When the movie became a big hit, Bob Loggia told his many interviewers that he had improvised most of his lines.
He stopped saying it when Richard told him that if he said it one more time, “I’m going to tell the press that you’re a bloody bald-faced liar.”
Robert Loggia was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Jagged Edge. He thanked neither me nor Richard.
In the beginning was the word.
Actor Chris Cooper (Adaptation): “Last night I tried to make a little bit of a joke at the very opening of a speech. I’m a guy that always needs a script. I can’t talk off the cuff and be witty.”
Who do you want me to be?
Actor John C. Reilly (Chicago, Gangs of New York): “I don’t know who I am unless you tell me who I am—or who you want me to be. I’m still figuring out who I am, you know?”
Sometimes it’s up to you to convince an actor to take the part.
Director Phillip Noyce (Sliver) describes a meeting he and I had with Sharon Stone to convince her to take the part of Carly Norris in Sliver: “On that occasion, which was quite tense going in, Sharon asked Joe if he’d like a massage. … It’s true that I stopped talking. But not because I was sexually moved by the sight of a fifty-year-old man lying on the floor moaning as Sharon Stone was massaging him while sitting astride him. I stopped talking simply because he was so grotesque in the sounds he was making that it seemed ridiculous to continue trying to convince Sharon to do the part. And so I stopped talking and let the two of them play with each other on the floor. After massaging Joe, Sharon agreed to take the part of Carly.”
If you have actor friends, try to get them to do a reading of your script.
Screenwriter Nicholas Kazan: “A reading won’t always validate the writer’s view … and that’s its beauty. It simply exposes the text, usually revealing problems of some sort.”
You don’t want Edward Norton starring in your movie.
He was so disgusted by the quality of the scripts he was getting that he took Robert McKee’s course, too, and he now rewrites all the scripts he agrees to act in.
Since he is a star, directors and studio execs try to flatter him into starring in their film by letting him do whatever he likes to the screenplay.
Try to stop Dustin Hoffman from being cast in your film.
Dusty is a huge fan of improvising a script. He will take a scene in the script that takes a minute and use it as a basis of improvisation with the other actors. They’ll improvise for a half hour and then ask the writer to rewrite it in a way that they discovered while they were improvising.
Penis Extension
A Robert Evans phrase for a male star with “eruptability and swagger.”
If Warren Beatty has anything to do with your film, stop working on it.
The joke in Hollywood is that Beatty, the great auteur, can turn a “go” movie into a development deal.
He’ll get involved, work with six writers, rewriting your script, then pull out of the project.
He wanted to play the lead in my film Jade, but the director knew that if Beatty got involved, he (the director) would be out of a job. So he blocked Beatty from getting involved by making sure the studio didn’t make Beatty’s very expensive deal. The way he made sure of that was by discussing it with his wife, who ran the studio.
The director was Billy Friedkin, his wife Sherry Lansing.
Beware the unprepared actor; he could give you the performance of a lifetime.
Marlon Brando arrived on the set of Apocalypse Now without having read either the script or the novel on which it was based. He was so overweight that he could be shot only from the neck up.
Oh, but to be a star.
Hedy Lamarr: “To be a star is to own the world and all the people in it. A star can have anything: if there’s something she can’t buy, there’s always a man to give it to her. Everybody adores a star. Strangers fight just to approach her. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.”
If an actor is looking for you, run!
Keanu Reeves was looking for a writer on the Academy Awards show.
“You’re one of the writers, right?” he said to Bruce Vilanch, holding a script.
“This is really important. In this line ‘This shocking, brutal, hilarious adventure is called Pulp Fiction.’”
Keanu looked at Vilanch.
Vilanch said, “So?”
Keanu said, “I want to change it.”
Vilanch said, “You want to change it?”
Keanu said, “Yeah.”
Vilanch said, “What do you want to change it to?”
Keanu said, “Can I say ‘entitled’ instead of ‘called’? ‘Entitled Pulp Fiction.’ ”
Vilanch said, “I don’t see why not.”
Keanu said, “Okay, good.”
Maybe you can learn to eat glass.
Agent Swifty Lazar: “One night a well-respected French writer named Joseph Kissel was a guest at the home of Lewis Milestone, a fine director who did All Quiet on the Western Front. Kissel, a monster of a man, had mastered the art of eating glass.
“Humphrey Bogart had never met Kissel. … It was early in the evening when Kissel encountered Bogart in the foyer and asked him if he could eat glass. Bogart admitted he could not.
“ ‘I can,’ the writer boasted.
“ ‘Well, eat this,’ Bogie said, pointing in the direction of an eighteenth-century mirror. And before you knew it, Bogie had smashed the mirror and handed a piece to Kissel. And Kissel immediately swallowed half the piece Bogie had given him.
“ ‘If you can do it, I can do it,’ Bogie said.
“He tried, but all he did was cut up the inside of his mouth.”
Actors bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the part.
Robert Redford belches a lot, one reason he’s mostly so cool and poker-faced on screen.
If Redford gets interested in your script, delete any scenes where he might be laughing.
Actors live their parts.
Hedy Lamarr: “How deeply do actresses become involved in their roles? Very deeply. I know when Ida Lupino did a string of neurotic characters, it had a definite effect on her. The doctor recommended happier pictures. The same thing happened to Bette Davis. I remember that during the making of Samson and Delilah my libido was definitely aroused.”
Sometimes, very rarely, very very rarely, once in a blue moon, hardly ever, an actor will improvise a line better than any writer could have written it.
At the Academy Awards, after a streaker crossed the stage, actor David Niven said, “Isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings?”
Actors really do respect, um, the screenwriter.
Tim Robbins: “There are the scripts you don’t want to touch at all, that are so brilliant that you just have to figure a way into the character, and that’s your job. There’s other stuff that you have to fill out on your own and flesh out on your own. I try not to get involved with rewriting. I don’t think it’s necessary for an actor to do that. I think it’s necessary for an actor to say, ‘This doesn’t really ring true. Is there something else we can do here?’ But only after really trying. Sometimes actors can be wrong about their instincts and, without trying to go to a place emotionally out of some kind of reluctance, think they need a rewrite. But I trust—99 percent of the time—the writer’s instinct.”
I wasn’t a dirty old man then, but maybe I am now.
When she was cast as the lead in my film Jade, Linda Fiorentino told Daily Variety, “It’s an absolutely brilliant screenplay.”
When Jade failed, Linda Fiorentino told reporters, “I had a lot of doubts about the script. It reads like it’s written by a dirty old man.”
Actors are ingrates.
I asked Paramount to cast Tom Berenger in Sliver. Tom and I were friends—we had met on the Betrayed set.
Paramount
didn’t want to cast him—he hadn’t had any hit movies and he was drinking too much.
I finally went to Brandon Tartikoff, the head of production at the time, and asked him as a personal favor to me to cast Tom.
Brandon finally agreed—but told me I owed him a big one.
During the shoot, I discovered on the set that Tom was indeed drinking too much—he had vodka bottles in his trailer that he was sucking on, but I stood by him. The studio didn’t replace him.
When the movie was released (and failed), Tom told USA Today, “Yeah, well, Joe can be real sleazy sometimes.”
Actors have short memories.
Asked at a New York political fund-raiser what children should say no to, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose movies have included more than five hundred shootings, maimings, or knifings, said, “How about violence? We should say no to violence.”
Actors are loyal.
David Caruso, about my film Jade: “You’ll see. Jade will be re-discovered by audiences in the future. In fact, I will make a prediction that this film will have a resurgence.”
Gina Gershon, about my film Showgirls: “I’m not embarrassed saying I was in that movie. And I can’t tell you how many people still come up to me and tell me how much they liked that movie. I think the Showgirls phenomenon has to do with the media. There were such high expectations that by the time the movie came out, it was bound to fail. And then when the critics started blasting it, people were scared to have their own opinion. I don’t think it was as bad as some people said.”
Shit happens to actors, too.
Hedy Lamarr: “At times, sex has been a disruptive factor in my life. The men in my life have ranged from a classic case history of impotence to a whip-brandishing sadist who enjoyed sex only after he tied my arms behind me with the sash of his robe. There was another man who took his pleasure with a girl in my own bed, while he thought I was asleep in it.”
It ain’t easy to be a star.
I stopped believing in Santa Claus at an early age,” said Shirley Temple. “Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked me for my autograph.”
To Do a Garry Shandling
To sue, as Shandling did, your own agent or manager—an absolute nono in the business. Look at what’s happened to Shandling’s career in the past five years: nada.
No hobbies, no kids, no nothin’ …
Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter, King of New York): “I hardly turn down anything, that’s true. I don’t have hobbies. I don’t have kids. I really like to go to work. And when you’re working, you want to stay a little bit fit and thin—so you look nice and your diet’s better.”
Macho Isn’t Mucho
Said first by Zsa Zsa Gabor. In today’s industry, macho definitely isn’t mucho.
Try to avoid Method actors.
My fellow Hungarian Tony Curtis: “At the studio’s urging I made a stab or two at the Method school of acting. … They called it sense memory. You had to recall the feeling of an icebox, or the exact sensation you had when you held a glass ball in your hand or felt the fabric of your tie. It was valid enough for some young actors, because it gave them something to do. But the truth is, acting was the only profession people thought about a lot and did very little. … It was a mind fuck: Go off in your head somewhere and find some other reality for what you were doing, regardless of what the script intended.”
Poor Victor Mature …
Hedy Lamarr complained to director C. B. DeMille that in every scene she had with Victor Mature, her back was to the camera.
De Mille said, “Do you think there are any men in America who would rather look at Victor’s face than your ass? Up to this point in your life, every man in the audience wanted to marry you. After this picture every man will want to go to bed with you. I have taken you out of the living room and brought you into the bedroom.”
To Do a Jennifer Grey
To get the kind of plastic surgery that destroys your career.
It helps if the director is your ally and not the star’s.
Director Phillip Noyce, discussing Sliver: “We were only a few weeks from shooting and basically Sharon was saying she wanted to start back with the script at square one. My own loyalty to Joe Eszterhas, as well as the practicality of the situation, meant that I had to say ‘No, we’re not gonna do that.’ That was the issue—whether we were going to rewrite the script from the first page, and that was the issue on which I took a stand. I gave her the appearance of submitting, whereas in fact we did shoot Joe Eszterhas’s script. But I allowed Sharon to feel she had won—that she was the most powerful person in the relationship. Joe Eszterhas has failed to understand that you can often achieve exactly what you want to by appearing to let the other person win.”
The star is not your script’s ally.
Producer Mace Neufeld described Harrison Ford’s contribution to the script of Patriot Games this way: “He’s always looking to eliminate false notes, writer’s directions that look good on paper but just don’t work.”
Some screenwriters hate actors.
Author/screenwriter William Saroyan hated Marlon Brando. He had his reasons.
When he was a young man, Saroyan discovered that Brando had seduced his wife, Carol.
When he was an old man, Saroyan discovered that Brando had seduced his daughter, Lucy.
Why Marlon Brando could seduce both Mrs. and Miss Saroyan …
An actor friend of Robert Duvall’s told him that as far as sex is concerned, “acting is the greatest leg-opener in the world.”
You’re lucky you’re you and not Tom Cruise.
Screenwriter William Goldman: “It’s shitty work. Not the money, not the power, that’s all neat. But have you ever been on a movie set? Death. It’s all mechanical stuff. Done in quick snippets. Sure, there’s craft involved in sustaining a character over a four-month shoot—but most stars only play themselves, so even that isn’t so hard. Ask anyone—movie acting is the snooze of all the world. So it’s shitty and it’s phony and the fame doesn’t last. No wonder they’re crazy. Maybe the real wonder is that they’re not crazier than they are.”
Actors are bullies.
Ryan O’Neal, sometime producer, played a studio executive in my film An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn.
The script called for him to hit a National Enquirer reporter named Alan Smith, played by a real National Enquirer reporter named Alan Smith.
O’Neal, a Hollywood lothario, had reason not to like the tabloids … and Alan Smith, who had written about him in the past.
So when the scene was being filmed, Ryan hit the real Alan Smith so hard that he almost broke the man’s jaw.
“Score one for us,” Ryan O’Neal said.
If you’re really pissed off at an actor, touch him or her.
What’s awful about being famous and being an actress,” said famous actress Winona Ryder, “is when people come up to you and touch you. That’s scary, and they just seem to think it’s okay to do it, like you’re public property.”
ALL HAIL
Mercedes de Acosta!
The screenwriter/playwright seduced both Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
A friend said she looked like “a Spanish Dracula with the body of a young boy.”
She was known in society circles as “the dyke at the top of the stairs.”
You’re too smart to learn anything from actors.
Professor James Ryan in Screenwriting from the Heart: “Having worked early in my career as a professional actor in stage, film, and television, I tried an experiment. I got my writing students on their feet doing improvisations. It helped enormously even if they were lousy actors. They began to understand that good dramatic writing is acting on the page and there must be truthful moment to moment behavior for their characters. I devised ‘simple-stupid’ exercises to get all their ‘learning’ out of the way, so that they could access their deeply felt imagination and find that place in themselves that would give them a sense
of prowess—a feeling of being alive and true.”
H—E—L—P!
Forehead
One of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite words—it means a stupid person or a person who argues with Arnold. Most of the legislators in California are “foreheads.”
Lame-o
Jack Nicholson’s version of “forehead.”
Their PR person will decide about your script.
Actress Sally Field said, “I hesitate to say that Pat Kingsley does my public relations. It’s way beyond that. I send her material, the scripts I’m thinking of doing or developing. And I’m not the only one who does. Jim Brooks, Goldie Hawn—a whole bunch of people ask her about scripts, about writers.”
Oh, wasn’t Jim Brooks a writer once?
The screenwriter/director, according to Sally Field, sends his scripts to Pat Kingsley, PR person, for advice.
A writer who sends his script to his PR person? For advice?
This is the meaning of “star power.”
Screenwriter/director Billy Wilder: “There was an actress named Marilyn Monroe. She was always late. She never remembered her lines. She was a pain in the ass. My Aunt Millie is a nice lady. If she were in pictures, she would always be on time. She would know her lines. She would be nice. Why does everyone in Hollywood want to work with Marilyn Monroe and no one wants to work with my Aunt Millie? Because no one will go to the movies to watch my Aunt Millie and everyone will come out to watch Marilyn Monroe.”
You, too, can leave your wife.
Mike Medavoy said this to Kevin Costner after meeting him for the first time: “You know, I have this sense that I’m sitting here with someone who is going to become a great big star. You’re going to want to direct your own movies, produce your own movies, and you’re going to end up leaving your wife and going through the whole Hollywood movie-star cycle.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 30