The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (17 page)

Spiegelese

A line of BS that sounds terrific and is designed to take advantage of you, it was originated by Sam Spiegel, producer, but perfected by David Begelman, who spoke perfect Spiegelese and became a top-ranked agent and then a studio head and then (flat broke) a suicide. “How
cheesy
, wags said, to commit suicide at the Century Plaza, of all places, not at the Bel Air, the Chateau Marmont, or a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

Three’s Company, but Four Is an Orgy

Old Hollywood rule, allegedly first said by Mae West, then later by Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Learn to recognize bullshit when you hear it
.

A
director called and told me he’d read my script and was interested in directing it. He said, “I don’t want to exploit your script. I want to pay homage to it.”

I hung up on him.

If you want to sell your script, be capable of anything
.

A
ctress Sigourney Weaver was in the middle of her gynecological exam when the doctor said, “I have written a screenplay. Could you possibly read it?”

Move to the Midwest
.

D
iscussing a script, producer Sam Spiegel said to screenwriter Harold Pinter, “They won’t understand it in the Midwest.”

Pinter said, “Fuck the Midwest!”

Spiegel said, “Do you want to fuck the
whole
of the Midwest?”

It’s okay to live in your car
.

M
ichael Blake did before he sold
Dances with Wolves
.

I was so poor before I sold my first script that I was working as a bartender and going through my pockets looking for forgotten change.

L.A. has lots of places where you can work all day without paying too much—the Rose Café, the Farmers Market, in the company of other screenwriters.

And many young screenwriters swear that the El Pollo Loco diet is healthy, too, besides being filling.

Forget playing video games; watch Tracy and Hepburn instead
.

T
he old Tracy and Hepburn movies are a dialogue treat, as are the films of Preston Sturges and Woody Allen. They’re fun to watch, and good dialogue exercise, too.

It’s okay to have literary influences
.

S
creenwriter William Faulkner referred to his penis as “Mr. Bolton,” a play on the name of a character from D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

Don’t have an affair with a script girl
.

S
creenwriter William Faulkner did; he had a lengthy affair with a script girl. After he died, she wrote a book about him. She wrote that for most of his life he was impotent. She even wrote that he ran the water in the bathroom so no one could hear his bodily functions and that he took a bath before they made love. He had the “prettiest little feet,” she wrote, and always kept a handkerchief around in case he coughed.

Don’t have an affair with an actress, either (heh-heh-heh)
.

S
ally Field did an interview for
Playboy
magazine in which she said “there were always” men around Burt Reynolds. It came at the same time that Reynolds had lost a lot of weight, thanks to a broken jaw. The Field interview led to rampant and false rumors that Reynolds was gay and dying of AIDS.

There are many in Hollywood who think that single Sally Field interview destroyed Burt Reynolds’s career.

Never lie to yourself
.

M
ichael Moore, after his famous Bush-bashing acceptance speech for
Bowling for Columbine
, asked Academy president Frank Pierson, “Did I make an ass out of myself up there?”

To Do an Eric Red

To flip out and lose it suddenly. Red, the talented screenwriter of
The Hitcher
and other action-noir films, drove his car one day into a bar full of people in Westwood.

If you want to be a movie star, write a screenplay
.

S
ylvester Stallone wrote
Rocky
. Billie Bob Thornton wrote
Sling Blade
. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote
Good Will Hunting
.

Then they stuck to their guns and said they wouldn’t sell their scripts unless they could play the star parts.

Producers argued with them and offered them vast sums of money not to act in their films. They turned the vast sums of money down … and became movie stars and multimillionaires by holding firm.

Don’t try to figure out the next trend before you write your script
.

T
here was an investor who thought
Heaven’s Gate
was going to be such a big hit that dozens of other Westerns would be made, so he
bought all the horses
used in
Heaven’s Gate
, thinking he’d make a fortune renting movie-trained horses out to other film companies.

Well, after
Heaven’s Gate
became one of the biggest disasters of all times, he was stuck with all these unemployable horses.

What did he do with them?

Well, they shoot horses, don’t they?

It doesn’t pay to go out to lunch with other screenwriters
.

B
en Hecht: “Would that our writing had been as good as our lunches.”

The Cocaine Highway

Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

If you need drugs to write
.

T
he valet parkers at a lot of “hot” Hollywood restaurants will be able to help you.