The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (18 page)

For many years, the valet-parking guys at a famous Sunset Strip restaurant had the best coke in the business, until they all got busted. Some people said the real reason people ate there was for the coke, not the food.

ALL HAIL

Peter Viertel!

The author, who wrote the screenplay of
The Sun Also Rises
, had a reputation for “looking great in bathing suits” and for coaxing “everyone” to be “naughty.”

T
AKE IT FROM ME:
IT’S OKAY TO DEVELOP SOME SCHOLARLY INTERESTS

My lifelong scholarly interest has been Zsa Zsa Gabor
.

There is a story that I just can’t get out of my head about Zsa Zsa, who is a fellow Hungarian, a story that I’m fixated on. It’s a true story
.

Zsa Zsa and Marlon Brando are on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. Zsa Zsa is saying something—they are on the air—and Marlon interrupts her rudely and says to Johnny, “I don’t know why Zsa Zsa has to talk so much. With those boobs she really doesn’t have to say anything! Do you want to know what I want to do with that girl, Johnny? I want to fuck her!”

Then Marlon turns to Zsa Zsa and says, “A man can only do one thing with you, Zsa Zsa—throw you down and fuck you!”

Call yourself on the phone
.

I
f you want people to think you’re important, have yourself paged by friends at the Polo Lounge or at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Producer Robert Evans once took a phone call from director Roman Polanski while being interviewed for ABC’s
20/20
. An ABC staffer picked an extension up and found Evans speaking to dead air. Bob had faked the call from Roman.

Your script can burn
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski: “Usually what the greatest actor of our day and his friends do after eating (if the night is cold) is to have a few drinks and watch the screenplays burn in the fireplace. Or after eating (on warm evenings) after a few drinks the screenplays are taken frozen out of cold storage. He hands some to his friends—keeps some—then together from the veranda they toss them like flying saucers far out into the spacious canyon below. Then they all go back in knowing instinctively that the screenplays were bad.”

Don’t work in a studio office
.

S
creenwriter William Faulkner: “It’s like a hospital prison corridor. Those damned gray walls, those damned wide corridors, all those closed doors. And everything so damned hushed and still. I hate it.”

Believe in
God
-incidence
.

A
s a young journalist at the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
, I did an interview with soul singer Otis Redding after a concert at a place called Leo’s Casino. Otis and I hit it off and I found him a generous and truly soulful man.

The next afternoon, he got on a little plane in Cleveland and the plane crashed at a lake in Wisconsin and Otis Redding died.

My interview with him was his last.

Nearly thirty years later, listening one afternoon to one of his songs, I thought back to that interview with Otis and I heard a voice telling me to write his story.

The next day, I sat down and called his widow in Macon, Georgia, did a month’s worth of research, and started writing.

In Hollywood, sometimes even God can’t help you
.

O
tis’s widow loved the script so much that she kept it under her pillow for a month and prayed that someone would make it.

Eight years later, no one has made it.

Don’t write any personal pet projects
.

L
ook what happened to Oliver Stone:
Alexander
. Kevin Spacey:
Beyond the Sea
. Martin Scorsese:
Gangs of New York
. Bill Murray:
The Razor’s Edge
. Francis Ford Coppola:
One from the Heart
. And Joe Eszterhas:
Telling Lies in America
. All personal pet projects. All box-office disasters.

Everything in moderation
…

N
ovelist and screenwriter Dominick Dunne: “Drunk, I once set my room on fire in the Volney Hotel in New York, where I was living. Another time, I was in the closet with people I didn’t know using Turnbull and Asser ties to find a vein to shoot cocaine. One of the strangers died. I ran. Then, when I was stoned again, a crazed psychopath beat me, tied me up, put a brown grocery bag over my face, and dropped lighted matches on the bag. I lived.”

Try to write a “fuck film” like
Love Story.

A
ccording to Paramount’s research people, that’s what
Love Story
was.

Why? A guy took his date to see
Love Story
. They held hands and cried when she died at the end. Then they went back to his place and vigorously showed their appreciation that
they
were alive.

Any publicity is good publicity
.

T
he week after his eleven-year-old daughter, Marci, was abducted, Calvin Klein sold a record number of blue jeans: 200,000 in a single week.

Help those who have helped you
.

I
got more exposure from the
Today
show than any screenwriter in history thanks to a
Today
show producer who had befriended me.

When he told me that he wanted to write television sitcoms, I fixed him up with a TV agent.

You can make directors beg to work with you
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce: “I liked the script of
Sliver
a lot. Or at least I liked the idea of jumping on the Joe Eszterhas bandwagon.”

LESSON 4

Beware of the Back Pat!

You’ll need to ward off evil spirits
.

W
hen he was a young director, Marty Scorsese wore a gold talisman to keep evil spirits at bay, as well as an American Indian pouch filled with holy objects.

The Jack Story

Superagent Jeff Berg told me this old Hollywood story in an effort to calm me down about what I saw as a potential problem.

Jeff said, “A guy is driving down an abandoned country road and gets a flat tire. He opens his trunk and finds he doesn’t have a jack. He looks around, freaks, and says, ‘Oh, God, what am I going to do now?’ He doesn’t see any houses anywhere. He starts walking down the road—angry, worried, fearful that he is in Deliverance country and anything can happen to him. He can wind up like poor Ned Beatty in that movie. He turns a corner and there’s a big house in front of him. He walks up warily. Norman Bates can be in there. A beautiful woman opens the door. He asks the woman if she’s got a jack. Of course she does. She walks back to his car with him. She helps him fix the tire. She asks if he wants a cold beer. She walks back to her house with him. They have more beers. She fucks him atop the kitchen table. They fall in love. They marry. They have blond, blue-eyed children. They live happily ever after.”

The moral of the story: Don’t turn every mini problem into “a jack story.”

You’ve gotta be Sammy Glick
.

P
aul Schrader (
Taxi Driver, American Gigolo
): “No one succeeds in film if he’s not hustling. The first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning is ‘Who can I hustle?’ And the last thing you think of before you go to bed is ‘Who can I hustle?’”