasn’t really Alvin Sargent anymore, he was Alvin Sargent Ziskin, the husband of a studio exec and/or producer, the same way that the director of my film Jade was Billy Friedkin Lansing. Alvin, like Billy, kept working.
What about Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane)? Well, yes sort of … Ben Hecht? Yes of course. Ben Hecht wrote over a hundred scripts, but he ground them out one after the other, sometimes working on three or four at a time, sometimes having three meetings a day pitching three different projects—which is something that Ron Bass did, too.
I worked on one script at a time and mostly I wrote spec scripts. That meant I didn’t have a deal when I started writing. I finished the script and then sent it to my agent to sell to the studios. It was a finished script by the time the studios got it.
I wrote mostly spec scripts for three reasons:
I didn’t have to play Willy Loman and try to pitch a studio head into giving me a chance to write a script.
I avoided the “development” process where all the studio execs had a chance to give me their ideas before I started writing.
If the studios bought a “finished” script, it was less likely that they would make changes in it because the script was ready to shoot. Or, at least, they would make fewer changes in it than otherwise.
If a director tried to change my script without my agreement—either by himself or with another screenwriter, I tried to stop him by hook or crook, by baseball bat or heart-attack-inducing memo.
If I couldn’t stop a director with a direct assault or by going over his head, I threatened to take my name off the movie.
With One Night Stand, I took my name off when the director Mike Figgis made my script unrecognizable to me. Took my name off after New Line had paid me $4 million for the script. (I was amazed that New Line allowed Figgis to make so many changes in the script after having paid so much money for it.)
I knew how much I galled some directors and studios. Every other screenwriter could take his name off every other movie in town and nobody cared. But if I did it, it would be on the front page of the trades and jump from there into the dailies and the magazines, which cannibalized the trades for Hollywood news.
And I knew that studio executives believed that bad publicity about a movie—any kind of bad publicity—would hurt a movie fatally. Bad publicity gave a movie “the clap.”
The studios knew the kind of wildlife they were going into business with whenever they signed a deal with me. It was right there in front of them in black and white—the name of the company I had set up for income tax purposes.
I was Barbarian, Ltd.
Naomi and I called our little boys our “barbarians.”
The reason New Line allowed Mike Figgis to completely rewrite a script the studio had paid a record amount of money for was explained to me years later, by a New Line executive:
“We loved your script when we got it. People in the office were memorizing lines and saying them to each other. When Figgis first said he was interested, we told him we wanted him to shoot the script. He agreed.
“Then Leaving Las Vegas, which Figgis had directed, came out. It was the unexpected smash of the year. Each year there’s one unexpected hit that gets a million dollars’ worth of publicity. That year it was Leaving Las Vegas. Oscars, Second Coming reviews. Figgis was suddenly the hottest director in town.
“Every other studio wanted to sign him up—to shoot the phone book if that’s what he wanted to do. And we had him with One Night Stand, your script. Figgis came to us and said he still wanted to do One Night Stand, but he wanted to rewrite it. And we still tried to defend your script. ‘A little rewrite, okay,’ we said to Figgis, ‘a polish, but not a major rewrite.’ He agreed.
“And then, just then, your picture Showgirls came out. The critical disaster of the year. You got the Sour Apple Award, you got several Razzies. And here, at this same time, was Figgis rewriting your new script—a script probably raunchier than Showgirls—Figgis the artiste of the hour with his Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Did you see him in his beret at the Golden Globes?
“He turned in his rewrite. It wasn’t just not a polish, it wasn’t just a major rewrite, it was a tidal wave of a rewrite. Everything in your
script had been washed away. Many of us hated his rewrite. But Figgis had us. What were we supposed to do? Tell Mike Figgis—think Cimino at the height of his glory, Figgis as the Orson Welles of the month—that we were going to junk his script to find another director to reverentially shoot a script written by the man who’d written Showgirls?
“We thought about the publicity that would have gotten. We would have looked like idiots. At that particular moment, with the furor of Showgirls’s failure, we didn’t even like stories which pointed out that we had paid $4 million to the author of Showgirls. Many of us felt that was really embarrassing, like—I don’t know—did you ever see Steve McQueen in that Ibsen play—An Enemy of the People?
“Some of us were actually hoping you’d make a big deal out of being rewritten by Figgis. We knew the kind of publicity together you and Figgis would get and we knew it would only help the movie—especially since the publicity would focus on how the sleaze-meister who wrote Showgirls was rewritten by a high-class Oscar nominee.
“It worked, too, for a while. We got exactly that kind of publicity when you announced that you were taking your name off the movie. And for the first couple days, the movie did well. Then, of course, the roof fell in and the movie tanked. Many of us weren’t surprised. We knew Figgis’s script stunk. Mike is a brilliant and brilliantly atmospheric, stylistic director with an awesome visual sense. But he isn’t a writer. He can’t write any more than Cimino can or probably Welles could.
“Even you have to admit it would have been impossible to tell Mike that at the height of his days of glory. As I said, every studio in town was offering him everything. He would have taken one of those other offers if we would have said anything to him about not liking his script.
“It helped this company’s prestige that he directed a movie for us when he could have directed a movie for anybody. In retrospect, from the corporate point of view, it helped us greatly that, at the moment he was the hottest thing in town, he did a movie for us—even if that movie later wound up being a critical and box office failure.”
XV
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