My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  Warner Brothers was at its best when Steve Ross was running the company from New York. He said, “Let's get the best people and treat them in the best way.” So at its height, Warners had Richard Donner, Steven Spielberg with Amblin Productions, Clint Eastwood with Malpaso, Goldie Hawn, when she was a huge star, and Billy Friedkin for a while. Bob Daly and Terry Semel were the chairman and president, respectively. They treated everybody really wonderfully. There was a nominal head of production, Mark Canton. They all worked together so well. Bob and Terry sometimes would share a car to the studio together.

  Warners was famous for having eight private jets. One night, Stefanie Powers and I were shooting at Columbia because Spelling-Goldberg had sold Hart to Hart to Columbia. Columbia shared the same lot with Warners in those days. For a few years, Stefanie and I bred Arabian horses. We wanted to go to the Arabian Nationals, which started at nine o'clock in the morning on a Saturday in Albuquerque. We were shooting late Friday night until midnight and couldn't get out. There were no flights to Albuquerque. I called Terry Semel's office and asked, “Can I get a little plane just to take us to Albuquerque?”

  “Absolutely.” They would treat you so wonderfully. You were a member of the Warners family. Steve Ross would insist on that. Clint had first call on the big plane. I didn't take advantage. I only took a plane twice. They would fly you everywhere if you were a talent with them.

  The exact opposite of that was when I was at Universal. Lew Wasserman ran the whole joint. And Lew was amazing. He knew everything that was going on, and this was his kingdom. Johnny Carson used to joke about the big black office building—”If you ran a studio, would you stick this in the middle of the San Fernando Valley?” But then again, it only takes one man. So this was Lew's place. Sid Sheinberg was his second in command. Universal was not making moneymaking movies at the time. It had hit bottom, financially speaking, with a movie called Howard the Duck, which cost a fortune and grossed nothing. Dragnet was its first moneymaker in a long time. There was an opening for a new head of production. Frank Price had been head of production at Columbia during Ghostbusters and Gandhi. Lew wanted him. Sid Sheinberg didn't want him, because Sid thought he was number two and Frank was going to take over at the studio. Lew won. Frank came.

  Immediately, there was a big unspoken fight involving two movies. Frank brought Out of Africa with him, and it was made. Lew had Back to the Future. They came out the same year. At Universal, the question was who you were with. Sid Sheinberg was very close to Steven Spielberg, whose company produced Back to the Future. Oscar time came; Out of Africa won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Score, Best Photography. It won seven Oscars. Things were very uncomfortable at Universal. Not everybody was rowing in the same direction.

  The housekeeping deals disappeared because studios found them too expensive like everything else. You'd make a housekeeping deal with John Travolta, who becomes a star again. Now he's got his own chef and martial arts expert and everybody goes on salary, and all of a sudden, it's costing you a fortune. Maybe that year he does one picture that doesn't gross a lot of money, and the studio is saying, “Jesus, I'd rather hire him on a picture-by-picture basis.” On the other hand, Dick Donner makes Superman for Warners. Then he makes all four Lethal Weapon movies for Warners. He makes Conspiracy Theory for Warners. He makes Ladyhawke for Warners and Fox. Free Willie and all those movies he produced with Lauren Shuler. He had twelve people on salary. But Warners was happy because, my God, it's making so much money off him. The Lethal Weapon movies alone made billions—not millions, billions.

  A Vast Wasteland

  It's so expensive now to open movies that you would rather give somebody a piece of the gross than to give them $20 million or $30 million up front. The salaries got so high: Hanks was getting $25 million; Mel Gibson got $25 million when he was really big as an actor. So now studios say, “Look, if we give away 5 or even 10 percent of the gross, at least we're giving away a piece of what we're getting. Whereas, if this picture turns out to be a big flop and it was made for $140 million and $40 million of that is two actors' salaries, then we can't get that money back.” Everything is just so bleeping expensive now. That's why reality television is on. It's too expensive, on a steady diet, to do NCIS, because you've got actors in the fourth or fifth year of their contract, they're making a lot of money, you've got writers, you're paying directors, special effects, scoring. That costs you a lot more than if you do “The World's Tallest Nun,” or “Fat People Fall in Love.” H. L. Mencken had the classic quote, “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” And son of a bitch, there is an audience out there for The Bachelorette. I see five minutes of it and I want to throw up. It's so stupid. But it gets the ratings, so somebody's watching it.

  Most studios agree Will Smith is worth $20 million, but his last couple of pictures were not hits. Years ago, if it was a Jerry Lewis comedy, you could predict X. Clint Eastwood was the biggest star in the world, but when he did Bronco Billy and that little movie about the Depression with his son, they didn't make any money. It wasn't the Clint Eastwood the audience wanted to see. Paul Newman probably delivered more than anybody, but I could run you a festival of The Drowning Pool and Winning, and you don't hear about those movies. So I don't think anybody's infallible, even the biggest names—Paul Newman or Tom Hanks or, back then, Jimmy Stewart. Steven Spielberg made Always, which didn't make any money. But if I could have the rest from Jaws to E.T. to Close Encounters to Schindler's List to Private Ryan, I would be rolling in it. They're all different kinds of films, and they're all wonderful films. He had a certain eye for it. I love Steven Spielberg, he's one of the three or four best directors that ever directed. Any kind of film is his kind of film, except what Robert Shaw said, a love story between a man and a woman or a comedy. After Jaws, everybody got sequelitis. I'll bet you when Spielberg was making 1941, somebody was already drawing up the plans for 1942. Then the picture came out.

  Francis Coppola said recently that the major studios are almost out of the quality filmmaking business. Just like the World's Biggest Loser, world's greatest blah-blah-blah, they know if they do Transformers VI, they can just keep going until finally one of them doesn't make it. Iron Man III. Spider-Man IV. There will be an audience out there that's going to run to it. I give credit to J. K. Rowling. She said, “There are seven Harry Potter books and it's over. It's finished. You can make seven movies out of it.” I'm sure the studio will try and make a deal with her, since she owns the character. “Can we make new ones?” I don't know what she'll say. Harry and the Magic Bachelorette. The only guy who really stayed true to it was J. D. Salinger; never let any of his books be made as a movie. Somebody made a movie that steals from Catcher in the Rye, and it's done as an homage, but Salinger's estate is suing him.

  What terrifies me (and I'll probably sound like a snob for saying it) is the Internet has made everybody so ubiquitous and so omnipresent; Facebook, Craigslist—almost nothing is special anymore. It's the dumbing down of America in terms of entertainment. Not that great films aren't made every year, but not as many great films. The films I'm talking about, the Shanes and the High Noons and From Here to Eternitys and On the Waterfronts, those were mainstream major studio films. And the people who made them were fucking proud of them. Also, somehow, adults were in those films. Look at Roman Holiday. Audrey Hepburn's twenty-three and Gregory Peck's thirty-four, but they look like a man and a woman. Today, everybody looks like a kid, even at fifty-five. Judd Apatow makes a semiserious film, Funny People, and it's not serious and it's not funny, and the problem is, he should have made me cry. But everybody in it is a big kid, even Adam Sandler. They're just all big kids. You wouldn't call anybody a man in that film. Even now, when they're in their forties or fifties, they're big, shaggy kids. Maybe George Clooney is a man. He looks like a guy. But there are damn few. He's had a wonderful career. He's made a fortune and he directed a movie, Good Night, and Good Luck, the Edward R. Murrow movie. One o
f the reasons that no great operas were written after the twentieth century was that Mozart or Rossini were sitting in their house and they had nothing the fuck to do except this opera. Today, you've got radio, television, the Internet, you're Twittering, you're texting. How does anybody have the time to concentrate on a great piece of work? You have to have such willpower to sit down and work on it.

  Everybody feels as if they could be, in fact, famous for fifteen minutes. All they have to do is put the right thing on their blog. Newton Minow, the famous head of the Federal Communications Commission in the late fifties, called television a “vast wasteland.” A reporter said, “You know, Mr. Minow, one day there are going to be three or four hundred channels.” And, he said, “Good God, what on earth are they going to put on it?” Well, we're getting the answer right now. I've got Project Runway. You don't like that? America's Next Top Model. I got three other model shows and cooking shows. Make sure it's show business. The chef gets angry, and I want to see him throw a cleaver because you've got to have a little drama. My chef show's angrier than your chef show. Horse racing is dying, but there are two racing channels. We've got Santa Anita and Hollywood Park.

  One of the reasons that politics has gotten so hostile is that if I'm Sean Hannity, or I'm Keith Olbermann, take the left or the right, or I'm Glenn Beck—who I think needs professional help, he's a psycho—I have to fill an hour every night. How do I do that? That's why Larry King did eighteen straight hours of Michael Jackson coverage. There aren't that many interesting people. So now you have, “Tonight, for the whole hour, Barbara Eden.” And, you say, “No, please!” Jermaine Jackson has been seen more on the Larry King show in the last year than he has been seen in the last ten years anywhere. It's just insane. And that's what worries me. There are fewer and fewer truly fine films every year. There used to be many, many more. When I was growing up, if you lived in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Saint Louis—any big city—every year you would see an Ingmar Bergman film, a Claude Chabrol film, a Truffaut film, a Fellini film, a Visconti film, an Antonioni film. There was a whole world of cinema out there. Today, you can't even find a film from any other part of the world except if you go to Little Tokyo, where they have films in Japanese. They were all fine films by wonderful artists. That just doesn't exist anymore, because “Fat People Make Love” gets a 45 share.

  A studio will make a picture like G.I. Joe, which gets derisive reviews and, apparently, hoots from the audience, but it still does $59 million the opening weekend. So they have private-label studios—Fox Searchlight—that make the films that literate people would want to see. An amazing statistic is, of the last fifteen films nominated for Best Picture, fourteen of them were not made by a major studio. Now the Academy is doubling the number of nominees. You can say they used to have ten in the thirties, but there was no television. Now Transformers can be one of the ten even though it's not going to win to generate more TV ratings. What happens now, with these mass entertainments, is somebody like Marion Cotillard wins for La Vie en Rose and there's a collective “Who?” sucked in around the country. Nobody's seen the fucking movie and she wins the Oscar. The public says, “These are specialty awards now.” But she did the best work. She should have won it.

  The Coen brothers make wonderful films that no one sees. Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski. No Country for Old Men. That was such a great movie. I was hypnotized by it. It was well written, wonderfully played, so perverse, and brave. They have the courage to make these idiosyncratic movies that they know in advance are not going to be huge grossers. But they go ahead and make them anyway. Fargo was a wonderful picture. You knew everybody in that movie: Bill Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi. These were real people. They were all just great. I admire work like that so much.

  A major disappointment to me is Quentin Tarantino. After his first two pictures, I thought he was going to be a wonderful director. They're still the best two he ever made, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. He just has never grown up. He's never made a movie about a human being. I thought, here's somebody who, as he gets older and more experienced, is going to make some real movies. I look at the trailer for Inglourious Basterds—oh, Jesus, I don't want to see that. It's just fooling around. He should be making some real movies.

  Brokeback Mountain was an exceptional piece of work. Ang Lee is one of my favorite directors, even when he goes to wretched excess like the Chinese exotic film he did. But why I think he's so good—George Stevens was like this, and Sydney Pollack was like this—is if I cut the main titles off and showed you Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, you would swear on your life they were not directed by the same person, but they were all directed by him. He threw himself into the project, into the style, the way George Stevens could direct Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a musical, then Gunga Din, a huge adventure picture, then Woman of the Year, a sophisticated romantic comedy with Tracy and Hepburn, then A Place in the Sun, a moving melodrama, then Shane, a great western. You look at those and say the same guy could not possibly have done that. Sydney Pollack, the most underrated director, could do a social picture like Absence of Malice, then do a hysterical comedy like Tootsie, then do a lyrical love story like Out of Africa because he threw himself into it. I miss those people. As they start to drop, it's the last generation for me of really good filmmakers.

  I got to know Jack Lemmon at Irving Lazar's parties. I really liked Jack. He was a wonderful guy, wonderful actor. He liked to drink and play the piano. One night, during a party, Jack and I were lying on chaises by the pool. He asked, “What are you doing next?”

  I said, “I'm doing another comedy.” Beat. I asked, “What are you doing next?”

  Jack said, “Doing another film with Walter Matthau.” Silence. He said, “You went to Yale, didn't you?”

  I said, “Yeah. You went to Harvard.”

  Jack said, “That's right.” Pause. He said, “What a waste of a great fucking education.”

  Suffer the Pain Alone

  When George Peppard said to me, “I told my agent, ‘I didn't know Tom was a great writer; all I know is he's fucking my wife,’” I said to him, “George, what can I tell you? Your agent's right and you're right.” That was so unlike me because I am not a conflict person. I do not dare the person I'm saying things to to take a swing at me. I heard so much screaming and yelling when I was growing up, doors slamming, and I spent so many nights on the bathroom floor wheezing, that I will avoid conflict if I can. I wouldn't call myself a coward. I have a very dexterous personality; I can figure out how to get out of the situation, and then come home and direct all the pain on me. Suffer the pain alone. I'm running from conflict and anxiety that, as a kid, I experienced with my mother and father. What I'm running to is some kind of peace. It's never going to be realized in the sense that you can't ever have perfect peace. If you had perfect peace, you'd be a vegetable. A certain amount of stress keeps you alive. In all the relationships I had, I was having the same relationship with my mother in various ways, where I was hopelessly attracted to women who were troubled. They could recognize in me the perfect foil, the perfect person to get involved with, because it made me even more solicitous, more eager to help. You feed off each other that way. The opposite reaction was the screenplay I wrote where there was a guy on the beach who was an ex-detective and a young, cute girl in a bikini who had a crush on him. She asked, “What is your ambition in life, Nick?” He said—I said—“To be left alone.” Even though I never did a movie about it, I always liked characters like Jim Rockford or Harry O living on the beach. There was this thing about leave me alone. Let me be. One of the reasons I may have had a talent for adventure and comedy is that it was so distracting from having to sit down and write serious things.

  I'll never find peace. On one hand, I've led a very successful life. I have lots of friends. But on the other hand, I'm sixty-eight years old, I live alone with two cats, I have no children, and I've never been married. I don't know an
ybody who has it all. Rich people would never commit suicide if the solution was to have money. Although, to be able to live a comfortable life is a tremendous advantage. I've successfully sat on the demons that I have inside me. I don't take tranquilizers, maybe one five-milligram Xanax every three weeks. My cousin John, who used to take a lot of drugs, calls them training wheels. He said, “Five milligrams of Xanax, I wouldn't even know what that is.” I've been in analysis a couple of times in my life. One of the things that has always driven me crazy about analysis, if I can use that reference, is when am I through? I've heard about Woody Allen going to the analyst for forty years. I didn't want to. You have a problem? Now fix it. The two times I went into analysis, both were as a result of my getting involved over and over again with the same woman. I thought, okay, when you get cured…in other words, it's like having a rash and it goes away, or you have a cold, then you don't have a cold. There seemed to be no end. I'd go into a session, and I felt as a human being, much less as a writer, that I was losing my spontaneity. Everything I was going through during the day, I knew I was going to report on tomorrow. I was censoring myself, saying, “Here, I'm doing this again.”

  Fred Hacker, who had been my mother's analyst, was personally taught by Freud. He was a family friend. In the beginning, when I was late for an appointment by three minutes, I said, “I'm sorry I'm late.”

  Fred said, “There is no correct time to arrive at the analyst. If you're early, you're anxious. If you're late, you're hostile. And if you're on time, you're compulsive. So, don't worry about it.”

  He was totally bizarre, as most great analysts are, and he never paid a parking ticket. But he was finally arrested. One hundred thirty-four parking tickets. The judge said to him, “Dr. Hacker, you are an embarrassment. Here you are, one of the eminent psychoanalysts in the world, and you have 134 parking tickets. I can't even explain it.”