Always go to a pitch meeting with a witness.
Try to convince your agent or your agent’s assistant to accompany you. If you can’t convince them, go with a friend, whom you should call your “writing partner.”
They will be less likely to rip you off if they know you had a witness in the room—and if they do rip you off, you can go to court with a chance to win.
Who is this goofball?
Professor James Ryan in Screenwriting from the Heart: “A producer asked me to take the concept of the film The Man Who Came to Dinner and change it into The Woman Who Came to Dinner. He had a producing deal with a well-known actress and thought this screenplay would provide an excellent vehicle for her talent. Written by the Epstein Brothers, The Man Who Came to Dinner was based on the Kaufman-Hart play about a pompous New York critic, Monty Wooley, who accidentally slips on ice, breaks his leg, and is forced to stay with a midwestern family during his recovery, driving them crazy with his arrogance and grandiosity. At the time we were pitching this project in Hollywood, Jurassic Park had just opened and everyone was taken with its blockbuster success. When we sat down to discuss the project with a studio executive, my producer introduced me in this way: ‘James has a really great story to tell you. Just like Jurassic Park, this story is about a dinosaur that descends upon an unsuspecting midwestern town.’ ”
Take notes for yourself after a pitch meeting.
Describe what you pitched, what you said, and what those in the room said to you. Be very detailed about everyone who was in the room.
Then mail these notes to your lawyer, keeping, of course, a copy for yourself.
Bill Goldman and I agree on something.
William Goldman: “I have only tried one ‘pitch’ in my life and that was for friends, and I was so awful I quit halfway through.”
Send those that you’ve pitched an e-mail.
The e-mail should begin by saying how much you enjoyed the meeting, and end by detailing everything that you said and that they said.
Yes, of course they will know why you sent the note, but it will make it less likely that they will steal your ideas.
Pukeheads
A studio exec’s term for those screenwriters who are nervous doing a pitch.
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW … MUSIC BOX
As an immigrant kid in Cleveland, I played with kids whose fathers were raving anti-Semites and whom other Hungarians in Cleveland were calling “war criminals.”
Many years later, I wrote a script called Music Box about a Hungarian-American lawyer who defends her father against criminal charges for activities back in Hungary during World War II.
DO YOUR RESEARCH … BASIC INSTINCT
One night when I was a young man, I was with a girl I’d picked up at a go-go bar in Dayton, Ohio. She was one of the dancers.
We went to a hotel and, after what we’d done what we went there to do, she pulled a cute little .22-caliber revolver on me and asked if I had any real good reason why she shouldn’t pull the trigger, considering the way her life was going and considering how used she felt at that moment.
She told me I wouldn’t be the first guy she’d pulled the trigger on, and I believed her … and somehow talked her out of pulling it on me.
When I was writing Basic Instinct many years later in a little room of my house in San Rafael, California, I remembered the girl in that hotel room in Dayton, Ohio.
If you’ve pitched a story and they want you to give them an outline …
Fudge. I do this all the time. I explain in the first paragraph of the outline that it isn’t an outline. It is a document containing “notes in the direction of a story.”
This wording gives you a legalistic out in case your script doesn’t reflect what is in the outline that isn’t an outline.
Don’t talk your story away.
Keep what you’re writing to yourself. Don’t expend the energy you’ll need to write it by talking your story instead, telling friends in bars, restaurants, and beds what you’re working on.
I’ve heard too many good stories from screenwriters who talked but never wrote them. I’ve come to the conclusion that your characters get angry at you if you speak about them … and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge.
Remember: Real writers sit down and write; wannabe writers sit around and talk.
Screenwriter Robert Towne is famous in Hollywood for talking terrific scripts that never get written. Towne even had an agent once who heard so many brilliant and unwritten scripts from Towne that he started writing their plot summaries down. He proposed to Towne that they form a production company together and assign the unwritten Towne stories to other writers. Towne, horrified that his agent was taking notes about what he was telling him, fired the agent instead.
There is another reason not to tell anyone what you are writing. It isn’t as likely that you’ll be ripped off if you stay mum. Rip-offs are common in Hollywood; some of the town’s most successful writers have plagiarized. A screen-writer won an Academy Award by ripping off a novel written by one of his college professors; the studio paid a hefty six-figure sum to settle the suit.
Write your script; don’t schmooze your producer.
Producer David Geffen, discussing screenwriter Robert Towne: “Bob was a very talented writer, although an extraordinarily boring man. He always talked about himself. He used to go to Catalina to write and would describe to you in endless detail watching the cows shit.”
She wouldn’t have liked Bob Towne.
Hedy Lamarr: “In my experiences with writers, I found that those who talk less are more talented. I sat a whole evening with Otto Preminger and Tennessee Williams and Mr. Williams said just ten words.”
It’s okay to plagiarize yourself.
Ben Hecht based his 1958 film, The Fiend Who Walked the West, starring a young Robert Evans, on his 1947 hit film, Kiss of Death, starring Richard Widmark.
I based my 1983 film, Flashdance, on the Dutch film Spetters, directed by Paul Verhoeven. Then I based my 1995 film, Showgirls, directed by Paul Verhoeven, on Flashdance.
It might be fair then to say that my friend Paul Verhoeven was the creative spark behind both Flashdance and Showgirls. I’m certainly happy he didn’t direct Flashdance, though, because he probably would have had an affair with Jennifer Beals, and Lord knows how Flashdance would have turned out.
You can rob yourself blind.
Raymond Chandler did it all the time, turning sketches into short stories, stories into novels, and novels into screenplays.
As he said, “I am the copyright owner. I can use my material in any way I see fit. There is no moral or ethical issue involved.”
Chandler was once lambasted for plagiarizing himself—by a reader named E. Howard Hunt who, twenty years later, was one of the burglars involved in the Watergate break-in.
Hunt obviously didn’t have any issues with someone stealing from other people.
Eugene O’Neill plagiarized Raymond Chandler … or did Raymond Chandler plagiarize Eugene O’Neill?
My ideas have been plagiarized,” wrote Raymond Chandler. “Throughout the play The Iceman Cometh O’Neill uses the expression “The Big Sleep” as a synonym for death. He is apparently under the impression that this is a current underworld or half-world usage, whereas it is a pure invention on my part. If I am remembered long enough, I shall probably be accused of stealing the phrase from O’Neill, since he is a big shot.”
I swear I wasn’t influenced by reading Hungarian plays.
Orson Welles said, “Every Hungarian play is plagiarized from another Hungarian play.”
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW … TELLING LIES IN AMERICA
I went to a Catholic high school in Cleveland, where I was the victim of a great deal of prejudice because I was an immigrant and because I was poor. I dreamed of overcoming all that animosity and becoming an American writer one day.
Thirty years later, I wrote Telling Lies in America, the story of a kid at a Catholic hig
h school in Cleveland who is the victim of a great deal of prejudice because he is an immigrant and because he is poor. He dreams of overcoming the marginalization and being a famous American writer someday.
DO YOUR RESEARCH … FLASHDANCE
I researched a script about pipeline welders for a script about the Alaska pipeline. The script, called Rowdy, was never made into a film.
Four years later, I used all the research I had done about the pipeline for the young woman that I made a welder in Flashdance.
The most important part of what you write is what will be left out.
The hell of good film writing,” Raymond Chandler wrote, “is that the most important part is left out. It’s left out because the camera and the actors can do it better and quicker, above all quicker. But it had to be there in the beginning.”
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW … CHECKING OUT
In my midthirties, I suddenly began experiencing panic and anxiety attacks, during which I felt I was going to die. I wrote a script— Checking Out —about a man who begins having anxiety and panic attacks and is convinced he is going to die.
After I wrote the film, I stopped having the attacks. I had cured myself with my own writing.
When the movie failed both critically and commercially, I had a couple more attacks.
The “asshole guy” might read your script.
By writing screenplays for Hollywood production, you are writing for studio executives who don’t read anything, except maybe their readers’ summaries about scripts.
Oh, they might skim through Vanity Fair to see the new chichi Prada and Dolce ads. But they don’t read books or scripts. They are about as illiterate as most people who want to write scripts … as illiterate, maybe, as you.
Some go to the greatest lengths to avoid reading. I know a studio exec who gives the comedies his reader says he should read to his wife’s gynecologist and the dramas to his own proctologist.
I know another illiterate exec who’s made everyone believe that he’s got dyslexia; consequently, he has his assistants tape a script (even then he will sometimes fast-forward through it).
The fact that most studio execs don’t read books or even scripts isn’t good news … if you want to write a literate and literary script that the critics would praise but no one would see.
If, however, you want to write a script of a movie that everyone would see, like Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge and Flashdance, then these semi-illiterate and illiterate studio execs might be your perfect first audience.
WRITE WHAT YOU FEAR … BIG SHOTS
While I was having my panic attacks, I worried what would happen to my ten-year-old son, Steve, if I died. So I sat down and wrote a script called Big Shots, which is about a ten-year-old boy who loves his father very much and whose father dies.
When they were about to film the script, the producer met my son Steve and wanted to cast him in the film as the kid whose father dies. I stopped it because I was afraid that if Steve played the kid whose father died, then I might die.
When Steve graduated from high school, I gave him the Rolex Submariner that I always wore, and which was featured in the movie. It was the watch that the fictional kid always wanted and which he got after his father died.
I felt odd giving Steve the watch … since I was very much alive.
You’ll probably be rewritten.
In some ways, this has always been the case in Hollywood. Witness what F. Scott Fitzgerald said during his Hollywood years: “If one writer on a picture is good, ten are ten times better.”
I was very fortunate in this regard: Of my fifteen films, I had sole credit on nine.
Francis Ford Coppola caused the carpet bombing of Cambodia.
The night before American fighters carpet-bombed Cambodia, Richard Nixon watched Patton in the White House over and over again.
Paddy Chayefsky got Arnold elected.
Thanks to his line—“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”—Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California.
James Cameron has blood on his hands, too.
Hasta la vista, baby!” Cameron wrote in The Terminator. It, too, became a slogan of Arnold’s gubernatorial campaign.
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW … BETRAYED
I attended every one of my son Steve’s Little League games and found racist and anti-Semitic epithets carved into some of the grandstands—in liberal Marin County, northern California.
I wrote a script about the rise of neo-Nazis in America, Betrayed.
It was filmed in Lethbridge, Canada, and one day during filming, missing Steve, I wandered down to a local field and watched some Little Leaguers play a game. And I noticed that the grandstand I was watching the game from had the same kind of anti-Semitic epithets on it that I had seen in Marin County.
Don’t try to discover the hot new thing.
Mike Medavoy: “I’m always suspicious of the hot new thing. You can really get burned attempting to make films like the ones that worked last month or last year.”
Write what your heart tells you to write.
It might lead you nowhere. I’ve always loved old-timey honky-tonk country music … Ernest Tubb and Hank and Ray Price and George Jones.
I decided one day that I was going to put my love of real country music up on the big screen. I wrote an old-timey country musical, called The Honky-Tonk Opera, which was more a stage musical than a movie. Once I had the script written, I didn’t know what to do with it. For one thing, somebody would have to write the music—all I had were the words.
I sent the script to Tom Ross, who had been the head of CAA’s music division. He loved it. He said he could envision stage versions of Honky-Tonk produced in places like Nashville, Vegas, and Houston after the movie’s release. Tom felt we needed “a country music partner,” so we made a trip to Nashville, trying to convince country-music record executives Tony Brown, Joe Galante, and Mike Curb to come aboard as coproducers. Curb, the former lieutenant governor of California, went for it. He was a huge name in country music—among his artists at Curb Records were Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and Jo Dee Messina.
With Ross and Curb attached to the project, my agents went out to sell the script. They got nowhere. Potential buyers didn’t know what to do with it. Old-timey Hank Williams country music? Say what? A tear-jerking celebration of love and America? Huh? By the guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls? Oh boy. Where was the sex? (There was no sex.)
I went to David Geffen, who’d produced both films and plays, and asked him to read the script and tell me his opinion. He read it and told me that it was “unproducible.”
I thanked him and put The Honky-Tonk Opera into a drawer. It’s still there … where my heart had led me.
Only shitheads do shitwork.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Bill Goldman: “Screenwriting is shitwork. Brief example: Waldo Pepper. Waldo was basically an original screenplay of mine. I say ‘basically’ because the pulse of the movie came from George Hill, the director, and we worked for ten days on a story. … Okay, we open in New York and three daily papers are split—two terrific, one pan. In neither of the laudatory reviews was my name even mentioned. But you better believe I got top billing in the pan. I had screwed up George Hill’s movie. Nothing unusual at all about that—it’s SOP for the screenwriter. That is simply the way of the world. You do not, except in rare, rare exceptions, get critical recognition.”
The moral of the story: Don’t work with any director for ten days trying to come up with a story. Don’t let the screenplay be “basically” yours. Make sure the “pulse” of the movie comes from you and not the directing.
If you do all those things, you won’t be doing shitwork.
Do your research.
Ben Hecht: “The producer wanted my script to top all the other gangster pictures. So I had my secretary go out and see all the gangster pictures playing. She scouted up all the dead people in each picture. In one film nine people were bumped off, so I we
nt to the producer and said, ‘We’re going to kill twenty-five people!’ ”
LESSON 8
Ideas Are Poison!
Go outside the box.
Screenwriter/director Jean-Luc Godard: “A film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
Violate everyone’s privacy.
To write the way real people talk, listen to the way real people talk. Pretend you have a scanner in your head and, as people talk, imagine their words running across the screen, complete with punctuation marks, to “see” the words more clearly.
A friend of mine who is a screenwriter taped his own phone calls but felt after awhile that his conversations were becoming stilted because he knew he was taping them. So he put a tiny microphone into a flowerpot near a table at a bar and listened to the conversations at that table while he sat across the room with a tiny transmitter in his ear.
I have another friend, a phone repairman in L.A. He sits atop a telephone pole for hours every day listening to strangers’ conversations. He wants to be a screenwriter.
PERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN GET A FREE LEXUS
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 13