When I wrote An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, I wrote several Toyota Land Cruisers into the script.
I got a call from a Lexus representative, who told me that if I changed the Toyotas in the script into Lexuses, I’d get a free Lexus delivered to my house in Malibu.
In what was probably the most stupid move of my life, done for obviously perverse reasons, I turned my free Lexus down.
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW … RELIABLE SOURCES
When I was a young newspaper reporter, I covered a hostage situation where a gunman was holding his ex-girlfriend hostage.
Twenty-five years later, I wrote the story as Reliable Sources and sold the script to Paramount for 2 million.
Don’t write a Western.
The odds are overwhelming that it won’t be made, and that if it is, it will fail. Almost every year or so, there is a failed attempt to do a Western—some, like Larry Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp, have been especially good, but the public doesn’t seem interested.
A producer said to me, “A Western in space, yes, a hip-hop Western, yes, but a Western with horses, absolutely not.
A Tender Love Story
That, according to director Jim Cameron, is what The Terminator was. Cameron used the very same words to describe Titanic.
“The worst thing that could happen” is the worst thing you can do.
A lot of screenwriters write scripts this way!
A man is happily married and has three beautiful children. What’s the worst thing that could happen to him? His wife dies. Okay. Now what’s the worst thing that could happen? His kids die, too. Okay. Now what’s the worst thing that could happen? He falls in love with the wrong woman. Now what’s the worst thing that could happen? She steals all of his money. Now what’s the worst thing that could happen? He becomes a homeless person. Now what’s the worst thing that could happen? He finds himself asleep at night atop his wife’s grave. Now what? He gets pneumonia. Now what? He dies. Now what? The person who receives the kidney that he left to medical science rejects his kidney and dies, too.
And on and on and on.
Do not allow that sentence—What’s the worst thing that could happen?—to enter your thoughts as you write.
No more Travis Bickle …
If you want to sell your script, give your main characters lots of friends, extended families to cheer him/her on.
Studios love this—studio execs feel that if an audience sees a lead character being cheered on-screen, then the audience will automatically like him.
Studio research on Top Gun, for example, discovered that audiences weren’t cheering the movie at its end. The studio inserted a scene that had been shot earlier, which showed all the other pilots cheering on-screen at the end.
After that scene was inserted, audiences everywhere cheered the ending of the movie.
DO YOUR RESEARCH … AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM
A director came to have lunch with me at my home in Malibu. His name was Stuart Baird. He was formerly a film editor and he had just directed his first big action hit. He was a Brit who’d worked with Ken Russell and was dressed all in khaki. I liked him and we talked for hours.
A couple of weeks later, I sat down to write An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, which is about a former film editor who directs his first film. My lead character, the director, Alan Smithee, is a Brit who has worked with Ken Russell and dresses in all khaki.
When the film was released, Stuart Baird went to the producer and said, “That bloody Hungarian—he stole my whole life in one bloody lunch.”
You’re better off getting the rights.
My movie F.I.S.T. was about Jimmy Hoffa. But United Artists didn’t have the rights to Hoffa’s life and didn’t want to pay to acquire the rights, either; so throughout the writing of the script, I had to be careful not to get too close to the details of Hoffa’s life (even though I knew and the studio knew that I was writing about Hoffa).
It was a nightmare because I had to be as concerned about what the lawyers would think as what the director, producer, and studio executives would think.
Angie Dickinson inspired Basic Instinct, Sliver, Showgirls, and Jade.
I was staying overnight in a producer’s guest house in Beverly Hills and dreamed all night about sex.
I don’t dream often about sex, but on this night I kept having a vision of endless coupling with women whose faces I didn’t recognize.
The dreams were only of the act itself—without tenderness or feeling—sporting, athletic, as though I were riding a mechanical bull.
I awoke worn-out, drenched in sweat, and with the kind of painful erection I’d had when I was thirteen years old.
The producer asked me how I’d slept, and I lied and said fine. Then he told me that his guest house had been the place where JFK trysted with Angie Dickinson when he came to town.
A couple weeks later, as I was waiting for a cab in the portico of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, I watched as a little Mercedes convertible pulled up and a stunning older woman got out and walked toward me into the hotel.
As Angie Dickinson passed me, I couldn’t help winking at her, and she gave me a knowing, dazzling smile.
Be nice to those you’ve wounded.
Don’t try to take credit away from the first writer, who thought the basic concept up. After I rewrote Flashdance, there wasn’t much left of Tom Hedley’s original script except the title and the concept of a working-class girl wanting to be a ballet dancer.
It was enough, though.
In its arbitration, the Writers Guild ruled that the credit should be: Screenplay by Hedley and Eszterhas, story by Hedley.
While in my heart I felt that I should have had story credit along with him, I understood that without him, we would’ve had nothing. So, after the arbitration was announced, I called Tom Hedley and congratulated him.
ALL HAIL
Nunnally Johnson, Charles
MacArthur, and Joel Sayre!
Told by Dave Chasen one night that his restaurant was about to close, the three screenwriters picked Chasen up, took him outside, came back in, and locked the door.
DO YOUR RESEARCH … AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM
In my film An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the lead character, Smithee, has two props that he carries throughout the film: his Dogon fighting stick and his Tibetan rock. They are his talismans, holy objects he carries for luck.
Stuart Baird didn’t carry those things around, but I did. I keep those holy objects near me—even now, as I write this.
I made my holy objects famous! I put them up on the big screen!
You’re not writing children’s books.
Professor Andrew Horton, of Loyola University, in his book Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay: “Want to get a good feel for writing screenplays? … Check out an armful of children’s books from the library. I’m serious. Comic books do much the same thing—after all, they’re written in ‘frames’ with speech bubbles. But children’s books have become incredibly inventive and VISUALLY IMAGINATIVE JOURNEYS for kids.”
Avoid writing about living people.
In my Otis Redding script, Blaze of Glory, I wrote about Zelma, his wife, and his friend and manager, Phil Walden.
Zelma loved the script and her depiction and had no problems. Initially, neither did Phil Walden, who publicly said he loved the script.
But after a couple of weeks, he changed his mind. While both Phil and one of his brothers had managed Otis, in my script, for reasons of dramatic tension, I showed only Phil (no brother) representing Otis.
Understandably, Phil’s brother didn’t like being left out of the script, and Phil, no doubt not wanting to make his brother unhappy, turned against the script—one reason it hasn’t been made in all these years.
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW … FLASHDANCE
When I was nineteen years old, I dated a twenty-four-year-old woman from the West Side of Cleveland who worked for Republic Steel as a welder. She’d once dreamed of be
ing a ballet dancer and went to every ballet performance in the city.
Twenty years later, I wrote the story of the young woman who wants to be a ballet dancer and works as a welder—Alex, in Flashdance.
Expose all your family secrets.
You know all the family secrets—how Uncle John used to dress up as a woman on weekends and how one of his kids spotted him getting out of a car downtown; how Aunt Emily disappeared at the wedding reception for forty minutes with the best man.
Change all the names, of course, and if you sell your script and Uncle John sees himself on-screen, pretend that it has nothing at all to do with him. Chances are he won’t confront you because he won’t want the comparison to be made by anybody.
If someone in the family asks you how you came up with that particular story, just smile and say that your writing has nothing to do with you, that there’s a twisted little person inside you who makes all this stuff up.
Your toys can inspire you.
An African Dogon hatchet that I bought at an antique fair became the murder weapon in Jade.
My favorite antique manual typewriter became the McGuffin in Jagged Edge—the clue that gives Jeff Bridges away as the murderer.
Compounded irony: I actually wrote the script of Jagged Edge on the very antique manual typewriter that was the McGuffin in the script.
If you’re good in the sack, you can make ’em laugh.
Comedian Jay Leno: “No one thinks they’re a bad lay. Everyone figures ‘I may be fat and acne-riddled or stupid, but I know, in the sack, I’m the greatest thing in the world’ … and it’s the same thing with comedy. Telling someone they have no sense of humor is like telling someone they’re bad at sex.”
If you want to win an Oscar …
Paddy Chayefsky gave this advice to Gore Vidal: “If you want all the prizes, you gotta write shrill.”
“He had a point,” said Vidal.
Winner’s Walk
The passageway at the Academy Awards between the stage and the press room—the route taken by all Oscar winners.
If you want to win an Oscar, fight the good fight.
A Holocaust-related film was, for many years, a good bet to be nominated for an Oscar; in later years, it was a film about civil rights and black empowerment.
Today’s hot Oscar subjects are gay rights and gay empowerment.
An Oscar-winning producer said to me, “The Holocaust battle has been won. We’re winning on women’s empowerment, too. The best indication of that is the record number of copies sold of Hillary’s book. The real door-to-door political street fighting is about gay rights and gay marriage now. Those are the movies the Academy wants to reward, and there are a lot of shrewd people in this town who always figure out what the Academy wants to reward, before they sit down and go to work.”
POWs
Past Oscar winners.
If you write this script, you’re probably a sure bet for an Oscar.
The script is about a saintly black man with a newly discovered mental illness who was abused by white foster parents as a child, and who has surgery now to become the woman he’s always wanted to be, so she can help other black children abused by white foster parents.
In the first half of the movie, he’s played by Denzel Washington. In the second half, the starring role is played by Halle Berry.
They both win Oscars—for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively—as does Michael Moore for Best Director.
Trophy Girls
Bimbos who carry the statues at awards shows.
Or, if you want to win an Oscar, try writing about …
A saintly heroic woman, a saintly heroic gay man or woman, a saintly heroic black man or woman, a victimized woman, a gay man or woman, a black man or woman … who frees him or her, or himself and herself from victimization and empowers any of the above gender/color combos, as well as anyone with autism, Tourette’s, or, best of all, a bizarre new neurological disorder that only Oliver Sachs knows about.
Don’t write any John Wayne–type parts.
With the exception of Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson, there are few stars able to play supermacho parts today. Many of Hollywood’s top male movie stars are either bisexual or gay. If they’re not bisexual or gay, their feminine sides overpower their manhood. Look at how Orlando Bloom and Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt failed, respectively, in Kingdom of Heaven, Alexander, and Troy.
Are My Nipples Even?
The greatest concern of starlets who appear on awards shows.
Another surefire formula for a quick script sale …
Write a script about a young woman battling cancer, whose best friend is a gay man and who has an adopted black daughter and a mutant but cuddly and ugly dog.
If you want to sell your script, don’t kill off your lead character.
John Wayne made over two hundred movies; he died in only eight of them, including his last one, The Shootist.
Sylvester Stallone had a full-scale hissy fit when my script of F.I.S.T. called for him to die. Studio lawyers had to force him to die.
If you write a real man’s man …
Do to him what Jim Brooks did to the Jack Nicholson character in As Good As It Gets.
Turn him inside out. Show him to be the asshole that he is and, at the end, show him reborn as a touchy-feely man who has great disdain for the way he used to be—cure him of his psychic, spiritual cancer and show how happy he is to be healthily reborn.
Or do to him what Marty Brest did to the Ben Affleck character in Gigli: “It’s turkeytime,” and he gobble-gobbles and maybe he’ll even stop calling that poor kid “a fucking retard,” as he’s done through the whole movie.
To simplify this: If you have an old-style man’s man in the beginning of the movie, castrate him gradually in the second and third acts—and at the end, show how happy he is about his gelding.
Write strong and independent female characters.
Your women have to be smart, tough, streetwise, courageous, heroic, and good. They have to be smarter than their male costars and they have to have women friends they bond with. It helps if they have gay friends—male or female—and it’s not even harmful to have them be subtly bisexual.
While they may kiss men on-screen and condescend to them and patronize them and make love to them (in darkly shot scenes), there should be something in their persona that says, All men are assholes.
If you’re male and trying to write a female character …
Screenwriter/director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham): “Write a woman’s character as a man, then change any specifics, and you’ll find there’re very few things you have to change.”
Write a buddy movie about two women.
You’ll sell the script, though the movie might fail.
Director/screenwriter Anthony Minghella, discussing Cold Mountain: “I wanted to make a movie about … the joy that occurs when men are away and women find each other and help each other. The relationship between Ruby and Ada, the wit of it, and the idea that there could be this exchange of gifts between people, that you could help somebody else and they could help you and you would grow with them and laugh at them and laugh with them. Such a relief not to have made a movie in which the two women are fighting over the same guy.”
You can get away with trashing straight white males.
There is no male counterpart for the National Organization for Women (thankfully). There are no male lobbying or pressure groups. And, as a group, straight white males have been so beaten down by their wives and girlfriends (and by media coverage, especially TV ads) that many believe they really are and have historically been villains and/or assholes.
Redeeming Social Values
The values (liberal, progressive, or elitist—that’s your choice) shared by most Hollywood studio heads, producers, directors, stars, screenwriters, and all those others who want to work in this town again.
Too Ethnic
A story that is too Jewish or too black.
I don’t s
hoot my villains.
Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane): “In a novel a hero can lay the girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.”
Orson Welles agrees with me: He said, “Most heavies should be played for sympathy.”
No Denzel in bed with Gwyneth …
After Monster’s Ball, it’s possible to get a movie made that includes torrid sex between a white man and a black woman—but the reverse won’t fly.
Denzel Washington or Jamie Foxx in bed with Gwyneth Paltrow or Charlize Theron (or even the dark-hued Angelina Jolie)? Forget it.
Hollywood executives are secretly still afraid there would be riots, lynchings, and God knows what else in the streets.
Richard Pryor and Margot Kidder got it on in a movie called Some Kind of Hero many years ago; the footage was so hot that it can still be seen at certain producers’ parties, along with Mickey Rourke and Carrie Otis in Wild Orchid and, for comic relief, Sharon Stone and Billy Baldwin in Sliver.
Don’t be afraid to write sex scenes.
Nothing risqué, nothing gained,” said Jayne Mansfield, sexy actress.
Showing a little flesh won’t hurt your movie.
Actor James Coburn: “A little titty never hurt anyone.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 14