The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood

by Joe Eszterhas

  Dustpan is a hypocrite.

  He starred in Straw Dogs, one of the bloodiest of all the films directed by Sam Peckinpah. Years later, he first turned down Captain Hook, the Peter Pan remake to be directed by Steven Spielberg, because, as Dusty’s agent said, “The script is too violent.”

  Montgomery Clift in The Bridge on the River Kwai …

  Producer Sam Spiegel was interested in casting Montgomery Clift in The Bridge on the River Kwai. He asked him to dinner in New York.

  Clift arrived sky-high on pills. He would say things out of the blue, like “The sky is blue.” He ordered a martini and then ordered two more. He ordered both steak and lamb chops—rare. He ate the steak and the chops and spit meat and blood all over the table. Then he lay down in the booth and went to sleep.

  The producer changed his mind about casting him.

  Only if it’s a real honker …

  While nose jobs hurt the careers of Jennifer Grey, Carol Burnett, and Roy Scheider, Peter O’Toole had such a beak of a nose that he would always have been a character actor without surgery.

  Brando was stupid.

  Brando not only sold off his gross points in The Godfather for 100,000 but then asked for 100,000 to attend the twenty-fifth-anniversary party of The Godfather’s release.

  He didn’t get it and didn’t go. He would have received at least 8 million had he not sold his gross points.

  Kate Nelligan was too smart.

  Screenwriter/playwright Harold Pinter: “The porter called to say that a young actress named Kate Nelligan was on the way up to meet us and I can always remember Mike Nichols saying ‘I feel sorry for young actresses. Can you imagine coming up to meet Sam Spiegel, Harold Pinter, and me—it must be terrifying.’ And the next thing we knew, she walked into the room and took us to the cleaners. She was totally self-possessed, absolutely on top of everything, and made us feel that we didn’t know what we were doing. She didn’t get the part because of that.”

  TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

  Zsa Zsa killed Clark Gable.

  Zsa says that Clark’s favorite food in the whole world was the artery-busting Hungarian favorite kolbasz, smoked and dried sausage.

  She introduced Clark to it and he loved it so much that she would take a bunch of it over to his house each week—even the week that he died of a massive heart attack.

  Elizabeth Taylor killed his dream.

  Richard Burton, who said he was “a pockmarked boyo from Wales,” didn’t want to be an actor. He said he should have been a coal miner.

  His dream was to own a big house filled with books and little else. He wanted to spend his life reading his books.

  The Italian dwarf, movie star …

  He is the actor whom Paramount executives referred to as “that Italian dwarf” before they cast him in The Godfather.

  George C. Scott was George Lincoln Rockwell.

  George C. Scott hated black people so much that Islands in the Stream had to be shot in Hawaii, on Kauai, where there were no black people—so Scott wouldn’t get into trouble in the bars at night.

  The few blacks necessary for scenes in the movie, set in the Caribbean, had to be flown in.

  Vacuum the Dustpan.

  Dusty went to story meetings for years with his own personal “dramaturge”—the playwright Murray Schisgal. Dusty wanted screenwriters he was working with to “work with Murray” as they wrote their scripts.

  After they had worked with Murray and the script was finished, Dusty often brought in another personal pet writer just to rewrite his character’s dialogue—that’s how Malia Scotch Marmo wound up getting a shared screenplay credit on Hook.

  The moral of the story: After Dusty and Murray and Malia are done with you, you might not recognize your own script.

  Kim Novak almost killed Sammy Davis, Jr.

  Columbia studio czar Harry Cohn once asked mobster Mickey Cohen to kill Sammy Davis, Jr., because Sammy was having an affair with Columbia star Kim Novak.

  Cohn worried that if the affair became public, Novak’s career would be finished.

  Drew’s father was an actor, too.

  Actress Drew Barrymore: “My father said, ‘Hey, Drew, you want to give me an autograph, too? How about putting it on a check?’ ”

  David Caruso sleeps with a mirror.

  My lead actor in Jade, David Caruso, said, “I’m nowhere near as sexy as I come off on-camera. Film just loves me.”

  Sandra Bernhard defines whores.

  Icast her in An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. I think she’s a brilliant actress.

  She once said, “I find people in the porn world are very lively and animated. So what if they screw for a living? I like a lot of them better than the actors in Hollywood—who are the real whores, to be perfectly honest with you.”

  I wonder if Grace Kelly ever slept with Joe Mankiewicz.

  Gary Cooper told friends that Grace Kelly liked going to bed wearing nothing but white gloves.

  Coop said, “She gave the impression that she could be a cold dish until you got her in bed … then she could really explode.”

  Tim Robbins is full of … himself.

  Actor Tim Robbins: “The best directors I’ve worked with would never consider themselves auteurs or experts or anything. Those experiences taught me that the open ear, the open mind, the open heart can produce such great work from the actor. If an actor comes on the set and the director is viewing themself [sic] as the person who knows everything, the person that has all the answers, then you’re not going to create an organic performance. You’re going to create someone’s idea of a performance. And the really great directors know that and are able to inspire their actors to create by giving them a confidence in themselves and a worth in themselves. Then actors feel like they belong there. They feel like they are contributing something significant, that they aren’t just saying lines, that they are bringing who they are as people to the project and are fully appreciated for that.”

  A Quality of Eruptibility

  Absolutely necessary for a lead male part, making every female viewer believe that the actor playing the part would go to bed with her.

  A Quality of Availability

  Absolutely necessary for a lead feminine part, making every male viewer believe he could bed the starlet playing the part.

  Val Kilmer is an imbecile.

  Asked by the Academy to nominate the three best film moments of the century, Kilmer nominated three of his movies (one of them was Batman Forever). He enclosed a postcard to the Academy that said, “I can’t help it, these are my three favorite movies.”

  The Pesci is beginning to stink.

  Actor Joe Pesci, after winning Best Supporting Actor for Good-Fellas, went offstage and collapsed on the floor, clutching his Oscar and mumbling, “I can’t believe this! I can’t believe this!”

  Yes, but did she clean the blood off the coat hangers?

  Joan Crawford had all of her furniture and even her walls coated in plastic so she could clean them better.

  Is that why he changed professions?

  Harrison Ford, carpenter, was hired by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion to remodel their Trancas house.

  Julia Roberts’s virgin eyes …

  When she moved into an apartment complex, Julia Roberts had notices sent to the other tenants, telling them they were not to speak to her or even look at her if they ran into her in the corridor.

  Barbra Streisand did the same thing when she was doing a gig at a hotel in Vegas.

  And Hillary Clinton did the same thing with Secret Service agents in the White House.

  Is Tom Thumb the new Burt Reynolds?

  Mimi Rogers, discussing soon-to-be-ex-husband Tom Cruise: “Here’s the real story on why we broke up. Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn’t fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. My instrument needed tuning.
Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.”

  James Woods’s Krazy-glued penis.

  When she broke up with actor James Woods, actress Sean Young put mutilated voodoo dolls on his front porch and told friends she was going to Krazy-glue his penis to his thigh.

  The one-sheet tells all.

  If the stars’ faces aren’t on it, their careers are fading. Check out Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, missing from the What Lies Beneath one-sheet, and Sylvester Stallone, missing from the Cliffhanger poster.

  He, too, was a big-mouth Hungarian.

  Hungarian screenwriter Andrew Solt told his friend Zsa Zsa Gabor that Ingrid Bergman, on Joan of Arc, the picture he had written, slept with everyone on the set, including the electricians, and that when she was through with the electricians, she had them fired.

  If Bruce Willis is a real asshole, then say he’s a real asshole.

  At a writer’s seminar on Maui, Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), who was sitting next to me, said, “Okay, I’ll say it, Bruce Willis is a real asshole.”

  Okay, maybe my physical proximity to Shane made him say it.

  PART ELEVEN

  SURVIVING THE CRITICS

  LESSON 18

  They Want to Kill You, Rape Your

  Wife, and Eat Your Children!

  The definition of a critic …

  Ben Hecht: “A person who smiles when he calls you a son of a bitch.”

  Comedian Dick Shawn: “A critic is someone who comes in after the battle is over and shoots the wounded.”

  Don’t read your reviews.

  William Faulkner never did. “Who knows the faults of my work better than I do?” he said.

  His brother said, “He was simply protecting himself from hurt.”

  Never mind the damn critics; maybe you’ve just written Dr. Zhivago.

  Dr. Zhivago was hammered by the critic when it was released. It is now considered perhaps the greatest movie of all time by many writers, directors … and critics.

  The best way to deal with a bad review …

  When critic Louis Kronenberger panned one of Ben Hecht’s plays, Hecht threatened to castrate him.

  Bruce Willis might be an asshole, but he’s got a pretty good idea here.

  Bruce Willis: “What I had hoped for her [the critic] was that she became so famous that she had to start worrying about her life, that she had to start feeling that she was threatened, and then had to sleep with a gun by her bed every night because she thought that she was so famous someone was going to do something to her or attack her. And then one night she finally realized the sick life she was living, and she just put the gun in her mouth and blew her fucking brains out.”

  They have a (tawdry) living to make.

  Most film critics also do filmmaker interviews for the publications they work for. Their income depends on their access to stars.

  So let’s say Steven Spielberg has directed a new movie starring Julia Roberts and written by John Doe.

  Let’s say this new movie is awful. The critic for your local metropolitan paper or TV station knows he will need interviews with Spielberg and Roberts in the future. He reviews the film nevertheless and says that the movie isn’t very good. He knows that if he says a bad movie is good too often, his readers will dismiss him as a street-corner hooker.

  But if the movie isn’t very good, then whom should he blame? Spielberg? Roberts? Or the screenwriter, John Doe, whom he will never need to interview because (A) the public could give a flying fig about who the screenwriter is, and (B) because there are almost no screenwriters who are stars (and whom he will ever need to interview).

  This, more likely, will be the critic’s capsule review: “Julia Roberts shows flashes of brilliance with some of her obviously improvised lines of dialogue. But Spielberg, who has given it a heroic try, is ultimately brought down by John Doe’s hackneyed and cliché-ridden screenplay.”

  Now you’re talking, Billy boy!

  William Goldman: “Directors have no vision. … One of the reasons the media gushes about them is this—they don’t know shit about the movie business. They are filling columns or minutes for circulation or ratings. And since they want to feel important, the people they interview have to be fabulously important. The hottest young star, the most brilliant director. That kind of madness.”

  They want to kill you, rape your wife, and eat your children.

  No critic working today compares the first draft of an original screenplay with the finished movie.

  Doing this would show the critic—especially in a misfired movie—who is to blame.

  What if the script was brilliant and a moronic director destroyed it?

  Critics claim that it would take too much time for them to read the script of a movie, but I’m convinced they don’t want to know if a director has butchered a brilliant script.

  Critics purposely blind themselves to any information that would force them to praise the writer and damn the director or the star.

  This is because their bread and butter depends on access to the directors and the stars. And because they hate you—because they want to be you.

  Aw, come on! Rape your wife and eat your children?

  Yup.

  Because you’re a screenwriter and they’re self-styled “film experts” who can’t write screenplays.

  Because you make big bucks and they make peanuts, even in comparison to what you make if you write unsuccessful movies.

  And because they don’t think it is fair that they know all this movie trivia and you don’t, and still you’re the one writing screenplays!

  They want to be you!

  Consequently: If you’ve written a good movie, don’t expect them to praise you. They might not even mention you in their review, and they’ll certainly heap lavish praise upon the director for “creating” a great movie.

  If, however, you’ve written a movie that winds up being bad onscreen, they’ll not only mention you; they’ll blame you for everything—even bad acting. The actor, they’ll say, just couldn’t do anything with your lame lines of dialogue.

  Some critics are so shamelessly biased that they’ll even praise an actor’s performance while bashing your script—as if the performance were created by the director’s notes and not your story, character, and lines of dialogue.

  Who are these miscreants?

  Hollywood Reporter columnist Ray Richmond, himself a sometime film critic: “They are at once heavily ego-driven and desperately insecure. Film critics are movie geeks who write as much to impress other critics as they do to inform their audience. They’re obsessed with being taken seriously, which can manifest itself either via quotes in movie ads or their anointing by the critical intelligentsia as one of their own. Yet while critics sport the iconoclast’s soul, it’s mitigated by an almost child-like need to be loved—not necessarily by the public but by their peers. They pine to be members of the club and at the same time somehow outside it, but not so much that they appear to be snobbish. This is why most would never be caught dead lavishing too much worship on a mainstream blockbuster … unless of course their contemporaries did too (such as in the case of Spider-Man 2). Then it would be cool.”

  How these miscreants see themselves.

  Film critic A. O. Scott in The New York Times: “Criticism always contains an element of autobiography, and it is not much a leap to suggest that more than a few have seen themselves in Sideways. (Several have admitted as much.) This is not to suggest that white, middle-aged men with a taste for alcohol are disproportionately represented in the ranks of working movie reviewers; plausible as such a notion may be, I don’t have the sociological data to support it just yet. But the self-pity and the solipsism that are Miles’s less attractive (and frequently most prominent) traits represent the underside of the critical temperament; his morbid sensitivity may be an occupational hazard we all face.”

  Critics are hustlers who want to be screenwriters.

  Consider James Agee, Peter Bogdanovic
h, Barbara Shulgasser, Paul Schrader, Jay Cocks, Paul Attanasio, among others—all critics who made it to be screenwriters or directors.

  What better way to advertise that you know something about writing screenplays than to pick apart the screenplays of the movies you’re reviewing—knowing that producers and studio execs will read your review if it’s coming from a relatively prominent place.

  They’ll hang you by your themes.

  I’ve always been fascinated by the notion that we don’t ever know one another—that lovers and family members may not really know their mates or parents.

  I played with that theme in Betrayed, Music Box, Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, and Sliver.

  According to the critics, though, screenwriters aren’t allowed to have themes. However, novelists and directors are.

  But the critics said there was no theme to my work. I was, they said, “plagiarizing myself.”

  If you write witty dialogue …

  Be prepared for the critics to call you not a witty writer, but a wordsmith.

  No matter what you do, the critics will define you.

  Critics have defined me as the man who writes about sleazy sex. To reach that conclusion they have ignored most of my films: F.I.S.T., Checking Out, Big Shots, Hearts of Fire, Betrayed, Music Box, Nowhere to Run, Telling Lies in America, and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn.

  You, too, can laugh all the way to the bank.

  In every bad review I got for Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Sliver, and Jade, the amount of money I received for the script was always in the review—often in the first paragraph.

  William Goldman, speaking about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “My very late great agent, Evarts Ziegler, had secured 400,000 for the screenplay. A lot of money today. Back then, record-shattering. It made all the papers, not just Variety. And a lot of people wondered what the world was coming to, a western selling for that. It’s my belief that the reason the reviews were so shitty is because of the money I got. A lot of people were pissed, a lot of these people were critics. For them the title of the movie really turned out to be this: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 400,000.”