The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood

by Joe Eszterhas

  Brass-knuckle him.

  If a director insisted that Frank Sinatra do more than two takes of a scene, the director got a visit at home that night from Frank’s pal Jilly Rizzo.

  Jilly carried a pair of brass knuckles given to him by Frank and inscribed “To Jilly with love from Frankie.” Jilly would show the director he visited these brass knuckles.

  Shoot him.

  Screenwriter Abraham Polonsky about director Elia Kazan: “I’ll be watching, hoping somebody shoots him.”

  Yes, I know, I know—Abe might have had personal issue with him: Kazan testified in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; Polonsky refused to testify and therefore became a blacklisted screenwriter.

  Spit in the producer’s face and call him a pig.

  That’s what Katharine Hepburn did when she finished the last shot of Suddenly Last Summer.

  She spit in the director Joe Mankiewicz’s face and called the producer “a pig in a silk suit who sends flowers.” Then she spat on the floor.

  Seduce his wife.

  I was introduced to Martin Scorsese a few years after I publicly fired his good friend and agent Michael Ovitz. Marty looked at me superciliously, barely taking my hand.

  I knew he was the King of the Auteurs, while I was the auteur-slayer. I knew how seriously he took himself, while I prided myself on being the “rogue elephant” of screenwriters.

  I knew all those things about him and I knew a whole lot more that he didn’t know I knew, things I had learned from one of his wives, things she had told me after we’d made love on the kitchen floor of Marty’s house while Marty was off on location, shooting, being the auteur.

  Throw something in his face.

  Angry at Roman Polanski, Faye Dunaway peed in a coffee cup and threw it into his face.

  Did poor Francis lose his marbles?

  When studio head Mike Medavoy arrived on the set of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines, director Coppola spoke to him mostly in the language of the natives he’d been living with.

  Coppola said to Medavoy, “Maybe it should be a perpetual work in progress. I don’t know if I want to finish it this year. I might want to finish it next year. Or maybe I should just start improvising and see where it goes.”

  Francis can teach you how to write a screenplay, though.

  He can do this for you, even though he hasn’t written anything in decades, even though he spends most of his time these days greeting tourists at his Napa Valley winery.

  If you pay Francis 3,250 plus air fare to Belize, you can stay at his Blancaneaux Lodge, sleep in teak cabanas, drink wine shipped from Francis’s vineyard, and talk about writing a script—not with Francis, no, since he’ll be back home in Napa greeting tourists, but with the editors of his Zoetrope magazine.

  Francis who?

  Accepting her Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Sofia Coppola thanked no writers for inspiring her. She did, however, thank a long list of directors.

  Not among them, however, was her father, Francis Ford Coppola.

  She did thank her mother “for inspiration.”

  No wonder Francis went bankrupt.

  ABC offered Coppola 10 million for the TV rights to Apocalypse Now. He held out for 12 million. After the film came out and failed commercially, he sold it to ABC for 4 million.

  The gods get angry sometimes.

  Because he was the director, Francis Ford Coppola was able to hire his father, Carmine, to do the score for The Godfather.

  Carmine did the score so well that he won the Oscar for Best Original Score.

  But on the way back from the stage to his seat, he dropped the Oscar and it shattered.

  Were they also screenwriters?

  When two studio executives from Columbia Pictures showed up on the set of The Cincinnati Kid, director Sam Peckinpah had them stripped, hog-tied, and left in a seedy motel far away from the set.

  ALL HAIL

  Norman Jewison

  Yes, I know he’s a director, but he’s a man I admire, and he’s also a friend of mine.

  A male star threw a punch at Norman on the set, then came back and apologized and said he was ready to go back to work.

  Norman said, “After you apologize.”

  “I just apologized,” the star said.

  Norman said, “You have to apologize to everybody. The whole crew. You insulted them.”

  The star apologized to the whole crew.

  Directors are human.

  Director Victor Fleming suffered a nervous breakdown during the shooting of Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola had a near breakdown/heart attack during the shooting of Apocalypse Now.

  Director Robert Harmon suffered a heart attack while reading a memo I’d sent him, questioning his ability to direct Nowhere to Run. Harmon recovered and went on to botch the movie, just as I knew he would.

  I swear, though, that I didn’t know—didn’t know, did not, did not know—that Harmon had a preexisting heart problem when I sent him my near-lethal memo.

  Directors are feminists.

  Sam Peckinpah: “Women have very complicated plumbing that I’m fascinated with.”

  Another romantic director …

  Director Blake Edwards said about his wife, Julie Andrews, “She has lilacs for pubic hairs.”

  A director is a visual artist.

  More than anything, he’s a painter—but he likes to think of himself as a writer.

  Gus Van Sant did oil paintings before he began to direct films, and he still paints. Peter Weir says he wishes he could “cram my trailer full of Gauguins and van Goghs and all the great art in history.” Paul Verhoeven is a comic book artist who actually draws images of the scenes on the pages of the screenplay. Adrian Lyne knows more about modern painters than most art critics. Howard Zieff, Jerry Schatzberg, and Stanley Kubrick all began their professional careers as photographers.

  In theory, to have a man who is a visual artist direct a script written by someone who works with words sounds like the perfect combination. Except that the director always tries to tell the writer what to write, while the writer never tries to tell the director how to compose his images on the screen.

  Director Michael Mann is an especially brilliant visual stylist.

  Gusmano Cesaretti, a respected still photographer, has been Michael Mann’s associate producer since the 1970s. After he reads the script of whatever Mann’s upcoming film is, he goes out and shoots thousands of stills of images that might work in the film.

  As Mann shoots the movie, he tries to fit photographer Cesaretti’s images into “his” film.

  Some directors love torturing the actors.

  Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries): “We asked the actors to arrive four months prior to the shoot in Buenos Aires and then we started to do a series of seminars on Latin American history; on the cinema of the 50s. We did seminars on Incan history; we studied the music of the 50s in Latin America, with the help of professors from Buenos Aires University—all this was done to create a collective starting point, where the actors and the technical crew could have a really ingrained sense of what this journey was about.”

  Orson Welles was a liar.

  Welles said he wrote the character of Harry Lime in The Third Man. “I wrote everything to do with his character, I created him all around,” Welles said. “It was more than just a part for me. Harry Lime is without doubt part of my creative work.”

  The Third Man was written by Graham Greene. Welles played the part of Harry Lime. He wrote no dialogue for the character.

  Orson Welles was a big fat liar.

  The only film I wrote from the first to the last word,” Welles said, “is Citizen Kane.”

  Welles directed Citizen Kane, but he didn’t write it. It was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz.

  You’ll meet all kinds.

  When Joe Mankiewicz was on the set directing, he always wore white cotton gloves. He had eczema, which broke out on his hands whenever he was nervous. He was alwa
ys nervous on a set.

  Director Jack Clayton (Moby Dick, The Innocents) chain-smoked on the set, drank brandy and sodas nonstop, and wore a Bedouin knife strapped to his right leg. He once said to his producer, “Don’t speak while I’m talking or I’ll have you thrown off the set.”

  You might even run into some Hungarian hack.

  Legendary director Michael Curtiz, who was Hungarian, was often used by the studios to replace other directors. He was famous for getting the script on Saturday and beginning to shoot on Monday.

  Hitchcock was a great auteur.

  In a letter to the head of MGM after he’d written the screenplay of Strangers on a Train, Raymond Chandler wrote, “Are you aware that this screenplay was written without one single consultation with Mr. Hitchcock after the writing of the screenplay began? Not even a telephone call. Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence then and since. There are always things that need to be discussed. There are always places where a writer goes wrong, not being himself a master of the camera. There are always difficult little points which require the meeting of minds, the accommodation of points of view. I had none of this. I find it rather strange. I find it rather ruthless. I find it almost incomparably rude.”

  To Do a Jim Cameron

  To have the kind of huge success that frightens you out of doing any more films.

  Robert Altman is an asshole.

  That’s what producer Don Simpson, a friend of mine, thought: “We made Popeye and we hated Altman. He was a true fraud … he was full of gibberish and full of himself, a pompous, pretentious asshole.”

  Don Simpson was right about Robert Altman.

  Ring Lardner wrote MASH and director Altman praised his script in early interviews.

  After the movie was a hit, Altman said that he had tossed out Lardner’s script and written it himself.

  The movie’s producer, George Litto, said, “Bob was never one to acknowledge a writer’s contribution. The movie was ninety percent Ring Lardner’s script, but Bob started saying he improvised the movie. I said, ‘Bob, Ring Lardner gave you the best opportunity you had in your whole life. Ring was blacklisted for years. What you’re doing is very unfair to him and you ought to stop it.’ ”

  Howard Hughes’s masturbatory vision …

  He took over directing The Outlaw from Howard Hawks. His camera angles were always in dominant positions over Jane Russell, who was nineteen years old during filming. His biographer Charles Higham wrote, “No other individual in commercial Hollywood had so completely released his sexual urges on screen.”

  Directors are occasionally self-aware.

  Abook published in Holland about director Paul Verhoeven is entitled Verhoeven: Poet or Pervert? Paul told me that he came up with the title.

  Never mind everything else, Billy Friedkin is an honest man.

  Friedkin: “The day after I won the Oscar was the only time I ever went to see a psychiatrist. I was profoundly unhappy. I told him I won an Oscar and didn’t think I deserved it.”

  Beware of English directors.

  The English were supposed to be so nice,” Marilyn Monroe said. “But they treated me like a freak, a sex freak. All they wanted to know was whether I slept without any clothes on, did I wear underwear, what were my measurements. Gosh, don’t they have women in England?”

  It’s tough for a director to share credit with Henry James.

  Woody Allen had lunch with Peter Bogdanovich shortly after Bogdanovich wrapped Daisy Miller.

  Allen: “He spent the whole meal agonizing. He didn’t know what the credit should read. A Peter Bogdanovich Film of Henry James’s Novella? Henry James’s Novella Directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Henry James’s Daisy Miller, a film by Peter Bogdanovich? Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, from Henry James’s Novella?”

  Directors have taste.

  Costa-Gavras directed two of my scripts—Betrayed and Music Box—showing, I think, great taste in choosing them.

  I don’t know why he passed on directing The Godfather.

  First-time directors are piglets.

  On HBO’s Project Greenlight, directors Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle did the following things on-camera:

  Tried to fire a boom-mike operator because he had “a bad attitude.”

  Wasted most of a day’s shoot talking to producers as cast and crew stood around doing nothing.

  Asked that the screenwriter and the producer communicate with them through index cards.

  Demanded a free car when learning that the screenwriter had been provided a car to use.

  After all, they were first-time directors.

  Don’t hold your breath.

  Eventually,” wrote screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler in 1951, “there will be a type of director who realizes that what is said and how it is said is more important than shooting it upside down through a glass of champagne.”

  If you consider yourself a writer, don’t direct.

  Playwright Robert E. Lee: “Becoming a director diminishes the writer. He may have more control and more power, but he loses the writer’s perspective, the chance of looking at something with a broad, objective eye.”

  “More and more writers are becoming directors,” wrote Raymond Chandler in 1957. “But in essence they cease to be writers, because a writer creates his own world on his own terms, in his own way.”

  ALL HAIL

  Anatole Litvak!

  Yes, he was a director … but we’re hailing him anyway for creating one of old Hollywood’s legendary moments.

  One night at Ciro’s—as fancy and celebrated then as Spago is now—Anatole Litvak sank to the floor, put his head in Paulette Goddard’s lap, and did naughty things there.

  Don’t be so sure you can direct.

  After a week’s production on Personal Best, screenwriter turned director Robert Towne was a month behind schedule.

  Directors know there are screenwriters out there who hate them.

  Steven Spielberg, Bob Zemeckis, and Michael Mann describe themselves as “weapons enthusiasts” and can sometimes be seen at various L.A. “shooting clubs.”

  All three also describe themselves as liberal Democrats who “believe in gun control.”

  Let’s hope David Benioff doesn’t hate any directors.

  Screenwriter David Benioff (Troy) describes himself as a “weapons enthusiast,” too; and according to gun club owners, he can outshoot Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Mann.

  Was he a screenwriter?

  Police arrested a man trying to break into Steven Spielberg’s Pacific Palisades mansion. The man had a gun, a knife, rolls of duct tape, whips, a dildo, and various objects described by police as “torture instruments.”

  The man told police he wanted to rape Spielberg and kill him.

  PART EIGHT

  WORKING WITH THE

  PRODUCER

  LESSON 14

  Is His Heart Full of Shit?

  Your producer can be your greatest ally.

  When a woman got up at a Betrayed screening and started yelling about how much she disliked the movie, producer Irwin Winkler, a literate and sophisticated man, yelled this at her: “Shut up! Sit down! Throw her out! Get her the fuck outta here!”

  Pray for a good producer.

  I got very lucky with two of my scripts—Betrayed and Music Box. Irwin Winkler produced both of them.

  I saw what made him a great producer on the Betrayed set. He was there from seven in the morning until seven at night every day. It was a hundred degrees outside, and under the bright lights in a suffocating barn, it was much hotter than that—but Irwin was there for every single day of the shoot.

  One day he was so exhausted and dehydrated that he got dizzy and had to be driven back to his hotel. I warned him about his health, and Irwin said, “I know. But all directors are a little nuts. The best directors are more than a little nuts. I want to be there to make sure we don’t experience any unexpected improvisations or unwarranted flights of frenzy.”

/>   Irwin was talking about Costa-Gavras, a man we both loved and greatly respected, but still… he was a director.

  The definition of a good producer …

  Novelist/screenwriter John Gregory Dunne: “If Don Simpson didn’t like something, he hit you right between the eyes with it; he did not send eleven pages of notes to an agent, with orders not to show them to the writer, and then go pissing and moaning to the studio. Okay, he said, let’s fix it, and we would sit down and do it. What the really good producers do is make you enthusiastic by the sheer force of their personalities about the most problematic ideas.

  If your producer is pissing you off, remember that you’ve got him by the balls.

  Playwright/screenwriter David Mamet: “The problem for them is, the story is the one thing that producers can’t do.”

  The most respected producer.

  Sam Spiegel is admired by today’s producers as the “producer of all producers.” He produced The African Queen, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia. He won three Oscars.

  When he first came to America from Europe, he told his sister, “I’ll either become a very rich and famous man or I’ll die like a dog in the gutter.”

  He bounced checks constantly. He even pimped for a while. He even went to jail in San Francisco for fraud.

  Sam Spiegel’s résumé …

  Before Sam Spiegel produced any movies, he had an affair with a wealthy divorcée. He stole her George Bernard Shaw first editions, he stole her car, and he stole her ex-husband’s walking stick.

  He was arrested in England for fraud: the nonpayment of his apartment bill. He went to Brixton Prison and was allowed one phone call.

  He called a studio executive in Hollywood and tried to set up a film deal.

  If your producer asks you to send him your script before you send it to the studio.

  Don’t do it. Your deal isn’t with the producer; it’s with the studio—and by contract, you have to deliver the script to the studio. What the producer is trying to do is to get a free draft of the script from you.