Michael Ovitz was my fairy godmother.
The first thing Michael Ovitz asked me at our first meeting—this was about six years before he told me that his foot soldiers would put me into the ground—was this: “What’s your biggest dream? I need to know so I can make it come true.”
Michael Ovitz was Magic Johnson and Aristotle combined.
Superagent Michael Ovitz, explaining his success: “Read The Art of War and Tao Teh Ching, get it flavored by a little of Aristotle, and watch the Los Angeles Lakers do a fast break. It’s like watching a Swiss watch work as they drive down the court, five guys; Magic Johnson would look, fake, and rarely take the shot. That was my philosophy.”
Michael Ovitz used Robert Redford.
I’m not worried about the press,” agent Michael Ovitz told me at a meeting in September of 1989. “All those guys want is to write screenplays for Robert Redford.”
Michael Ovitz was Citizen Kane.
When he began representing Bill Carruthers, producer of game shows, Michael Ovitz asked him to give his wife, Judy, a spot as a model on the show Give and Take.
Michael Ovitz was a killer.
On rare occasions when he told something to his friends confidentially, Michael Ovitz said, “This is a private conversation. If you ever repeat it, I’m going to kill you.”
Michael Ovitz was the Godfather.
After his first meeting with agent Michael Ovitz, comedian David Letterman told a friend, “I’ve been to see the Godfather! I had a meeting with the Godfather!”
Michael Ovitz was the Antichrist.
NBC president Don Ohlmeyer called superagent Michael Ovitz “The Antichrist.” Producer David Geffen then commented, “Apparently Don Ohlmeyer thinks more highly of Michael Ovitz than I do.”
Nobody punked Michael Ovitz!
When I read that Michael Ovitz blamed his demise on what he called “Hollywood’s gay mafia,” I remembered something he’d said to me in our famous meeting in 1989, during which he’d threatened to destroy my career if I left his agency.
“You think you’re just going to leave this agency and I’m just going to take it?” he said. “Nobody makes a faggot out of me—nobody!”
How did Michael Ovitz get away with acting like the Antichrist?
Mike Medavoy: “Ovitz got away with it because people thought he had his hand on some kind of nuclear launch button. The moment fear of him disappeared, he became fair game for everyone who resented his methods.”
I punked Michael Ovitz.
If you make me eat shit, I’m going to make you eat shit,” superagent Michael Ovitz told me at a meeting in September 1989.
I even stole Michael Ovitz’s best line.
Ten years after Michael Ovitz told me his foot soldiers who went up and down Wilshire Boulevard would “put me into the ground,” and several years after Ovitz left CAA, his former agency asked me to appear in their annual video.
I improvised my line on the video: “My foot soldiers who go up and down Zuma Beach will put Mike Ovitz into the sand.”
Michael Ovitz believed what they wrote about him.
In the 1990s, Michael Ovitz said to reporters, “I understand I am the single most powerful force in the entertainment industry.” Ten years later, he was out of the business.
Now Michael Ovitz is a fucking bum.
Years before I had a public fight with him and fired him, Michael Ovitz tried to convince me to let him represent me.
I had a big meeting with him in a CAA conference room, where a bunch of other agents were present, and said no thank you to Ovitz’s pitch and walked out of the room.
Ovitz called Don Simpson, the producer I was working with at the time, and said, “Who is this fucking bum to do this to me?”
Michael Ovitz had a role model.
When Tommy Dorsey wanted to leave MCA, his agent, Billy Goodhart, said this to him: “Tommy, if you continue this bullshit, making everybody miserable, you see these balls?” He bent over and grabbed his own balls. “I’m gonna cut yours off. Not only won’t you be working for MCA, you won’t be working for anybody else for maybe the rest of your life. You have something to say, put it in writing. Now get the fuck out of here—you irritate me.”
A threesome: Michael Ovitz, Roseanne, and Zsa Zsa.
After Michael Ovitz threatened to destroy my career, Roseanne Barr, whom I’d never met, sent him a note with the words “Fuck you!” scrawled all over the page.
I was flattered … until I heard that after my fellow Hungarian Zsa Zsa Gabor was arrested for a scuffle with a Beverly Hills cop, Roseanne sent Zsa Zsa a note that said, “Fuck them all!”
The Writers Guild can be punked, too.
When I was in a public battle with agent Michael Ovitz—and he was denying the threats he had made to destroy my career—I asked the Writers Guild for support.
The Writers Guild issued a statement saying that “if Ovitz did the things Eszterhas alleges,” he was wrong.
In other words, instead of supporting me, the Writers Guild was publicly questioning my integrity. And, of course, they launched no investigation of Ovitz or agency tactics.
The president of the Writers Guild at the time was George Kirgo, a television writer represented by the Creative Artists Agency, headed by Ovitz.
We’ll Kill for You!
The sentence with which superagent Michael Ovitz concluded his pitches to prospective clients.
I tried that same phrase out on a literary agent who wanted to represent the books I wrote. “I want you,” I said, “to kill for me!”
The agent, Ed Victor, urbane, sophisticated, and very literary (he lives in London) blanched, and looked like he was having cardiac arrhythmia.
This is the agent you need.
George Shapiro, a William Morris agent, had his assistant answer the phone by saying, “George Shapiro’s office—kill for the love of killing.”
Most agents don’t read books.
When Julius Caesar Stein was running MCA, the superagency of its day, he decorated the building with antiques he bought in England.
The bookcases he bought needed books, so he bought roomfuls of leather-covered books he called “furniture books.”
No one who worked at MCA ever read the leather-covered books, but Tennessee Williams, who was represented by MCA, told his friends, “If you’re ever in the building, take five or six books. They’ll never miss them.”
Your agent can screw up.
Agent Swifty Lazar: “When I sold Rich Man, Poor Man, I made a great mistake—and, over time, it cost me my friendship with Irwin Shaw [the author]. The lowliest writer who sells his book to television gets, by union contract, at least a guaranteed minimum for repeat showings and spin-offs. In Irwin’s contract, there was no such provision. I know what I was thinking—I’d had such a struggle selling it that I believed it would never get beyond the option stage—but I should have protected Irwin better. I had no excuse.”
It’s okay to fire your agent.
Sean Penn: “Changing agents is like changing lounge chairs on the deck of the Titanic.”
If you make it big, you don’t have to return your agent’s call.
Sydney Pollack on not returning agent Michael Ovitz’s calls: “Sometimes I didn’t take his calls. And he would say, when I finally did, ‘Did you get my message? You didn’t return my call.’ And I would tell him, ‘I didn’t return your call, Michael, because there’s nothing to say. All you want to say to me is, ‘I’m just checking in.’ ”
If you’re angry at your agent.
Director Sam Peckinpah liked to get drunk and then hurl knives at a dartboard. He’d ask his agent over sometimes to hold the dartboard.
If you’re successful enough, your agent will clean up the poo-poo.
Mae West told her agent, my fellow Hungarian Johnny Hyde, who would later make love to Marilyn Monroe, to clean up the poo-poo whenever her pet chimp had diarrhea.
I told that story to one of my agents, and she said, “
That’s what we do all right; we work with chimps and clean up their poo-poo.”
But it might be smarter if you clean up the poo-poo.
Today’s agent might be tomorrow’s producer and next month’s studio head.
Mike Medavoy: “In the entertainment industry, people change jobs faster than they change cars, girlfriends, clothes, sometimes even underwear.”
Underwear?
If your agent dies, forget about him.
Agent mogul Julius Caesar Stein of MCA asked in his will that his clients Benny Goodman and Dinah Shore perform at his funeral.
When Stein died, both Goodman and Shore declined, citing previous commitments.
PART SIX
FILMING THE SCRIPT
LESSON 11
Steal As Much Memorabilia from the
Set As You Can!
Your new agent has submitted your script to a studio. He tells you that a “studio reader” is reading it. Who is a studio reader?
The studio reader who first gets your script and either recommends it or not to the studio execs is your worst enemy.
This person is a wannabe screenwriter trying desperately to break into the business. He wants to shout out his own erudition and cinematic skills by impressing the studio execs—by deconstructing, castrating, disemboweling your script—and telling the execs how he could and would make it better.
Few readers ever praise a script, because they know that very few scripts ever become hit movies. They don’t want to put their own pimply, pale skinnies on the line in support of a script that will probably never be made and would probably be a disaster even if it were made.
When I auctioned the script of Basic Instinct, a reader at Warner Bros. trashed the script and advised the studio not to bid on it. When the studio discovered a few hours later that everyone else in town was bidding on it, the Warner’s executives decided to bid on it, too, although they hadn’t read it and their reader had advised against it. The reason, of course, was that they figured if everyone else was bidding to buy it, the script had to be good and their loser reader/wannabe screenwriter had to be wrong.
The execs could have shut themselves off in their offices and read the script; it would have taken them an hour to two (even if they moved their lips while reading).
But since they all hated to read, they didn’t read it; they just automatically bid on it. They ultimately bid 2.5 million; it sold for 3 million. And when the auction was over, they fired their reader/wannabe screenwriter for making an obviously bad call.
When Basic Instinct made 500 million, their woeful, misbegotten reader was captured by the studio’s foot soldiers one night (at Starbucks), driven to the back lot (near the water tower) at Warner Bros., and beheaded.
Oh no, all those readers have been McKee’d.
Robert McKee’s Web site bio says, “Several companies such as ABC, Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount regularly send their entire creative and writing staffs to his lectures.”
If the first studio passes on your script …
Sugar Ray Robinson, former middleweight champion of the world: “You never know how tough you are till somebody knocks you down and you decide whether you wanna get yourself up or not.”
A Calling-Card Script
A script that you don’t sell but that studio execs read as an indication of your talent. Figure it his way: Even if you don’t sell the script that you’ve put your heart and guts into, it still might get you a writing job—although this kind of figuring can get a bit overdrawn at times. I spoke to a wannabe screenwriter once, who said, “I haven’t sold anything yet, but I’ve got six or seven really great calling-card scripts.”
Cover the Waterfront
It once used to mean something very different, but now it means getting your script to as many potential buyers as possible if you’re trying to sell it on a spec basis.
A Pussy Hair Away
According to producer Robert Evans, this is a deal that’s almost but not quite done.
After several months of trying, your new agent has sold your script to a studio. They ask you how long it took you to write it. Lie.
After I had sold Basic Instinct for 3 million, many people asked me how long it had taken me to write it.
I had my answer down pat: “Well, I’ve probably been working on this script for most of my life. It’s about homicidal impulse and thrill killing, and I was fascinated by those things even twenty-five years ago, when I was a journalist. I remember I interviewed a mass murderer named Edward Kemper when I was writing for Rolling Stone magazine, and before that, when I was a reporter in Cleveland, I interviewed two kids there who’d killed their parents, Freddie Esherick and Treva Crosthwaite. And I’d known and worked with cops from the time when I covered the police beat in Cleveland to the time I interviewed narcotics agents for Rolling Stone. I actually had my office in Cleveland in the basement at Central Police Station. I even covered a shooting where eight policemen were shot down in the streets a couple hundred feet in front of me. And I did a profile of a burned-out cop very much like the Nick Curran character in my script; he was involved in so many shootings, he was suspended from the force. And, from the point of view of the other central character, Catherine Tramell, well, I’ve already written three films where women were manipulated by men—Betrayed, Jagged Edge, and Music Box—and I wanted to write a story about a woman who is so smart and so sensual that she can manipulate even the smartest streetwise homicide cop. And, of course, I’m a writer and the central character of this piece is a writer. I wanted to get into the whole notion of becoming your characters, of getting too close to the fire and getting burned. So, as you see, this script comes from deep in my soul, and maybe the reason it was sold for so much money is because the buyers sensed the authenticity, the reality, of it.”
This was all true, but it was also malarkey. Because while it was true that I had done all the things I referred to in my little speech, it had taken only thirteen days from the moment I had the idea to the moment my agents sold the finished script at auction.
Truth is, I had gotten 3 million for maybe ten days’ writing.
I certainly wasn’t about to tell anyone that.
Had I said that, many people in Hollywood would immediately have said, “Never mind that it sold for three mil, if all it took to write it was ten days, then it’s a piece of shit.” (Few in Hollywood knew or would have cared that it took William Faulkner six weeks to write The Sound and the Fury, one of the most complex novels of our time.)
Only after Basic was a smash did I tell the press that it had taken just thirteen days from inception to sale.
I told the truth, then, to flip a gigantic bird in the face of Hollywood.
Thirteen days and five hundred mil! I can do that and you can’t!
But nowhere have I revealed my real motive for writing that script. In 1980, I had set a record for a spec script by selling City Hall for 500,000. I had broken my own record a couple of years later by selling Big Shots for 1,250,000. Then a writer named Shane Black had broken my record by selling The Last Boy Scout for 1,750,000.
I read about Shane’s sale—and my record being broken—on the front page of the Los Angeles Times while I was vacationing at the Kahala Hilton in Hawaii. Shane’s sale pissed me off. I wanted my record back. I wanted to see an article on the front page of the Los Angeles Times about me setting a new record.
I flew home from Hawaii and sat down immediately and started writing the most commercial script I could think of.
Twelve days later, I had my record back. I had the article on the front page of the Los Angeles Times about my new record. And I had my 3 million.
Arthur Miller lied, too.
He didn’t tell anyone for many years that he wrote the first draft of Death of a Salesman in one day and part of a night.
Always lie about how many drafts you’ve done.
Tell the studio or the producer that it’s your fifth or sixth draft but that it’s just the
first one you’re turning in.
Gore Vidal tells this story: “After about three weeks, I turned in my first draft. The producer couldn’t believe it, he wanted me to work forever and ever because he wanted his money’s worth. I remember telling him, ‘Yes, but what I do in the first draft is generally the best, and people usually end up going back to it.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, no, we must work harder.”
ALL HAIL
William Saroyan!
Agent Swifty Lazar: “One day L. B. Mayer mentioned that he was looking for some new stories. By coincidence, Saroyan had just called me—he always rang when he was broke. I explained what Mayer was looking for and urged him to come up with something. I then told Mayer that I had a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer with a great story. A few days later, I brought Saroyan to Mayer’s office. As Saroyan took him through the plot, L. B. Mayer began to tear up—he was a real crier. My heart was less moved: I knew Saroyan was making it up as he went along.
“ ‘That’s terrific,’ Mayer said, when Saroyan finished weaving his tale. ‘Now go wait outside and I’ll talk to Irving about it.’
“Saroyan dutifully strolled out to the parking lot.
“ ‘How much?’ Mayer asked.
“ ‘He wants one fifty,’ I said.
“ ‘He’s got it.’
“I went to Business Affairs to work out the payment: fifty thousand up front, fifty thousand when he hands in half the story, then a final fifty thousand when he turns in the ending. Elated, I hurried out to the car to tell Saroyan I’d gotten him fifty grand to start.
“ ‘What’s the total?’ he asked.
“ ‘One hundred fifty.’
“ ‘Get me the one fifty. I need all of it right now.’
“ ‘You’re crazy.’
“ ‘Tell him I want the one fifty now or no deal.’
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 20