By 1998, when An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn was released, I had become too big for my own britches. Here I was writing a ruthless satire of the industry itself, a savage piece which even used as many real names and situations as legally possible.
I had attracted Sly Stallone and Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Chan, among others, to my script—but the ads for the movie didn’t headline them—they headlined me: “FROM JOE ESZTERHAS” the poster said.
And then, in the making of this movie about power and control in Hollywood, I had persuaded the studio to dump the director’s cut and let me sit in his editing room working with his editor to do the final cut of the movie.
This wasn’t just any director who was getting stabbed in the back either: Arthur Hiller was the former president of the Directors Guild and the present president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! He was the symbol of the director as titan. He had led all directors; he was now leading the Academy. And, with the studio as my accomplice, I had stuck a shiv in his back. (At least he hadn’t suffered, like Bob Harmon, a real-life heart attack.)
The Directors Guild was so angry at me that they debated changing the name “Alan Smithee” to some other name as their designation for a movie where the director took his name off it. I immediately did a gleeful interview pointing out that a mere screenwriter had stolen “Alan Smithee” from the all-powerful Directors Guild.
Even Paddy Chayefsky—if I was Che, Paddy was Trotsky—hadn’t been able to accomplish that, although the posters for his movies didn’t just have his name on them—they had a picture of Paddy in the corner of the poster beating on his typewriter.
I was never able to pull that off, though I did put the actual manual typewriter I used up on the screen in Jagged Edge. I don’t think any other writer in Hollywood history was ever able to put his typewriter—his actual weapon—up on-screen.
Paddy Chayefsky began working in Hollywood in the fifties, a time when the dean of American screenwriters, Ben Hecht, was quoted as saying: “A screenwriter is a cross between a groundhog and a doormat. … All you have to do to make a screenwriter behave is gag him with thousand dollar bills.”
Paddy was at dinner once at a studio head’s house and he felt the hostess was condescending to him. When he was leaving, she air-kissed him on both cheeks and said good night and thank you.
Paddy air-kissed both of her cheeks and said, “Good night, thank you, and fuck you.”
Paddy called NBC critic Gene Shalit a “professional clown.”
Paddy insisted that he always be paid at least as much as the director of the movie and was often paid much more.
“The director is an assassin in terms of story,” Paddy Chayefsky said. “You have to stand ceaseless guard against the director’s ambushes.”
He also said:
“Collaboration in film is fine, as long as it’s geared to the realization of the script that I wrote.”
“Becoming a director diminishes a writer—it may give him more power and control, but he loses the writer’s perspective.”
“All your life you aim for a time when you’re doing what you do for no other reason than that you like it, and I love writing.”
“You spill your guts into a typewriter, which is why you can’t stand to see what you write destroyed or degraded into a bunch of claptrap.”
“A writer does not have to compromise his talents in Hollywood. Good films can be made there as well as anywhere else.”
“The worst kind of censorship is the kind that takes place in your own mind before you sit down to a typewriter.”
“Can you believe this? These cruds want rewrites.”
Paddy Chayefsky realized every screenwriter’s dream—not a word of his script could be changed. It was in his contract.
The studio hired the English director Ken Russell to direct one of Paddy’s scripts, Altered States. Russell was the classic auteur director.
Russell started changing things in Paddy’s script as he shot the movie. Paddy reminded the studio that by contract nothing could be changed. The studio reminded Russell.
Russell went berserk. “He started to beat the shit out of the script,” the producer of the movie said. “He would make real lousy remarks. Just anything to get Paddy upset. He was really looking to dislodge Paddy from any position of authority, that was obvious.”
Ken Russell said to Paddy: “Take your turkey sandwiches and your script and your Sanka and stuff it up your ass and get on the next fucking plane back to New York and let me get on with the fucking film.”
Still, no matter how ballistic he was, Ken Russell, the auteur director, couldn’t change one word of Paddy’s script. Not one word. By contract.
And he didn’t.
But something got lost in the movie, which was a critical and commercial disaster. Critics blamed not Russell nor the actors but, as one critic said, “the oratorical style” of Paddy’s dialogue.
Paddy was heartbroken. He had accomplished what no other screenwriter had ever accomplished. He had protected, by contract, the sanctity of his words—but for what?
“Man, I’m tired of fighting,” he wrote a friend. “I truly am.”
Within a year, he was dead.
His last words to his wife were “I tried, I really tried.”
These words will be on my tombstone: “I tried, I really tried.”
Some critic will say: “Even the words on Eszterhas’s tombstone aren’t original. For most of his career, he lived in penis envy of Paddy Chayefsky (and possibly William Goldman).”
I was discovered as a screenwriter by a studio executive named Marcia Nasatir who’d read a book I’d written and thought I had great potential as a screenwriter.
She was famous in town for writing this memo about a screenplay: “No hope … no hero … all madness and bullshit philosophy. Script is too wordy. Everything is punched home twice or even thrice.”
Marcia was writing about Paddy Chayefsky’s script Network, for which Paddy later won an Oscar.
I was pleased that she preferred me to my hero, Paddy Chayefsky.
XVI
One of my favorite American novelists never did work in Hollywood, though he wanted to.
“I have listened to writers,” Thomas Wolfe said, “who had a book published shudder with horror at the very mention of Hollywood—some of them have even asked me if I would ever listen to an offer from Hollywood—if I could possibly submit my artistic conscience to prostitution by allowing anything I’d write to be made into a motion picture in Hollywood. My answer to this has always been an enthusiastic and fervent yes. If Hollywood wants to prostitute me by buying one of my books for the movies, I am not only willing but eager for the seducers to make their first dastardly proposal. In fact, my position in the matter is very much that of the Belgian virgin the night the Germans took the town: ‘When do the atrocities begin?’”
When Thomas Wolfe arrived in Hollywood on a visit, Dorothy Parker threw a party for him where she told a roomful of people that Wolfe “was built on a heroic scale” and that there was no one else “built like him.”
Word about his “heroic build” got around quickly all over town and when Wolfe said all he wanted to do was to meet Jean Harlow, Harlow agreed. He met her on the MGM lot and watched her on the set for hours and at the end of the day Harlow, who wore fur-lined tin bras so her nipples wouldn’t show through, asked if she could drive the Writer Who Was Built Like No One Else home to his room at the Garden of Allah Hotel.
Everyone on the set noticed the next morning that Jean Harlow and Thomas Wolfe were dressed in the same clothes they had been wearing the night before, but Thomas Wolfe turned down all of MGM’s lucrative but dastardly screenwriting proposals and left town the same day.
When William Faulkner, “book-writin’ man,” first arrived in Hollywood to be a screenwriter, he went to the studio, took a good look around, and fled … to Death Valley, where he wandered the desert for a week on a monumental binge.
He
went back to the studio, worked in an office for ten hours a day, and stopped by the Hofbrau at night to listen to German music and drink beer. He also played miniature golf and drove down to Santa Monica to watch the surf.
A married man with his wife back home in Mississippi, he went to bed with the secretary at the studio he dictated his scripts to. He wrote poems about her.
He wrote that “her long girl’s body was sweet to fuck.”
He called her “my heart, my jasmine garden, my April and May cunt, my sweet-assed gal.”
Bill Faulkner, screenwriter, brought his wife, Estelle, and their six-year-old little girl to Hollywood. They rented a house in the Palisades. Estelle didn’t know that he’d been having an affair with a young secretary for years.
He wanted his secretary to meet Estelle so she could see that Estelle was no threat to his affection for her. The secretary met Estelle at a party and thought her “pale, sad, wasted—not an interesting person.”
“Billy,” Estelle said to the secretary, “is going to teach me to write.” Estelle told her that she was going to become a writer like Zelda Fitzgerald.
At the end of the evening, Estelle said to the secretary, “I hope that you and I will see a lot of each other and become good friends.”
From Harlow to Marilyn to Sharon Stone.
A literary tradition for which I did my bit. The pen is mightier than the director’s sword. It’s important to observe that Wolfe and Miller and I … what the hell, throw in Paddy and Kim Novak, too, although Novak really doesn’t belong in that company … it’s important to observe that Wolfe and Miller and Paddy and I … all used manual typewriters.
Screenwriters today don’t use manual typewriters anymore, they use laptops which they display to other screenwriters while comparing notes about writer’s block at the Rose Café in Venice or at the Farmers Market in L.A.
They don’t use manual typewriters and they expose their laptops to each other—one reason, I think, why this joke is paradigm for today’s screenwriters: “Did you hear about the Polish starlet who slept with the screenwriter to get the part?”
A final note about Marilyn which I consider relevant: Cleveland, my hometown, isn’t just a place of steel mills and boilermakers. It was home for many years to one of the greatest bar joints in America, the Theatrical Grill, run by a gangster/philosopher named Mushy Wexler.
One night Marilyn Monroe walked in. She was in town on a press tour. She wound up sitting with Mushy, who introduced her to that limp string of spaghetti, sitting by himself in the corner, Arthur Miller, in town for a lecture at the library.
The Theatrical was also loved by Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, who got fantastically drunk there the night the Cleveland Indians stopped his 56-game hitting streak at Municipal Stadium.
The point, obviously, is this: all roads lead not only to Hollywood, not only to sex, but to Cleveland.
Marilyn did not leave with Arthur Miller that night at the Theatrical, according to my Hungarian friend Shondor Birns, who was the resident Casanova of the Theatrical Grill in those days and who was an even bigger poobah racketeer than Mushy Wexler.
Shon was Cleveland’s numbers king before the arrival of Don King, who went on to become the infamous boxing manager and promoter. Shon spent a lot of time in jail but whenever he was out, he was back in his green Cadillac, wearing his Italian sharkskin suits, his fedora, and his sunglasses, back hustling the buxom wannabe gun molls at the Theatrical.
According to my friend Shondor Birns, he was there the night Marilyn Monroe had drinks with Mushy and another gambler named Fuzzy Lakis when that pointy-headed writer Arthur or Arnold something came over to the table at Mushy’s invitation.
But according to Shon, Arthur or Arnold or whatever was introduced and then left and it was he, Shon, who took Marilyn Monroe back to her suite at the Hollenden Hotel and spent the night with her.
According to Shon, Marilyn Monroe had skin so pearly white that at a certain moment in the evening he could see all of her veins right through her skin.
Shondor Birns swore to me that all this was true, swore to it till the day he died, his green Cadillac blown to smithereens all over West 25th Street, only a few blocks from where on Lorain Avenue I had grown up.
XVII
Bill Faulkner, screenwriter, woke up one morning at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood screaming: “Oh, Lordy! Oh, Jesus! They’re coming at me! Help me! Don’t let them! They’re coming at me! No! No!”
He had himself taken to a sanitarium and dried out.
Gérard Brach may be the most famous screenwriter in Europe, author of many of the films Roman Polanski has directed.
One day, while watching CNN in his flat in Paris, something happened to Gérard Brach. He became fixated on the news anchor he was watching.
While the news anchor was unarguably an attractive woman, Gérard Brach had been with many more attractive women. He had even been around Catherine Deneuve, one of the most beautiful women in the world, when she was filming one of his movies.
Gérard Brach watched his news anchor every hour of every day when she was on CNN. Because of the time difference between Paris and Atlanta, sometimes he got up in the middle of the night to watch her.
He stopped going out to make sure he didn’t miss her and the doctors told him he had a nervous disorder called agoraphobia—“fear of the marketplace,” fear of going out in public.
He wasn’t unhappy being home alone all the time. He wasn’t home alone. He was at home with his news anchor.
William Goldman, who got so angry at me after I called him “a hooker from Connecticut” in the London Times, has given screenwriters this advice:
“No matter how much shit you may have heard or read, movies are finally about one thing: THE NEXT JOB.”
“Many, maybe most in the Hollywood community, have a certain contempt for screenwriters. And they’re not necessarily wrong.”
And this is what Goldman did at a story meeting when he heard an idea from a producer which he knew was absurd: “I wanted to scream so loud: I wanted to choke the asshole—But I was so sweet. I took notes. I grunted and nodded. I smiled when it was conceivably possible.”
A couple years after I called him “a hooker from Connecticut,” I saw Bill Goldman at Spago. He was with a tableful of Castle Rock executives, obviously pitching something. I was with a gorgeous blonde.
His table was closer to the kitchen. Mine was by the window.
I told my waiter to send him a drink. I watched as the waiter went over. Bill Goldman looked up, glanced at me, shook his head, and looked away from me.
He surprised me. I was sure he’d take the drink.
There are those who claim the reason I’ve been critical of Bill Goldman for years is that I’m jealous of his Oscars and his critical success.
Oh … well … um … I’m not saying it’s completely impossible … that maybe … they’re not … entirely … wrong.
Before I got to Hollywood, when I was a very young newspaperman in Cleveland, I kept hearing from the older reporters about a legendary former reporter who’d wanted to be a Hollywood screenwriter.
He was a legendary drinker and gambler—legendary, too, because he’d been fired from the newspaper for stealing a wristwatch from a jewelry store where he’d gone to cover a holdup.
His name was Ernest Tidyman and when I started writing screenplays in Hollywood, he had just won the Academy Award for writing The French Connection.
Overwhelmed with big-money offers to write screenplays, he signed every deal offered him, then hired three young writers to write for him, all of them writing under the name “Ernest Tidyman.”
None of the scripts the young men wrote were very good, none of them were made into movies, and suddenly Ernest Tidyman, Oscar winner, wasn’t getting any offers anymore.
He died of a heart attack while on a flight to England to meet a director.
I never met him but I spoke after his death to a nephew who told me his uncle
had had an extensive collection of watches.
Many years after Ernest Tidyman’s death, the director of The French Connection, Billy Friedkin, told me that he and Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider had improvised the film and that Ernest Tidyman didn’t deserve his Oscar.
But I didn’t believe Billy. I figured Billy said that about all the screenwriters who wrote hit movies for him.
Since the movie I wrote for Billy, Jade, was a failure, I reckoned Billy wouldn’t say that about me: Billy would say he shot every word of my script.
John Monk Saunders, one of the first screenwriters to win an Academy Award, hanged himself.
XVIII
Are screenwriters ever … triumphant?
Well, yes, in our evil little ways.
Ben Hecht, the most successful screenwriter in Hollywood history, demanded $5,000 a week from Samuel Goldwyn. This was at a time when houses in Beverly Hills sold for $25,000. He demanded that $2,500 of his weekly payment be made every Monday and the rest every Wednesday.
Goldwyn, one of the most powerful studio bosses in Hollywood, agreed to Hecht’s demands.
Then Ben Hecht demanded that if Goldwyn spoke just one word to him the deal would be null and void and Hecht could keep all the money he’d been paid so far. Samuel Goldwyn agreed to that, too.
The weeks went by. Ben Hecht hadn’t turned in a page but he’d collected his weekly $5,000. Samuel Goldwyn called him and said, “Ben, this is strictly a social call.”
Ben Hecht said, “This cancels the deal,” took the $30,000 he’d been paid so far, and was gone.
Charles MacArthur was a celebrated playwright/screenwriter who believed that studio executives were some of the dumbest people he’d ever met and didn’t know anything at all about writing. He decided to prove it.
At the gas station one day, he started chatting with the young Englishman who was filling up his tank. The young man lamented that he was only making $40 a week and Charles MacArthur asked him if wanted to make $1,000 a week. The young man said, “Whoever I have to kill, I will happily do it.”
Charles MacArthur bought him a new tweed suit and a curved-stem pipe. He took him in to the studio head and introduced him as “Kenneth Woolcott, the well-known English novelist who is against doing any movie writing because he insists there’s no room for creative talent in the movies.”
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