The script was read by more than a dozen people who’d read my work in the past and whom I respect, both industry and media people. Without exception, they told me that it was the best script I had ever written. Some of them said it was the best script they had ever read.
Since Paul Verhoeven and I had worked on Basic and Showgirls together, I showed the script to Paul. Paul, of course, is one of the world’s premier directors, a man whose movies have grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office, a man who, I thought, would be ideally suited to direct Gangland. Paul, a tough judge of material and at times in the past a sharp critic of my work, told me that he thought the script was “excellent” and the best script I had written. Then, to my great joy, he told me he would be “very interested” in directing the movie.
Days after I’d turned in the script to Columbia, there was no response from the studio. A week later, two weeks later, three weeks later … there was still no response. Nobody even bothered to call me. It was like I had dropped the script into a vacuum. Finally, about a month after I delivered the script, my agent was informed that the studio had “notes.” Neither my agent nor I heard what the studio thought of the script—we just heard that the studio had “notes.”
I informed Columbia, through my agent, that Paul Verhoeven loved the script and was interested in directing it. I was flabbergasted to hear that, except for a cursory phone call to Paul’s agent checking his availability, no effort was made to tie him into the project. No one met with Paul. No one called Paul. I didn’t understand how a studio allegedly in the business of making money could treat a man of Paul’s stature and track record this way. I began to wonder, frankly, if anybody was at home at Columbia—if the varied press accounts that I had read about the studio’s failed movies, executive arrogance, executive indecision, were true.
Please understand what I felt at the time: I was the most successful screenwriter in Hollywood. I had managed to interest one of the most respected directors in the world in a script that I had written. It was a script that I was hugely proud of; a script that everyone who read it said was the best that I had done. And at the studio … there was nobody home; it was Looney Tunes/Daffy Duck time; some kind of private circle-jerk seemed to be in progress. I was coming to the conclusion that maybe the studio really was, as the Wall Street Journal later headlined—“In a League of Its Own.”
And then the “notes” finally arrived. Pages and pages and pages of them, opinions hidden, of course, beneath the corporate umbrella, anonymous except for the Columbia logo and the majestic Columbia “We.” They made the case for a bad television movie that had already been made. To agree with the notes, I felt, would be agreeing to destroy my own work, to kill my own baby, to turn what I was convinced would be a unique, $200 million movie into … warmed spit.
I disagreed vehemently with the “notes,” both through my agent and also in direct conversation with both your studio executive Barry Josephson and Jon Peters, who finally called me a month after I’d turned the script in. Both Jon and Barry began to back away from the “notes.” These weren’t directives, they said, these were suggestions. Would I think about the suggestions—that’s all, just think about them? Well, I said, as much as you could “think” about something “moronic,” I’d “think” about them.
At the end of the summer, while in Maui, I got a phone call at seven o’clock one morning from Adrian Lyne. Adrian had directed Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and Flashdance, among other things. Adrian was excited. His agent had sent him Gangland. He was calling from the South of France. He thought the script was brilliant. He thought it was one of the most amazing scripts he’d ever read. He was very interested in directing it.
I was thrilled … and sick … at the same time.
Here was another world-caliber director … another director whose movies had grossed more than a billion dollars, another director who, I felt, made constantly exciting, visually dazzling movies … responding with great excitement to my work … the work which was being trashed by moronic “notes.”
Would Adrian Lyne, I wondered, become another victim of the Looney Tunes/Daffy Duck circle-jerk?
Through my agent, I informed Columbia of Adrian’s interest. The studio pretended to be excited. There would be a meeting with Adrian, I was told … as there would be a meeting with me.
In the fall of this year, I finally had my only meeting with the studio about my Gangland script. More exactly, my meeting was with Jon Peters. Jon brought his new head of development with him to the lunch, then dismissed her a half hour later so we could talk alone. He made the following suggestions for the script: 1. Strengthen the part of Jed, the lead FBI agent; 2. Give the FBI agents working on the case more of a Dirty Dozen feel; 3. Write a scene where Jed, the lead FBI agent and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano are boxing and Jed beats Gravano up in the ring, causing Gravano to turn against Gotti.
What about everything else in the pages and pages and pages of notes?—I asked Jon. He told me to forget everything else in the notes. He said that if I incorporated his suggestions into the script it would “neutralize the masses over at Columbia who were taking shots at it.” He told me that if Columbia was not pleased with the changes he was suggesting, he would take the project in turnaround to Warner Brothers and we’d get the movie made there. Would Columbia agree to let him take it to Warner’s?—I asked him. Jon said it wouldn’t be a problem because once Mark left Columbia, he’d go back to Warner’s and work with Jon.
At the same meeting, I urged Jon … in the strongest way … to make a holding deal with Adrian Lyne. He said he’d meet with Adrian and they’d make a holding deal with him. The meeting between Jon and Adrian did take place, but to my bewilderment … and to the complete bewilderment of Adrian’s agent … no holding deal was made with Adrian and no attempt to make a holding deal with him was made, either.
It became clear to me that my fears were justified. Columbia seemed as interested in making Gangland with Adrian Lyne as they were in making Gangland with Paul Verhoeven. This was a studio that, for whatever reason, was not interested in working with two of the top directors in the world. This was a studio, I concluded, more interested in its masturbatory games than in making money at the box office with a unique and startling piece of material.
I began the rewrite, using Jon’s suggestions … but only to a point where I felt they wouldn’t hurt the script. I wrote new scenes strengthening Jed’s part. I wrote a new scene emphasizing the Dirty Dozen aspects of the agents working the case. I did not write the scene between Gravano and Jed in the boxing ring because I felt it would be unrealistic and juvenile. Writing the boxing ring scene, I felt, would vitiate the power of Gravano’s turn on Gotti as it existed in the script.
I turned the rewrite in two weeks ago. Adrian Lyne called me to tell me he thought it was terrific. Howard Blum, author of the book, called to tell me it was “brilliant.” “We’ve got to move heaven and earth to get this made,” Howard said.
To date … I have heard nothing from Columbia … nada … from anyone at Columbia … from Jon Peters.
I did hear, about a week ago, from an industry journalist. This is what he told me: “Columbia is going to sue you for breach of contract for not doing an adequate rewrite.”
I am writing to you, Mr. Schulhof, as an appeal to some sort of reason, decency, and fairness. I wrote a 170-page script that has been praised by everyone who’s read it—except the people at Columbia. My script attracted two of the premier directors in the world to the project. The author of the book feels that the script is brilliant. And I am being accused of breach of contract?
Forgive me, Mr. Schulhof, but something is very wrong at your studio. I don’t know who is in charge. I don’t know if anyone is in charge. I don’t know what the agendas are, though I am convinced they have to be private and politically tangled ones. I do know that the agenda is not to make original and successful movies.
I don’t even know, most depressingly,
who at Columbia has even read my script. A conversation my agent had with an executive more than implied that neither Mark Canton nor Jon Peters had read the script and/or the rewrite.
You pay a man more than $3 million to write a script—that’s what this total deal is—and then you don’t read it? It’s something out of Orwell or Kafka.
My appeal to you, Mr. Schulhof, is that you read my script and my rewrite … that you read it yourself … don’t ask a “reader” to read it for you … don’t read someone else’s “coverage” … read it yourself … please.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask. I put my heart and soul, all of my creative innards, into Gangland. I wrote something I am proud of. My words attracted two of the best directors in the world.
My hope is that your reading will save my script. My hope is that you will stop the morons from doing their moronic pitiful dance at the cost of an original and successful movie. A few years ago, they danced with a script of mine called Pals, which was transmogrified into an awful movie called Nowhere to Run.
Perhaps, as part of your reading, you should check the grosses for Nowhere to Run.
P.S. Please forgive the vagaries of my manual typewriter. It does feel strange writing a letter to the chairman of Sony on a manual typewriter, but I’ll make a deal with you. If you read my script, I’ll do my best to learn to write on a computer.
Mickey Schulhof never responded to my letter, but Columbia didn’t sue me, either. Many other screenwriters were brought into the project for rewrites. The movie, to this day, hasn’t been made.
At the height of my battle with Columbia, Jon Peters took me out to lunch again and urged me yet again to make the changes I refused to make.
“Come on,” he said, “this is me talking now. This is the guy who got them to pay you more than three million bucks. I stuck my neck out for you. Come on, make the fucking changes. As a personal favor to me.”
I said, “I can’t. The changes would destroy the script. The changes are stupid.”
Jon said, “So what? They’re just words.”
I said, “I’m a writer. They’re not just words. Words are what I do.”
Jon said, “I’m asking you as a favor to me—to your friend. Change the fucking words!”
I said, “I can’t.”
He said, “You can but you won’t.”
“All right,” I said, “have it your way. I won’t.”
Jon said, “You know what that means, you cocksucker, it means we’re not friends anymore!”
“Jon,” I said, “you don’t get it.”
“No!” he said. “No!” He stuck his finger at me like a gun.
“You don’t get it!” he said, got up, threw his napkin down, and left the patio restaurant of the Bel Air Hotel.
They came right after the last fire, the one that took out much of Malibu east of the Pacific Coast Highway. They came in armies.
The big mucky-muck multi-zillionaires of Malibu were sitting on their glass-walled patios or watching the sun set in their wrought iron gazebos when they saw them traipsing across the lawn or scampering around the palm trees.
Squirrels? No, they weren’t squirrels. They were Norwegian rats. They got under the houses and into the walls. They chewed holes through the screens and got into the kids’ rooms. At night you could see them in the moonlight, seemingly getting fatter by the hour.
The big mucky-muck zillionaires of Malibu fled. Those who also had houses in Beverly Hills or Bel Air went there. Those who didn’t went into Beverly Hills and got a suite at the Four Seasons or the Peninsula.
They paid fortunes for exterminators to come immediately and do whatever had to be done. The exterminators made them bid against each other, made some of them wait three days, even a week.
It became a status thing. If you were really powerful, if you really had money, you didn’t have to wait.
I didn’t have to wait at all, although I wasn’t a big mucky-muck zillionaire. I was one of the first whose house was exterminated, whose walls were cleaned out, whose attic and crawl spaces were cleared.
Why was I one of the first? Why did I get faster, better service than Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz and Jerry Perenchio and Irwin Winkler?
Because my exterminator wanted to be a screenwriter. He had some scripts he asked me to read. He wanted me to give him career advice after I’d read them.
I read his scripts quickly. I told him he had promise. I asked if he had others I could read.
Thank God he didn’t.
I had heard rumblings from both Evans and Craig Baumgarten, Jade’s producers, that Billy had made some changes which I “might not like.”
My interpretation of that was that the changes must have been so serious that neither Evans nor Baumgarten could tolerate them—though they would never say so (considering that Billy was married to the studio head).
I asked Billy to lunch in Malibu, looked him in the eye, and said, “When am I going to see the rough cut?”
Billy said, “In about a month.”
I said, “Look. If you’ve changed things I don’t know about, tell me now—so I can get used to the idea somewhat before I walk in there and get kicked in the gut.”
Billy said, “Joe, Joe—I give you my word—I shot your script. I’m not stupid. I know how you are about your words. We’re going to do a lot of other movies together. I’d tell you if I changed anything.”
I was a little calmed by that but Billy’s next sentence set off all my shit-detectors.
“I’m telling you, Joe,” Billy said, “this movie that you created is really something.”
I had never heard a director use that phrase to a screenwriter: This movie that you created.
And I was convinced that any director who used it was trying to cover up something truly awful that he had done.
I finished another spec script … this one about the soul singer Otis Redding that I called Blaze of Glory.
I’d been working on the script a long time and had secured the rights to Otis’s music, and to the “life rights” of his best friend and manager, Phil Walden, and of Otis’s wife, Zelma.
I’d always been drawn to Otis’s music and was the last person to interview him in Cleveland before his plane crashed into a Wisconsin lake in the late sixties.
I felt that the script was more than just another script about a rock star. By focusing on the relationship between Phil Walden and Otis Redding, a white man and a black man in the sixties, I hoped I was telling a story that was a metaphor for the civil rights movement.
Guy and Jeff Berg read the script and loved it and so did my lawyers, who agreed with ICM that the script would sell for $5 million.
Boy, I thought to myself, that would keep Gerri Eszterhas’s wolves away from our door for a long time.
We had a strategy session at my house. Guy said he was going to send the script out on Wednesday and set a Monday deadline for responses.
“By the way,” he announced, “I’m leaving for Palm Springs Wednesday afternoon.”
I was incredulous. He was sending the script out Wednesday morning and leaving for Palm Springs Wednesday afternoon?
“You’re doing what?” I said.
“I’m in a golf tournament,” he said. “Last year I won ten grand.”
“You’re going off to a golf tournament the same day you’re sending my script out on auction?”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I can call people from there. They can reach me on my cellular.”
I gaped at him.
When agents send a script out for auction, they call and schmooze the potential players, trying to get one to bid against the other. It is the moment when the agenting process turns into a Byzantine fine art, a political and manipulative game that has to be played subtly and intensely. It is a mammoth and time-consuming task, especially when you’re sending the script to thirty some production entities—as we were doing with Blaze of Glory.
I couldn’t believe what Guy was saying to
me. He knew how to run a successful auction. He knew the focus which a successful auction requires.
He was going to do this auction from his golf course. He was literally going to phone this one in. On his cellular.
I felt my blood pressure rise.
“You can’t go out of town when you’re auctioning my script,” I told him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m telling you. We’ll be fine.”
“What if somebody just loves it and wants to preempt everybody else and buy it immediately? How are you gonna make a deal?”
“On the phone,” Guy said.
“From the fucking golf course in Palm Springs?”
He shrugged and lit a cigarette.
“It’s too late to move the auction back,” he said. “I’ve already let most of them know it’s coming on Wednesday.”
“It’s not too late for you not to go to your golf tournament.”
“I won ten grand last year,” he repeated.
“Guy,” I said, “I’m not asking you not to go. I’m telling you.”
He looked down and flicked the ash of his cigarette into the ashtray with his thumb.
He said, “Okay.”
The script went out, no one bid, and I fired Guy McElwaine, my close friend of so many years, the man I’d defied Michael Ovitz for.
Not because he couldn’t sell Blaze of Glory—I had written several other spec scripts through the years that went unsold.
I fired Guy because he had let me down at a crucial time in my life … when I literally couldn’t afford to be let down. I fired him because he knew what a crucial time in my life this was.
I fired him because he wanted to play golf when my new family’s welfare was on the line.
I fired him because of the way he had flicked the ash into the ashtray and said, “Okay.”
I fired him because I had risked everything for him with Michael Ovitz and now, five years later, he didn’t want to give up a golf tournament and a possible ten grand for me.
“Remember this,” Guy had said to me a long time ago, “there is no heart as black as the black heart of an agent.”
Hollywood Animal Page 70