A Chocolate Life
Hollywood retirement: champagne, caviar, fresh flowers delivered every day, and all the chocolate you can eat.
No matter how old you are, you can always learn more about film.
Director Akira Kurosawa, at age eighty-two: “I’m just beginning to understand what cinema can do.”
Did I tell you to get the hell out of L.A.?
Raymond Chandler: “No doubt I have learned a lot from Hollywood. Please do not think I completely despise it, because I don’t … but the overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have really never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world … it is like one of these South American palace revolutions conducted by officers in comic opera uniforms—only when the thing is over the ragged dead men lie in rows against the wall, and you suddenly know that this is not funny, this is the Roman circus, and damn near the end of civilization.”
If you reach a certain point, quit screenwriting.
I mean it. I bartended for a while.
Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam: “I have a schedule, I have a secretary and a producing partner and a development person, and I feel like I’m no longer living the quiet, contemplative life of a writer. I’m not getting that benefit anymore, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m losing my patience with directors and producers. I feel ‘Why do I have to please these people? Why do I have to knock myself out to please them? Come back to them with idea after idea after idea. They’re all good, but they reject them so often. I’m just sick of it.”
Time to go bartend, Jeffrey.
You can get drunk and dance in your bare feet.
Screenwriter William Faulkner: “Anybody who can sell anything to the movies for more than 50,000 has a right to get drunk and dance in his bare feet.”
Peter Bart doesn’t have any balls. Or … Take notes for your Hollywood tell-all. Or … Sidney Korshak was a sleazeball.
Variety editor Peter Bart, in his book Shoot Out: “One night I wandered home, dead tired, and found myself leafing through the journal I had been keeping—notes that I would someday turn into my ‘definitive’ book about life at the studio. I was riveted as I relived these day-to-day experiences—encounters with Mafioso and managers, with the Roman Polanskis and the Sidney Korshaks. I’d even noted down one conversation with Korshak, the ever-somber attorney who had started out serving Al Capone and ended up mentoring stars and studio chiefs. ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘do you know what’s the best insurance policy—one that guarantees continuous breathing?’ I thought this an odd question, but I asked for his answer. ‘It’s silence,’ he intoned. He said it as though he had just imparted great wisdom, and in a sense he had. This was, after all, advice emanating from someone who was arguably the industry’s most talented ‘fixer.’ I decided it was advice worth taking. I would stay at Paramount, but I would shred my notes.”
That’s crap. Moustache Pete Omertà stuff. Write everything down and keep your notes, and if you feel like it, write the book that tells all. I’ve written two of those already.
If they screw you over, write about it.
It’s okay to bite the hand that feeds you.
Ben Hecht, the king of all screenwriters, wrote the scripts for three films that satirized Hollywood: Actors and Sin, in which an old actor kills his actress daughter so she will not wind up being a nobody like him; I Hate Actors, in which a celebrated and successful script is written by a nine-year-old child; The Scoundrel, in which a producer says, “Don’t use that line; it’s twenty-five years old.” (The line is “I love you.”)
I wrote a script called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, which made fun of most of the players in town. In my first draft, I used real names, not made-up ones. I will sell that draft on eBay someday.
(Just kidding, I think.)
You’re a writer, not the owner of a writing factory.
Ben Hecht hired writers to “block out and draft” scripts, which he then revised and called his own. Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection) did the same thing after he won the Oscar. While Ron Bass (Rain Main) denies that he runs a writing factory, he does hire assistants and researchers, who accompany him to studio meetings.
The trouble with doing this, of course, is that word spreads quickly, and that studios will think twice about hiring you if they think you’re doing what they’re doing: grinding out sausages.
Nobody ever accused William Goldman of running a writing factory, but he does write quickly. When he wrote three scripts in one year and none of them was produced, word spread that he was grinding out sausages. His phone didn’t ring for years.
Don’t die wearing a diamond ring.
Famed producer Mike Todd’s remains were stolen from a Chicago cemetery so the thieves could get the big diamond ring he was famous for wearing.
Anthony Pellicano will unearth you, too.
The infamous Hollywood private eye’s first claim to fame was finding Mike Todd’s remains. Alas, when the Pelican found the body, the diamond ring was gone.
If you’re asked for casting advice, take great care.
My first draft of An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn called for Anthony Pellicano to play an infamous Hollywood gumshoe named Anthony Pellicano.
I called Anthony and sent him the script and he happily agreed to play himself in the film.
When I cast Sly Stallone in the lead part, Sly had only one demand: that Anthony Pellicano not be in the film.
I don’t know why he made that demand and I was smart enough not to want to know. I didn’t ask him.
I called Anthony and told him I had to write him out of the film or I’d lose Sly.
Anthony called Sly a bunch of names but said he understood that Sly’s presence in the film gave us our financing for it.
I changed the Anthony Pellicano character’s name in the script to the fictitious Sam Rizzo.
My agent called me a couple of weeks later and said he had a friend who had read the script and was desperate to play the Sam Rizzo part. It was Harvey Weinstein, then the head of Miramax and one of the most powerful people in town.
I cast Harvey and called Anthony and told him that Harvey Weinstein would be playing the part.
Anthony said: “Harvey Weinstein? Harvey Weinstein is going to play me? He’s a fuckin’ wuss. He can’t play me!”
I said, “No, he’s going to play Sam Rizzo.”
Anthony said, “There is no fuckin’ Sam Rizzo! Sam Rizzo is me!”
Anthony said: “I oughta get my baseball bat and go visit the set.”
But Anthony laughed. He was making a little joke.
The joke was funny, but …
Anthony invited himself over to my house in Malibu.
“I’ve got a lot of stories you’d be interested in hearing,” he said.
Something told me I wasn’t interested in hearing Anthony’s stories.
I never invited him over to my house.
That may have been the smartest move I’ve ever made in Hollywood.
Raymond Chandler was just jealous of writers who made more money than he did.
After I sold a four-page outline for 4 million, I tried not to think about what Raymond Chandler had said about screenwriting in Hollywood: “The big money still goes to the wrong people.”
PERK OF SUCCESS:
OLFACTORY PLEASURES
You will know the smell of freshly baked croissants at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.
You can bury your friends.
Maxwell Bodenheim, Ben Hecht’s poet friend, wrote Ben and begged him for some money.
Ben wrote him a letter, saying that he was enclosing two hundred dollars. But he �
�forgot” to enclose the money.
When Maxwell Bodenheim died broke, Ben said he would pay for his funeral, so that Max wouldn’t be buried in a potter’s field. Then he put fifty dollars into a fund for his friend’s funeral.
TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
If you make it and get divorced, share custody but keep the help.
“There is nothing harder to find than good servants. I remember when I was sitting in the Plaza Hotel in New York with Porfirio Rubirosa, and George Sanders called from California to say that finally he’d allow me to divorce him, but he also said that Albert, who’d served us for years, was going with him. I started to cry bitterly. Rubirosa said, ‘You wanted to divorce him and now that he says “yes,” you start to cry.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be silly! I’m not crying for him, I’m crying for the butler.’ ”
You don’t have to be a victim.
Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman: “I’ve never seen a rough cut of a picture I’ve written. And I rarely get invited to sneaks. Marathon Man is a good example, because there were two sneaks, in California. And I live in New York, so it’s expensive to bring me out. Except I was in California at the time. Wouldn’t have cost a whole lot to have [had] me along.”
I’ve seen the rough cut of almost all of the fifteen films I’ve written.
I have often been sent by FedEx the tapes of the dailies as they are printed.
I attend all of the research screenings of my films.
I have been to every focus-group preview of my films, flying on the corporate jet along with the director, the producer, studio people, and sometimes even the star to sneaks in Chicago; Paramus, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Kansas City, Missouri.
Why does the studio ask me to participate in these things while shutting out Bill Goldman?
One reason may be that everyone involved with the films knows that I care passionately about them—I am not already thinking about THE NEXT JOB (Bill’s caps).
Another reason may be that everyone knows I’m perfectly capable of badmouthing the movie publicly—and getting lots of media attention—if I’m shut out of the process.
Keep on writing and writing.
Screenwriter Dan Harris (Imaginary Heroes): “Life is hard, and it often pulls no punches. Sometimes when you think it cannot get any worse, it does. Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel dies just as you approach it. But sometimes there is healing in catastrophe. Sometimes people are given a second chance.”
Don’t let the bastards get you down.
Paddy Chayefsky, in a letter to a friend: “I’m out here in California trying to make a movie, which has been a horror show from the beginning. We started shooting the fucker last Friday, and the director not only has turned out to be a monster, but a monster with not enough talent to make it worthwhile. Man, I’m tired of battling. I truly am.”
You have to be the toughest person in the world.
Screenwriter/director Ron Shelton: “You have to be the toughest person in the world. If writers take the passive role, they become victims. I tell writer’s groups—don’t complain. If you’re good enough at your work and your craft, get a lot tougher. You have to be ruthless. Writers aren’t tough enough.”
Don’ let anyone walk over you.
Screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “I have fought many hard battles in my life and I never found that there was any way to fight them except directly, accepting the risks, knowing that all I had to fight with was my brain and my courage, and that I could easily lose against much more powerful people than myself. But I did not become one of the three or four highest-paid writers in Hollywood by letting anyone walk over me.”
Write messages from your soul.
Writer/producer William Froug: “In the final analysis of our lives, as well as our writing, what else do we really have to listen to but the messages from our own souls, psyches, guts, instincts, muses, whatever you call it? This is where our personal truth, our themes, our creativity lies. The writers who fearlessly kept writing what they truly believed, in my experience, are the ones who have gone on to the greater glory—not merely money or fame, but something far more basic: inner peace and genuine fulfillment.”
Go see your movie in your neighborhood theater.
Columbia Tristar once released a film nationally—The Bloodhounds of Broadway—with a whole reel missing from it. No one noticed.
Develop a short memory.
Producer Ben Hecht: “They can screw you, and you can screw them, but if you want to keep on working, both of you need a short memory.”
You can make God smile.
Dalton Trumbo: “Once in a while when God smiles and the table is tilted just slightly in our favor, something happens. It comes from inside and reveals what we really are.”
Just keep writing.
And writing and writing … and if you are good to your fellow humans and if God smiles, the day will come when you are writing something and you will stop and smile and jump up and down because it is working, because you know that what you are writing is good!
But until that magical sun-kissed moment comes, hang in there and just keep fucking writing!
Keep writing even if you’re hurling.
For the first couple of years that I wrote screenplays, I was so nervous about what I was doing that I threw up before I began writing each morning.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s much better than reading what you’ve written at the end of the day and throwing up.
PERK OF SUCCESS: FEAR
My biggest fear …
After thirty years of writing scripts, it’s a fear that I know you don’t have, thank God.
I can’t operate a computer. Oh hell, I can’t even work an electric typewriter—I hit the keys too damn hard.
I’m a two-finger typist and I slam away at my manual Olivetti with both middle fingers (a lot of critics have made too much about the significance of writing with my two middle fingers, thank you).
The trouble is that one of these days they’re going to stop making Olivetti manual typewriters. The only reason they still make them is because there’s a big market for them in retirement communities.
Well hell, I don’t live in a retirement community. I’ve got four boys under the age of ten, for Christ’s sake. And I’ve got a lot of script and book ideas for the future.
So what’s going to happen to me when Olivetti manuals become obsolete? Well, I have ten brand-new (still in the box) Olivetti manual typewriters in my closet, ready to go. But they’re made in all kinds of Third World places (like Hungary) and sometimes I beat these machines to death in a matter of months with my slamming middle fingers.
And, get this: I discovered recently that they have already stopped making Olivetti ribbons for manual typewriters. Naomi has patiently hunted the Internet and we now have sixty-three new Olivetti ribbons in the closet with the ten machines.
But what happens when I’ve killed all the machines or used up all the ribbons for the machines? Do I then have to learn how to use a word processor or the dreaded computer?
Or do I hang it up and say God (and all my critics) has silenced me?
I tell you this story to put all your fears into perspective. All you have to do is write your script. All you really have to do is write the first page of your script, because then you’ll already be rolling.
I have to figure out my entire future!
No matter what, try to be optimistic.
Screenwriter William Faulkner said, “You have to live so that you can die.”
TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
“If you get depressed,” said my Hungarian compatriot Zsa Zsa Gabor, “take a bath and wash your hair.”
Don’t give up.
Paddy Chayefsky’s mother said to him, “Listen, you want to be a writer, you’ve got to write. You submit, and they’ll reject. But you’ve got to keep writing.”
Don’t ever give up on selling your script.
Warren Beatty said this
about trying to bed every woman that he met: “You get slapped a lot, but you get fucked sometimes, too.”
You’ve still gotta believe in happy endings.
When he was an old man, several of producer Sam Spiegel’s Oscars were stolen by the prostitute who frequently came to his home.
But it’s never too early to consider your epitaph.
This is one Marilyn Monroe wanted: “Here lies Marilyn. No lies. Only lays.”
If I made it, you surely can.
Consider the following:
English is my second language. Some critics have said I butcher it.
I stole cars and carried a knife when I was a kid; I almost killed another kid with a baseball bat and almost went to jail.
I flunked both algebra and biology in high school and had to go to summer school two years in a row.
I was a C student in high school.
I didn’t graduate from college because I was on both academic and disciplinary probation.
I was a D student in college, although I won every writing competition I entered.
I started drinking when I was fourteen and was a functional alcoholic by the time I was in college.
I’ve never believed in chitchatting and networking—I’ve been a loner all of my life.
Naomi says I’m abrupt, direct, sometimes downright rude, occasionally antisocial.
For much of my life, I’ve looked and dressed like a Hell’s Angel.
I’ve always preferred reading a book to seeing a movie.
But I’ve always preferred having sex to reading a book.
For many years, I preferred having a drink to anything, but I don’t drink anymore.
I’ve named my company “Barbarian, Ltd.”
Hollywood has paid “Barbarian” many, many millions of dollars through the years.
Don’t let ’em take your mojo.
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 35