Make sure you’re part of the junket interviews.
Some directors like to exclude screenwriters from these interviews because the journalists who fly in from everywhere are bought and paid for—literally. The studio covers all their expenses. That means they’re not going to write anything bad about your movie or, if you’re there to be interviewed, you—not unless they want to lose their sunny weekends sitting by the pool at the Four Seasons, enjoying anything they want to order from room service.
Wash your hands of any blood.
If your script becomes a movie and on the first weekend of its release some sick freak in Omaha kills his girlfriend in the same manner in which you killed one of your characters, forget about it.
Remember that Mark Chapman had a copy of Catcher in the Rye in his pocket when he shot John Lennon. And keep in mind that more killers have carried the Bible in their pockets during the act of murder than any other book.
Your words can become toys and trading cards.
Traveling through Italy while Flashdance was being released there, I started collecting Flashdance trading cards. Each shot of the film I had cowritten had been turned into a trading card. I saw little Italian kids flipping the cards against the curb and trying to win them from one another.
Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (Alien): “When Alien was made, I went into a Thrifty Drug and there was a little Alien doll in the toy stand. When your work begins to become somewhat influential like that, you do see pieces of yourself come floating back in the oddest places.”
If your movie fails, they’ll blame the marketing department.
When three straight MGM films with big budgets and big stars failed miserably—Windtalkers, Hart’s War, Rollerball—the studio didn’t fire its head of production and didn’t hesitate to make new development deals with the screenwriters and directors of those three disasters. Instead, the studio got rid of two people in the marketing department.
Aw, stop whining already.
Screenwriter/director Larry Kasdan (Body Heat), talking about screenwriting: “The movie comes out and there’s the pain that your movie never got made; there’s this other movie instead. But everyone says you wrote it, and they blame you for it anyway. So you’re getting it from both sides: from inside and outside.”
Pissing on Your Leg
What audiences do when they don’t like something they see on-screen—that, at least, is how Warren Beatty puts it.
If your movie fails, blame it on the director.
Tell everyone he trashed your script and/or let the actors improvise.
As my good friend Don Simpson used to say, “It’s not how you play the game; it’s how you place the blame.”
Or blame it on the good old USA.
In an interview in Budapest, Hungary, director Oliver Stone blamed the failure of his film Alexander on American audiences. “Americans aren’t interested in history,” he said, “and can’t concentrate enough for a three-hour film.”
And talk about how huge it is in Croatia.
Oliver Stone, discussing the failure of Alexander: “Europe was spectacular. Not the major territories—that’s in January. What’s positive is that it opened in various regions very strongly—Russia, Sweden, it moved down to Croatia. And then you go down to Turkey, Taiwan, the Asian side. Then to Bangkok and the Philippines. That was very, very encouraging. I don’t follow these things—I’m told it’s like Number One.”
Or use Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Goethe as your alibi.
Oliver Stone, discussing the failure of his film Alexander: “I mean—why didn’t Shakespeare touch Alexander, or Marlowe or Goethe? Alexander was famous. Nobody touched him. Why? Because there’s too much success. He’s too much—too much for people.”
In other words, while Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Goethe chickened out, at least Oliver tried!
But you won’t be able to fool Robert J. Hurns of Mount Prospect, Illinois.
After reading Oliver Stone discussing the failure of Alexander, Mr. Hurns wrote a letter to The New York Times (January 2, 2005):
“The failure of his film wasn’t due to a lack of interest in Alexander the Great, but rather to the unwillingness of moviegoers to invest their time and money in a product associated with Oliver the Opinionated.
“Mr. Stone states that Alexander was ‘too much’ for Shakespeare, Marlowe and Goethe. The true epic here is that of Mr. Stone’s bloated ego.”
Once you write some hit movies, you’ll have much more power.
Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon): “I get no more respect now than I did when I first started. Absolutely none … I feel that I’ve earned more respect than I’m getting. And that my ideas shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, which they often are. I’ll throw out an idea at a meeting, and the director or producer or the studio executive will say, ‘I hate it.’ They won’t explain to me why; they feel like they don’t have to. They’re not curious to know how I would actually execute this idea. They stop me and say, ‘That’s terrible. We don’t like it. Move on.’ You know, just like I’m the errand boy.”
If you let ’em treat you like an errand boy, Jeffrey, then you’re an errand boy.
If somebody says “I hate it,” one possible answer, with your record of hit movies, is, “Oh yeah, how many millions have your movies grossed, asshole?”
In my experience, I’ve found that most producers, directors, and studio execs don’t know how to deal with that word—asshole—when it’s directed at them, possibly because deep in their hearts they know that they’re …
If your movie fails, there’s a good chance that one day it will be remade.
Samuel Goldwyn: “It’s a mistake to remake a great picture, because you can never make it better. Better you should find a picture that was done badly and see what can be done to improve it.”
PART SEVEN
WORKING WITH THE
DIRECTOR
LESSON 12
He’s a Passive-Aggressive Snake!
Defining the director …
Screenwriter William Faulkner describing his director friend Howard Hawks: “He’s a cold-blooded man, but he will protect me if I write a script that will make money for him.”
Another definition of the director …
The starlet offers the director a blow job for a bit part. The director says, “What’s in it for me?”
It’s all about the next job, isn’t it, Ron?
Oscar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass (Rain Main) on the director: “He’s a fascinating guy. He’s a brilliant guy. He’s really a challenging guy. … Everything he wanted to do, even when I didn’t see the sense of it at the time or I didn’t see where he was going, it all did make sense and it was all going toward a vision that was his vision. … This was my first lesson in trying to let go of my vision of the piece and understand that there comes a point when the director’s the guy who’s got to make the movie, and you really have to be servicing his vision. … I see the film and I say at the end of it, ‘Boy, he’s a lot smarter than I was and smart enough to realize it.’ … The director is the author of the film. … The farther I go in my writing career, the more I enjoy what I’m doing, the more sympathetic and admiring I am of directors. I think directing is the lousiest job in the world. … The directors are the victims. They are controlled by the movie. They are the victims of the flaws in my script.”
Directors can plagiarize anything they want.
If they steal, it’s called an homage. The director Brian De Palma has done whole film-length homages to Hitchcock—Sisters, Blow Out, Obsession.
Directors are petty despots.
Director Ken Russell to screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky: “What’s it to you whether you like the set or not? You’re only the writer! … Take your turkey sandwiches and your script and your Sanka and stuff it up your ass and get on the next fucking plane back to New York and let me get on with the fucking film.”
Avoid auteur directors.
The director’s job is to put your vision up on the movie screen. If you work with an auteur director, he will steal your vision and change it enough so he can call it his own.
Stanley Kubrick, perhaps the best director in the world, wanted to direct Paddy Chayefsky’s Network. Paddy wouldn’t work with him and stopped the studio from hiring him. Network won the Oscar for Best Screenplay and was a huge worldwide hit. It remained very much “a Paddy Chayefsky film,” not “a film by Stanley Kubrick.”
An Ambience Chaser
A director who uses smokepots in every scene.
Don’t work with any director who’s just won an Oscar.
That director will be so impressed with his accomplishment that he won’t work again for many years.
Robert Redford didn’t work again for eight years after he won for Ordinary People; Warren Beatty didn’t direct again for nine years after Reds; Milos Forman didn’t direct for five years after Amadeus.
What these guys all did, though, for all those years they didn’t direct, was develop properties.
They worked with screenwriters like you, trying to get a script in good-enough shape to shoot. The fact that they found no scripts in all that time good enough to shoot may have had something to do with how petrified they were to direct after winning an Oscar.
To Do a Cimino
To direct a film that fails so badly that it kills the studio, like Michael’s Heaven’s Gate.
ALL HAIL
Bruce Vilanch!
Never mind all the producers and directors and hosts, Bruce Vilanch, screenwriter, has been writing the Academy Awards show for fifteen years and is its true voice.
Work with a director when he is “briefly, temporarily, human.”
Producer Robert Evans: “The time I want to work with a director is when he’s just had a gigantic failure. Think Cimino after Heaven’s Gate, Spielberg after 1941, Coppola after One from the Heart, Verhoeven after Showgirls. That’s the time to work with them—when, briefly, temporarily, they’re human.”
Try to work with directors who began as producers.
Joe Mankiewicz, Alan Pakula, and Irwin Winkler all began as successful producers and then became successful directors. Knowing so much about film, there is less chance that they view themselves as omnipotent auteurs.
If you hook up with the wrong director, it can be hazardous to your health.
Raymond Chandler: “I went to Hollywood to work with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity. This was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life.”
Directors resent the money you’re paid.
Director David Lean wrote a memo to the producer about Michael Wilson, the screenwriter they’d been working with on Lawrence of Arabia.
Lean wrote, “He’s shot his bolt as far as this script’s concerned and whether he’s bitter with you and me or both of us we’ve got to lump it. I only note him because I hope you are not proposing to give him the two and a half percent profit because, softy as I am, I would resent it very much.”
Some directors will try to take your credit away from you.
Screenwriter Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) on director Bob Rafelson: “If he wrote ten words, he’d say he wrote the whole thing.”
A Credit-Card Filmmaker
A guy who’s broke and can’t pay for an option on your script but wants to direct it—though he’s only directed a couple of TV ads in regional markets—and wants to sit down with you first to share some ideas he has about the script.
ALL HAIL
Director Philip Noyce!
My friend Phillip refuses to take the “film by” credit on any of his films.
He explained it to me this way: “I don’t deserve it any more than you deserve it or the stars deserve it or the DP deserves it or the editor deserves it or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
Beware of world-famous, highly publicized auteur directors.
Film editor Lou Lombardo, who worked with both men, compared Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman this way: “Peckinpah is a prick and Altman is a cunt.”
Don’t work with a busy director.
Director Jon Avnet and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne were having a script discussion on the phone, when Avnet got another call and told Dunne he’d call him right back. He called him back eleven days later, but explained that he’d been very busy.
A director can agree to direct your script for the wrong reasons.
Director Phillip Noyce, on directing The Saint: “It was an opportunity at the time to create a franchise. Although in the end, what I really found attractive about it was the opportunity to choose my own location to set the story. So, it became as much about the adventure of making the film as the adventure of the story of the film. It was as much about the adventure off the screen as the adventure on the screen. I satisfied my curiosity about post-Soviet Russia during the making of that movie.”
In other words, Phillip just wanted to take an extended trip to Russia.
Some directors are only as good as their wives.
Bob Rafelson’s and Peter Bogdanovich’s best work was behind them the day Bob divorced Toby and Peter divorced Polly Platt.
Directors are incessantly looking for their next job.
The director Adrian Lyne and I were discussing Flashdance many years after we’d made the movie. A young supporting actress in the film had died tragically, as had studio executive Dawn Steel and our producer, Don Simpson.
“But that’s nothing compared to Superman,” I said. “George Reeves, the guy who played him on TV, was murdered. Look what happened to Christopher Reeve, and then there was poor Margot Kidder, found wandering around that guy’s backyard out near the airport.”
“Bloody hell,” Adrian said. And then he added, “Do you think there’s a movie there? Our sequel? The Curse of Flashdance?”
If you wrote and directed it, then you’re an auteur.
If you’re the screenwriter, you are not the author of the film; you, the director, the producer, the actors, the editor, and the cinematographer are collaborators.
That’s why it’s immoral and absurd for directors to take a credit that reads “a film by Bill Hotshot.”
Newspapers and magazines, staffed by reporters and critics who’d love to make screenwriter wages, rub this in. They refer to movies as simply “by” the director.
Don’t ever refer to a movie as the director’s possession; that’s incorrect and morally wrong.
It is not George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is not Steven Spielberg’s E.T. It is not Sidney Lumet’s Network. It is not Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. It is not Clint East-wood’s Million Dollar Baby. It is not John Avildsen’s Rocky. It is not Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise. It is not Richard Marquand’s Jagged Edge. It is not Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. It is not Billy Friedkin’s Jade.
It is just as wrong to refer to a movie as the screenwriter’s possession, but it’s a helluva lot of fun.
It is William Goldman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is Melissa Mathison’s E.T. It is Paddy Chayefsky’s Network. It is Alan Ball’s American Beauty. It is F. X. Toole’s and Paul Haggis’s Million Dollar Baby. It is Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky. It is Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise. It is Joe Eszterhas’s Jagged Edge. It is Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct. It is Joe Eszterhas’s Jade.
When working with the director, always say “my movie” while talking to him.
This is, of course, your revenge for what you will see on-screen and in ads: a film by the director.
Just because the Writers Guild doesn’t even care about this usage doesn’t mean you can’t get your sweet little pound (okay, ounce) of flesh.
Orson Welles told the truth.
Welles told French critic André Bazin, the father of the auteur theory, this: “Directing is an invention of people like you. It’s not an art, it’s at most an art for one minute per day.”
Yours is a creative art; the director’s is interpret
ive.
Screenwriter/novelist Donald Westlake: “I am not a proponent of the director’s auteur theory. I think it comes out of a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the creative versus interpretive arts.”
You’ve got the power.
Ascreenwriter and a director were on a trip, scouting locations.
The script called for “white houses dotting the hillsides.” The hills they were looking at were perfect except for the fact that blue houses were dotting the hillside, not white ones.
The director, a freak for authenticity, turned the location down because of the blue houses.
The screenwriter took the script out of the director’s hands, then crossed the word white out and replaced it with the word blue.
The director approved the hillside.
The vision is yours, not the director’s.
Ihad an agent named Rosalie Swedlin, who, after a research screening of my film Betrayed, turned to the director (Costa-Gavras), who was standing next to me, and congratulated him for his “vision.”
I fired her the next day.
Anybody can direct.
Producer David O. Selznick: “There is no mystery to directing. I don’t have time. Frankly it’s easier to criticize another man’s work than to direct myself. As a producer, I can maintain an editorial perspective that I wouldn’t have as a director. I consider myself first a creative person, then a showman, and then a businessman.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 23