He grinned. “I don’t think so, either, but we’ll see.”
What fascinated him at the core of my bastard mutant exegesis of a treatment was the shadow of Jimmy Hoffa, who, as far as I was concerned, wasn’t even in the damn bastard mutant exegesis of a treatment.
“This guy Kovak, your hero,” he said, “he’s Hoffa.”
“He’s not—I took him as far away from Hoffa as I could, considering that he heads a truckers’ union.”
“That’s one of the things that’s wrong with it—get Kovak closer to Hoffa.”
“I’m not writing a roman à clef.”
He held the treatment up. “So far I haven’t seen you writing anything except this mutation.”
When we were finished with our discussions, he said—“Remember this, kid. We’ve talked about a lot of things. You’re a writer, I’m not. Use what you think will help you and discard the rest. Write it with your heart, put yourself into it. I can’t ask you to do more.”
Then he said, “Call me when you’re done.”
A week later he called me.
“They’re really pushing me on Ragtime,” he said. “I’ve got a first draft that’s pretty good. Send me the pages you’ve got.”
“That wasn’t our deal,” I said. “I said I’d send you the script when it was done. I’m not going to send you pages and then listen to your suggestions on the pages as I’m writing. I’m writing this—you’re not.”
“Well, okay,” he said, “but they’re really pushing me to do Ragtime.”
I said, “Fine. Do Ragtime.”
He laughed. “I’ll make a deal with you. This script is going to be in two parts [we envisioned an intermission in the middle of the movie], send me the first part when you’re done.”
“What if you don’t like it?”
“Then I’ll do Ragtime.”
“What if I don’t send it to you?”
He laughed again.
“I’ll still do Ragtime.”
· · ·
About a month and a half later, I sent him the first half of the script. I was petrified. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. This wasn’t journalism, which I’d done all my life. This was making things up out of the air.
“Well, I read it,” he said when he called me.
“And?”
“And keep writing.”
“Did you hate it?”
“No.”
“Did you like it?”
“No.”
“Are you doing Ragtime?”
“No.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m waiting for the second half of it,” Norman said.
A month and a half later I sent him the rest of the script. The two halves of the first draft came to 387 pages. A page of script, I’d learned, equaled one minute of screen time. Three hundred eighty-seven minutes: a six-hour-and-some-minute movie.
Pat Palmer asked me to come down to L.A. and see Norman three days later. When I walked into his office, Norman was grinning like a loon. “Three hundred eighty-seven minutes,” he said. “Three hundred eighty-seven minutes!” He ruffled through the script. “A monologue that goes on for eight minutes.” He started to laugh, holding the script up—“It weighs like War and Peace, kid,” he said, “but it doesn’t read like it.”
I said, “What’s wrong with an eight-minute monologue?”
He said, “They’ll throw tomatoes at the screen, that’s what’s wrong.”
“Not if the words are good.”
Norman and Pat Palmer thought that was hilarious.
We started to go through the script page by page, scene by scene, over and over again—at his house in Malibu, at his house by the lake near Toronto. We argued incessantly. I was green at this and I knew it, but I wanted to save the script from the kind of slick theatricality that I hated in Hollywood movies.
Gene Corman, meanwhile, was desperate to know what was going on. Did Norman like the script? Was he going to direct it? Was he going to do Ragtime? Were Norman and I getting along? Gene didn’t know anything. He was out of the loop. Even UA wasn’t talking to him. I finally agreed to see him, Norman or no Norman. Gene had been friendly to me. I thought he at least deserved to know how things were progressing. He was nervous about Norman finding out about the meeting, though. He asked me if he could meet me on a street corner two blocks from Norman’s Malibu house and take me out to dinner.
I stood in the dark waiting for him. His Mercedes swooped by, I jumped in, and we went to eat. He dropped me off at the same spot afterward and begged me not to tell Norman that we’d met.
As Norman and I continued working on the script, we continued arguing. He could have said thank you very much and moved on to another project. He could have replaced me with other writers and kept working on F.I.S.T. I really have no explanation for why he didn’t do those things except for the patience and generosity of spirit that epitomizes the man to me now.
We just kept going over the script, cutting, rewriting, restructuring. When I look back on it now I realize that what I was getting was a graduate seminar in film from a man who had more than proven his ability to make commercially successful and award-winning movies.
Oh, he did now and again give me some not so subtle hints to be less intractable. After a particularly difficult day of back and forth, exasperated with me, he took me out sailing on the lake in Ontario. I’d never been sailing before. A wind kicked up and a storm came in. The damn boat was flopping around in the water—this thing kept swinging by my head on the boat, barely missing me. I was dry-mouthed, scared shitless.
Jewison looked at me with his killer grin: “A little dry-mouthed, are we?” he said. “This will teach you not to fuck with me.”
In Malibu once, in the middle of our Sturm und Drang, I found an envelope on the table in my guest bedroom. It was addressed to Norman Jewison from an accounting firm. It said “Personal and Confidential.” The thing was just lying there on the table. It hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t sealed. I stared at it for a while, then turned away. All I could hear was the lapping of the sea but this envelope was screaming at me. I finally gave up and opened it. It was a statement from Norman’s accountant of his net worth.
Norman Jewison was a very, very rich man.
The next morning, on his deck, we resumed the battle over the script. After I’d said something particularly obnoxious and probably insulting, he got up and stretched. He looked at the crashing surf for a while.
Without looking at me, he said, “Did you open it?”
I said, “What?”
“You know what.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do,” he said, “and if you’d just listen to me sometimes and stop being so goddamn pigheaded, it’s just possible that you’ll be worth that kind of money someday.”
I said nothing and, as we both looked at the crashing sea, we both started to laugh.
· · ·
We finally finished the script—it had taken us almost six months working together. I liked it. I knew it was as much his as it was mine, but I liked it.
“It’s a good script, kid,” he said. “I’m proud of you. You did good.”
I said, “Thank you. Does this mean you’re going to direct it?”
“Maybe.” He smiled.
“If,” Pat Palmer said, “we get the right budget and good casting.”
“What if you don’t?” I said to Norman.
“Well,” he said, not cracking a smile, “we had a lot of fun, didn’t we?”
I felt nauseated when he said that, but as I got older and wiser I understood that we’d had more fun than movie people usually do.
Norman sent the script to Robert De Niro. We waited. Weeks went by … a month went by … another month went by. De Niro didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. His agent said he hadn’t yet had a chance to read it.
At the same time, we ran into budget problems with United Ar
tists. Norman needed $14 million to make it the way we wanted to make it: a big, epic, three-hour-long movie with an intermission in the middle. UA would only go as high as $11 million. Norman asked to have the project in turnaround, making it possible for him to take it to any other financier. UA agreed.
Norman took it to every financier in town. Everybody passed (a classic Hollywood word: projects pass the way kidney stones and people do).
He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He went back to United Artists and begged and pleaded. He got nowhere. He got on a plane and flew to New York to meet with Arthur Krim, the corporate head of United Artists, a nearly mythical elderly man known for his taste and liberal political beliefs. And he talked Arthur Krim into making the movie … but only for the $11 million they had earlier agreed to.
It meant we had to cut the script. It meant that our three-hour movie would be down to two hours and some minutes. It meant that the intermission was gone. It was a very painful process.
“Is it worth truncating this script?” I asked him.
“We’re not truncating it,” he said, “we’re cutting it.”
“Is it worth cutting it radically just to get it made?”
“Would you rather it sit around in a drawer?” he asked. “That’s our only alternative. You’ve spent years on it. I’ve spent more than a year on it. But if you tell me that it’s better it sit in a drawer, we’ll stop right here.”
“No,” I said, after a moment’s thought, “I’m not telling you that.”
“I didn’t think you were.” He smiled.
Then he said, “I think you’ll have a long career in this town.”
· · ·
We cut forty pages out of the script and then, suddenly, Norman cast it. His agent was Stan Kamen at William Morris. Stan was also representing the hottest actor in Hollywood, an actor whose face was on the covers of Time and Newsweek, whose last movie, Rocky, had become an American icon: Sylvester Stallone. Through Stan, Norman persuaded Sylvester Stallone to star in F.I.S.T.
The day after Norman and Stan and Stallone met and agreed, Robert De Niro’s agent called to say that De Niro wanted to do the movie. It was too late. There was a verbal agreement with Stallone.
The day after De Niro’s agent called, Norman, Pat, and I were sitting at Norman’s patio in Malibu. All three of us were muted. Robert De Niro was the best actor in the world. Nobody really knew whether Stallone could act. We had the most publicized young star in the world and none of us were happy.
I went back home to Marin County and Norman started pre-production on F.I.S.T. Thanks to Stallone’s involvement, it was suddenly the most publicized movie being made in town. The whole world had wondered what he’d do to follow up Rocky.
I suddenly was being hustled by agents and producers who, in most cases, hadn’t even read my script, but were aware of the fact that I’d written a film starring Sylvester Stallone.
Gene Corman mailed me a clip from Army Archerd’s column in Daily Variety. Army, the dean of Hollywood columnists, devoted most of his column to the fact that Stallone was going to star in F.I.S.T. He talked a lot about Jewison, too, and even mentioned me.
He said that I “would stop playing for the Rolling Stones” and would now be doing screenplays full-time. That, of course, was news to me, but then so was the fact that I’d stopped singing with Mick and Keith. Corman had yellow-penned the parts of the column about me.
What he did not yellow-pen, but what came leaping out at me, was this line: “Stallone plans to immediately begin working on his rewrite of F.I.S.T. with director Jewison.”
What? WHAT?
I called Norman in a near lunatic state. He sounded busy, distracted, but blasé.
“Oh, that,” he said, “don’t worry about it.”
“But—but—is it true?”
“No, not really.”
“Not—really?”
“Stallone considers himself a writer, not just a star. He wrote Rocky. He’s got his ego in writing, too. He’s going to be on the cover of Writer’s Digest. It’s a part of his deal.”
“What—deal?”
“His acting deal. I had to agree to let him do a polish to get him to star in the picture. I’ll let him do a polish, so what—it’s not going to make any difference to the script.”
“But it’s my script.” I said. “I wrote it. I spent nearly three years on it, now he’s saying—”
“It doesn’t matter what he’s saying. Everybody in town knows it’s your script. It’s just star ego. Everybody in town knows what that’s about.”
I didn’t say anything and Norman knew I was seething.
“Aw, come on,” he said. “You’ll take it to the Writers Guild. You’ll get sole screenwriting credit, I promise you.”
I tried to settle down, but just when I thought I was handling it, I read an interview with Stallone in the Pacific Sun. The Pacific Sun was my hometown Marin County paper. And in the Pacific Sun, Stallone was quoted as saying: “I’ve written a new script called F.I.S.T.”
“Is it a sequel to Rocky?” the interviewer asked him.
“No, I know it sounds like a boxing movie,” Stallone told the Pacific Sun, “but it’s about labor unions.”
I had a routine doctor’s appointment and my doctor said, “Why did you tell me you’d written that movie—F.I.S.T.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I did write it.”
“I know who wrote it,” he said. “I read it in the paper.”
On the way out of his office, I was afraid he’d ask me to pay him in cash.
I seethed and seethed and just at my boiling point, I got a call from a writer named Saul Pett who wrote features for the Associated Press. Pett was interested in writing a nice cuddly human interest story about how it must feel for a novice screenwriter writing his first script to attract the hottest star in the world.
I said: “Sylvester Stallone is a thief.”
I said: “He is trying to steal my screenplay.”
I said: “He’s Apollo Creed. I’m Rocky Balboa here—I’m the refugee kid who was born in Csákánydoroszló, Hungary.”
I said: “I’ll fight him anyplace, anytime.”
I said: “Besides, I’ve been in more barroom brawls than he has. He fights like a sissy.”
Saul Pett wrote it all down and the story appeared on the front page of more than two hundred newspapers that Sunday.
My father read it in Cleveland and called me. “It’s okay if you threaten to fight him,” he said, “but I saw Rocky, too. Threaten to fight him, but don’t fight him.”
Norman called, laughing. He said “Sly”—as he was calling him now—was ballistic.
“You’ve really done it now, kid,” he said.
Norman said he was sorry, but for the sake of the production, he couldn’t allow me on the set of the movie.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this, Norman,” I said.
“I’m not doing this,” he said, “you did.”
On the set that I wasn’t allowed to visit, in Dubuque, Iowa, Norman Jewison was having his own problems with Sylvester Stallone.
The first problem was that some of the town fathers were getting very upset about the number of cheerleaders who were seen entering and leaving the star’s hotel suite. The second was more serious. In the script that he signed on to, the character that Stallone plays, Johnny Kovak, dies. He is shot to death by the forces who were once his allies. He is forced to go to the mob for help against the bankers and the companies … but the mob, twenty years later, feels forced to kill him.
It was Greek tragedy, the logical ending to a tragic story. Except …
Sylvester Stallone did not want to die.
He argued it with Norman over and over again: “The public will not accept me dying,” he said. “I’m Rocky. I’m a hero. It’s going to hurt the movie commercially and it’s going to hurt me. It turns the movie into a downer.”
Norman dug his heels in. “You have to die,” h
e told Sly. “We’re not making Rocky here, we’re making a tragedy about the labor movement. Without your death, there is no ending to the movie. It won’t hurt your career, it’ll help it, it’ll show your range.”
“I’m a star,” Stallone said.
“You’re an actor,” Norman said.
Stallone went to his agent and then he went to the studio. They told him he had read the script which he had agreed to do. He had signed a contract.
“I’m not doing it,” Stallone told Norman.
The day they were supposed to shoot the scene where Johnny Kovak is shotgunned to death and falls down the stairs, Sylvester Stallone said he couldn’t work. He had hurt his neck, he said.
Lawyers got into it now. Stallone threatened to walk off the movie. He threatened not to do any publicity for the movie. The studio threatened to sue. Norman threatened to sue. Two orthopedic specialists were flown from Beverly Hills to Dubuque to examine Sylvester Stallone’s neck. One was chosen by the studio, the other by Stallone. The studio’s specialist said there was nothing wrong with Stallone’s neck. Stallone’s specialist said he had sprained his neck muscles and couldn’t work.
Filming stopped for a day until Norman and Stallone and the agents and the studio people and the specialists and the insurance company and the completion bond people worked out a compromise.
Stallone would do the death scene once.
Just once—that was it.
If Norman somehow blew the scene, that would be it. We’d have to redo the ending of the movie.
So Norman shot the scene just once.
He shot it perfectly.
And Sylvester Stallone died the way he was supposed to.
Norman showed me the rough cut. I liked what I saw for the most part. Yes, I missed the forty pages we had cut out at the end and I kept wondering what De Niro would have been like in the part, but I liked the movie. I even liked Stallone in it most of the time.
The big change that Sly had made to the script involved the killing of his best friend and near-brother. In my script, Johnny Kovak ordered that his lifelong brother be killed. In the movie, the mob did the killing without his knowledge.
“There is no way I could get him to play it that way,” Norman said. “He didn’t want to even die, let alone look like he was orchestrating his best friend’s death. It’s a star thing.”
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