Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  “Just play it like you didn’t do it,” Richard told him. “Play it like you’re innocent.”

  “You mean I shouldn’t try to get into the psychology of it?” Jeff said.

  “You’re not evil,” Richard said. “You’re Jeff Bridges. You’re a sweet man. Play it like that.”

  “Don’t act?” Jeff smiled.

  “Don’t overact.” Richard smiled back.

  One of the early scenes shot was the lovemaking sequence between Glenn and Jeff. “She’s nervous about it,” Richard told me. “She’s not comfortable with the nudity.”

  I said, “She knows there won’t be any real nudity up on-screen.”

  Richard and I had agreed that the scene wouldn’t be explicit—that less was more. Their lovemaking would be shadowed by lighting and camera angles.

  “She’s not comfortable with being nude just for the shoot.”

  “I don’t blame her,” I said. “I wouldn’t be comfortable naked in front of a bunch of strangers and bright lights, either.”

  Richard closed the set and limited the number of people in the room to the essential camera and lighting people.

  Marty wanted to be in there.

  Glenn Close said absolutely not.

  “I’m the producer of the movie,” Marty said. “Nobody can tell me I can’t be there during a shoot.”

  “She’s not comfortable with you …” Richard began.

  “I don’t want to fuck her for Christ’s sake,” Marty raved. “Who’d want to fuck her? I’m not gonna get any jollies looking at her. I want to make sure there’s heat in the scene.”

  “That’s my job,” Richard said.

  “You need all the help you can get,” Marty said.

  The issue went all the way to the top: to Guy.

  Guy denied Marty’s demand.

  From that moment on, the Wild Boar started telling everyone at Columbia that Glenn Close looked awful and the movie was going to be a disaster. He openly criticized the dailies. He called Richard a “traffic cop.” And he kept undermining Glenn Close.

  Word of what Marty was saying got back to Glenn, of course, and now she began being critical of the dailies—more specifically, of how she looked …

  Marty was urging Guy to fire Richard. Glenn was urging Guy to fire the cinematographer. Richard was being critical of Glenn’s costume designer, Ann Roth, who was there because Glenn had chosen her.

  “I’m not firing anybody,” Guy said. “I think Glenn looks fine.”

  It is not an exaggeration to say that everybody was at everybody’s throat. Marty was angry at Richard and Glenn and Guy.

  Glenn was angry at Marty and the cinematographer and at Richard—for not firing the cinematographer.

  Guy and Richard were angry at the costume designer.

  And Marty and Glenn were very angry at me because all I was doing was backing Richard up.

  “You’re destroying your own movie, Bananas,” Marty railed. “All because you’re so in love with your boyfriend. You’re blind. Your boyfriend is destroying what you’ve written.”

  On a more sinister note, he said: “I thought maybe you’d learned your lesson with your first boyfriend [Craig Baumgarten]. Now you’re just as much in love with your second one. Didn’t you get the postcard I sent you in London?”

  In a courtroom scene one day, I saw Glenn Close get even with Marty Ransohoff. He had brought his daughter to the set. Marty was excited about having her there. He was in an unusually jovial mood and, the proud dad, introduced her to everyone.

  Glenn was doing a scene in which she paces across the courtroom, making a speech to the jury. Marty and his daughter were out of camera range, watching Glenn. Marty had his arm around his daughter.

  As Glenn paced across the room, she stopped dead suddenly and, on this packed set, pointed at Marty and his daughter. “I can’t do this with them in here!” She was spitting her words. “They are in my line of vision! Get them out of here!”

  Marty looked mortified. His daughter was frozen. He put his arm around her and, with their heads down as everyone stared, they left the set.

  Glenn watched them leave and turned to Richard with a satisfied smile.

  “Are we ready now?” she said.

  “The cunt!” Marty raged. “She does that to me with my daughter there! She’s gonna regret what she did till the day she dies!”

  He knew what he wanted to do in revenge. The love scene, he told me, was terrible. It would have to be reshot.

  “I’m gonna make that cunt go in there and take her clothes off,” Marty Ransohoff said, “and I’m gonna be standing there watching her fat white ass and I’m gonna be fucking it with my eyes. She’s gonna know it, too. She’s gonna know I’m standing there, fucking her with my eyes!”

  He launched a campaign. He showed everyone at Columbia the love scene. He made sure that as many people as possible at Columbia saw Glenn Close naked. He tried to convince everyone that the scene lacked “heat” and had to be reshot.

  Richard and I knew what he was doing and went to Guy.

  “Forget it,” Guy told Marty, “the scene will not be reshot.”

  When the shoot ended, Richard and I felt we had a good movie. Guy was just happy that the shoot was over.

  The Wild Boar said, “This was all your fault, Bananas. You and your three boyfriends, you put me into a gang bang.”

  Every movie mystery needs a McGuffin, a smoking gun, a clue that ties the killer inextricably to the crime.

  In Jagged Edge it was the old typewriter that Glenn Close finds in Jeff Bridges’s closet, an antique machine which as she types the phrase “he is innocent” inverts the letter T and that matches the notes the killer had sent earlier.

  The idea came from my own work process. I have always used a manual typewriter. I learned to type when I was twelve on one of my father’s discarded machines, using two fingers—the middle fingers of my right and left hands.

  “If Marty’s got fuck-you shoes,” Richard Marquand once said, “then Joe’s got fuck-you fingers.”

  But since I learned to type that way, I’ve been unable to use either electric typewriters or computers. I hit the keys so hard with the two fingers that I would destroy an electric typewriter or a computer in a week—besides bringing five other keys down for every one I intended to hit. Even the old manual machines I use are worn out at least once a year.

  Through the years, when manual typewriters became scarce, I collected old ones at flea markets and office sales. Almost every machine I used had some sort of imbalance with the letters—either an up or a down. The old Royal I used to write my script of Jagged Edge had just such a natural inversion and as I typed my script, I came up with the McGuffin.

  The McGuffin would be … the typewriter itself.

  Not only the typewriter itself, but the very same typewriter—the old Royal—I was using to write the script.

  I showed the old Royal to Richard at my home in Marin and he liked the look of it so much that when it came time to shoot the discovery of the McGuffin, he asked if they could use my machine itself for the scene.

  I loved the poetry of it: here was an old machine that beat out a story about an old machine that leads to a killer … and now this old machine itself would be up on-screen.

  “Please,” I said to Richard, “take care of this. I’ve written a lot of things on it and I’m very attached to it. It’s okay if it becomes a movie star, but I want it back to write other scripts with.”

  “What do you want it back for?” Guy said. “Reading a script on it is like spending a weekend with the Vietcong.”

  Richard understood the value and meaning of it. He assigned someone on the set to keep an eye on it at all times and when they finished the scene, he assigned someone to pack it carefully, swaddled in Styrofoam.

  He didn’t trust regular mail or Federal Express, so he sent my old Royal back by private express. A messenger took it to the airport in L.A. and a messenger waited for it in San Francisco.<
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  But the messenger in San Francisco was told it wasn’t on the plane, even though it had been put on the plane in L.A. At the last minute, he was told, it must have been rerouted somewhere.

  A search was conducted.

  “Nada,” as Robert Loggia said in Jagged Edge. “Zilch. Nothing.”

  Instigated by Columbia Pictures, an investigation was begun by United Airlines.

  Nada. Zilch. Nothing.

  My old Royal was gone. The typewriter which, as far as I was concerned, was a star in the movie, had been stolen.

  McElwaine, pondering his weekends with the Vietcong, said it was a benevolent act of God.

  Marty said, “It wasn’t a very good typewriter, and it wasn’t a very good McGuffin, either. Who the fuck cares?”

  As Richard and I watched the rough assembly, we felt the performances were superb. Glenn had just the right amount of vulnerability combined with strength, Jeff’s boyish charm made the ending impossible to predict, and Robert Loggia was a diamond in the rough: Marty’s call was right; Loggia almost stole the movie.

  Marty had distanced himself from the movie, even though Richard had agreed to hire one of his sons as part of the editing team.

  “It’s your movie, you and your boyfriends’,” Marty said to me. “I never did like a ménage.”

  We realized the movie would be controversial when, at an early screening, during the first scene, a woman got up in the dark and started to scream.

  “I’m not going to watch this exploitative piece of shit!” she yelled. “Let me out of here.”

  I followed her out to the lobby with Guy and some of the other Columbia executives. She was continuing her tirade.

  “Who’s the drunken sailor who wrote this piece of shit?”

  Guy thought that was funny and pointed to me.

  “He’s right there,” he said.

  The woman started coming for me and I ducked back into the darkened theater.

  · · ·

  We premiered the movie at the Toronto Film Festival. The two-thousand-seat theater sold out. Richard and I sat high up on the top step of the balcony and, at a certain moment near the climax, when a window unexpectedly shatters on-screen, we saw the audience practically levitate.

  At that moment Richard turned to me and said, “We’ve got a hit movie.”

  The next day festival goers picked Jagged Edge as the festival’s “audience favorite.”

  Our next stop was at the Mill Valley Film Festival on my home turf, in Marin County. Glenn had agreed to fly in—she had not yet seen the picture.

  I also flew my father in from Cleveland. I warned him before the screening: Glenn, we were hearing, was still very nervous about the picture’s ending. She was, she was telling Columbia, unsure about doing any publicity for it. She had a movie called Maxie scheduled to come out two weeks before Jagged Edge and, from what we were hearing, she was putting all of her efforts behind Maxie.

  “So,” I said to my father, “whatever you do, don’t say anything to her about ‘revenge’ or ‘vigilantes.’”

  Glenn sat next to me at the theater in Mill Valley. Sitting near her was Craig Baumgarten, whom Richard and I had invited to the festival. Still unable to find a job, Craig had been our ally from the beginning and we wanted him here now at the end.

  Richard and I said a few words to the audience, introduced Glenn and Craig, and then sat down to watch it with them. The response was identical to the one in Toronto. They literally jumped out of their seats, stayed through the final credits, and applauded for a full minute.

  When the applause ended, I turned to Glenn and asked, “What did you think?” Richard, a few seats away, was intensely watching our conversation.

  “I thought my ass was too big,” Glenn said.

  I saw Richard put his head in his hands and start to giggle.

  That’s all Glenn said. Period. Not a word about her performance, the others’ performances, or the movie itself.

  At dinner afterward, I introduced her to my father, who went through the elaborate Hungarian hand-kissing routine I had seen him perform too many times through the years.

  But Glenn was charmed. I heard the two of them talk about the years I spent in the refugee camps and then I heard my father, at his most charming, say: “You were wonderful. You were unbelievable. With your hair—your hair wet and then the gun …”

  I was agape at what I was hearing my father saying and I turned to him as he finished the thought: “You were an avenging angel!”

  “A what?” Glenn said. Her smile was frozen and her mouth was open.

  “Avenging angel!” my father repeated, very loudly this time so others could hear it.

  “Did you think so?” Glenn said, her smile gone.

  “Absolutely,” my father said.

  “Avenging angel,” Richard repeated, a smile on his face, “well I guess that pretty well says it, doesn’t it?”

  He started to laugh and reached for his glass of champagne.

  It was no surprise to us then that Glenn informed Columbia that due to her other movie, Maxie, she would do little publicity for Jagged Edge.

  We watched her do every big and piddling TV show as Maxie came out and had mixed feelings when it died a mean box office death its first weekend.

  We were concerned about what effect the death of one Glenn Close movie would have on another one opening right behind it.

  Marty’s opinion was not a surprise.

  “She sucks, that’s what it says. The public doesn’t want to see her. We’ll die the way Maxie died.”

  “A lot of people saw her on a lot of those shows,” Guy said. “Maybe they like her but didn’t like Maxie.”

  “If they like her they would have gone to see Maxie,” Marty replied.

  The weekend Jagged Edge opened, the numbers were flat—a little better than Maxie, but not much. The reviews, for the most part, were dismissive and negative. The New York Times took care of us in about seven paragraphs.

  And then, suddenly, it was like Flashdance all over again—the second weekend, the numbers jumped up, miraculously up—and Jagged Edge was the number one movie in America.

  The third weekend the numbers were up again. We stayed number one for four weeks and played for six months.

  Once again, I had an “audience movie,” a movie that defied the critics and spread solely on word of mouth. And it was the ending that Frank Price wanted to change so ferociously that seemed to startle people the most.

  Siskel and Ebert, reviewing the movie late, spun off an entirely different phenomenon. Once the ski mask came off the killer at the end, they said, it wasn’t clear to them who the killer really was—was it Jeff? Or was it actor Marshall Colt, who played the part of the red-herring tennis pro, Bobby Slade.

  The exhibitors began reporting that people were going back to see it a second or third time just to be sure that it was Jeff when the mask came off.

  Various lawyers’ groups began attacking the movie for “inaccuracy,” claiming that lawyers never had affairs with clients—a charge the public found absurd.

  And a knife shop in Saginaw, Michigan, sued us, claiming that we’d gotten the title of the movie from the name of their shop: the Jagged Edge.

  A very nervous Columbia lawyer asked me, “Have you ever been in Saginaw, Michigan?”

  I told him that, thankfully, I had not.

  “Did you ever buy a knife from a store called the Jagged Edge and use either a credit card or a check?”

  I told him that, thankfully, I had never bought anything from any shop in Saginaw, Michigan.

  While Richard and I reveled in the fact that we had a hit movie, Marty Ransohoff and Frank Price were unyielding.

  “We got lucky,” Marty was telling people, “the script overcame the acting and the direction.”

  And Frank was saying, “If they would have used my ending, they would have done thirty million dollars more. Their ending cost them thirty million dollars.”

  “You
’re a screenwriter,” my lawyer, Barry Hirsch, said to me, “but you’re a star.”

  I had had two big hit movies, now.

  “I’m a screenwriter,” I said, “screenwriters aren’t stars.”

  “You are,” he said. “You need a PR person.”

  “What for?”

  “To deal with the interviews you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing them,” I said, “what more is there to it?”

  “Plenty,” he said.

  He took me to lunch with Pat Kingsley, the most successful PR woman in town. She represented a lot of stars, including Jessica Lange and Julia Roberts, but she’d never represented any screenwriters.

  “What can you do for me that I’m not doing for myself?” I asked.

  “I can get you profiles in the New York Times and in the big magazines,” she said.

  “I’m doing those already.”

  “I can pick the writers,” she said.

  “You can pick the writers?”

  I was astounded. I was under the impression that editors picked writers to do stories. “How can you do that?”

  “I can pick a writer that I know will be friendly to you.”

  “How?”

  “They all want interviews with my other star clients. I can tell them they can get someone like Jessica or Julia if they interview you. They know that if they write a negative profile of you, they’ll never get Jessica or Julia.”

  “The magazines let you do that? Pick the writer?”

  “Sure. They want Julia or Jessica on their covers. Julia and Jessica sell magazines. The magazine editors want to be very nice to me.”

  “What if a writer lies to you and stabs me in the back?”

  “Impossible. He’ll never get interviews with any of my other clients. He won’t be able to make a living.”

  “I guess that’s why I see so many star profile puff pieces,” I said.

  She laughed and said, “I can do something else for you, too. In some cases I can get you the story before it gets to the editors. If you don’t like something in it, we can change it or take it out.”

  “You mean I can edit the guy’s story?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Officially he can say he sent it to me and I sent it to you just to make sure your quotes are accurate. It’s all done in the interest of journalistic accuracy.”