The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (21 page)

A producer and his family sat near us and I asked him what Dunne and Didion were doing here.

“What do you think?” the producer said. “Can’t you tell? Writing. Working.”

If you make it, directors will resent the amount of money you make
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce: “I continued to work on a script of
The Sum of All Fears
. Paul Attanasio [
Donnie Brasco
and
Quiz Show
] wrote another draft with a lot of input from myself and, particularly, my business partner Kathleen McLaughlin. He was paid more than a million dollars to rewrite the screenplay, which, due to another commitment, he ended up doing in about ten days. Nice work if you can get it!”

You didn’t write
Gone with the Wind.

I
was at a shop in Los Angeles in the mideighties and the store owner asked me what I did for a living. I told him I wrote movies, and when he asked me which ones, I told him my last movie was
Flashdance
.

“Hey,” he said, “you must have worked with my niece.” He told me her name.

I’d never heard of his niece and asked what she did on the film.

He said, “She wrote it, too.”

I said, “No, she didn’t.”

He said, “Yes, she did.”

I said, “Is her name up on-screen?”

He said, “She wrote the damn movie; that’s what she told me.”

I discovered that his niece had been brought in to do some “polishing” on the script but didn’t do enough work on it to get any credit from the Writers Guild.

It was my first introduction to a whole subgenre of screenwriters in Hollywood: those who claim to have “written” a movie but don’t have any writing credit on it.

You’re a writer, not a social butterfly
.

I
ran into him by the pool of the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. He came up and introduced himself and told me his story.

He was a successful and well-known attorney from Chicago but had always wanted to write for television, so one day he took a leave of absence and came out to L.A. He was living at the Four Seasons.

He’d given himself six months. He’d be at the Four Seasons for six months and in that time he would have as many meetings with television producers and executives and showrunners as possible. If it didn’t work out in six months, he’d go back to Chicago.

I got a note from him about a year later. He was back with the law firm in Chicago. It hadn’t worked out in L.A.

“But I’ll always know that I tried,” he wrote. “I didn’t futz around. I really, really went for it.”

I remembered what I had told him when we met: “Stop running around meeting people. Go back to Chicago and write something.”

I hoped that’s what he was doing.

You, too, can con the MPAA
.

W
hen the MPAA ratings board saw
Basic Instinct
, they gave the movie an NC-17.

As long as Sharon uncrossed her legs, the board told us, the NC-17 would stand.

I told the studio PR people to tell the MPAA that this wasn’t a sex scene; this was a confrontation scene between an empowered and liberated modern woman and her male-piggy poe/leece inquisitors.

The “empowerment” argument swayed the MPAA and saved the beaver. Paul Verhoeven only had to take a few snips from the, um,
focal point
of the scene to satisfy the ratings board.

You never know how they’ll film the scene that you wrote
.

I
wrote an extravagant dance sequence for Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance
.

Some studio wizard suggested cutting the sequence in half and rewriting it, but I convinced them that a big dance movie had to have a lot of dance in it.

Since Jenny couldn’t dance very well and certainly couldn’t do a big dance sequence, the director hired a “dance double” for Jenny named Marine Jahan.

But it still wasn’t enough to convince the audience that Jenny Beals could dance, because Marine Jihan couldn’t do the floor spins.

So the producers brought in someone who could do the floor spins perfectly—a guy, who had to wear a wig and shave his legs … but who refused to shave his mustache.

If you slow the film down and look very closely, you can see Jenny Beals spinning around, wearing leotards and a mustache.

Don’t die with the wrong people
.

T
hat’s what happened to screenwriter/novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose last girlfriend was gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.

Graham had once been previously married to a man who was twenty-five years older and arranged dates for her with wealthy men. She and her husband lived off the gifts given to her by the wealthy men she went out with.

To Do a Belushi

To OD on drugs, like actor John.

Some people do, temporarily, know some things about making hit movies
.

P
roducer Jerry Bruckheimer, producer Brian Grazer, the late producer Don Simpson, producer/director George Lucas, and producer/director Steven Spielberg all know some things.

Producer/director Ivan Reitman
knew
some things, but he has forgotten them. So has Francis Ford Coppola.

After
Flashdance, Jagged Edge
, and
Basic Instinct
, I knew some things about making hit movies, too.

But after
Sliver, Showgirls
, and
Jade
, I, like Ivan and Francis, forgot what I knew.

P
ERK OF SUCCESS:
YOU, TOO, CAN GET FRANKIE AVALON TO SING FOR YOU

He knew who I was, and somebody at our table, as a joke, told him that it was my wife Geraldine’s birthday. So Frankie Avalon sang “Happy Birthday” for her
.

It wasn’t her birthday at all, but she’d loved Frankie Avalon as a teenager, and when he sang happy birthday to her, she cried. She told me after our divorce that it was one of her greatest thrills as a screenwriter’s wife
.

Billy Wilder was a sexist pig
.

S
creenwriter/director Billy Wilder had a recurring fantasy that he told friends about: He wanted to invent a mattress that would make a woman disappear after he’d made love to her.

In her place would appear three of his friends around a card table.

Wilder said that if men were forced to choose between sex with a woman and playing cards, 98 percent would choose cards. (Not me, babe.)

If they say it won’t work, it probably will
.

I
was once told by a studio head that movies set on farms didn’t sell because “dirt doesn’t sell.” Then the film
Witness
came out. It was set on a farm and it was a smash.

Paddy Chayefsky was told by a studio head that movies “with funeral scenes” don’t sell. Then
The Godfather
came out. It had a funeral scene and it was a smash.

I was told by another studio exec that “courtroom dramas don’t sell.” I wrote
Jagged Edge
and it was the number-one movie in America for more than a month.

The truth is that anything that is well written, well directed, and well acted can sell.

Bull-whip every Hollywood astrologer you meet
.

A
uthor Hunter S. Thompson: “There is a ghastly political factor in doing any business with Hollywood. You can’t get by without five or six personal staff people—and at least one personal astrologer. I have always hated astrologers, and I like to have sport with them. They are harmless quacks in the main, but some of them get ambitious and turn predatory, especially in Hollywood. In Venice Beach, I ran into a man who claimed to be Johnny Depp’s astrologer. … I took his card and examined it carefully a moment, as if I couldn’t quite read the small print. But I knew he was lying, so I leaned toward him and slapped him sharply in the nuts. Not hard, but very quickly, using the back of my hand and my fingers like a bull whip, yet very discreetly. He let out a hiss and went limp, unable to speak or breathe.”

P
ERK OF SUCCESS:
YOU, TOO, CAN WIN AN INDUSTRY AWARD

Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, in a note to himself: “Develop the idea that no moderately competent hack in any field of Hollywood endeavor can spend ten years in the community without winning a wide assortment of plaques, medals, and certificates of merit.”

Leave a message at 1:30
P.M
., during lunch hour, on his answering machine
.

D
o this when you don’t want to talk to that studio executive but want to make it appear that you do.

But if you get a message back on
your
answering machine during lunch hour, it might really be time to talk to him.

You’re not going to be in
The Dictionary of Film.

A
magazine wanted to do a profile of me and assigned the job to David Thomson, the critic and author of
A Biographical Dictionary of Film
, recognized as a classic film book.

I had lunch with David Thomson, a pleasant man, at the Lark Creek Inn in Larkspur, California, and told him I wasn’t going to let him do the article.

He seemed shocked. “But why not?”

I said, “Because I’ve read your dictionary and there are hardly any screenwriters in it; there are all kinds of actors, directors, producers, even cinematographers, but not one screenwriter.”

David Thomson said, “What does that have to do with anything? Just because you’re a screenwriter doesn’t mean I can’t write about you in a publication.”

I said, “But you obviously don’t believe very many screenwriters are important enough to include in
A Biographical Dictionary of Film
.”

“No,” he said calmly, “I don’t suppose I do.”

So I didn’t let him do the interview—enjoying the fact that I, a lowly screenwriter, was denying him a paycheck.

Keep your name out of the trades
.

M
ike Medavoy: “I told my writer clients to ignore the bigsplash announcements in the trades about some unknown writer getting big bucks for a script, because often these guys are never heard from again.”

Don’t be anybody’s
N
word
.

A
ccording to screenwriter Buck Henry, screenwriter Robert Towne became “Warren Beatty’s nigger.”

Don’t take yourself seriously
.

P
roducer Gerry Ayres: “Bob Towne would love to work for money on rewrites on which he got no credit, and would do it quickly. Over three weeks, he’d have a whole new script ready. But something that had his name on it would become all involved in the neurosis of completion and failure and would take forever.”

Scald ’em with chicken soup
.

M
ike Medavoy: “I had lunch with Paddy Chayefsky. We were talking about directors for Paddy’s script
Network
and Paddy asked me what I thought of Sidney Lumet.