Or you can do what Andrew Kevin Walker did.
He worked at Tower Records in L.A. for three years while writing the script he entitled Seven.
When he was finished, he called the Writers Guild with a list of writers who had written scripts about mass murderers. He asked for the names of their agents.
Then he called the agents, but, of course, he couldn’t get through to them directly. However, he spoke to their assistants, who told him that they wouldn’t accept unsolicited screenplays.
And then, brilliantly, he pitched his script to the assistants very simply: “It’s about a serial killer who kills according to the seven deadly sins.”
He went down the list, pitching to the assistants, until one of them said, “Okay, send it. I’ll read it.”
She did, loved it, and gave it to her boss.
Seven, a brilliantly written piece, became one of the biggest hits of 1995. And Andrew Kevin Walker quit his job at Tower Records.
Or you can join the Church of Scientology.
Many big-time Hollywood actors belong to the Church of Scientology, and you just might meet them if you join. If you meet them, you just might get a chance to slip them your script.
On the other hand, screenwriter Floyd Mutrux, a longtime member of the Church of Scientology, hasn’t had very many movies made, making me think that the rumored rigorous discipline of Scientologists might not be worth the access to a star.
On the other hand, there’s that machine called the E-meter that vets each screenplay its members are asked to star in.
If that’s really true, though, I wonder how Eyes Wide Shut got past the E-meter for Tom Cruise.
If you don’t want to become a Scientologist, this is what you can do to get your script read by someone important.
You can skydive from a rented plane onto Steven Spielberg’s Pacific Palisades estate and hope your daredevil exploit impresses the house manager enough so that she will give your script to Steven.
You can streak naked through the shower room at the Riviera Country Club and hand your plastic-bagged script to Sylvester Stallone. (If he likes it, you’ll probably have to share credit with him.)
You can swim to shore off Brad Pitt’s Santa Barbara estate and leave several copies of your script around the pool, then race back to the beach and swim back to your boat before security gets you.
You can visit the Coppola Winery in the Napa Valley, shake Francis’s hand, and slip him a couple of C-notes to get your script to Sofia.
You can pretend to be an exterminator and show up at the door of David Geffen’s estate in Malibu. Since Malibu always has a rat problem, chances are excellent that someone will let you in.
You can go down to Maxfield’s on Melrose or Chrome Hearts on Robertson and slip a clerk a couple of twenties for some Maxfield or Chrome Hearts boxes. You can then send the boxes (with your script inside) to the agents, producers, or directors of your choice.
Maxfield’s and Chrome Hearts boxes are almost always immediately opened by the addressees themselves, not assistants, because the addressees are afraid their assistants will steal whatever goodies are inside those boxes. Also, if the agents, producers, or directors are successful, chances are excellent that he or she shops at Maxfield’s or Chrome Hearts.
You can go down to the Coffee Bean on Sunset and slip your script to Jennifer Aniston.
My brother-in-law, a sometimes-aspiring screenwriter, drinks double lattes there but so far has not had the cojones to slip any of the beautiful people there his masterpiece. He does, however, keep a chart on his wall of the stars he’s sighted at the Bean, along with time and date of sighting and witnesses.
You can go down to the office of Dr. Robert Koblin on Robertson or that of Dr. Edward Kantor off Wilshire Boulevard and wait around. Koblin is an internist who treats many of the most powerful people in the industry; Kantor is known as the “ENT man to the stars.” These folks who walk into these offices may not exactly be happy to see you there waiting for them with your script, especially if they are in pain or stressed to the max, but you’ve got a living to make, don’t you?
And as my director friend Richard Marquand used to say, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”
You can follow them into the john.
Mike Medavoy: “I’ll be using the men’s room at the AMC Century 14 and some one will hand me a script. ‘You should make this script,’ the man will say; ‘it’s a lot better than the last film you made.’ There hasn’t been a woman in the men’s room yet, but there will be.”
A Script Stalker
A screenwriter capable of following you anywhere or doing anything to get you to read his/her script.
Even Steven Spielberg needs an agent.
Steven Spielberg hadn’t had an agent in many years. He felt he didn’t need one. Then he sent Tom Cruise a script he wanted Tom to do with him. More exactly, he sent Tom’s agent at CAA—the Creative Artists Agency, run by Michael Ovitz—the script he wanted Cruise to do, an old F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.
Steven didn’t get an answer—not a yes, nor a no—for six months.
At the end of six months, Steven Spielberg signed CAA up as his agents—so he would get an answer from Tom Cruise.
He got his answer: Tom Cruise said no. He didn’t want to do that script with Steven, although he did hook up with Steven about a year later.
Steven Spielberg must have felt he needed an agent pretty badly.
It couldn’t have been easy for Steven, the most powerful director in Hollywood, to sign up with CAA.
He knew that before he married Kate Capshaw, CAA head Michael Ovitz had chased her around his office.
Why Steven Spielberg has never been represented by Jeff Berg at ICM …
Jeff’s brother, Tony, said, “A Steven Spielberg film is a classic example of a third-rate melodrama elevated way beyond its depth. I can’t think of a filmmaker whose stuff I like less. His work is so manipulative.”
Mike Medavoy isn’t smart about everything.
When his client Steven Spielberg didn’t walk out on his deal with Universal as he had recommended, agent Medavoy fired Spielberg. Medavoy: “I’m just glad that wasn’t the defining point of my career.”
An agent will help you to hold on to your aureole.
Writer/director Elia Kazan: “Let your agent tell the lies. Get a hireling to drop the axe so that you never fog your aureole of culture and gentility.”
Your first agent won’t be your last agent.
I had an agent who told me we’d spend decades together; six months later she stopped being an agent and became a very successful interior decorator in New York.
I had an agent who said, “My job isn’t to give you advice. My job is to respond. When you say ‘Jump,’ I say ‘How high?’ ” I fired him.
I had an agent who told me it would take him two weeks to read an original screenplay I’d written. I figured he was too busy to be my agent or that he moved his lips when he read. I fired him.
I had an agent who spoke with a thick English accent many years after she’d spent six months working in London. After awhile, the accent was driving me nuts. I fired her.
I had an agent who, in the middle of a negotiation with a studio, disappeared for ten days. Nobody knew where he was. He finally reappeared and whispered to me, man to man, that he’d gotten hold of a “big bag” of cocaine and had been in Puerto Vallarta with a well-known sexpot movie star. I fired him after he concluded the negotiation successfully. It’s not impossible that I fired him because I was jealous.
I had an agent who was depressed and gloomy much of the time while he was representing me. A producer friend and I had a bet that one day he’d drive into the desert (he liked to go to Joshua Tree alone on weekends) and blow his brains out. But we were wrong. He went on Prozac, stopped being depressed, stopped driving out into the desert, married a beautiful, smart woman, and is now one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. I fired and rehired him twice in my career
. I like him.
I had an agent who was one of the coldest people I’ve ever met and one of the smartest. We had nothing to talk to each other about besides business—our conversations usually lasted thirty seconds or less. I finally fired him because, although he was very good as an agent, I just couldn’t tolerate his coldness anymore. He wrote me an affable postcard after I fired him, wishing me the best of luck. It was the warmest communication he’d ever had with me. He also said that sooner or later he knew I’d rehire him because I’d realize just how good he was as an agent. A couple years after he sent me the note, I rehired him. I was with him for a couple years, until his coldness got to me again and I fired him once more.
Don’t let your agent give you creative advice.
Whatever he tells you will be stupid.
It’s what George Bernard Shaw said to Sam Goldwyn: “Mr. Goldwyn, all you want to do is talk about art and all I want to do is talk about money.”
I knew an agent who not only hired a reader to read all scripts for him but then hired another reader to read that reader’s reports and compress them into one paragraph—or no more than thirty words.
A Rainmaker
An agent who makes a lot of money (with successful clients) for an agency.
Agents have their own agendas.
The morning that we began the Basic Instinct auction, I asked the head of my agency, Jeff Berg of ICM, who he thought was going to buy it and how much he thought it would sell for.
Jeff said he thought Mario Kassar at Carolco would wind up buying it for 3 million.
Jeff ran the auction himself. Everyone in town except Fox played and bid against one another. And at the end of that long day, Mario Kassar of Carolco bought it for 3 million.
How did Berg know? Was there a side deal between ICM and Carolco that I didn’t know about? Was there a kickback to ICM? Not that I was ever able to uncover, but I was suspicious.
Of course it’s also possible that Jeff Berg is more than just one of the smartest people in Hollywood. It’s possible that Jeff is a genius and a seer.
The Ubermenschen of Hollywood
What CAA agents, led by Michael Ovitz, were known as in the 1990s.
How you can tell that your agent cares about you …
He calls you three times a week at least. He has nothing really to say to you, so he says, “I’m just checking in,” thinking, maybe, that you’ve turned into a hotel.
He kisses you on both cheeks every time he sees you. He tells you he loves you every time he sees you.
How you can tell that your agent doesn’t care about you …
He calls you three times a week at least. He has nothing to say to you, so he says “I’m just checking in,” thinking, maybe, that you’ve turned into a hotel.
He kisses you on both cheeks every time he sees you. He tells you he loves you every time he sees you.
You’re part of the ebb and flow.
There is an ebb and flow in the client business,” agent Jeff Berg once told me. “You lose a client and you ask yourself, How can I get a new one?”
You don’t want a sweet and adorable negotiator.
Legendary former agent Freddie Fields: “What excuse do you have, what defense against a proper negotiator, when you’ve been bettered? You call him a killer, a cold-blooded guy. They’re all overused terms. There’s no such thing as a sweet, warm, adorable good negotiator.”
Try to find an agent who’s seen it all.
Like my longtime agent Guy McElwaine—studio head at Warner Bros., Columbia, and Rastar; married seven or nine times; represented Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Peters Sellers, Yul Brynner, Burt Reynolds, Sharon Stone, Richard Pryor; married on three separate occasions to separate women at the Splendido Hotel in Portofino, Italy; once made love to Natalie Wood on top of a pool table in a bar where the jukebox was playing Sinatra; once won a white Lincoln Continental in a poker game from golfer Johnny Miller; once pulled producer David Geffen off a conference table when he was about to duke it out with Warner Bros. head Ted Ashley.
Be a pain in your agent’s ass.
Screenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan (Gorillas in the Mist): “My agent gave me the best advice an agent had ever given me. He said, ‘I represent a lot of big people. I’m going to forget about you unless you bug me. You have to call me. You have to call me three, four times a week and you have to make me crazy. Make me hate you. If you don’t, I’m going to forget about you, and this is not going to go anywhere.”
Tumeling
Where agents want to be: at the center of the action.
If you’ve written a new script and want to give it to your new agent …
Wait until the next time he’s flying to New York and give it to him the day before he leaves. He’ll be captive for five hours, and that means:
1. He’ll probably be able to finish the script before he lands.
2. He won’t stop reading it to take any phone calls.
ALL HAIL
Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar!
David O. Selznick, the most powerful producer in town at the time, said of him: “There is one man who is single-handedly ruining the motion picture industry as we know it. The ridiculous prices he demands for books and plays and writers will surely be the end of us all.”
To Wirtschafter
To lose clients because of stupid things you said during an interview—like William Morris agent David Wirtschafter, who lost clients after an interview he did with The New Yorker magazine.
What was that about the black heart of an agent?
When agent Marty Baum retired from CMA, where he’d worked for many years, his fellow agents gave him a Cartier tank watch. He discovered that it was a Hong Kong knockoff.
I wouldn’t hire this guy.
ACAA agent hustles new clients by saying, “I want to be your asshole,” or “I want to be your bitch.”
Try to get your agent to lie for you.
This won’t be easy, because your agent will have better relationships with studio executives (whom he’s known for a long time) than with you. But if you can somehow get your agent to do it, it will pay off big-time.
In 1980, I wrote a spec script called City Hall and sent it to my agent. He loved it and decided to auction it. He sent it out to Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros., and MGM at the same time. Within hours, Paramount, Universal, and MGM passed. Warner Bros. was thinking about it.
I asked my agent to tell Warner Bros. that one of the three who’d passed wanted to buy it. He said he couldn’t lie to people he’d had a relationship with for a long time. I reminded him of my two little kids, the house we had just bought, the mortgage payments owed, the college educations I would one day have to pay for.
He interrupted me and said, “You really are a Hungarian, you know.”
He called Warners and told them Paramount wanted to buy City Hall and he was only calling to inform them of this. Warners decided they wanted to buy it, too—but came in at a low figure. He told them Paramount was at a higher figure. Warners then came in so high that it set a new industry record for a spec script, beating the price for William Goldman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Shortly afterward, the Warners executives who bought the script were fired. Almost twenty-five years later, City Hall is still up on the Warner Bros. shelf—unmade. The money they paid for it, though, has long been spent.
Don’t be fooled by the paintings on the walls.
I had an agent who lived in a posh Beverly Hills house with spectacular art on the walls—sometimes.
Sometimes when I saw him, the art was there, but sometimes the walls were bare.
One of his colleagues explained it to me: The paintings were rented. Some months he was able to foot the bill and other months he wasn’t.
As a matter of fact, I discovered, the house was rented, too, and both the Jaguar and the Mercedes were leased.
It’s okay to be a pawn in their game.
If you write scripts that are made in
to movies, agencies will kiss your butt.
This isn’t because they care about you—you are, after all, nothing but a schmuck writer—but because they can use you to convince superstar actors to let them represent them.
The superstar actor will think that if this agency represents him, he will get first crack at your script.
Michael Ovitz was a con artist.
When superagent Michael Ovitz graduated from Birmingham High School in Encino, California, he received an award of merit at the senior breakfast. It was for being “class con artist.”
Michael Ovitz was a frat boy.
When superagent Michael Ovitz became president of his fraternity at UCLA, his fraternity brothers called him “King” Ovitz.
Michael Ovitz was a narc.
When the members of the rock band Sly and the Family Stone took a look at their new agent, Michael Ovitz, one of them yelled, “Narc!”
Michael Ovitz was a mensch.
This is how Mike Medavoy first met agent Michael Ovitz: “I’d never talked to him before, but I knew who he was and took his phone call. He said to me, ‘My name is Mike Ovitz. I don’t know you, but I intend to be your best friend. I want to come and see you.’ I asked when. He said, ‘Now.’ Fifteen minutes later, he appeared at my door.”
Michael Ovitz was a healer.
When superlawyer Bert Fields’s wife was ill with cancer, agent Michael Ovitz arranged for the best specialists at UCLA to treat her. When screenwriter Robert Towne’s Hungarian dog bit him severely, Michael Ovitz arranged for the best specialists at UCLA to treat him. When I hurt my back in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Michael Ovitz called me and offered to fly his acupuncturist to my home in Marin County.
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 19