Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  I knew I could put my heart into this piece. I had been called a “greenhorn” and a “hunkie” and “trash” as I grew up on the streets of Cleveland. They were the same epithets hurled at those in the labor movement.

  It was time to write a treatment and send it to Marcia. I had no idea what a treatment was. I knew what an outline was, but a treatment was evidently not that, nor was it a screenplay.

  I wrote an eighty-page exegesis which bore the results of my research and also included some rudimentary notes in search of a story and characters.

  To my utter amazement, Marcia called to tell me she liked the alleged treatment very much and also to say that the studio already had a director interested in making the movie.

  “But there’s no script,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “he likes the idea.”

  “There not much of an idea there, either,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. There’s enough there to interest him. You’ll work out the rest of it together.”

  “Together?” I said. “He’s not writing it, I’m writing it. He’s directing it.”

  She laughed at me. “It’s part of directing,” she said.

  “What—writing?”

  “Yes.”

  “But has he written anything before?”

  “No,” she said, “he’s not a writer, he’s a director, why would he have written anything before?”

  Bob Rafelson was the director. I knew his work and had greatly admired one of his movies: Five Easy Pieces. I also knew that he was a very in-demand director, a star director, and I was flattered that he was interested in directing my script even though it wasn’t a script.

  “There’s a great movie in here somewhere,” Bob said when we met in L.A., “all we have to do is find it.”

  “How do we do that?” I asked.

  “You’ll find it, all I’m going to do is give you directions.”

  What we had to do, Bob said, was talk. We had an awful lot of talking to do, he said, and somewhere in all that talk we would find the words that would go into the script.

  “Fine,” I said, “but I’ll write the script, right?”

  “Of course you’ll write the script,” he said, “I don’t know anything about writing.”

  We made plans to do our talking in Aspen, where Bob had a home.

  “You better plan to stay awhile,” he said. “A couple weeks.”

  “A couple weeks?”

  “Well, we’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

  The morning of the day before I was to leave for Aspen Bob called, got my flight information, and said he’d meet me at the Aspen Airport.

  That afternoon, Marcia Nasatir called me and told me I wasn’t going to Aspen.

  I said, “Yes I am, Bob’s going to pick me up.”

  “No he isn’t,” she said.

  “Yes he is, I just spoke to him.”

  “He’s off the project,” she said.

  “No he’s not, he’s really into it, he’s got all kinds of ideas.”

  “We took him off the project,” she said.

  “You said he’d be perfect for this.”

  “We saw the rough cut of Stay Hungry.” It was Bob’s new movie.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s awful.”

  “You said he was one of the most talented directors in the business.”

  “He is,” she said, “but the movie’s awful.”

  “How can the movie be so awful if he’s so talented?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why we’re taking him off F.I.S.T.”

  She said the studio would start looking for a new director. Meanwhile, she advised me, I should “sit tight.”

  The next afternoon, my phone rang.

  “Where the hell are you?” Bob Rafelson said.

  I said, “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m at the Aspen Airport and you’re not. Your plane just got in and you aren’t on it. What the hell’s going on?”

  I didn’t know what to say. For a long moment, I said nothing.

  Bob kept saying: “Hello? Hello?”

  I said, “They told me not to go.”

  He said, “Who told you not to go?”

  “UA.”

  “UA?”

  “Yes.”

  “But—why?”

  I said nothing again. Bob said, “Hello? Are you there? Is something wrong with this connection?”

  “They took you off the project.”

  “UA took me off the project?”

  “Yup. That’s what Marcia told me.”

  “But why did UA take me off the project?” I could almost hear a snicker of disbelief in his voice.

  “Because of Stay Hungry.”

  “Stay Hungry? What does Stay Hungry have to do with this?”

  “They said it was awful.”

  “They did?”

  Bob Rafelson hung up shortly afterward and moments later Marcia Nasatir called, very angry.

  “What did you tell Bob Rafelson?” she asked.

  “I told him I wasn’t going. Why didn’t you tell him I wasn’t going?”

  “It was an oversight. Did you tell him I said Stay Hungry was awful?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why in the world would you tell him that?”

  “Because you told me it was awful.”

  “But I didn’t tell you to tell him that.”

  “He was at the airport. He wanted to know why I wasn’t there. What was I going to tell him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “anything else. Tell him anything else, but don’t tell him I said his movie was awful.”

  The phone didn’t ring for weeks after that. I didn’t know what was going on.

  When the phone finally did ring, Marcia sounded very happy. She kept calling me “honey” and “darling” and it sounded like I’d been forgiven for my Rafelson indiscretion. She was calling, she said, with great news. We not only had a director who was “just perfect,” but we also had a producer who was a “powerhouse.”

  Gene Corman was in his fifties—his brother Roger was a Hollywood legend for making low-budget movies directed by people who became stars: Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma and Jonathan Demme. Gene was very excited about producing the project and said he loved my treatment.

  “This movie is going to be like Zhivago,” he said.

  “Zhivago? Zhivago is a love story.”

  “Well, so is F.I.S.T.,” he said.

  “It is? It’s about the labor movement.”

  “Of course it is,” he said, “but before we’re done it’s going to be a love story, too. That’s what makes Zhivago great—it’s history with a love story in the middle of it.”

  “Well, I hadn’t really considered the love story aspect,” I said.

  “I know that,” he said, “but you’re just at the treatment stage. The love story usually comes out of the third or fourth draft.”

  Gene was “awed” by our new director: Karel Reisz, a Czech-born Englishman who had directed the English classic Morgan! and the critical rave Isadora, with Vanessa Redgrave. He had also just shot a movie called The Gambler with James Caan, which, Gene Corman said, “has hot word of mouth.”

  “You’ve got to talk Karel into doing this,” Gene said.

  “I thought he wanted to do it.”

  “No, he’s interested in doing it. He likes your treatment.”

  “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. If he likes your script, then he’ll commit to direct it.”

  “How can I talk him into doing it until I write the script?”

  “You can make him part of the process. You can make him feel like he’s writing it with you. Get him pregnant.”

  “He’s not going to write it with me.”

  “Of course he’s not, but make him feel like he is.”

  “How do I make him feel that he’s writing it with me?”

  “Listen to his ideas. Pu
t his ideas into the script. Tell him how well his ideas are working.”

  “What if I don’t like his ideas?”

  “Pretend that you do. He’s probably developing five other things. He probably won’t remember what his ideas were.”

  Karel Reisz was a very wired, chain-smoking man who seemed like he wasn’t even sure that he liked my “treatment.” He didn’t call it a treatment. He called it a “document.”

  “I think it’s a very interesting document,” he said, “with a great many interesting things in it.”

  We talked a lot about the labor movement during our meeting in L.A. and I recounted some of the more powerful anecdotes I’d picked up in the research.

  “It could be a tough, hard-hitting movie,” Karel said.

  “Not Zhivago.”

  “Zhivago?” he said. “My God no. I don’t see this as a love story, do you?”

  “God no,” I said. It was a great relief to me that at least we agreed about that.

  Karel was going home to England and we made plans for me to join him there so we could continue to talk about the movie that was possibly there in the “document.”

  The week before I was to leave, Marcia Nasatir called and told me that Karel Reisz was off the project. The UA executives had seen The Gambler and agreed that it was nearly “unwatchable.”

  “Will you tell him he’s off of F.I.S.T.?” I said to Marcia.

  She laughed. “I’ll tell him.”

  “Will you tell him today?”

  “I’ll tell him today.”

  “Do you promise, Marcia?”

  “I promise.”

  Gene Corman called to tell me I shouldn’t worry about Karel Reisz’s departure from the project. Gene was no longer “in awe.”

  “He wasn’t the right director for this anyway,” Gene said. “Morgan!’s very funny, but it’s certainly not an epic. F.I.S.T. is an epic. Isadora has some scale, but it doesn’t work as a love story. It ain’t Zhivago.”

  Three days later Karel Reisz called from London saying he was looking forward to my arrival and asking about my hotel reservations.

  “Have you talked to UA?” I asked.

  “Not since I left,” he said. “Why?”

  “I’m not coming,” I said.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re off the project, Karel,” I said.

  “Why am I off the project?” he asked.

  I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t about to tell him that the UA executives felt The Gambler was “unwatchable.”

  I said, “I don’t know, Karel. You’ll have to ask them.”

  Fourteen years later, on a set in Lethbridge, Canada, I met Karel Reisz’s wife of many years, Betsy Blair, a distinguished and gutsy woman who defied the blacklist. I asked about Karel’s health and mentioned how much I’d liked him during our F.I.S.T. discussions.

  “You know,” Betsy Blair said to me, “I remember you were supposed to come to London and then you didn’t. Karel still doesn’t know what happened to him on that project.”

  By then I had learned the truth about why Karel Reisz was suddenly gone from F.I.S.T. It had nothing to do with The Gambler being unwatchable. It had everything to do with a man named Norman Jewison and his former agent, the head of production at United Artists, Mike Medavoy.

  At the time I met him, Norman Jewison was forty-eight years old and one of the superstar directors in town. He’d had big-hit movies—The Cincinnati Kid, The Russians Are Coming, In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, Fiddler on the Roof—and he’d directed them without condescending to his audiences. A Jewison movie was accessible, it was about something, and was never pretentious.

  Medavoy had been his agent years ago and had somehow managed to get my “treatment” to him. When Norman finally read it and liked it, Mike Medavoy dumped Karel Reisz, poor Karel’s new movie became “unwatchable,” and Gene Corman was no longer “in awe.”

  The first thing Norman Jewison said to me, holding my seventy-some-page exegesis of F.I.S.T., was, “I don’t know what the fuck this is. It isn’t a treatment, it isn’t an outline, it sure as hell isn’t a screenplay. It’s neither fiction nor nonfiction. It’s some sort of bastard mutation.”

  I liked him personally immediately. There was an orneriness about him, a feistiness. He viewed himself as a combatant against the studios, but his combat was not only confrontational, more often it was charming. He mainly lived in Toronto, had another place on a lake in Ontario, but he also often stayed at his house in Malibu next to Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews on the beach.

  One early morning he was staring at the surf and when I came up behind him he fixed me with those elflike eyes and said, “Do you know why I live out here at the beach?” He turned back toward town and the eyes suddenly narrowed. “So I don’t have to look at those fuckers over there.”

  By “fuckers” he meant the world of the studios, the world he’d succeeded in but tried to keep at arm’s length, the world that he was convinced was a creative enemy but could occasionally be either beaten or cajoled into being a temporary ally.

  “I’ll tell you what they’re good for, kid,” he’d say. “They put up the money.”

  I was a kid. I’d come off Rolling Stone, watching Hunter shoot ether into his navel or hearing about Hunter spraying fire retardant on Jann, into this world that I didn’t understand and that I often found intimidating. As it turned out, Norman Jewison would become my mentor and, through the years, my internal guide. I often found myself thinking: Well, what would Norman think about this? How would Norman play this? Would Norman tell ’em to fuck off or would he put his killer grin on and take them out to lunch?

  I didn’t know that then, though. All I knew was that I liked the man, I liked his movies, and while there was a whole worldful of stuff I didn’t know about, I took pride in being a writer and intended to be one on this screenplay. A writer who would write a script out of his own heart and gut the way he wanted to write it. Norman, a shrewd judge of people, knew what he was dealing with quickly, of course.

  A kid with a chip on his shoulder looking at Hollywood warily while at the same time ready to be seduced by it.

  The first step was to take my bastard mutation exegesis of a treatment and talk it to death, which is what we proceeded to do.

  I marvel at Norman’s patience now. This was my script and no one was going to push me around, including Norman big cheese Jewison, so I said a lot of things about making a movie that didn’t sell out, that wasn’t Hollywood, that had true street smarts—using words that I hoped would push buttons on a man who was a big “commercial” director.

  He took it all in stride but he let me see him in action. We had an early meeting with Gene Corman. Also present was Norman’s producing partner, Pat Palmer, a man I subsequently learned was one of the best line producers (he did the actual on-set production work) in the business.

  Pat Palmer was thirty-eight. He had a goateed wooden face. He spoke rarely but when he did it was with laserlike precision. He had a shit detector that was foolproof. He and Norman had partnered on several movies together.

  The meeting began with Gene Corman’s empty, echo-chambered niceties. How happy he was that Norman was doing this, how deeply he respected Norman’s work, how he thought Norman was the ideal director to do this epic movie, how he hoped we’d all work together happily.

  “We’re not working together,” Norman said.

  Pat Palmer’s face was so wooden that I knew if you touched it, you’d get splinters.

  Gene Corman cleared his throat. It seemed to me that he wasn’t as nearly surprised by what Norman had just said as was I. He didn’t look Norman in the eye. His gaze wandered to the posters of his brother’s movies on the wall.

  “This is the way it’s going to work,” Norman said. “Pat and I will produce it. You’ll be executive producer. You don’t have any input into the script. I don’t want
you having any contact with Joe. I’ll shoot the movie, I’ll do the cut. I look forward to seeing you at the premiere.”

  Okay, I thought, here we go. You don’t treat a producer like this. You don’t tell him who he can and can’t have contact with. This guy was a Corman. It was a name known in this town.

  Gene’s eyes wandered into Norman’s now. Norman’s eyes were stone. I wasn’t even sure Palmer was breathing.

  “That’s fine with me,” Gene Corman said, “whatever you say, Norman.”

  The meeting ended with Gene Corman repeating the same echo-chambered niceties. Incredibly, now he seemed to mean the words praising Norman more than he had at the beginning of the meeting.

  As we got to his car in the parking lot, Norman turned to Pat Palmer.

  “Good meeting, huh, Pat?” Norman smiled.

  “Great meeting,” Palmer said.

  “He’s really a nice guy, Gene,” Norman said.

  Pat said, “I like him.”

  I said, “You fucked him.”

  Norman and Pat laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  “What do you mean, kid?” Norman said.

  “You fucked him, you cut his balls off, you stuck ’em in his mouth, and it made him smile.”

  They thought that was even funnier. They were nearly bending over laughing.

  “Dead men smile sometimes,” I said. “It’s rigor mortis.”

  On the way back to Norman’s house at the beach, he and Pat would turn to each other occasionally and say, “It’s rigor mortis,” and start to laugh again.

  We started talking about the story that would wrap itself around all of my research. The discussions would begin early in the morning and go all day. Norman had been asked to direct Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow’s best-seller, and he often took calls during the day about that project.

  “I thought you were doing F.I.S.T.,” I said to him.

  “I don’t have a script of F.I.S.T.,” he said. “I don’t have a script of Ragtime, either. I’ll do whichever script I like.”

  “You want me to compete with Ragtime? It’s an international best-seller,” I said, “written by one of the great writers of our time.”

  “What are you,” Norman asked, “chopped liver?”

  “I don’t think so.”