We scheduled a meeting with Ivan, Redford, and me. Debra Winger was in New York. Redford was the guy you had to please, he was the huge star. Bob was an hour late for the meeting; Ivan and I were just sitting there. There were all these phone calls, “Redford's on his way. Redford's on his way.” I gather this is something that he had really gotten into in his life; he always was late, inexcusably late. Melanie Griffith, on a movie that Redford directed called The Milagro Beanfield War, said, “I remember it was so hot in New Mexico, where we were shooting. It was the first day, and we all sat and waited in the heat, made up, for Redford. He finally showed up at nine thirty. We were ready to go at eight. He was meeting with the cameraman, Robbie Greenberg. Redford said, ‘We're shooting here?' And Greenberg said, ‘Yes, Bob, you picked it.' He said, ‘No, we can find a better place than this.' Then Redford took off looking for places.” He was maddeningly late all the time, and I don't know when he got into that habit.
But we had a meeting. It was pleasant. He remembered me very well through Natalie Wood and Alan Pakula. I hadn't seen him in years. I was at the wedding of David Lange, Hope Lange's brother, Alan Pakula's brother-in-law, in Toronto, where David's wife's family came from. I was one of the two best men at the wedding. Me and Bob Redford. He was a young actor. Alan had worked with him on Inside Daisy Clover. It was a Sunday night, and you couldn't get a drink in Toronto on Sundays except in the hotel. We were in the hotel bar, and Redford got a phone call from whatever charlatan was running the Foreign Press Association. The Golden Globes were the next night. And he said, “Congratulations, you've just won the Star of Tomorrow Award. You have to be here to accept it.” It was so clear that they had given it to somebody else who wasn't going to be there so they decided to give it to Redford.
He said, “Unfortunately, I'm leaving for Europe tomorrow from New York with my wife, Lola, so I can't be there.” Then they clearly said he had to be there in person to receive it or they wouldn't give him the award. Redford said, “Listen, I don't care about the award so much, but since you guys offered it to me, if I don't get it, I'm going to reprint this phone conversation on the back of both trade papers.” He got it. The Golden Globes were quite a different thing then.
We all agreed on what had to be done. The picture had to start because everybody had a window. Redford said to me, “Listen, when you're writing, I don't say funny lines very well.”
I said, “Gee, I'm sorry to hear that, Bob, because it's a comedy. That's really devastating.”
He said, “But I react great. So give her the funny lines and then cut to me. I'm great reacting.”
So I started writing. I got to New York. I met Debra, crazy about her. She was kooky, talented, had a husky little voice, and she was obviously emotionally troubled in some ways. In our first meeting, she stood on her head. She asked, “Does this make you nervous?”
And I said, “No, I went with Tuesday Weld for three years,” and she laughed and fell down.
She called me in the middle of the night as pages were flying out of my suite at the Helmsley Palace. She said, “Do you know what's wrong with this picture?”
And I said, “No, Debra, what's wrong with this picture?”
She said, “This is a Tracy-Hepburn comedy and I'm playing Spencer Tracy. When did I get all the funny lines? When did I become Henny Youngman?”
I said, “Ms. Winger, meet Mr. Redford. Mr. Redford doesn't like to say funny lines.” She and Redford didn't get along. I mean, they didn't hate each other.
She said, “Redford is always the love object; he's never the leading man. In The Way We Were, Barbra Streisand played the man, he was the love object. In Out of Africa, Meryl Streep was the man, he was the love object. In The Electric Horseman, Jane Fonda was the man, he was the love object on the horse. Jesus, even in Butch Cassidy, Paul Newman was the guy and Redford was the love object. So this is what he wants to be.” Years later, Indecent Proposal presented the same scenario—Redford as the love object in the sense that there was a million dollars offered to spend the night with him. There was a scene in Legal Eagles where Redford had to sleep with Daryl Hannah. He was really upset about it. Originally, he took her to bed, and then he thought that was really bad because he realized she was half his age. Also, he didn't do that as Robert Redford. I had to twist the thing around so that he falls asleep in bed, he wakes up, and she's just lying there next to him saying, “I couldn't sleep either.” So it was like she forces herself on him. Again, he was the love object.
Debra Winger was going with Governor Bob Kerrey of Nebraska at the time, and he was in New York. She had a limousine and a driver at her call twenty-four hours a day. She had her German shepherd with her named Petey. Once, I was in a rush to do something and I asked, “Is your car down there? Can I borrow your car?”
She said, “Oh, damn, I wish I'd known. He's out with Petey.”
And I said, “What?”
She said, “I never know what to do with the car, so I say to the driver, ‘Why don't you show Petey New York?'” So he's driving the fucking dog around New York. Show him Central Park. She felt guilty about being in New York with this dog. You didn't want to keep him in a room all day. So it was the only car and driver that was showing a German shepherd New York.
Terence Stamp was in the cast as a villain. We had a great reunion because he was General Zod in Superman. What a terrific man. Redford was a handful. The problem was that Ivan Reitman was not in control of the movie. Nobody was in control of the movie. Ivan Reitman's wife wanted to be a director. She was onset always standing in Debra Winger's eye line. And Debra would say, “I don't want to work if your wife's on the set.”
Ivan had scenes written by art experts, which he would hand me. His dentist had ideas. I'm not exaggerating by much. I would get forty pages from different people, and Ivan would say, “See what you can do with this.”
Laszlo Kovacs was the cameraman. I knew Laszlo very well, and I'd known him for years. My assistant, Annie, was married to Bobby Stevens, who had been his operator on all the famous pictures. Outside of Laszlo, I don't know that Ivan knew anybody's name on the set. You can get a buzz off a set. Many times they would wait for Redford. I said to Ivan, “Can you talk to him?”
Ivan said, “What am I going to do, fire Bob Redford? I can't fire Bob Redford. I've talked to him. He says, ‘I'm sorry.'”
Now it's Christmastime. I've finished my rewrite, and I'm going to my house in Kenya. I call Mike Ovitz. “Mike, I just want you to be aware, I'm going to Kenya on the fifteenth. I've done my draft.”
He says, “Bob doesn't want you to leave.”
I say, “Well, I'm really sorry about that, but I have gone through it. I've done a whole draft, and I've talked to him. Bob has been in movies for thirty years. Surely he knows somebody who he would want to work on it.”
Mike calls me back and says, “He does, and it's you.”
I say, “I can't do it. I'm going to Kenya.”
Ovitz calls again later. “Bob wants to know, can you come through New York on your way to Kenya? Oh, and Bob has a message: ‘It's not a lot of fun in Kenya.'”
I say, “No, it is a lot of fun there.”
I liked Redford a lot when I knew him earlier, and I'm sure he's done a lot of wonderful things as a person. So I take the red-eye to New York so that I can be down in SoHo where they're shooting by eight in the morning so I can meet with Redford. Then I can get on a plane in the afternoon to go through London on to Kenya. I get there, downtown, eight o'clock. Everybody's shooting, but Redford's not there; he didn't show. Nine o'clock, he's not there. Ten o'clock, he's not there. Now Ivan's run out of other stuff to shoot. Finally, at eleven thirty, Redford shows up. He gets out of the car and says, “Oh, hi, Tom. I'll be just a minute.” He goes into his motor home and shuts the door. A few minutes later, he says, “Come on in.” So, I oblige.
I'm sitting there. Bob says, “So, I think the script's looking pretty good.”
I say, “Well, I did my best, Bob. A
re there any particular scenes that you think still need some work, because I can be doing them on the plane and send them.”
He says, “No, I think we're in pretty good shape.”
I say, “Well, thanks. That's it?” And that was it. I thought, no way to prove it, but it's just his ego. He felt fucked if I was just going to take the next flight to Kenya. So instead, I stopped in New York to see him. There was no reason for the meeting.
It was a lesson in how not to make a movie, because it started all wrong. If this had been a Bill Murray-Dan Aykroyd buddy movie about two lawyers, it would have been completely different than what it turned out to be. Nobody was in it for the right reasons; Redford thought he wanted to do a romantic comedy, which he hadn't done in a while; Debra Winger needed that kind of part; this was a property Universal owned anyway, and they had the guy to rewrite it. But there's no reason to make the movie. And you saw so many movies like that in that time. CAA was involved with a lot of them. The reason to make the movie was the package.
“Why the Fuck Are We Here?”
Sometimes projects just happen. An example is a picture called Hot Pursuit, produced in 1986, of which I was one of the executive producers. There was a French-Canadian producer named Pierre David, with whom we almost got a film off the ground called The Practice about doctors owning a certain drug and masking the fact that it was actually killing people. David got a little project together with a director named Steve Lisberger, who directed Tron, which was a big flop when it came out and is now regarded as a great science fiction piece. Steve had written a script, a coming-of-age story about a kid who falls in love in Mexico. I read it and liked it and tried to help Steve Lisberger with some ideas. They couldn't get the budget down below $4 million. Nobody was interested in making it except RKO, which had some money to invest, but they only had $2.8 million.
Ned Tanen was one of the greatest guys who was ever an executive. If he had been an executive my whole life, I would have only done pictures with him. I never did. He started at Universal and was a real iconoclast. You could come in with the biggest stars in the world and he'd say, “No fucking way, I just hate this script,” or, “I love it, I don't care who's in it, let's make it.” He was funny and smart. He was then head of production at Paramount. I said, “Maybe, we could get a million-two from Paramount.”
Ned and I saw each other socially. So they set up a meeting with Ned. He'd just had a big hit with 48 Hrs, and they'd announced a sequel. Paramount was doing great. David said, “If we can get this money, Tom, you'll be executive producer.” They wanted to use my name because I was hot at the time.
So we all assembled at Ned Tanen's office, and the RKO guys were dressed to the nines. They'd got three-piece suits. Pierre David looked like he'd just come from a wedding. They'd rehearsed their speeches. I was in a shirt and pants. I wasn't in a jacket. We waited ten or fifteen minutes in the outer office, and I could hear them mumbling and going through their notes. An assistant appeared. “Come in, Mr. Tanen will see you now.” So we all walked in. “Hey, Ned, how are you?” “Great, Mank.” Everybody sat down. It was one of those nervous Hollywood beginnings with “How ‘bout those Dodgers? Thought they were going to lose last night.” “It sure is hot today.”
Ned cut right through it. “So, why the fuck are we here?”
I said, “Ned, we sent a script to you guys. We're asking for a million-two, or slightly less than you're going to spend on the wrap party for 48 Hrs. II”
Ned said, “Yeah, you got it.” There was a big silence. He said, “So, do we have anything else to do?”
I said, “No.” All these guys have their speeches. Never said a word. “That's it, Ned. Thank you.”
“Okay.” So off we went. We looked at young actors. There was a wonderful young actor named Anthony Michael Hall who almost got the part. We settled on a young actor who had never played a lead but had played a couple of small parts, John Cusack. And the villain kid, in his first lead, Ben Stiller. Robert Loggia played the old sea captain. And son of a bitch, they had a $4 million budget; shot it for $3.999 million. Paramount owned the cable rights. Everybody came out fine, especially Cusack and Ben Stiller, who went on to bigger and better things.
Dum, Da, Dum, Dum
In 1986 Frank Price called and said, “Dan Aykroyd's here, and he's going to do Dragnet. He's written an original screenplay. Ted Kotcheff is supposed to direct it. He's a Canadian director who's done a lot of things—a good football movie, North Dallas Forty; the Mordecai Richler thing, Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.”
I said to Frank, “It's inspired to have Dan Aykroyd play Jack Webb. He'll be great.”
Danny was bouncing off Ghostbusters and he was a huge star. He was getting $2 million for the picture, which was a huge amount of money. His screenplay was hysterical, but it didn't make any sense, didn't hang together; insane stuff like kidney thieves who would sit down on a bus bench and knife you in the back and take your kidney and leave you. Danny had a friend involved named Alan Zweibel, a good writer who was working on It's Garry Shandling's Show and had written Saturday Night Live. Frank said, “Try and meet with Danny. He was great with Ted Kotcheff. But I've got to warn you, Danny can be very prickly. He's not the easiest guy in the world to work with. He's an acquired taste like mushrooms, and very smart.”
So I went over to Danny's bungalow, and I just fell in love with him. We got along like a house afire from the beginning, the same kind of humor. I said, “Okay, you can never get away with this stuff in the script.”
He said, “I know, I know, but I like to make them suffer up there.”
We started to work, and it was the most complete collaboration I've ever done. Danny did a script with Alan Zweibel. Then I did the rewrite with Alan. Then Danny and I wrote the final script. So we worked with each other, never the three of us in the same room at the same time. Ted Kotcheff was in Europe. We sent him the script, and he sent back a long memo. I told Frank, “The things he likes the best about the draft are the things I think are the weakest. And the things he really thinks have to be fixed, I think are its strong points. We're the wrong chemistry for this script, because everything I think is gangbusters is what he thinks has to be worked on.”
And Frank, out of the clear, blue sky, said, “How about if you directed
it?”
A shudder went through me. I said, “Well, I wouldn't let you down.”
He said, “If I thought you'd let me down, I wouldn't have asked you in the first place.” This obviously had been arranged. Danny had approved me in advance, because he never would have asked me.
The Best Reasons to Do a Movie
The next thing was Tom Hanks, who was on the verge of becoming a huge star. He had done Splash and Bosom Buddies on television. Tom was, and still is, somebody who tries all kinds of material. He had just done a love story in Israel that no one had seen. He'd done a picture with Jackie Gleason called Nothing in Common. It was not a big hit, but Tom was just wonderful. Danny had originally wanted Jim Belushi to play his sidekick. I mean this with great respect to Jim, he's a nice man and talented, but thank goodness he was busy and Tom Hanks was hired. Hanks came in to see me. I asked, “Why do you want to do this picture, anyway?”
A lot of times, actors make up stuff, saying, “I think I can get to the root of this guy.” Hanks said, “I think the script is very funny, it's going to be a big hit, and I'm going to love the company I'm keeping.”
I said, “These are the best reasons to do a movie.”
When you talk to actors, always talk to them privately. Meet with them privately. Dabney Coleman, who was going to play the Bob Guccione/Hugh Hefner character, came up to the house. We sat in the bar and talked for a long time. Dabney said, “I think he should be talking like this,” and he started talking with a southern accent and lisping. I asked, why? He said, “In school, he had this lisp, and the girls wouldn't go out with him. And he comes from the south.” He started this whole back story, and as he did it in t
hat lisp, it was so funny.
I said, “Okay, I'll buy it.” It was hysterical in the movie.
I thought Chris Plummer would be great for the phony preacher. We'd sent him the script. I called him up in New York. He said, “This looks like it could be a lot of fun. I'd love to work with you.”
I said, “Chris, it would be, believe me.” Danny loved it because Chris was Canadian.
Chris said, “I've got a thing I'd like to play with this minister because I've been watching ministers on television now for two weeks since I got the script. There's this curious man named Pat Robertson, who's the only man in the history of the world with a totally unmotivated laugh. He'll say, ‘Yesterday, my wife and I went down to the store,' and he really laughs for no reason, and I'd like to make that part of my character.” He's hysterical doing that at times in the movie.
It is total joy working with people who have that kind of talent. But always meet with them privately, and meet with them as soon as you possibly can so that you have a personal relationship with them. Have lunch with them, have drinks with them, have dinner with them. You've been through the script with them, just the two of you, so that you don't have an actor suddenly say, “You know, I never liked this line.” Now you have to deal with that, and what happens is it gets contagious with actors. Then another actor feels he or she has to object to something to show that they're contributing too, and now you've got anarchy. A movie set is not a democracy. The director is in charge on a movie set, and he or she is the ringmaster at the circus. No matter how much fun you're having, you've got to be able to pull people back and say, “Wait a minute, guys, this is our next shot, and this is what we're going to do.”
We were looking for the Virgin Connie Swail, and I wanted a fresh face. Lots of people came in, including Danny's wife, and I said, “No, you can't, Donna, you can't do that.” Lots of people wanted to play the Virgin Connie Swail because, again in the words of Tom Hanks, they wanted to be “keeping good company.” I saw this beautiful girl in a picture called American Flyer, directed by John Badham, reminiscent of Jackie Bisset in Two for the Road when we hired her for The Sweet Ride. It was Alexandra Paul, and she played a small part. I called John Badham and asked, “Do you think she's a good actress?”
My Life as a Mankiewicz Page 38