The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood

by Joe Eszterhas

  If you slow the film down and look very closely, you can see Jenny Beals spinning around, wearing leotards and a mustache.

  Don’t die with the wrong people.

  That’s what happened to screenwriter/novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose last girlfriend was gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.

  Graham had once been previously married to a man who was twenty-five years older and arranged dates for her with wealthy men. She and her husband lived off the gifts given to her by the wealthy men she went out with.

  To Do a Belushi

  To OD on drugs, like actor John.

  Some people do, temporarily, know some things about making hit movies.

  Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, producer Brian Grazer, the late producer Don Simpson, producer/director George Lucas, and producer/director Steven Spielberg all know some things.

  Producer/director Ivan Reitman knew some things, but he has forgotten them. So has Francis Ford Coppola.

  After Flashdance, Jagged Edge, and Basic Instinct, I knew some things about making hit movies, too.

  But after Sliver, Showgirls, and Jade, I, like Ivan and Francis, forgot what I knew.

  PERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN GET FRANKIE AVALON TO SING FOR YOU

  He knew who I was, and somebody at our table, as a joke, told him that it was my wife Geraldine’s birthday. So Frankie Avalon sang “Happy Birthday” for her.

  It wasn’t her birthday at all, but she’d loved Frankie Avalon as a teenager, and when he sang happy birthday to her, she cried. She told me after our divorce that it was one of her greatest thrills as a screenwriter’s wife.

  Billy Wilder was a sexist pig.

  Screenwriter/director Billy Wilder had a recurring fantasy that he told friends about: He wanted to invent a mattress that would make a woman disappear after he’d made love to her.

  In her place would appear three of his friends around a card table.

  Wilder said that if men were forced to choose between sex with a woman and playing cards, 98 percent would choose cards. (Not me, babe.)

  If they say it won’t work, it probably will.

  I was once told by a studio head that movies set on farms didn’t sell because “dirt doesn’t sell.” Then the film Witness came out. It was set on a farm and it was a smash.

  Paddy Chayefsky was told by a studio head that movies “with funeral scenes” don’t sell. Then The Godfather came out. It had a funeral scene and it was a smash.

  I was told by another studio exec that “courtroom dramas don’t sell.” I wrote Jagged Edge and it was the number-one movie in America for more than a month.

  The truth is that anything that is well written, well directed, and well acted can sell.

  Bull-whip every Hollywood astrologer you meet.

  Author Hunter S. Thompson: “There is a ghastly political factor in doing any business with Hollywood. You can’t get by without five or six personal staff people—and at least one personal astrologer. I have always hated astrologers, and I like to have sport with them. They are harmless quacks in the main, but some of them get ambitious and turn predatory, especially in Hollywood. In Venice Beach, I ran into a man who claimed to be Johnny Depp’s astrologer. … I took his card and examined it carefully a moment, as if I couldn’t quite read the small print. But I knew he was lying, so I leaned toward him and slapped him sharply in the nuts. Not hard, but very quickly, using the back of my hand and my fingers like a bull whip, yet very discreetly. He let out a hiss and went limp, unable to speak or breathe.”

  PERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN WIN AN INDUSTRY AWARD

  Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, in a note to himself: “Develop the idea that no moderately competent hack in any field of Hollywood endeavor can spend ten years in the community without winning a wide assortment of plaques, medals, and certificates of merit.”

  Leave a message at 1:30 P.M., during lunch hour, on his answering machine.

  Do this when you don’t want to talk to that studio executive but want to make it appear that you do.

  But if you get a message back on your answering machine during lunch hour, it might really be time to talk to him.

  You’re not going to be in The Dictionary of Film.

  A magazine wanted to do a profile of me and assigned the job to David Thomson, the critic and author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, recognized as a classic film book.

  I had lunch with David Thomson, a pleasant man, at the Lark Creek Inn in Larkspur, California, and told him I wasn’t going to let him do the article.

  He seemed shocked. “But why not?”

  I said, “Because I’ve read your dictionary and there are hardly any screenwriters in it; there are all kinds of actors, directors, producers, even cinematographers, but not one screenwriter.”

  David Thomson said, “What does that have to do with anything? Just because you’re a screenwriter doesn’t mean I can’t write about you in a publication.”

  I said, “But you obviously don’t believe very many screenwriters are important enough to include in A Biographical Dictionary of Film.”

  “No,” he said calmly, “I don’t suppose I do.”

  So I didn’t let him do the interview—enjoying the fact that I, a lowly screenwriter, was denying him a paycheck.

  Keep your name out of the trades.

  Mike Medavoy: “I told my writer clients to ignore the bigsplash announcements in the trades about some unknown writer getting big bucks for a script, because often these guys are never heard from again.”

  Don’t be anybody’s N word.

  According to screenwriter Buck Henry, screenwriter Robert Towne became “Warren Beatty’s nigger.”

  Don’t take yourself seriously.

  Producer Gerry Ayres: “Bob Towne would love to work for money on rewrites on which he got no credit, and would do it quickly. Over three weeks, he’d have a whole new script ready. But something that had his name on it would become all involved in the neurosis of completion and failure and would take forever.”

  Scald ’em with chicken soup.

  Mike Medavoy: “I had lunch with Paddy Chayefsky. We were talking about directors for Paddy’s script Network and Paddy asked me what I thought of Sidney Lumet.

  “ ‘Sidney Lumet to do Network?’ I gasped. ‘What was the last funny movie he made?’

  “In response, Paddy turned his bowl of chicken soup over on the table. “

  ‘You’re right, Paddy,’ I replied, ‘he’d be great.’ ”

  If you make it, don’t brag about it.

  My fellow Hungarian, actor Tony Curtis: “It was a miserable, rainy late afternoon, my chauffeur drives me down Fortyeighth Street, and who do I see out front, standing under the marquee, but Walter Matthau. He’s got a long, heavy coat on and looks as grumpy as he’s ever looked in his life … he’s looking out at this cold miserable world he’s got to live in. He hates it. I’m getting this reading as I’m sitting in my limo, warm and comfy, looking at this poor guy on the sidewalk staring into the gutter and saying to himself, ‘What’s ever going to happen for me? Nothin’.’ You could see that on his face.

  “So I say to the driver, ‘See that guy standing under the awning? Drive up to him as slowly as possible, and when we’re alongside of him, stop.’ He says okay, so we drive up, and I see Walter watching this limousine come rolling up, and it stops right where he’s standing. I roll the window down, I look at him, and I say, ‘I fucked Yvonne DeCarlo!’

  “Then I just rolled that window back up and told the driver to get the hell out of there.”

  To Do a Hughie

  To trip on your own dick, like actor Hugh Grant.

  The definition of “creative differences” …

  The producer had a reputation for having a nasty temper, so some people were surprised when he was named to take over the studio.

  He soon developed a conflict with a lawyer in Business Affairs who kept questioning some of the personal expenses that the new studio head was writing off—expenses
like an airplaneful of orchids sent to an actress girlfriend in Rio.

  The studio head told the lawyer several times to back off. The lawyers’ friends told him to back off.

  Yet he kept after the studio head, questioning expenses in meetings—expenses like twenty thousand dollars for a party involving three girls who worked for a club in Vegas.

  One day, at a meeting in a studio conference room full of executives, the lawyer nitpicked about some suspicious expense. The studio head punched him in the mouth, judo-chopped him in the throat, and kicked him in the head and ribs while the other studio executives sat there and did nothing.

  The lawyer was taken by ambulance to a hospital. He recovered quickly. He left the studio and received a 5 million settlement.

  Raymond Chandler, role model …

  Producer Ray Stark told screenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison that as a young agent one of his jobs was to get Raymond Chandler off the floor of his apartment, where he sometimes slept fully dressed in a drying pool of his own vomit.

  Never hug an actress on a soundstage.

  You’ll screw up her hair, costuming, and makeup. She’ll hate you.

  LESSON 5

  Don’t Let ’Em Bleed on You!

  You’re on your own.

  After I sold Basic Instinct for 3 million to Carolco, Disney studio honcho Jeff Katzenberg wrote a memo lamenting the fact, and studio heads got together in meetings to discuss ways of keeping future script prices down. (Daily Variety reported both the memo and the studio meetings.)

  The Writers Guild should have filed an antitrust action against the studios for conspiring to keep writers’ prices down, but the Guild, great on matters of health plans and insurance and awful on matters of creative rights, did nothing.

  The multimillion-dollar script frenzy ended within six months, making it pretty clear that the studios had successfully put the writers back in their places: the schmucks at the bottom of the totem pole.

  In 2001, the Guild threatened a strike. One of its main demands was the elimination of the directors’ possessory “Filmed by” credit.

  When the Guild made progress on financial fronts, it simply—without even an explanatory statement—dropped its demands about the directors’ possessory credit, and signed a new contract with the studios.

  Be an outlaw.

  John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry): “I liken myself to a successful outlaw. To be worth a shit in the world, you’ve got to blaze your own trail. Nothing else is any good. Whatever you’re going to do you’re going to do alone.”

  Even Mailer lost his soul.

  Sandy Charlebois Thomas, Norman Mailer’s secretary: “Something happened to him out in Hollywood. He’s talked to me about being corrupted out there. He was young, suddenly very famous, and he was wined and dined. He discovered if he did the cutest little things, people just fell all over him.”

  Don’t let ’em bleed on you.

  Stanley Jaffe, producer and former head of Paramount, would yell at people with such force that blood would flow from his nostrils.

  Don’t do it.

  Screenwriter/playwright David Mamet: “Working as a screenwriter, I always thought that ‘Film is a collaborative business’ only constituted half of the actual phrase. From a screenwriter’s point of view, the correct rendering should be ‘Film is a collaborative business: bend over.’”

  Slug some more Kaopectate, Bill.

  Screenwriter William Goldman: “It’s probably not unwise to try to remember why movie people have kept the tranquilizer business booming; after a debacle, it’s hard to get work; after two, it’s hard to get television.

  Can I have a slug of your Kaopectate, Bill?

  Your last movie has bombed at the box office. Good luck. You’re in a heap of creative trouble. Everyone in every story meeting or phone conference will now think that they know more than you do.

  They may have thought that before your movie failed, but now that it has, they know that you know that you have to listen to their ideas.

  Don’t be a road map.

  Screenwriter Terry George (Hotel Rwanda): “Film today is more and more concentrated on the amusement park element. If a writer can attach an actor or a producer who has some clout, then you can arm yourself; otherwise, a script simply becomes a road map to attract money and talent.”

  I’ve moved out of Malibu, thank you.

  Screenwriter Milo Addica (Birth): “Most writers just want to get their movie made, and it doesn’t matter how. I think I am not in that category. I like to get my movies made by the right director, so that I can have a body of work I can look back on and be proud of. Otherwise, I would not be doing anything I am doing now. I would be in Hollywood trying to make my first million and move up to Malibu.”

  They want to control you.

  Novelist/screenwriter George Pelecanos: “When I was a kid, I used to watch Twilight Zone, as everybody did. The reason I watched it—although I didn’t know enough intellectually then to know why I was watching it—it was written by novelists like Richard Matheson. I always wondered, Why don’t they do that more? Because, damn, novelists sure could use the work; I mean, just to get that extra thirty grand or whatever the scale is for a script and a story is a huge amount of money to most novelists. I think one of the reasons they don’t—actually what a producer told me one time is, ‘We can’t control you guys.’ ”

  They’ll spring the monster on you.

  John Gregory Dunne: “A producer and writer were arguing vigorously against the changes the studio was demanding in a picture already in production. The president of the Disney division overseeing the picture suddenly demanded silence. He was, he said, forced by the writer’s intransigence to ‘take the monster out of its cage.’

  “In the silence that ensued, the division president reached under the table, pretended to grab a small predatory animal from its lair, and then, as if clutching the creature by the neck in his fist, exhibited his empty, clawlike hand to the people around the table. He asked the screenwriter if he saw the monster. The writer, not knowing what else to do, nodded yes.

  “ ‘I’m going to put it back in its cage now,’ the executive said, drawing each word out, ‘and I never want you to force me to bring it out again.’ Then he mimed putting the monster back into its cage under the table. When he was done, the executive asked the writer, ‘Do you know what the monster is?’

  “The writer shook his head.

  “The executive said, ‘It’s our money.’ ”

  Don’t let ’em tell you what to write.

  I did what they said,” Marilyn Monroe said, “and all it got me was a lot of abuse. Everyone’s just laughing at me. I hate it. Big breasts, big ass, big deal.”

  They’ll even try to take your brains.

  Monroe Stahr, the producer in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Last Tycoon: “I never thought I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains belonged to me—because I knew how to use them.”

  Robert McKee taught him …

  A young screenwriter who’d attended Robert McKee’s screenwriting seminar sent me a script. It was about a young screenwriter who’d attended the Robert McKee seminar, hadn’t learned anything, and wound up homeless in Santa Monica.

  The script was awful.

  It helps to know how to fight.

  Screenwriter J. P. Miller said this about Paddy Chayefsky: “Paddy was an extraordinarily good human manipulator. He knew his way around a scrap as very few writers do. Most writers, if they get into a fight or a bad situation on a movie, call their agents. But Paddy knew Hollywood and he wouldn’t back down. He would go head to head with anybody—and at the same time he had this incredible writer’s sensitivity. That’s a rare combination which many of us don’t have. He was that rare breed of talent and fighter.”

  You don’t ever need a job this badly.

  During a script meeting, a producer suggested something that screenwriter William Goldman thought was “a
moron point.”

  Goldman: “I wanted to scream so loud. I wanted to choke the asshole. But I was so sweet. I took notes. I grunted and nodded. I smiled when it was conceivably possible.”

  Kick ’em in their ass!

  Screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “I don’t care about the money. I just like to fight. I’m a tired old man, but it takes more than a motion picture studio to push me around.”

  Kicking ass can do you good.

  Paddy Chayefsky: “I stormed and ranted. And the more I ranted, the more the studio people respected me.”

  I got into so many nasty fights with studio execs over my fifteen movies that the Los Angeles Business Weekly quoted an anonymous screenwriter as saying this about me: “At the heart of the Eszterhas phenomenon is titillation. There is a sense of danger about him, violence. For a lot of movie executives, who have no life experience, he’s exciting, exotic. They get a sense of danger by being in business with him.”

  Clench your fists; throw a fit.

  I once told a group of Disney executives in a crowded conference room to “get your hands off my dick and tell me the truth.”

  Billy Bob Thornton, back in his screenwriting days, leaped atop a studio executive’s desk and threatened to strangle the man for ruining his script.

  “Sometimes I find myself dealing unpleasantly with people,” said Paddy Chayefsky, “talking to them as if they were animals.”

  A producer describes Chayefsky at a meeting this way: “When he was crossed, his entire body would tighten like steel. He’d scowl, clench his fists, glare, then the verbal avalanche would begin. He could level armies with that tongue of his if he didn’t explode first, because his whole body would shake in a fit of apoplexy. For the most part, he looked like a monster child having a tantrum.”

  Pretend you’re Clint Eastwood.