Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  He had just bought Lucian Truscott IV’s best-seller, Dress Gray, which Herb Ross had agreed to direct for Paramount. I knew Lucian and liked him and his work. He and I had spent an insane week together covering Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon Jump—he for the Village Voice and me for Rolling Stone. Richard Roth wanted me to adapt Lucian’s novel for the screen.

  “I’ve done one adaptation,” I told Richard. “It was a terrible experience. I don’t want to do another one.”

  Richard begged me to at least take a meeting with Herb Ross and Jeff Katzenberg at Paramount. To convince me, he flew up to San Francisco and staged an ornate private-dining-room dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, then beginning to be recognized as the tabernacle of fine dining in California. After about the seventh course and the third bottle of the finest California red, I agreed to take the meeting.

  I had never met Jeff, known even then as one of the hardest-working executives in town, and only knew Herb Ross by reputation. A former choreographer, he had directed The Owl and the Pussycat and The Sunshine Boys and was known as a studio favorite.

  Jeff talked about what a commercially viable project he thought this was and Herb, who had read my unproduced scripts, talked about how perfect he thought I was for this material. I hadn’t said a word and finally Jeff looked at me and said, “What do you think?”

  I said, “Listen, guys, I appreciate this, I really do, but the only experience I’ve had with an adaptation was a nightmare and there’s no way I’m going to do this, thank you very much.”

  They looked at each other and then looked at me again—this time with a certain blankness of expression.

  “Thank you,” I said, and got up.

  “Wait a minute,” Jeffrey said, “if you had no intention of doing this, why did you take the meeting?”

  “Because Richard asked me to,” I said, “even though he knew how I felt.”

  “That’s true,” Richard said. “I thought we’d talk him into it.”

  I started shaking hands on my way to the door and Jeffrey said: “This is it? The meeting’s over?”

  “It is,” I said.

  Herb Ross laughed. “Well,” he said, “I’ve never seen a writer end a meeting before.”

  A couple of months later, the road led back to Jeffrey when Michael Cimino was suddenly interested in directing my script Nark, which was under Jeffrey’s aegis at Paramount. The script had been on Paramount’s shelf. Although everyone there professed to like it, no one had made any moves to start getting it made.

  Cimino had gotten the script somehow and called me. He said he knew Paramount was not interested in making it, but he liked it and wanted to do it at another studio. I asked if he wanted to sit down and talk about the script and he said he didn’t want to do that unless Paramount gave it back to me first … for him to take elsewhere. Then, once I had it back from Paramount in turnaround, we’d sit down and talk.

  I had mixed feelings about Michael Cimino. I thought The Deer Hunter was a brilliant movie that captured a kind of ethnic feel on-screen better than any movie I’d ever seen. And I thought Heaven’s Gate was an abomination, as awful as The Deer Hunter was dazzling. I suspected that part of the problem with Heaven’s Gate was that Cimino himself had written it.

  I had been witness to one of the sorriest moments in film, a New York press and VIP screening of Heaven’s Gate, attended by Jeff Bridges and Kris Kristofferson and Cimino and many of Cimino’s friends. Michael was pacing around the lobby before it began looking like he hadn’t slept in weeks; the word was that he had been editing the movie only an hour ago. Twenty minutes into the showing, the audience began to catcall and hiss—this was a press and VIP screening, for God’s sake!

  When it was over, I saw Kris Kristofferson nearly hurl himself into a limo.

  The next morning, in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “the greatest disaster in the history of American film.”

  So I called Jeffrey Katzenberg after hearing from Cimino and asked to have Nark back in turnaround and he said, “Absolutely not.”

  “Jeffrey,” I said, “please. The script is on your shelf. You’re not making it, give me a chance to get it made somewhere else. You know you’ll get the script price back with interest. What can you lose?”

  “It’s our policy not to give anything back in turnaround,” Jeffrey said. “It’s company policy. That’s it. I’d like to help you, Joe, but I can’t.”

  I pleaded with him and in the course of the pleading blurted out the phrase “personal favor.”

  “A personal favor?” Jeffrey stopped me. “Between you and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well why didn’t you say so,” he said. “Of course I’ll give it to you as a personal favor.”

  “You will?” I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

  “Of course I will,” he said, “but you will owe me a personal favor. Will you promise that you’ll remember that?”

  “I will,” I said, and I had Nark back, free to set it up anywhere else with Cimino.

  Michael was ready to discuss the script now and we set a time at Shipp’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire Boulevard. When I walked in, he was there already, wearing sunglasses and making himself his personal toast on the toaster at the table.

  He made me a couple of pieces of toast, too, and then he said, “Let’s do the bottom line first. This is how it’s going to work. You give the script to me—I own it—I take it wherever I want, I do whatever I want to it and then I shoot it and you come to see it when it’s locked.”

  The toast I was chewing definitely needed more jelly.

  “You mean you just take it,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Michael Cimino said, “that’s the way I work.”

  “Tell me why I should do that,” I said. “I’ve got a script that I wrote that I like. Maybe it’ll get made someday and maybe it won’t. But it will be my script and the story I want to tell. So why should I just give it to you and forget about it?”

  “Is your script being made?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I can get it made. That’s why you should do it.”

  “What if I’d rather it remain unmade unless it’s made the way I wrote it and want it made.”

  “Then I’m not the man to make it,” he said.

  We had a two-ton chunk of ice now between us and ten minutes later, I was out of there as Cimino sat waiting for his huevos rancheros.

  I called Jeffrey and said, “I don’t want Nark back anymore. You hold on to it. I changed my mind.”

  “You can’t change your mind,” he said, “you’ve got it for twelve months. And you owe me a personal favor.”

  Now Nark was up on my own shelf instead of Paramount’s, but at least Michael Cimino wasn’t making it—and, the way I figured it, that was a big plus.

  Guy McElwaine, meanwhile, was leaving the agency business. He was going to head a studio, Rastar, the producer Ray Stark’s production company, which, considering Stark’s power in town, was like a mini-studio itself. It was not the first time Guy had headed a studio. Sometime in the early seventies, before I met him, he was the head of Warner Brothers.

  “Well that’s just great,” I said. “Now I don’t even have you anymore.”

  “You’ll always have me,” Guy said. “Just because I’m heading a studio doesn’t mean I can’t look over your deals.”

  At Rastar, the first thing he did was make a deal with me.

  It was to do a five-day polish on a script called Blue Thunder that John Badham was about to shoot with Roy Scheider, also one of Guy’s clients. Badham had directed Saturday Night Fever and every studio in town wanted to work with him. What the movie needed was an ending. In five days, I came up with one.

  Guy wanted to buy me a new Jaguar for my five days’ work, which, considering my contribution, was eminently fair.

  My new agent, Guy’s protégé Jim Wiatt, didn’t.

  “What’s our commission?” Jim Wiatt said, �
�a wheel?”

  Jane Fonda wanted to do a project that I loved about a young woman named Karen Silkwood who gave her life in a battle with a corporate behemoth more interested in profit than in the common good.

  I had known Jane since I was a young reporter in Cleveland and she was busted as she flew from Canada to Cleveland for carrying a joint. I had interviewed her in jail and covered the legal proceedings. I admired Jane’s politics and her balls-out approach.

  When she learned, shortly after that, that I had written a book about Kent State, she read the book and took it around with her, holding it up, on just about every talk show that she did.

  She asked me to fly down to L.A. to see her and, together, we went to see the studio people at MGM, where her production company was housed, to talk about Silkwood.

  We were both impassioned about the Silkwood story. We both felt there was a profoundly disturbing movie there that said volumes about corporate greed and insensitivity.

  The executive we spoke to said, “This is politics, isn’t it?”

  We both said no—it was a stirring human story about a courageous young woman who would not be intimidated.

  “It’s a lefty thing, though, isn’t it?” the executive said.

  “It’s not a lefty thing, it’s a human thing,” I said.

  “But it’s sort of like propaganda.”

  “No,” Jane said, “it’s not. We will dwell on the human aspects of it.”

  “I guarantee you there will be no preaching in this movie,” I said. “Whatever message there is will come out of the facts.”

  “Facts are rarely black and white, though,” the executive said.

  “They’re pretty black and white in this case,” I explained.

  “There’s no proof, though, right? Nobody went to jail or anything.”

  Jane said, “Why don’t you let the lawyers worry about the legal stuff instead of worrying about it now?”

  “I’m not worrying,” the executive said. “I’m just offering guidelines.” The executive laughed. “We’re just spitballing here, aren’t we?”

  We agreed that yes, indeed, that’s all we were doing here, spitballing.

  “I like it,” the executive said. “I’m not sure how commercial it is. It is sort of a downer. She dies at the end, but I like it. I’ll pass it on upstairs.”

  We thanked the executive and left. We knew we didn’t have a prayer.

  Jane Fonda said, “There are so many idiots in this town. I don’t know how I do it.”

  Silkwood was made years later from a brilliant script by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen.

  While Guy was gone on his studio adventures, I bounced back and forth between agencies like a berserk shuttlecock. Even when I was with an agent, I was allowing myself to be wooed by others.

  I had a breakfast scheduled with an agent once, got back to the hotel at five in the morning, realized I’d never make the breakfast, and called him—at five in the morning to break our eight o’clock date.

  “I’ve never had anyone call me at five in the morning to cancel before,” he said.

  I said, “I didn’t want to be rude,” hung up, and laughed.

  First I was with Jim Wiatt at ICM, a smart, down-to-earth man who liked to drive out to the desert in his Porsche occasionally, park it at Joshua Tree, and live among the cacti for a few days “to keep it all together.” Then I switched to Michael Ovitz’s rising CAA, where I was represented by Steve Roth, Richard Roth’s brother. Steve was a free spirit much drawn to long getaway weekends with people like Debra Winger. Then, when Steve left the agency business, I switched back to Jim Wiatt at ICM, drawing, for the first time, the ire of Michael Ovitz. He called the producer Don Simpson, with whom I was working at the time, and said, “Who is this fucking bum to do this to me?”

  Ovitz didn’t care at all about me personally at the time, he just didn’t want it to appear that Roth’s departure (Roth was one of the original CAA founders) would cause any of his clients to leave CAA.

  Then, after being with Wiatt again for a while, I switched back to Ovitz’s CAA to be represented by Rosalie Swedlin, a young, bright “literary” agent who had spent time in London and spoke with an English accent.

  The accent drove me nuts after a while … she hadn’t spent that much time in London … but what bothered me more was that she was a “literary” agent. I didn’t know what a “literary” agent was doing in Hollywood, but she did. She seemed to feel the main part of her job was to give me advice about the scripts I had written.

  “The third act needs cutting,” she’d say to me and I finally asked her if she had ever written anything in her life.

  She took umbrage at that.

  “Is that meant to be an insulting question?” she asked.

  I met a bunch of other agents from other agencies and was unimpressed by all of them, even though all of them said the same flattering smarmy things and were more than willing to fly up to San Francisco at the drop of a dime.

  I finally wrote Rosalie, whom I personally liked very much, a note explaining our dramaturgical incompatibility and the note brought Michael Ovitz directly into my life for the first time. He was rapidly becoming one of the most powerful people in town and CAA was beginning to be viewed as the New York Yankees of tinseltown.

  Michael had a new plan in mind. He would represent me himself, along with another CAA agent, Rand Holston. I knew that when he said he would represent me himself it meant that he would send me presents for Christmas and that Rand Holston would do the actual work.

  It was, I had been told, a common CAA ploy.

  Holston came up to Marin County and arranged a lunch in a fancy place. He was in his early thirties, an earnest robotic yuppie. Well, I thought, I’m not marrying the guy and maybe Guy McElwaine would become an agent again one of these days.

  · · ·

  During the same period, I wrote three screenplays without a contract. I’d loved the freedom of City Hall—no discussions, no meetings, no advice from anyone, just the pure bald pleasure of writing a story I believed in.

  The first was called Platinum. It was about a rock and roll singer who is thought to have died. His brother, a Cleveland cop, thinks his death is suspicious and winds up very much out of his element tracking his brother’s glitzy and highly connected friends. My agent sent the script out to over a hundred financing entities in town. Every one of them passed. The script, the universal opinion held, was “too dark.”

  The second was called Magic Man. It was a poignant, nostalgic piece about the relationship between a rock disc jockey in the early sixties and a sixteen-year-old refugee Hungarian kid very much patterned after me. It involved payola and was about loyalty and values. My agent sent the script out to the same financing entities who had passed on Platinum. They all passed again.

  The third script was called Checking Out and was about a man in his thirties who suddenly realizes that he is going to die. He becomes obsessed with death and the obsession changes everything in his life. It was a dark comedy.

  My agent sent the script out to the same financing entities who had passed on Platinum and Magic Man. They all passed once again—except for the producer Ned Tanen, the former head of Universal, now an independent producer, who had been ill, found the script very funny, and wanted to think about it.

  He thought about it and then he passed.

  “They all thought it was too dark,” my agent said.

  “It’s a dark comedy,” I said.

  “They thought it was too dark for a dark comedy.”

  “Well, I can’t lighten it any,” I said, “it’s about dying.”

  “Tough subject,” he said, “I get it.”

  The good news: my price was higher than ever before, I was making more money than ever before, agents and producers and studio heads were now wooing me more than ever before.

  The bad news: the only movie I’d had made had flopped. None of the scripts I’d written on contract had been made or looked like th
ey’d ever be made. Three spec scripts I’d written hadn’t sold. The only spec script I’d sold, City Hall, was now being turned into a Goldie Hawn vehicle by other writers. (Dolly Parton had passed.)

  I got a call from a young guy in Marin County. He was working behind the counter at the Book Depot in the middle of town, serving coffee and selling books. His name was Ben Myron. He had formerly painted addresses on curbs without the homeowners’ permission and had then presented them with a bill for his “services.” Now he wanted to be a producer.

  Ben Myron asked if I had anything “in the drawer” that he could try to sell in Hollywood.

  “Do you know anything about Hollywood?” I asked him.

  “I grew up in L.A.”

  “Do you know anything about the movie business?”

  “Truthfully,” he said, “no.”

  I let him have Checking Out. It was the one I liked the most.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ll figure it out. Should I pay you any money for the option?”

  “Do you have any money?” I asked.

  “I don’t, but my girlfriend has some,” he said.

  “Forget about it,” I said. “Call me when you sell it.”

  Guy called to see how I was doing. He always said, “What trouble are you getting into?”

  I told him that the new producer of Checking Out was working behind the counter at the Book Depot in Mill Valley and had once painted addresses on curbs.

  “Perfect,” he said, “just perfect. Do you know what you’re doing? You’re establishing a real reputation for writing scripts that no one wants.”

  He went on and on. The spec scripts, he said, were going to destroy whatever career I had.

  “I love writing them,” I said, “I don’t have to hustle anybody, I don’t have to be nice to people I can’t stand—”

  “From what I hear you’re not nice to people you can’t stand anyway,” he said.