When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man

by Jerry Weintraub; Rich Cohen; George Clooney

  Much of this confusion had to do with problems in his own life, ways in which, so it seemed to him, everything was coming apart. First of all, his marriage had ended. He had split with Annie, who wasn't just his childhood sweetheart, but his muse. Much of his desire for her, the chase and courtship, could be heard, sublimated, in his best songs. The end of the marriage was the end of his life, the first life he lived from the time he left home. Then his father died. He had trouble with his father, but they had been close at the end. These losses hit him hard. In fact, the only person left from his old life was me. Which explains a lot. The man was trying to reinvent himself, start again by forgetting. This is when I began to hear rumors: John is upset. John is unhappy. John wants to leave you.

  I discounted these, because, I mean, look what we had done together: in the ten years since I found him, this obscure, underpaid nightclub singer had become one of the biggest stars in the world, with hit records and shows and a big movie career before him, and money pouring in. But I did not realize how troubled he was, how insecure, and how badly he ached to be free. This was my friend, the executor of my will, the caretaker of my (God forbid) orphaned children, yet I knew nothing about him. That you know a person, does not mean you know a person.

  So one morning, I was sitting in my office on Wilshire Boulevard--I had a huge office, with a million-dollar view of the hills--when John came storming in, unannounced and unplanned, a freight train with a head of steam.

  "We have to talk, Jerry."

  "Hey, John," I said, "great to see you. How're you doing?"

  "Fine, fine," he said. "I've got something to tell you."

  "Okay, good, tell me."

  "I'm firing you."

  I sat back and looked at him. I was infuriated, enraged. Look at this guy. Look where he was and look where he is. And now he comes here like this, not even sitting, not even talking and explaining, to tell me it's over and we are done. At such moments, I don't know why, my gut instinct is, Hey, fuck you!

  "What did you say?" I asked.

  "I'm firing you."

  "Can you repeat that?"

  "I'm firing you, Jerry."

  I came out from behind the desk, came at him like you would come at someone on a basketball court. I was really hot. "Say it again," I told him. "I want to hear you say it again."

  "I'm firing you."

  "I don't ever want to see your face again," I told him. "Get out of my office. Who the fuck do you think you are?"

  "Don't you want to know why I'm firing you?" he asked.

  "I don't care why, what, where, or how," I said. "Don't ever say my name again in your lifetime; get out of here."

  I threw him out. I went over to the window and stared at the hills without seeing, the blood pulsing in my face.

  Later that afternoon, John's business manager called to tell me that all the things I owned with John--we were partners on every show and record--no longer belonged to me, as I had been booking his shows while also working as a producer, which was not permitted, or some such mumbo jumbo. I could hardly follow him, and I did not care. I was angry, heartbroken as well. "What's the point of this conversation?" I asked. "Just tell me what you're trying to tell me."

  He said, "You don't own anything with John anymore."

  I said, "I don't want to own anything with John. You can keep it all." And I hung the phone up.

  I was depressed for weeks. Not about losing a client but about losing a friend, somebody to whom I had given so much of myself.

  Things did not go well for John after that. RCA dropped him, his talent agency dropped him, most of the other people he worked with dropped him. I knew all of them and they understood how the operation functioned. What we created with John, the persona, the mood, simply was not real; we invented it. We were so interwoven, there was simply no way you could have Denver without Weintraub--not as John Denver had been in the seventies. It was his talent, but it was also my maneuvering. I was really his partner in everything. I did all the marketing and press. I packaged and sold him and turned him into a star. I put in a lot of my own money and all of my effort and ingenuity, because he was so talented and because I loved him. I still do. I miss him even now. When John died--in 1997, he crashed an experimental aircraft off the California coast--there was still so much left to do, to forgive and to be forgiven for, but who knows. As the poets say, death is not a period, it's an ellipsis.

  John and I did not talk for years. He was just another star dimming in the glassy firmament, another face on TV. I wanted to forget him. Because he had been such a good friend, because the end had been so traumatic, because he had hurt me. I buried it and moved on. I did not see him again until 1984, in a restaurant at the Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. We exchanged polite hellos. Cordial, but cold.

  "Hey, Jerry," he asked, "now do you want to hear why I fired you?"

  "No, John," I told him, "I honestly don't give a fuck."

  Then, finally, about ten years after that, we ran into each other again and this time, probably because so many years had gone by, we could finally talk calmly.

  "Now do you want to hear why I fired you?" he asked.

  "No, not really," I said, "because I don't think there can be a good reason, but if you have something you need to say, then just say it."

  "Then I will tell you why I fired you," he said. "Because finally, after the death of my father and the end of my marriage, I wanted to take charge of my own life. I knew I could never do that while you were running my affairs. More than a manager and a friend, you were a father. And I had to see if I could live a life without fathers. I mean, Jerry, you ran my whole life!"

  I clapped him on the shoulder and I said, "Yeah, but did I really do such a bad job of it? Was it really so terrible?"

  Knowing Which Calls to Return

  One morning, at the end of the 1970s, I got into the office early. I like being up when New York is just waking, the old metabolism still governing in the Pacific Time Zone. I like knowing I have done an entire day of work before the clock strikes nine. When my secretary came in, she handed me the call list.

  Now, let me explain my call list of those years: Simply put, it was the names and numbers of all the people who had called and whom I was obligated to call back, three or four pages typed up and handed to me each morning. These names, taken together, told the story of my day: managers looking to cut deals, studio executives looking to pitch scenarios, actors looking for representation, arena owners wanting to renegotiate a split, politicians looking for a handout, rock stars angered by a missing amenity or anemic sound system, local promoters apoplectic over a perceived infringement, reporters looking for a quotation, bankers looking to sell bonds, realtors looking to sell or buy land, clients panicked between projects, friends looking for tickets or a room in a sold-out hotel in Vegas--hotels are never really sold out.

  So my secretary gave me the list--all these calls were in regard to Concerts West, my music business--and, as I was paging through the names, I suddenly realized that I did not want to call back any of these people. I sat there for a moment, thinking about what this meant, what my gut was telling me. It was not making the calls that bothered me. It was having to make the calls. In a flash I thought, I will quit this business instead of making these calls. I don't feel that way about my call list now--being successful means filling your life with calls you want to return. But in that moment, I knew that period of my life had ended. I was done with being a manager, because when you are a manager, you're not working for yourself. You're working for the people on the list. I'm not knocking it. But I just didn't want to work for anyone else. I called my clients over the next few days. I told them, one by one, "I love ya, find someone else, I'm done."

  All these years later, people still ask me how I was able to walk away from the concert business.

  "Don't you regret it? There was so much money to be made."

  "Not for a minute," I tell them. "Not for a second."

  You have to be w
illing to walk away from the most comfortable perch, precisely because it is the most comfortable.

  The next morning was the greatest morning of my life. I went to the office at the usual hour, had my coffee, read my paper, and did my work as usual, only this time, when my secretary came in with the call list, I crossed out the names of all the people I did not want to call back. I was free! There was nobody I had to talk to. It was so liberating. I had become my own person.

  Do you understand what I'm saying?

  Irving Azoff is one of the most successful men I know. He is a dear friend. He is as big and rich and brilliant as they come. But Irving Azoff has clients. One of his clients calls, he has to call back. Me? I call back who I want, when I want. That's freedom.

  In this way, I became a full-time movie producer. It was all I did, all I wanted to do. I was a free agent in search of ideas, combing the ether for projects, looking to put scenarios together with writers, to put writers together with directors, directors together with actors, all the time trying to match the feats of my heroes Mike Todd and Billy Wilder and Louis B. Mayer. In my memory, those years play as a succession of movies, each dating my life the way a layer of sediment dates an era of civilization. One of my favorites was Diner, which I made in 1982. It's about a group of friends passing the last days of their youth in the parking lots and row houses of Baltimore. It was written by Barry Levinson, who, at that point, was known only as a writer, having worked on several movies with Mel Brooks.

  I got the screenplay on a Friday at 8:00 A.M. By 9:30, I had fallen in love. Every kid I grew up with--the sports nut, the married-too-early, the deviant maniac--was in that script. You couldn't be from the East Coast and literate and not understand those guys. They came off the pages.

  I called Levinson.

  I said, "I have to make this movie."

  "Great," he said, "but you do know that every studio in town has already turned it down?"

  "I don't care what they did," I told him. "I love this movie and I'm going to make it."

  "Great," he said, "and I'm going to direct it."

  "Whoa! Wait a second. I did not know that was part of the deal."

  "Yeah," he said, "it is."

  Levinson had never directed before, and the script, as he said, had already been turned down. But if you think about it, and I did think about it, this really was his story, his life, and his world: Who could possibly tell it better than him?

  "Okay," I said, "as long as I have the right to fire you, I don't care if you direct."

  Barry, who had great faith in himself, agreed.

  I went all over town with the script, pitched like mad, but no one was interested. It's nearly impossible to sell a story that has no grand concept, reads intimate and small, and is moody in the way a song can be moody--you get it or don't. It was like trying to sell jazz to a person who's never heard Coltrane. Finally, when I was about to give up, David Chasman, an executive at MGM who could really read a script, called.

  "How much is this going to cost?"

  "Five and a half million dollars."

  "We're on."

  The key to Diner was casting. For this, credit goes to Ellen Chenoweth, who is one of the greatest casting directors of all time. She understood the script and was able to find real-life equivalents of the characters, clearly based on real guys, among the hungry young actors of LA. My job was to see what Levinson saw, then sell the executives at MGM on a cast of unknowns.

  It's no accident that, in the course of my life, I've launched dozens of careers. Like my father, I can look at a sea of sapphires and pick out the Star of Ardaban: the young kid who will blossom on stage, glow on screen, separate from the journeymen to become a star. Diner launched, among others, Ellen Barkin, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Daniel Stern, and Steve Guttenberg.

  Another favorite of those years was September 30, 1955, about the day James Dean died. It, too, was brilliantly cast, marking the debut of Tom Hulce and Dennis Quaid. That it did not find an audience is a perplexing mystery. Wise men say you learn more from failure than from success, and, though that's often true, in this case failure left me nothing but confused. So many variables determine the fate of a film, some having to do with script and casting and marketing; but others are so mysterious and zeitgeist-related and beyond human control that the best posture is humility. There are three key words in business: I don't know.

  Ideas come from many places. Sometimes they arrive in the mail as a script. Sometimes they develop like stalagmites, growing from a slow drip of thoughts. Sometimes they appear on TV, as a story in the news. Take, for example, The Karate Kid. I was at home watching the five-o'clock news. All the stations were broadcasting the same story. It was about a kid in the Valley who had been getting beat up every day on his way home from school. He took it and took it, until, tired of taking it, he found a teacher and learned karate. The next time the bullies came, it was lights out for the bad guys. I loved the story. It reminded me of the ninety-pound weakling ads they used to have for Charles Atlas.

  I found the kid. Billy Sassner. I had a car pick up him and his parents and bring them to my office. His dad was heavyset, a postman. His mom was heavy, too. (We made her a character in the first movie, but wrote her out of the sequels; the actress wanted too much money. I told the writer, "Deal with it in the script." It was going to be a funeral or a phone call--the phone call was cheaper.) I told Billy's parents just what I wanted to do, then made a deal for the rights to their story. I hired a screenwriter named Robert Kamen, who, in addition to being really good, knew all about karate, which was, of course, a huge advantage in writing the fight scenes.

  The plot was classic--the picked-on kid takes his revenge and the bully gets his comeuppance--but I wanted the movie to be more. Kamen and I knew it was not about karate, not really. It was about fathers and sons. Since the kid has no father in the film, this wise old teacher, this Japanese man named Miyagi, becomes his father. We worked hard to get that right. A lot of Miyagi is, in fact, my father, everybody's father, if not the father you had, then the father you wish you had.

  I hired John Avildsen to direct. He had won the Academy Award for Rocky, and The Karate Kid was really just Rocky in another way--it was an underdog story, a Cinderella story and a fantasy, the world as you wish it would be. We signed Ralph Macchio to play the kid, then found the girl. How does the girl fit into the picture? Haven't you ever been to the movies? There's always a girl in the picture! I found her in a Burger King commercial. She jumped off the screen. This was Elisabeth Shue, who later became a star in her own right.

  We soon had every major part cast with the exception of Miyagi, the most important part in the movie--the father, the teacher, the moral center, heart, and soul. I went to Hong Kong. I went to Kabuki theaters in Kyoto. I traveled the world looking for this guy. It was a manhunt. I flew the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune to LA. He showed up at my office with twenty-five or thirty people. He looked great, but something did not seem right. Whenever I asked him a question, a member of his entourage answered.

  "How do you like the script?"

  "Mr. Mifune likes the script very much."

  "How do you like your green tea?"

  "Mr. Mifune likes his green tea very much."

  I threw everyone out but Mifune.

  I said, "I want to talk to Toshiro myself."

  They went out reluctantly, looking back, but they went.

  I closed the door and said, "No bullshit now. Do you speak English?"

  "No," he said, "not really."

  "Then how can I do this picture with you?"

  He said he could sound out the lines phonetically--it would sound all right, even if he did not know the meaning of the words.

  "No, no," I said, "we can't do that."

  Mifune went to Western Costume after the meeting and had pictures of himself taken dressed as Miyagi. I still have them. He looked fantastic. He was a strong man. I was tempted, but how can you play father-and-son scenes phone
tically? I called the director John Frankenheimer, who worked with Mifune in Grand Prix.

  "How did you do it?"

  He told me they shot him in Japanese, went back, and dubbed all his lines into English. I did not have the budget for that. Mifune was out.

  I believe in not getting hung up or paralyzed in a quest for perfection, but by the same token, you have to identify what is truly important and hold out until you can get those things right: Miyagi was important. And I could not find him. I was about to put the picture on hold. We would just have to wait until fate brought us Miyagi-san.

  Then, one morning, John Avildsen burst into my office, grinning as if he had just made the mother of all breakthroughs, as if he had just found the cure for old age.

  "I know who should play Miyagi," he said.

  "Who?"

  "Pat Morita."

  "Pat Morita?"

  "Yeah, Pat Morita."

  I knew Pat Morita. I knew him when I was busing tables up in the Catskills. He was a hundred-dollar-a-night comic at the resorts. He played a character called "The Hip Nip." He came onstage in horn-rimmed glasses and fake buck teeth and, in a bad Japanese accent, from an old World War II movie, said, "Don't forget Pearl Harbor."

  I told John Avildsen, "No. This is a major motion picture. I'm not casting Hip Nip."

  "He's great," said Avildsen. "Let him audition at least."

  "No fucking way," I said. "Get out of my office."

  A few days later I was at my desk, eating a pastrami sandwich and drinking a Dr. Brown's cream soda, when Avildsen barged in, shut the door, and locked it behind him.

  "What's this?" I asked.

  He put a videotape in the machine and said, "Just watch."

  "Why?"

  "It's only three minutes. Just watch!"