Remember that chicken shit can turn into chicken liver.
My film Showgirls, trashed as one of the worst movies ever made when it was released, is now a cult classic.
A sequel and a Broadway show are planned.
Remember that chicken liver can turn into chicken shit, too.
Titanic, the world’s most successful film in history, winner of God knows how many Academy Awards, was voted one of the worst movies of all time in 2003 by the viewers of England’s BBC.
You don’t want to turn into Joe Gillis.
In Sunset Boulevard, Joe Gillis, screenwriter (played by William Holden), wound up as the kept man of a broken-down movie star who hadn’t made a movie in decades. She spoiled him, belittled him, and finally killed him. In the last scene of the film, we see him floating facedown in her swimming pool.
Someone asks him in the film, “Don’t you sometimes hate yourself?”
Joe says, “Constantly.”
This is the way Joe Gillis describes himself: “Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with a couple of B pictures to his credit. The poor dope.”
Don’t let this be your self-portrait.
William Goldman: “Everybody knows that writers are miserable—the line between novelists and alcoholics is constantly talked of. But we’re weird. We’re antisocial, and if you’ve seen us on the tube, you know that, except for Gore Vidal, we’re not a whole lot of fun. You expect the unhappiness.”
If you’re a boozer, go clean yourself up.
I did. I was the complete functioning alcoholic. I never staggered or slurred or passed out. I rarely even had hangovers.
But I started drinking when I was fourteen, and by 2001, I was drinking a fifth of tequila, bourbon, or gin a day and two bottles of white wine or two six-packs of beer.
I developed throat cancer and had to detox before the surgery. After the surgery, to have a chance to live, I had to stop smoking and drinking.
I did. I’ve been sober five years. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, but I did it. So can you.
Remember that first and foremost you’re an entertainer.
Director Phillip Noyce: “I first became interested in movies as a result of my fascination with the traveling tent shows that came to my small country town when I was a child. And my fascination with the tent shows was an attraction to the ability of the performer to engage the audience. So I’ve always seen myself as an entertainer of the public. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to sit in a cinema where one of my films is screening and to feel the pleasure that I’m giving to the audience. That’s what makes it all worthwhile. I’d make films for nothing if they told me there was no other way of getting a film financed, just so that I could continue to feel the thrill of that contact with a satisfied public as you take them into the make-believe world that you’ve created for them.”
Hold on to the magic.
I liked the cinema better before I began to do it,” said Orson Welles. “Now I can’t stop myself from hearing the clappers at the beginning of each shot; all the magic is destroyed.”
You can become an echo.
If your script doesn’t sell, there’s still hope for the future. My script about soul singer Otis Redding, Blaze of Glory, wasn’t made for eight years—until the Ray Charles biopic, Ray, became a hit movie—and then suddenly my phone didn’t stop ringing. People were now showing interest in Blaze.
Screenwriter Larry Gross bought the rights to and adapted two Andre Dubus short stories. He couldn’t sell his script for twenty years—until another Dubus piece, In the Bedroom, became a hit movie.
“My partner and I dusted off the script,” says Gross, “did a couple of more changes, and all the reasons people had passed on it now were ignored because it was from the author of In the Bedroom.”
And you can create an echo.
When I wrote Flashdance, there hadn’t been a hit musical in many years; after the movie’s success, there was suddenly a vast variety of musicals being filmed.
Ditto with Jagged Edge. There hadn’t been a hit courtroom mystery in a long time; after Jagged Edge’s success, one after another were released.
If everybody passes on your script …
Producer Robert Evans’s favorite saying is “Aw, fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all!”
If you get discouraged …
Remember that while Confederacy of Dunces is now hailed as the funniest novel ever written and won the Pulitzer Prize, every single publisher passed when it was first sent to them.
You’re in good company: Screenwriting almost killed Raymond Chandler, too.
The last picture I did at Paramount,” said the novelist/screenwriter, “nearly killed me. The producer was in the doghouse—he has since left—and the director was a stale old hack who had been directing for thirty years without once achieving any real distinction. Obviously he never could. So here I am, a mere writer and a tired one at that screaming at the front office to protect the producer and actually going on the set to direct scenes—I know nothing about directing—in order that the whole project might be saved from going down the drain. Well, it was saved. As pictures go, it was pretty lively. No classic, but no dud, either.”
The film Chandler was talking about was the noir classic The Blue Dahlia.
Don’t look to Marilyn for inspiration.
John Kennedy Toole, unable to sell his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, drove to California and visited Marilyn Monroe’s grave.
He then drove back home to Louisiana and killed himself.
Be philosophical about life.
While the PC police were organizing posses everywhere to lynch me for the sex in Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Sliver, the president of the United States and his intern were practicing analingus in the Oval Office.
Don’t get bitter.
Screenwriter and author John Fante (Ask the Dust) was sixty-nine years old and a resident of the Motion Picture and Television Hospital. He was blind. Both of his legs had been amputated.
He said, “The most horrible thing that happens to people is bitterness. They all get so bitter.”
If you get discouraged …
Remember that fabled (and smart) studio head Frank Price had first crack at a Steven Spielberg project and passed. The project was E.T.
Come on, you’ve only had one cable movie made, Bobby.
Robert McKee: “What I teach is the truth; you’re in over your head, this is not a hobby, this is an art form and a profession, and your chances of success are very, very slim. And if you’ve got only one story, get the fuck out of here. …”
Try not to burn out.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “For several years I have disliked motion pictures and planned tentatively to get out of them. … I have an overpowering desire never again to have anything to do with this depraved industry, and an equally overpowering desire to get what cash I can and blow.”
Analysis Paralysis
The definition of Hollywood burnout. For example:
The writer who has writer’s block.
The director who wants to himself rewrite the script.
The studio head who is afraid to say yes or no to a movie.
The agent who drives out to Joshua Tree in his new Porsche and sits in the car for three days drinking vodka and popping pills, watching the sunsets and sunrises.
The superstar actor who becomes a shoemaker’s apprentice in Italy.
The actress who gets a nose job that ruins her career.
The producer who decides, at the age of sixty-two, that he’s gay.
There are a thousand other symptoms of the same malaise.
The only cure? Get the hell outta Dodge—now!
If you get discouraged …
Remember that when a screenwriter changed the title to something else, put his own name on it, and sent it to most of the production entities in Hollywood, there were no takers.
The original title of that script was Casablanca.
If you can’t sell your script, enter the competitions.
Some agents read the scripts of competition winners and some producers assign readers to the winners’ scripts, too.
There seem to be more and more of these competitions each year, but some of the more established ones are the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, the Chesterfield Film Company’s Writer’s Film Project, and the Writer’s Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition. Check the Internet for others.
If things go bad screenwriting, you can always try to write a novel.
There is no director, producer, star, or studio head to work with. You will get no “notes” from anyone. You will have an editor who will make “suggestions” to you. You can take those suggestions or leave them. No writer will replace you if you leave the publisher. You’ll be paid whether you listen to the suggestions or not.
Sounds like bliss, right?
You can free yourself by writing a novel.
Screenwriter/director/novelist John Sayles (Matewan): “There’s a basic structure to movies. It’s rigid and reductive. In a movie, you only deal with core relationships: a protagonist, an antagonist. But in a novel you can do whatever you want. You can introduce characters that disappear for a hundred pages, you can have a dozen plot lines that interweave and overlap. In a novel, you get to be God. That doesn’t happen in the movies.”
Steven Bochco thinks writing a novel is fun.
Bochco (Hill Street Blues, Death by Hollywood): “Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can’t really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience. Once you have your map, once you know your final destination, you can take all these pit stops along the way. You can take side trips and digress, riff on something and come back to the main road. It’s so much fun.”
If you write a novel, you gotta go platinum or else.
John Sayles: “Getting a second novel published is even harder than getting a first novel published. It’s no longer enough to be a good writer; now you have to be a good writer whose first book went platinum.”
It isn’t bliss.
Publishing isn’t what it once was. By their preorders, booksellers determine how many copies of a book a publisher will print.
In film terms, that’s letting the exhibitors, the individual theater owners, determine how many prints a studio will make.
If you’re already writing your novel …
Remember that booksellers have so much power that they can determine the jacket of your book. This is what often happens when Barnes & Noble doesn’t like a cover. The publisher prints up a new one.
Another reason not to write novels …
One time when Irish author Carlo Gébler was doing a book reading, a group of drunken students in the audience started fighting.
“Do you want me to finish?” he asked.
“Not really,” someone yelled.
Carl Hiaasen, my favorite mystery novelist, went to a book reading in Arkansas and discovered that an Arkansas Razorbacks game was taking place at the same time. He did his book reading for the few book salesmen who showed up.
Novelist William Trevor went to a reading, found no one there, and read for the cabdriver who’d brought him. He discovered after he finished reading that his cabbie had charged him for his reading time.
You might want to try gay porn.
Screenwriter/novelist Gigi Grazer (Stepmom, The Starter Wife): “Writers, or any artists, should constantly be reinventing themselves, whatever that means—plays to screenplays to novels and back again, or second wife to mistress to third wife to gay porn, whatever works. Life feeds us. If we stagnate, there is no material.”
Be proud of being a screenwriter.
Don’t take any shit from anyone who asks you why, if you’re so unhappy being a screenwriter, you’re not writing novels instead.
Paddy Chayefsky: “I consider writing novels déclassé. After all, drama has been around since the Orphic rites; the novel has been around only since Cervantes or thereabouts.”
If you wind up writing television because you can’t get a film job …
You’re in good company.
David O. Selznick, the greatest creative producer in the history of Hollywood, wound up working in TV after he went broke.
If you can’t write screenplays, then take over the studio.
That’s what the legendary studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck did.
When he began his career, he was a screenwriter on the Warner Bros. payroll, making a hundred dollars a week.
If you can’t make it as a screenwriter, there’s still hope.
If you’re Tom Cruise or Jack Nicholson or Barbra—one of those people—what are you supposed to do? Stand out there on the side of the road on the 405 or I-10 and change the tire?
Yourself? Getting your hands dirty? Dirtying your new Gucci embroidered jeans?
That’s what gave my friend Hank an idea. He had been writing and trying to sell screenplays for eight years, without success. One year, he even slept in his car; his office was the Kinko’s on Lincoln Avenue.
Then, one beautiful socked-in L.A. day, he was driving along the 405 in his beater and there was a brother standing on the side of the road next to a Rolls-Royce. Hank saw that it was Eddie Murphy, and that got him thinking.
Hank had a friend who had a friend who was an accountant for people like Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss and a lot of other big-time directors and producers. He went to his friend, who went to his friend, the accountant, and got Hank an appointment with him. And the accountant loved Hank’s idea.
The accountant gave Hank’s number to all of his clients and the clients gave his number to big-shot friends of theirs, and pretty soon Hank’s phone started to ring.
If they needed to take any of their cars (some had six or seven) to be serviced, Hank took it for them—drove it there, had the work done, and drove it back home for them.
If they broke down on the road, or had any other difficulty, Hank drove to the scene, fixed the car if he could, or drove it to the shop if he couldn’t and then waited with them while the limo he had called for them arrived.
Hank has a staff of four now. As a sideline, he’s starting his own limo company. A good-looking guy, he’s even dating a couple of his clients, sometimes even showing them one of his scripts.
You don’t want to die like Clifford Odets did.
The world-acclaimed playwright was employed as a segment writer for the television show Paladin, starring Richard Boone, when he died of cancer at age fifty-seven.
A friend said, “He was miserable out there. All of his dreams were of escaping from it, of writing plays and coming back to the theater. He never made peace with his defeat.”
Go get some rhinoplasties.
Trevor Mills, a screenwriter who lives in Austin, Texas, couldn’t sell a script, so he spent nine thousand dollars on a chin implant and two rhinoplasties to make himself look like Keanu Reeves.
He still couldn’t sell a script after his surgeries, but he was thinking about studying acting.
Jim Harrison wants to be Jack Nicholson.
Screenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison was on a Mediterranean cruise with Jack Nicholson. Harrison said later, “It would be a tiny port and there would be all these women screaming ‘Fuck me, Jack! I love you, Jack! I’m yours, Jack!’ I remember thinking, What does that do to your head?”
Kevin Costner does Jim Harrison a favor.
Jim Harrison and Kevin Costner were sitting together in a bar. Jim pointed out to Kevin after their third beer that Kevin had gotten a dozen notes from ladies in the bar and that he had gotten none.
To make him feel better, Kevin offered to give Jim some of his notes.
Your teeth can be discolored and you can still score big-time.
Paddy Chayefsky, by all accounts, was a singularly unhandsome man—small, overweight, his teeth discolored, his hair balding. He usually reeked of tobacco and garlic. Yet he got the sex symbol
of his age to go to bed with him.
Does anybody think that had a little to do with the quality of his writing?
I don’t flatter myself, either. In the period of my life when I bedded the sex symbol of my age, I, too, was an unhandsome man—overweight, my teeth discolored, my hair down to my butt. I usually reeked of tobacco, garlic, and alcohol. And yet the sex symbol of my age slept with me, too.
If you keep writing, if you don’t give up, then you, too, can follow in our footsteps.
Billy Wilder was a gigolo.
If you can’t sell your script, maybe you can sell yourself.
That’s what Billy Wilder did when he couldn’t sell his scripts in Berlin. He became a gigolo.
If you get discouraged …
Paddy Chayefsky said, “In spite of everything, screenwriting is better than threading pipe.”
You don’t want to get old in Hollywood.
Bert Fields, one of the most powerful attorneys in Hollywood, wrote this in a short story entitled The Heart of the Matter: “On his sixty-fifth birthday, the actor sits alone on his terrace finishing a bottle of Cristal. The city lights stretch out before him. Millions of homes, millions of families. Husbands coming home to wives, kids, even dogs. He’s got his butler … and sometimes his lawyer. His agent has died. It doesn’t matter. No scripts come in anyway. He shakes his head, smiling sadly … remembering. He wonders whatever happened to his wife. He feels the need for people, noise, something. He dials his lawyer, gets an answering machine. He dials his favorite restaurant. They’re fully booked. For a few minutes, he stares out at the city. Then he rises slowly from the chair, blows a kiss to the lights, and climbs the stairs to the bedroom, where the .38 special lies waiting in the drawer.”
Unless you’re Clint Eastwood (who’s Marilyn in drag) …
Clint: “Some people glow really early, in their twenties and thirties, then in their fifties they are not doing as much. But I feel that growing up and maturing, constantly maturing—aging is the impolite way of saying it—I like to think there is an expansion going on philosophically.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 34