Go shake Bob Walker’s hand.
Drive out to Malibu and check out a little gallery in the Cross Creek Center called TOPS. It’s owned and managed by Bob Walker, also known as Robert Walker, Jr., who was going to be a big movie star—until one day he just left it all behind and decided to live like a human being. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into him and can shake his hand.
Everything in L.A. is so inbred.
Robert Walker, Jr., is the son of the actors Robert Walker (Strangers on a Train) and Jennifer Jones (Duel in the Sun).
ALL HAIL
Bob Towne!
Yelling that he was being cheated by Warner Bros., screenwriter Robert Towne drove to Warner head Terry Semel’s house in the mideighties and screamed obscenities outside his bedroom window.
The Auteur Theory
It will be the bane of your existence as a screenwriter and is the biggest single reason why movies are so awful today.
In France, where directors also write the scripts they direct, they are viewed as “the authors” of their films. They own the film’s copyright and distributors can only release their films, not interfere with them.
American directors—who mostly don’t write their films—began viewing themselves as “auteurs” in the seventies, looking for the same kind of critical canonization French directors were getting.
A generation of American film critics—some of them failed screenwriters like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael and Janet Maslin—supported these American directors and extended the “author” label to them.
The auteur theory is hypocritical and corrupt—unless the film’s writer and director are the same.
Try not to “go Hollywood.”
Screenwriter William Faulkner, a good ole boy from Oxford, Mississippi, took to wearing sunglasses while he wrote his scripts in his studio office in Hollywood.
And I, the street kid from Cleveland, allowed myself to be talked into putting blond highlights in my hair—which I grew to mid-back length—while I lived in Malibu on a bluff overlooking the sea.
I shopped at the same market as Tom and Nicole for recently arrived fresh truffles and got a black Dodge Ram pickup truck the same month that Steven Spielberg and David Geffen got theirs.
I had Sunday brunch at Wolfgang Puck’s Granita, listening to violinist David Wilson play his boulevardier chansons, avoiding eye contact with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, who kept staring at me one day.
Her stare said, There’s that misogynist, sexist asshole who wrote Showgirls and Basic Instinct.
I did not, however, wear sunglasses while I wrote my scripts—though I did wear them everywhere else … even, to my first wife’s great annoyance, in airports at night.
Don’t piss off the most powerful man in Hollywood.
He’s not a star or a studio head. He’s not a director or producer. He’s a lawyer. And he’s over seventy years old.
His name is Bert Fields. He’s the most powerful man in Hollywood because if he sends someone a letter threatening to sue, the recipient of that letter is better off simply giving Bert what he wants, instead of going to court to argue with him. He is a brilliant litigator, maybe the best in America. He’s also a writer (of thrillers) and a Shakespearean scholar. (Didn’t I tell you everyone in Hollywood, even the most powerful man in Hollywood, wants to be a writer?)
Patricia Glaser is the second most powerful person in Hollywood. Don’t piss her off, either.
She, too, is a lawyer. She, too, is a brilliant litigator, maybe the best in America. Behind her honeyed West Virginia drawl is a stonecold killer (whose childhood dream was to succeed Mickey Mantle in the New York Yankee outfield).
Patty Glaser doesn’t fear Bert Fields; she jousts with him publicly. She told The New York Times that a letter from Bert Fields was “a B.F. letter.” The whole town knew that “a B.F. letter” meant a “big fucking letter” and not “a Bert Fields letter.”
If you get a threatening letter from Bert Fields, hire Patty Glaser immediately.
Forget Bert Fields and Patty Glaser. Don’t ever—ever—piss these people off. … These are the most powerful people in Hollywood.
Scientologists.
Studios are terrified of them because they represent a lot of big stars.
Other people are terrified of them because they have a reputation of not tolerating anyone who, they feel, is trying to piss them off.
And no, I am not trying to piss them off!
PERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN WEAR SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT
I was wearing the hottest thing in town. Spielberg had one … and Geffen … and I got mine before Jeff Katzenberg did.
They cost four hundred dollars a pair, but they were in such short supply that some people were offering a thousand dollars for them.
They were the best pair of sunglasses Chrome Hearts on Robertson had ever made—but that’s not why everyone (me, too) wanted them. They wanted them because—if you rubbed the glass—ingrained in the glass very delicately, facing out, so you could see it if you really looked, were these words: Fuck you.
PERK OF FAILURE: YOU DON’T WANT TO WEAR THIS HAT
I saw two screenwriters recently at the farmer’s market inL.A. wearing ball caps that said DON’T SHIT ON MY HEAD.
A Hollywood parable …
A Rwandan tracker who appeared in Gorillas in the Mist was invited to attend its New York premiere by the producers.
The tracker had never been on an airplane. He had never been in New York. He had never been in America. He had never been out of the Rwandan mountains.
But he somehow got to New York.
And there was no one at the airport waiting for him.
He walked from Kennedy Airport to Park Avenue, where the producer who’d invited him lived.
The doorman turned him away. The producer was out of town.
The producer got back the next day and found the tracker waiting for him—squatting beneath the emergency stairway at the back of his apartment house.
Don’t contemplate your navel.
Producer Sean Daniel, after superagent Michael Ovitz left the Creative Artists Agency: “First the fall of the Soviet Union and now the fall of CAA.”
If you have to live in L.A., you simply have to have a pool.
California has, like, half the swimming pools in the whole USA,” said actress Drew Barrymore. “After you’re successful, you can’t not have a pool. Here, a house without a pool is like a neck with no diamond necklace.”
Look out! The pool underneath you is empty.
Jim Harrison: “My friend the novelist Tom McGuane used to compare the whole Hollywood experience to being on a high board, mostly at night, and possibly the pool beneath you was empty. I habitually think of it as being stuck on a shuddering elevator, always caught between one floor or another, always in transition up or down.”
You don’t want to leave a suicide note like this one.
Actor George Sanders left this suicide note: “I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”
I probably shouldn’t mention that he was once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor.
And I certainly shouldn’t mention that after their divorce, he married one of her sisters.
The Movie God
The explanation for all the insane, inane, moronic, crazy, surreal, hilarious, tragic things that happen daily in Hollywood.
As in: “There is nothing to explain it except the movie God.”
PART TWO
LEARNING THE
BUSINESS
LESSON 2
Use Your F-Bombs!
Want money and fame?
Producer and studio head Mike Medavoy: “Don’t do something to be remembered; it is the things you do that are remembered.”
There are some good reasons to want to be famous.
Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait: “Fame is like a big eraser. It’s strange, now that I’m famous, in my parents’
opinion, all the shitty things—all the wreckage of my past—is erased. … Now it’s like I was never the kid who got arrested—now I’m the wonderful son.”
You will be world-famous!
William Goldman: “There hasn’t been a truly famous writer since Hemingway died. At a Knicks game last year, Norman Mailer was introduced to the crowd and half a dozen people around me said, ‘Who?’ and one guy went so far as to ask, ‘Who did he play for?’”
Bullshit, Bill. When I walk down the street people ask me for my autograph. In L.A., I can’t even stand in theater lines or in restaurants without being bothered. I’ve done the Today show half a dozen times; I’ve done Good Morning America and CNN’s morning show and a whole half hour of Hardball and Deborah Norville and Greta Van Susteren and … More people went to see Showgirls because of my name than because of anyone else associated with the movie.
And no matter what you say, Bill, you’re famous, too.
Nowdays, you can be famous.
UCLA screenwriting professor Richard Walter in his novel, Escape from Film School: “Back in the 60s, there was not a single screenwriter—not one—I or anyone beyond the industry had ever heard of. It was not that there were no great screenwriters—quite the contrary; it was merely that none had ever been heard of. Screenwriters wrote; they were not written about.”
Are you really sure you want to be famous?
One of the most famous screenwriters in the world is Laura Hart McKinny, who teaches screenwriting at North Carolina College of the Arts.
She is one of the most famous screenwriters in the world, but she has never written a screenplay that has been made into a movie.
The reason she is one of the most famous screenwriters in the world is because of her former boyfriend.
His name is Lt. Mark Fuhrman, formerly of the Los Angeles Police Department. Laura was going to collaborate with Mark on a screenplay about L.A. cops, so she made a lot of tape recordings with him about his true-life experiences. Her tapes wound up smack-dab in the middle of the O. J. Simpson murder trail.
There’s a lot to be said for not being famous.
Actor Paul Newman: “I stopped signing autographs after I was asked to sign one while standing at a urinal in a restaurant. I was already quite cool about the idea after being asked for about the thousandth time, ‘Can you remove your sunglasses so we can see your blue eyes?’ I started saying, ‘I’m so sorry, but if I take off my glasses, my pants fall down.’”
Actor Robin Williams: “The paparazzi follow me into the men’s room. They say, ‘Robin, can you hold it up? Could you make the puppet talk? Oh, you’re having a bowel movement? Oh, great! It’s Live-Stools of the Rich and Famous!’”
You better stay forever young … or else!
Mike Medavoy: “This is a business that eats its elders instead of its young.”
Are screenwriters the victims of ageism?
There has always been the issue of ageism directed toward screenwriters, directors, producers, and actors in Hollywood.
An agent sets up a meeting for a screenwriter with a studio executive.
The agent says, “How old are you?”
The screenwriter says, “I’m twenty-eight.”
The agent says, “Let’s make it twenty-three.”
How do you define success?
Director Richard Quine (Sex and the Single Girl): “The definition of success is to be doing better than your best friend.”
If you make it, you won’t have any friends.
In direct proportion to how successful one is, that’s how much the need is to chop him or her down,” said actor/producer Michael Douglas.
Producer Bernie Brillstein: “You’re no one in Hollywood unless someone wants you dead.”
Marilyn Monroe: “It’s funny how success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing things in the eyes of those around you.”
Question: What things, Marilyn?
Mike Medavoy: “Friendships are a funny thing in Hollywood. Everyone talks about what good friends they are with everyone else. In truth, most people in the entertainment industry have many acquaintances and few friends, at least in the way I define friendship. In a movie script, you can create a fifteen-year friendship in fifteen minutes. In real life it takes fifteen years.”
Some canaries make it and some don’t.
My fellow Hungarian, actor Tony Curtis: “The Mocambo was on Sunset Boulevard in the middle of the Strip. It had a bar, a dining room, and a dance floor with a small stage, and along one long wall were cages with yellow canaries. We’d go there on weekends for an evening on the town, and I was always intrigued how those canaries were able to survive in that smoke-filled, noisy club. One night I found out. I happened to look over when one of the canaries toppled off its perch and fell to the bottom of the cage, dead. A waiter standing nearby just whipped out a fishnet from his pocket, opened the cage, and scooped it up. Another waiter came up instantly and replaced the poor dead canary with a live one. Nobody noticed it but me. So that was the mystery of the dead yellow canary. Some make it in Hollywood, and some don’t.”
Audience-Attuned
If you write movies that make a hundred million dollars each, you’re audience-attuned. Otherwise, you’re just another dumb schmuck writer.
You, too, can enjoy their pain.
Producer Peter Guber: “As I was to learn and experience in Hollywood, it’s not so much your own success that is relished, but more your friends’ failures.”
How to make it in Hollywood …
Legendary light-heavyweight champion Billy Conn: “He was a nice fellow. I hit him in the balls and knocked his ass through the ropes in the thirteenth round. You’re supposed to do everything you can to win. Hit ’em on the break, backhand ’em, do all the rotten stuff to ’em. You’re not an altar boy in there.”
Studio head L. B. Mayer: “There’s only one way to succeed in this business. Step on those guys. Gouge their eyes out. Trample on them. Kick them in the balls. You’ll be a smash.”
To Do an Ovitz
To commit an act of homophobia in public; like agent Michael, who, some said, committed such an act in the pages of Vanity Fair.
They lie, they cheat, and they steal.
Studio executives do not like to deal with honest men,” said screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler.
Hire a good accountant.
Accountants,” said screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, “are the most important people in the world.”
Let your accountant be your rabbi.
My accountant said to me, “In Hollywood, you only get ripped off by your friends and the people you trust.”
Invest wisely.
A well-known director in his sixties made millions of dollars and invested much of it years ago in a ranch in Wyoming. He visits his ranch three or four times a year but says he doesn’t really like to go there.
“Every time I’m there,” he says, “I think this is what my career amounted to—millions of dollars of horse shit.”
Save your money.
Sugar Ray Robinson, boxing champ, years after his retirement: “Do I still own a flashy Cadillac? No more. The car I drive now is a little red Pinto. But I’ve been there.”
TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
Tips to save money in Hollywood…
Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “When you open a new five-pound can of Beluga caviar and you are not able to eat it all right away, put what’s left over back into the refrigerator, where it will keep for five days, then you will always have nice fresh caviar handy. … Another hint to save you a lot is to never throw away any truffles. If, for instance, you open a can and you don’t use them all in the pheasant Souvaroff or whatever you’re making, don’t throw them in the disposal for garbage, but freeze them and they will be as good like new later.”
One good way to avoid writer’s block …
Advice to legendary produce
r David O. Selznick from his father: “Spend it all. Give it away. Throw it away. But get rid of it. Live expensively. If you have confidence in yourself, live beyond your means. Then you’ll have to work hard to catch up. That’s the only fun there is: hard work.”
The Three Cs
The “Three Cs” are what old-timers say Hollywood was once all about: “cocktails, cards, and cunt.”
Schtup Music
An old producer’s term for romantic music.
If you make it, you’re going to need an accountant.
If you don’t get one, you’re going to spend all your time bookkeeping and worrying about taxes—not writing.
You have to pick your accountant carefully, because some people have been robbed blind: Allen Funt, the creator of Candid Camera, lost everything he had to an unscrupulous accountant. Your fellow screenwriter Sylvester Stallone lost millions, too, to an accountant.
But for a set figure each month, based on what you’ve earned, you can get full-scale protection … the kind of protection where you won’t even receive your own bills, since everything will go to the accountant.
Just make sure you get a weekly cash-flow report, signed by your accountant.
You, too, can be addled by accountants.
Jim Harrison (Wolf, Revenge, Legends of the Fall): “Entering a bank made me sweat, lawyers frightened me, and accountants addled me so that I couldn’t write for a day or two. Despite learning how to make money I couldn’t quite figure out that I had to give half to the government.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 4