If they were pissed about Bill Goldman’s 400,000, imagine how apoplectic they must have gotten when I got 2.5 million for Jade, 3 million for Basic Instinct, and 3.7 million for Showgirls. Or how insane they must have been when the movie they’d unanimously trashed, Basic Instinct, became the biggestgrossing film of the year wordwide!
In the old days, they openly took bribes.
Syndicated columnist Jimmy Fiddler revealed that he was offered 2,500 for a favorable review of Errol Flynn’s The Prisoner of Zenda and turned the money down because the movie was so bad that he felt he couldn’t take it without looking like a simpleton.
Running into Fiddler at a party later, Flynn decked him—at which point, Fiddler’s wife stuck a fork in Flynn’s ear.
They can be bribed? You damn betcha!
Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and former Disney executive: “Studios know that many in the entertainment press don’t have the budgets or the scruples to turn down all-expenses-paid junkets to Disney World, to New York, or the set in New Zealand. A bag of swag, or a signed photo of the reporter in a bear hug with a smiling superstar, isn’t a guarantee against a critic’s pan, but it can’t hurt.”
They’re just damn whoors.
Many listen to the studio publicity people who call them and ask, “Couldn’t you say this about the movie?” and then tell them what to write.
The reason many critics listen is because they like going on those press junkets, where the studio pays for everything.
They like the Christmas gifts they’ll receive if the studio is pleased with the things they write during the year.
And they like to see their names in big letters in full-page ads paid for by the studio in The New York Times or USA Today.
Harlots, harlots everywhere!
Mike Medavoy: “Back in 1971 The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael could anoint a picture like Last Tango in Paris simply with a review. But by the end of the eighties, there were so many movie critics that their impact had become watered-down as their opinions piled up. Every small town has its own movie critic, and there are reviewers out there working for dubious-sounding organizations who will say something great about any piece of junk just to see their names in the ads.”
Liar, liar!
A reporter named Lenny Traube, writing for the Western Queens Gazette in Astoria, New York, described an interview he did with me at a place called Mary McGuire’s restaurant on Broadway.
He wrote: “Joe Eszterhas, the bearded millionaire screenwriter, turned up at Mary McGuire’s on Broadway following a script session at the Kaufman-Astoria studios and passed on the following to his eager interviewer, yours truly.”
Lenny Traube then quoted me at length about my past movies and future projects.
The only problem was that I’d never spoken to anyone named Lenny Traube or anyone else from the Western Queens Gazette. I had never been in Astoria, New York. I had never been at the Kaufman-Astoria studios. I had never been at Mary McGuire’s restaurant.
Lenny Traube had made the whole thing up and had plagiarized other interviews I had done during the previous six months.
When I threatened to sue, the Western Queens Gazette apologized and admitted that Lenny Traube had made it all up. They begged me not to sue. They even offered to do a lengthy (this time real) interview with me.
I didn’t do the interview.
I didn’t sue, either, although I should have.
Let’s make critics real people, not cinema geeks.
Here’s how to clean up film criticism—how to take the corruptions out of it, how to stop the payoffs and the junket swag and strip critics of their power.
It’s easy, really. In the interest of fairness, newspapers should rotate their film critics every six months. Film critics should not be people who have seen ten movies a week for years and years.
Their expertise should not be in the technique of moviemaking. They shouldn’t be cinema geeks who spend most of their time in dark theaters.
They should be reporters from the newspaper’s other beats—sports, news, the style sections, the obituary pages—who, for six months, get to review movies—not from a technical viewpoint, but from a human point of view—and who aren’t afraid to tell us without mincing words (for fear of antagonizing studios) how they feel about the movie they’ve just seen.
Take their names away from ’em.
I said this to a studio executive: “If you think critics are supreme egotists who like to see their names displayed in full-page newspaper ads, why don’t you leave their names out of the ads? Just go with the publication they work for. If all the studios did that, maybe critics would write less grandstanding reviews.”
She said, “No, we need their names, even if nobody’s ever heard of them. Because if we get thrashed by all the major media outlets, we will still have reviews from John and Jane Doe from obscure radio stations around the country, who will give us the review we need to plaster on a full page.”
Be patient—once they kick the holy hell out of you, they just might praise you.
While, after its release, feminists bashed Basic Instinct unanimously (Tammy Bruce, the then president of the L.A. chapter of NOW, even stood in a picket line), months later feminist author Naomi Wolf wrote, “What was so cathartic about Basic Instinct was here was not a cartoon villainess like in Fatal Attraction—not a misogynist two-dimensional nightmare—but a complex, compelling Nietzschean Uberfraulein who owns everything about her own power. She’s rich. She’s not ashamed of being rich, which is transgressive in the ideology of femininity.”
Yale lecturer and revisionist feminist Camille Paglia wrote, “Woman is the bitch goddess of the universe. … Sharon Stone’s performance was one of the great performances by a woman in screen history.”
When my film Jagged Edge was released, it was panned by the critics, dismissed in a few paragraphs by The New York Times. Ten years later, in an article about modern classic thrillers, the Times included Jagged Edge.
Pauline was the worst!
Canonized as “the Divine Redeemer” of film critics, Pauline Kael viewed James Toback (Fingers) as a creative genius.
That’s all you really need to know about her.
Plus the fact that she stopped writing criticism when Warren Beatty hired her to become part of his production company. Then, when he fired her about a year later, Pauline started writing reviews once again.
A Feedable Critic
Screenwriter/director Buck Henry: “Everyone knew that Pauline Kael was feedable, that if you sat next to her, got her drunk, and fed her some lines, you could get them replayed in some other form.”
Pauline liked to hang out.
To Pauline Kael, Altman was a cinematic god. She called M*A*S*H “the best American war comedy since sound came in.”
Screenwriter Joan Tewksbury, who worked with Altman, said, “Bob could cultivate Pauline. She would come to the sets, go out to dinner with him, hang around his office.”
How did Mailer know this?
He called Pauline Kael “the first frigid of the film critics.”
A Paulette
Disciples of Pauline Kael.
Was he talking about Pauline or Roger Ebert?
No, Raymond Chandler was referring to Edmund Wilson, the top literary critic of his day, when he called him “a fat bore … who made fornication as dull as a railroad time table.”
The next time you listen to Ebert …
Remember that he is a failed screenwriter, whose sole credit is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Gene Shalit is a circus clown.
Paddy Chayefsky called NBC’s Gene Shalit “a professional clown” and added that TV critics are “frustrated actors who try to be cute in ninety seconds.”
Charles Champlin was a good friend.
When F.I.S.T., my first movie, was released, Norman Jewison, the director, told me that the film critic of the Los Angeles Times had seen it and loved it.
“That doesn’t really mean a whole helluva lot, though,” Norman said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “It’s the Los Angeles Times. Who’s going to write the review it?”
“Charles Champlin,” Norman said.
“He’s a very respected guy,” I said.
“Sure he is,” Norman said. “But he’s a good friend of mine. I even blurbed his last book.”
“So what,” I said. “He liked it.”
“He certainly did,” Norman said, and grinned.
“But he’s a friend of yours,” I said.
“He certainly is,” Norman said, still grinning.
If Rex Reed gives you a bad review …
Ben Hecht and his writing partner, Charles MacArthur, saw a critic in a restaurant who had trashed their latest film. Hecht encouraged MacArthur to go over and punch the critic out.
MacArthur said, “It’s not worth it—I’ll just send him a poison choirboy.”
They gave me my props.
Many critics said Basic Instinct was written “from the crotch … from his loins … by his penis.”
Those reviews obviously impressed many women who read them and then, after reading them, sought me out.
A Popcorn Movie
They are movies like Flashdance and Jagged Edge that overcome negative critics and wind up doing huge business. In other words, they are movies that people who’ve seen them tell other people about. Mike Medavoy: “Studio owners have been known to tell production people, ‘Make popcorn movies; that’s what people want.’ ”
Maybe he thought Mike Ovitz would help him sell his script.
A reporter working for Details magazine asked me how I felt about the distress I was causing Michael Ovitz “and his family” by telling the world that he had threatened to destroy my career unless I continued to let him represent me.
From a writer’s point of view, who is the best film critic working today?
From a writer’s point of view, there are no good film critics working today.
There weren’t any good film critics working yesterday, either (except for maybe Graham Greene).
And there won’t be any good film critics working tomorrow, either.
From a writer’s point of view, as my late director friend Richard Marquand advocated, “All critics should be taken into the backyard, lined up alongside the garage wall, and shot.”
Forget about critics.
Marilyn Monroe said: “I don’t care about the critics. I don’t care about anybody. The only people I care about are the people in Times Square, across the street from the theatre, who can’t even get close as I come in.”
They even beat up on Arthur Miller.
A 1991 New Yorker article referred to Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, After the Fall, The Misfits) as “a critic’s punching bag.”
Leave the sons of bitches hanging.
Many film critics supplement their income by teaching film classes at various schools around L.A. and New York. Their salaries depend to a great extent on being able to get “stars” to do free Q and As sessions for their classes.
If, while doing an interview with you, they ask you to make a guest appearance in their classes, always say yes. The interview with you or their review of your movie will appear long before your scheduled appearance in one of their classes.
Then, a day before your scheduled appearance, call the person and, faking a hoarse voice, tell him you’ve got the flu.
Since my throat cancer, I don’t even have to fake my hoarse voice.
It pays to be friendly with Daily Variety.
Getting great coverage from Daily Variety translates into dollars and cents. If a studio knows that your profile and your relationship with Daily Variety can get it positive front-page coverage, that studio is more likely to make a deal with you.
You can use Variety to close your deals.
Another way to profit from a good relationship with Daily Variety: When a deal isn’t quite done, leak the story as a fait accompli to Daily Variety—it will make the deal more likely to get done if everyone is already talking about it.
It worked when I leaked that Paul Verhoeven was directing Showgirls, before he’d actually decided to direct it. Everyone told Paul what a great idea it sounded like, and he closed his deal.
It didn’t work when I leaked that Cuba Gooding, Jr., would play Otis Redding in my script Blaze of Glory. Cuba got pissed that Variety was writing about something he hadn’t yet decided to do, and he immediately pulled out of the project.
I had outfoxed myself.
This Variety device to get deals done was something I called “the Mike Fleming Net,” after the Variety writer who wrote all the stories about new deals.
Columnists like Cristal.
If you want her to mention you and to mention you nicely” producer Irwin Winkler said to me about entertainment columnist Marilyn Beck, “send her a bottle of great champagne each Christmas.”
I did … and she did.
A Chatter Chippie
A Hollywood gossip columnist.
Disrupt traffic, break windows, and slit tires.
A group of Writers Guild officials sat in my dining room in Malibu, telling me how awful it was that the Los Angeles Times was increasingly giving the “Film by” credit or simply the “by” credit to directors.
I said, “What are you guys doing about it?”
One of the Guild people said, “We’re setting a series of cocktail events up where Los Angeles Times and other journalists can come by and meet screenwriters once a week.”
I said, “Why are you doing that?”
One of them said, “So they can get to know screenwriters, write about them, and elevate their profile.”
I said, “That won’t do any good. Those journalists are jealous as hell of screenwriters. Those bastards would die to make the kind of money a lot of screenwriters make.”
One of them said, “Well, what would you do?”
I said, “I’d set up a picket line outside the Los Angeles Times building to protest the ‘Film by’ credit. I’d make a lot of noise, disrupt traffic, break some windows, slit some tires, and get our feelings on the front page of every newspaper in the country. SCREENWRITERS RUN AMOK—that’d be a great headline.”
The Writers Guild people got out of my house very quickly.
Isn’t there something wrong here?
Many newspapers are already using the “by” credit.
Here is what it looks like: Daisy Miller by Peter Bogdanovich; The Color Purple by Steven Spielberg; Gone With the Wind by Victor Fleming; The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola; War and Peace by King Vidor; Huckleberry Finn by William Desmond Taylor; The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille; and The Bible by John Huston.
PART TWELVE
THE HAPPY ENDING
LESSON 19
Fight, Write, Throw Up, and
Keep Writing!
It’s okay to be jealous of other screenwriters.
Novelist and screenwriter Gore Vidal: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
Robert McKee can get jealous, too.
McKee: “Would you rather get paid 25,000 to have your story on the screen exactly as you wrote it, or get paid a million dollars by a studio and have your script butchered by development executives? Nine out of ten screenwriters want the latter. These people are not artists. They have no integrity and they get what they deserve—to have their names associated with bad films.”
You don’t get it, Bobby. The name of the game is to get the million bucks and still get it made exactly as you wrote it … which is exactly what I have done with many of my movies.
Your movie needs a little luck.
The advance word on The China Syndrome was bleak. The movie lacked any buzz; everyone expected it to bomb.
Three days before it was released, a nuclear catastrophe at Three Mile Island got the attention of the whole world. The China Syndrome, a movie about a nuclear catastrop
he, was a smash hit.
You need a little luck, too.
A reporter for ABC television did a lengthy 20/20 piece about my screenwriting success. I had just sold several scripts for millions of dollars and I had just fallen head over heels with the love of my life. I was floating when I did the interview.
ABC’s correspondent Judd Rose told me off-camera in the course of our day together that he felt like his luck in life had run out. He was a young man and he had recently been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.
For luck, I gave him a beautiful antique Hawaiian walking stick, one of my most treasured objects.
But a couple of years later, Judd Rose died.
Avoid the gods of irony.
Mike Medavoy: “The gods of irony wield a lot of power in Hollywood.”
Don’t let it kill you.
Producer Alan Carr died as a result of the failure of his Academy Award telecast; director Richard Marquand died as a result of the failure of his film Hearts of Fire; Paddy Chayefsky died as a result of his directorially butchered film Altered States.
If you fail, don’t kill yourself.
Writer and producer Dominick Dunne: “For me, the pain of failure exceeded by far the joys of success. My plight was hopeless. I almost jumped in front of a train in Santa Barbara. At the last second I let it pass me. I had a major flirtation with a kitchen knife that I took to bed with me. The love that I felt for Los Angeles turned to hate. I ran from there.”
Creatively Reliable
A person who is so screwed up on drugs or booze that he is personally unreliable … but can still function as a screenwriter.
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 33