Robert McKee was the closest thing I’ve had to a mentor,” said screenwriter Jim Thomas on McKee’s Web site. Thomas is listed as the cowriter of Predator, Executive Decision, and Mission to Mars.
A screenwriter got JFK elected president.
The day of the West Virginia primary, which decided the Democratic nominee in the 1960 race, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was relaxed and in the best of humor.
He told reporters he’d watched a movie the night before and had gone to bed early.
He didn’t tell them it was a porn movie called Private Property.
He didn’t tell them he hadn’t gone to bed alone, either.
My point is this: Someone wrote Private Property. Did he know that he would one day relax and perhaps inspire the future president of the United States?
TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
Don’t go to bed with Hungarians.
Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Tony Curtis is also Hungarian and we were cast in the same movie. We got on very well. We shot our love scene at the studio. The script called for me to be in bed with Tony and I was seminude through most of it. After one take, the director said, ‘Let’s do another take!’
“Whereupon Tony ruefully admitted, ‘But I can’t retake it. That would be impossible.’ ”
Don’t step on any big toes accidentally.
I wrote a script about a man who kills his wife, and the film’s producer told me that if I wanted to get it made at this studio, I’d have to change the ending: It would have to be an innocent man falsely accused of killing his wife.
“Why won’t they make it the other way?” I asked.
He told me why: The studio head was a venerable and truly respected former producer, now a very wealthy man. But he hadn’t always been wealthy. He’d come to Hollywood as a penniless wannabe screenwriter and met a wealthy, socially elite widow. He married her and some years later she committed suicide and he inherited all of her money.
Then he met another wealthy, socially prominent widow and married her, too. And she, too, committed suicide some years later and he inherited all of her money, as well.
Demand your payment on time.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to producer Sam Spiegel: “Listen, I have a gun and I will shoot you if I don’t get my money today.”
To Spiegel
To manipulate, flatter, seduce, cajole, con, like producer Sam.
Spiegelese
A line of BS that sounds terrific and is designed to take advantage of you, it was originated by Sam Spiegel, producer, but perfected by David Begelman, who spoke perfect Spiegelese and became a top-ranked agent and then a studio head and then (flat broke) a suicide. “How cheesy, wags said, to commit suicide at the Century Plaza, of all places, not at the Bel Air, the Chateau Marmont, or a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
Three’s Company, but Four Is an Orgy
Old Hollywood rule, allegedly first said by Mae West, then later by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Learn to recognize bullshit when you hear it.
A director called and told me he’d read my script and was interested in directing it. He said, “I don’t want to exploit your script. I want to pay homage to it.”
I hung up on him.
If you want to sell your script, be capable of anything.
Actress Sigourney Weaver was in the middle of her gynecological exam when the doctor said, “I have written a screenplay. Could you possibly read it?”
Move to the Midwest.
Discussing a script, producer Sam Spiegel said to screenwriter Harold Pinter, “They won’t understand it in the Midwest.”
Pinter said, “Fuck the Midwest!”
Spiegel said, “Do you want to fuck the whole of the Midwest?”
It’s okay to live in your car.
Michael Blake did before he sold Dances with Wolves.
I was so poor before I sold my first script that I was working as a bartender and going through my pockets looking for forgotten change.
L.A. has lots of places where you can work all day without paying too much—the Rose Café, the Farmers Market, in the company of other screenwriters.
And many young screenwriters swear that the El Pollo Loco diet is healthy, too, besides being filling.
Forget playing video games; watch Tracy and Hepburn instead.
The old Tracy and Hepburn movies are a dialogue treat, as are the films of Preston Sturges and Woody Allen. They’re fun to watch, and good dialogue exercise, too.
It’s okay to have literary influences.
Screenwriter William Faulkner referred to his penis as “Mr. Bolton,” a play on the name of a character from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Don’t have an affair with a script girl.
Screenwriter William Faulkner did; he had a lengthy affair with a script girl. After he died, she wrote a book about him. She wrote that for most of his life he was impotent. She even wrote that he ran the water in the bathroom so no one could hear his bodily functions and that he took a bath before they made love. He had the “prettiest little feet,” she wrote, and always kept a handkerchief around in case he coughed.
Don’t have an affair with an actress, either (heh-heh-heh).
Sally Field did an interview for Playboy magazine in which she said “there were always” men around Burt Reynolds. It came at the same time that Reynolds had lost a lot of weight, thanks to a broken jaw. The Field interview led to rampant and false rumors that Reynolds was gay and dying of AIDS.
There are many in Hollywood who think that single Sally Field interview destroyed Burt Reynolds’s career.
Never lie to yourself.
Michael Moore, after his famous Bush-bashing acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine, asked Academy president Frank Pierson, “Did I make an ass out of myself up there?”
To Do an Eric Red
To flip out and lose it suddenly. Red, the talented screenwriter of The Hitcher and other action-noir films, drove his car one day into a bar full of people in Westwood.
If you want to be a movie star, write a screenplay.
Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky. Billie Bob Thornton wrote Sling Blade. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting.
Then they stuck to their guns and said they wouldn’t sell their scripts unless they could play the star parts.
Producers argued with them and offered them vast sums of money not to act in their films. They turned the vast sums of money down … and became movie stars and multimillionaires by holding firm.
Don’t try to figure out the next trend before you write your script.
There was an investor who thought Heaven’s Gate was going to be such a big hit that dozens of other Westerns would be made, so he bought all the horses used in Heaven’s Gate, thinking he’d make a fortune renting movie-trained horses out to other film companies.
Well, after Heaven’s Gate became one of the biggest disasters of all times, he was stuck with all these unemployable horses.
What did he do with them?
Well, they shoot horses, don’t they?
It doesn’t pay to go out to lunch with other screenwriters.
Ben Hecht: “Would that our writing had been as good as our lunches.”
The Cocaine Highway
Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
If you need drugs to write.
The valet parkers at a lot of “hot” Hollywood restaurants will be able to help you.
For many years, the valet-parking guys at a famous Sunset Strip restaurant had the best coke in the business, until they all got busted. Some people said the real reason people ate there was for the coke, not the food.
ALL HAIL
Peter Viertel!
The author, who wrote the screenplay of The Sun Also Rises, had a reputation for “looking great in bathing suits” and for coaxing “everyone” to be “naughty.”
TAKE IT FROM ME: IT’S OKAY TO DEVELOP SOME SCHOLARLY INTERESTS
My lifelong scholarly interest has been Zsa
Zsa Gabor.
There is a story that I just can’t get out of my head about Zsa Zsa, who is a fellow Hungarian, a story that I’m fixated on. It’s a true story.
Zsa Zsa and Marlon Brando are on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Zsa Zsa is saying something—they are on the air—and Marlon interrupts her rudely and says to Johnny, “I don’t know why Zsa Zsa has to talk so much. With those boobs she really doesn’t have to say anything! Do you want to know what I want to do with that girl, Johnny? I want to fuck her!”
Then Marlon turns to Zsa Zsa and says, “A man can only do one thing with you, Zsa Zsa—throw you down and fuck you!”
Call yourself on the phone.
If you want people to think you’re important, have yourself paged by friends at the Polo Lounge or at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Producer Robert Evans once took a phone call from director Roman Polanski while being interviewed for ABC’s 20/20. An ABC staffer picked an extension up and found Evans speaking to dead air. Bob had faked the call from Roman.
Your script can burn.
Screenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski: “Usually what the greatest actor of our day and his friends do after eating (if the night is cold) is to have a few drinks and watch the screenplays burn in the fireplace. Or after eating (on warm evenings) after a few drinks the screenplays are taken frozen out of cold storage. He hands some to his friends—keeps some—then together from the veranda they toss them like flying saucers far out into the spacious canyon below. Then they all go back in knowing instinctively that the screenplays were bad.”
Don’t work in a studio office.
Screenwriter William Faulkner: “It’s like a hospital prison corridor. Those damned gray walls, those damned wide corridors, all those closed doors. And everything so damned hushed and still. I hate it.”
Believe in God -incidence.
As a young journalist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I did an interview with soul singer Otis Redding after a concert at a place called Leo’s Casino. Otis and I hit it off and I found him a generous and truly soulful man.
The next afternoon, he got on a little plane in Cleveland and the plane crashed at a lake in Wisconsin and Otis Redding died.
My interview with him was his last.
Nearly thirty years later, listening one afternoon to one of his songs, I thought back to that interview with Otis and I heard a voice telling me to write his story.
The next day, I sat down and called his widow in Macon, Georgia, did a month’s worth of research, and started writing.
In Hollywood, sometimes even God can’t help you.
Otis’s widow loved the script so much that she kept it under her pillow for a month and prayed that someone would make it.
Eight years later, no one has made it.
Don’t write any personal pet projects.
Look what happened to Oliver Stone: Alexander. Kevin Spacey: Beyond the Sea. Martin Scorsese: Gangs of New York. Bill Murray: The Razor’s Edge. Francis Ford Coppola: One from the Heart. And Joe Eszterhas: Telling Lies in America. All personal pet projects. All box-office disasters.
Everything in moderation …
Novelist and screenwriter Dominick Dunne: “Drunk, I once set my room on fire in the Volney Hotel in New York, where I was living. Another time, I was in the closet with people I didn’t know using Turnbull and Asser ties to find a vein to shoot cocaine. One of the strangers died. I ran. Then, when I was stoned again, a crazed psychopath beat me, tied me up, put a brown grocery bag over my face, and dropped lighted matches on the bag. I lived.”
Try to write a “fuck film” like Love Story.
According to Paramount’s research people, that’s what Love Story was.
Why? A guy took his date to see Love Story. They held hands and cried when she died at the end. Then they went back to his place and vigorously showed their appreciation that they were alive.
Any publicity is good publicity.
The week after his eleven-year-old daughter, Marci, was abducted, Calvin Klein sold a record number of blue jeans: 200,000 in a single week.
Help those who have helped you.
I got more exposure from the Today show than any screenwriter in history thanks to a Today show producer who had befriended me.
When he told me that he wanted to write television sitcoms, I fixed him up with a TV agent.
You can make directors beg to work with you.
Director Phillip Noyce: “I liked the script of Sliver a lot. Or at least I liked the idea of jumping on the Joe Eszterhas bandwagon.”
LESSON 4
Beware of the Back Pat!
You’ll need to ward off evil spirits.
When he was a young director, Marty Scorsese wore a gold talisman to keep evil spirits at bay, as well as an American Indian pouch filled with holy objects.
The Jack Story
Superagent Jeff Berg told me this old Hollywood story in an effort to calm me down about what I saw as a potential problem.
Jeff said, “A guy is driving down an abandoned country road and gets a flat tire. He opens his trunk and finds he doesn’t have a jack. He looks around, freaks, and says, ‘Oh, God, what am I going to do now?’ He doesn’t see any houses anywhere. He starts walking down the road—angry, worried, fearful that he is in Deliverance country and anything can happen to him. He can wind up like poor Ned Beatty in that movie. He turns a corner and there’s a big house in front of him. He walks up warily. Norman Bates can be in there. A beautiful woman opens the door. He asks the woman if she’s got a jack. Of course she does. She walks back to his car with him. She helps him fix the tire. She asks if he wants a cold beer. She walks back to her house with him. They have more beers. She fucks him atop the kitchen table. They fall in love. They marry. They have blond, blue-eyed children. They live happily ever after.”
The moral of the story: Don’t turn every mini problem into “a jack story.”
You’ve gotta be Sammy Glick.
Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo): “No one succeeds in film if he’s not hustling. The first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning is ‘Who can I hustle?’ And the last thing you think of before you go to bed is ‘Who can I hustle?’”
Get arrested.
Screenwriter Stuart Beattie (Collateral): “My business manager once gave me this great advice. He said, ‘If you are not kicking down enough doors to sell your script and knocking on enough windows to get arrested, you are not trying hard enough.”
Beware of the back pat.
If a director or producer shakes hands with you and at the same time reaches around you and rubs your back with his left hand, run.
He’s looking for the soft spot where he can best stick the knife in your back.
You, too, can give a studio head an orgasm.
Jaws producer David Brown: “The only orgasm that Lew Wasserman [the longtime Universal chieftain] ever had in his life was when he saw the opening numbers for Jaws.”
This is what your brilliant, literary script is really about.
Producer Scott Rudin: “A movie is about two movie stars.”
Avoid spending time with Sherry Lansing.
Raymond Chandler: “These Hollywood people are fantastic when you have been away for a while. In their presence any calm sensible remark sounds faked. Their conversation is a mess of shopworn superlatives interrupted by four telephone calls to the sentence. Ray Stark is a nice chap. I like him. Everybody at the brothel is nice.”
They’ve made us settle for a Polish starlet.
Frank Pierson, screenwriter (Dog Day Afternoon) and Writers Guild president: “Screenwriters have accepted the idea of being third-class citizens, the industry’s pain in the ass. Our position is that maybe someday we could forget the old joke about the Polish starlet. You know, she thought she could get ahead by fucking the writer.”
I struck out with the Polish starlet.
I tried like hell to get Polish starlet Joanna Pacula to leav
e a party at Robert Evans’s house with me and go back to my hotel room, but it was no-go.
These are our male role models.
Many screenwriters have bedded movie stars: Charles MacArthur teamed up with Helen Hayes, Norman Mailer with Shelley Winters, Thomas Wolfe with Jean Harlow, Paddy Chayefsky with Kim Novak, Arthur Miller with Marilyn Monroe, Pete Hamill with Shirley MacLaine, John O’Hara with Marlene Dietrich, Robert Graves with Ava Gardner, Romain Gary with Jean Seberg, Tom McGuane with Elizabeth Ashley and Margot Kidder, Tom Green with Drew Barrymore, Peter Viertel with Deborah Kerr, James Jones with Montgomery Clift, John Monk Saunders with Mary Astor.
Get in touch with your feminine side.
The only good artists are feminine,” said Orson Welles. “I don’t believe an artist exists whose dominant characteristic is not feminine. It’s nothing to do with homosexuality, but intellectually an artist must be a man with feminine aptitudes.”
Norman Mailer has a feminine side.
Said Shelley Winters of Norman: “Norman’s not capable of sleeping with a starlet and using her and then just saying ‘That was great, kid. Goodbye.’ Unlike most men in Hollywood, he’s actually a feminist. He sees women as people, not just sex objects. He reveres women. He feels there’s a kind of respect they must have. He didn’t treat me like a dumb starlet, he just couldn’t do that. In fact, I remember times when he was in a restaurant with me and Burt Lancaster. Pretty, sexy girls would come over and sit down and be introduced to ‘Norman Mailer, the writer.’ And Norman would cool it. He wouldn’t be rude or anything, he’d be charming and with that funny little grin of his he has, he’d flatter them and compliment them. But as far as I could see, he wouldn’t make dates with them. Now maybe he tells people different, but from what I saw over the years in Hollywood, my impression—from a woman’s point of view—is that he never treated a woman like a hunk of meat.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 7