The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (23 page)

They’ll spring the monster on you
.

J
ohn Gregory Dunne: “A producer and writer were arguing vigorously against the changes the studio was demanding in a picture already in production. The president of the Disney division overseeing the picture suddenly demanded silence. He was, he said, forced by the writer’s intransigence to ‘take the monster out of its cage.’

“In the silence that ensued, the division president reached under the table, pretended to grab a small predatory animal from its lair, and then, as if clutching the creature by the neck in his fist, exhibited his empty, clawlike hand to the people around the table. He asked the screenwriter if he saw the monster. The writer, not knowing what else to do, nodded yes.

“ ‘I’m going to put it back in its cage now,’ the executive said, drawing each word out, ‘and I never want you to force me to bring it out again.’ Then he mimed putting the monster back into its cage under the table. When he was done, the executive asked the writer, ‘Do you know what the monster is?’

“The writer shook his head.

“The executive said, ‘It’s our money.’ ”

Don’t let ’em tell you what to write
.

I
did what they said,” Marilyn Monroe said, “and all it got me was a lot of abuse. Everyone’s just laughing at me. I hate it. Big breasts, big ass, big deal.”

They’ll even try to take your brains
.

M
onroe Stahr, the producer in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel,
The Last Tycoon
: “I never thought I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains
belonged
to me—because I knew how to use them.”

Robert McKee taught him
…

A
young screenwriter who’d attended Robert McKee’s screenwriting seminar sent me a script. It was about a young screenwriter who’d attended the Robert McKee seminar, hadn’t learned anything, and wound up homeless in Santa Monica.

The script was awful.

It helps to know how to fight
.

S
creenwriter J. P. Miller said this about Paddy Chayefsky: “Paddy was an extraordinarily good human manipulator. He knew his way around a scrap as very few writers do. Most writers, if they get into a fight or a bad situation on a movie, call their agents. But Paddy knew Hollywood and he wouldn’t back down. He would go head to head with anybody—and at the same time he had this incredible writer’s sensitivity. That’s a rare combination which many of us don’t have. He was that rare breed of talent and fighter.”

You don’t ever need a job
this
badly
.

D
uring a script meeting, a producer suggested something that screenwriter William Goldman thought was “a moron point.”

Goldman: “I wanted to scream so loud. I wanted to choke the asshole. But I was so sweet. I took notes. I grunted and nodded. I smiled when it was conceivably possible.”

Kick ’em in their ass!

S
creenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “I don’t care about the money. I just like to fight. I’m a tired old man, but it takes more than a motion picture studio to push me around.”

Kicking ass can do you good
.

P
addy Chayefsky: “I stormed and ranted. And the more I ranted, the more the studio people respected me.”

I got into so many nasty fights with studio execs over my fifteen movies that the
Los Angeles Business Weekly
quoted an anonymous screenwriter as saying this about me: “At the heart of the Eszterhas phenomenon is titillation. There is a sense of danger about him, violence. For a lot of movie executives, who have no life experience, he’s exciting, exotic. They get a sense of danger by being in business with him.”

Clench your fists; throw a fit
.

I
once told a group of Disney executives in a crowded conference room to “get your hands off my dick and tell me the truth.”

Billy Bob Thornton, back in his screenwriting days, leaped atop a studio executive’s desk and threatened to strangle the man for ruining his script.

“Sometimes I find myself dealing unpleasantly with people,” said Paddy Chayefsky, “talking to them as if they were animals.”

A producer describes Chayefsky at a meeting this way: “When he was crossed, his entire body would tighten like steel. He’d scowl, clench his fists, glare, then the verbal avalanche would begin. He could level armies with that tongue of his if he didn’t explode first, because his whole body would shake in a fit of apoplexy. For the most part, he looked like a monster child having a tantrum.”

Pretend you’re Clint Eastwood
.

A
fter seeing
The Outlaw Josey Wales
, Warner Bros. studio executive David Geffen said to director Clint Eastwood, “I only want to suggest one thing: I think it would be better if it was twenty minutes shorter.”

Clint said to David, “I’m glad you took the time to see the picture, and I appreciate your comments. But why don’t you study the picture some more and see if you have any more thoughts. When you do, give me a call over at Paramount.”

David said to Clint, “Why over at Paramount?”

“Because that’s where I’ll be making my next movie,” Clint said.

David said, “The picture is perfect. I wouldn’t change one frame. Thank you very much.”

Clint said, “Thank
you
.”

Don’t ever quit a job
.

I
f you’ve been hired to work on a script and you loathe the director and the producer and you feel that what you wrote is being truncated and transmogrified into dog shit, don’t quit. Keep telling them that you are “ready, willing, and able to perform”—legalese right out of the contract that you signed.

If you are pleasantly intransigent, they will fire you. That’s what you want. You’ll be paid in full and the trades will report that because of “creative differences,” you’ve left the project.

He was talking about Hemingway, honest, not about me
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “He never really wrote but one story. All the rest is the same thing in different pants—or without different pants. And his eternal preoccupation with what goes on between the sheets becomes rather nauseating in the end. One reaches a time of life when limericks written on the walls of comfort stations are not just obscene, they are horribly dull. This man has only one subject and he makes that ridiculous. I suppose the man’s epitaph, if he had the choosing of it, would be: Here Lies a Man Who Was Bloody Good in Bed. Too Bad He’s Alone Here. But the point is I begin to doubt whether he ever was. You don’t have to work so hard at things you are really good at—or do you?”

Our scripts turned Garbo into a recluse
.

S
creenwriter/playwright Mercedes de Acosta, an intimate friend of Greta Garbo, said Garbo’s reclusiveness was caused by disappointment in herself “for not fighting harder for better scripts.”

In other words, bad screenplays screwed Garbo up.

If you make an ass of yourself, don’t make an even bigger ass out of yourself
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Anne Rice looked silly when she said the biggest movie star in the world at the time, Tom Cruise, was too short to play her character Lestat in
Interview with a Vampire
.

But she looked even sillier when, after seeing the film, she took a two-page ad in
Daily Variety
saying how much she had loved Cruise … and the film.

ALL HAIL

Ben Hecht!

Agent Swifty Lazar: “No one was better at beating the moguls at their own game than Ben Hecht. The deal I made for him with Sam Goldwyn certainly proves that he had Sam beat.

“ ‘I get paid two thousand dollars per day—in cash,’ Ben told me. ‘I want it in hundred dollar bills on my desk, or I don’t show up for work the next day. And, by the way, there’s a very pretty girl who’s a wonderful secretary. You’ve got to get her a contract while I’m still out here. She’ll make a thousand a week. I know that sounds like a lot, but she’s a great actress and a great typist—and I want her to have a part in the picture.’

“ ‘Can she really act?’ I asked.

“ ‘
She
thinks she can.
I
think she can. Nobody may agree with us, but I can tell you right now. I’ll fight for her.’ ”

Don’t join a writing committee
.

T
he writing committee is a relatively new phenomenon, first seen when a few writers (very few) began getting more publicity on their films than the directors they were working with.

So the directors decided to bring not one writer on board a project, but
half a dozen
—on the theory that if there were half a dozen cooks in the kitchen, it would be obvious that the director was the auteur chef who told them what to do.

Don’t do “quick job” rewrites
.

T
hese are rewrites done at the behest of the director or a studio days before a movie goes into production.

There is no time to write anything except what the director or studio tells you to write.

Screenwriter William Goldman has done many of them.

“I make a point of never reading anything I’ve written in these rewrites,” he says.

Be respectful of those whose work you adapt for the screen
.

I
adapted Brian Moore’s novel
The Doctor’s Wife
, and on the front page of my script I wrote, “Screenplay by Joe Eszterhas, from the novel by Brian Moore.”

The executive in charge of the project at United Artists, Marcia Nasatir, said to me, “In all my years in the business, I’ve never seen the screenwriter put the novelist’s name on the title page of the script.”

I did the same thing with Ira Levin’s
Sliver
.

I did it because I knew that without their
novels
, without the story and characters
they
created, I wouldn’t have this job of
translating
their work from book to screenplay.

This is what you do when you are asked to rewrite the last draft of
Gone With the Wind.

B
en Hecht read the previous seven drafts, which had been done by different writers. He turned his rewrite in
three days
later. And he never read the novel.

Write original screenplays, not rewrites
.

D
irector David Lean: “We want someone who has written original stories. We don’t want a scriptwriter who has spent his time embroidering on other people’s ideas.”

The more writers on a movie, the worse it will be
.

I
f a character has been rewritten by, say, six or eight or ten writers, that character will not have a distinctive and original voice; the voice will be a hodgepodge of a bunch of characters’ voices, as each writer envisions the character
for himself
.

The actors aren’t smart enough to realize that their lines are being homogenized, and directors feel that
their imprint
on the film will be more felt the more writers there are on it.