The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (26 page)

A
fter the failure of the sequel, Sharon Stone announced that she would direct either another sequel or a
Basic Instinct
television series.

A producer friend told me, “What happened to the sequel says nobody even wants to see her pussy anymore, let alone her movies.”

Beware of quisling screenwriters
.

N
otice how often critics and film journalists write that such and such a screenwriter worked on a film, doing an uncredited polish or rewrite.

The critics and journalists are leaked this information by the director or the studio. The screenwriters they plug are either the director’s friends or the studio’s lackeys.

The reason the names of these screenwriters are leaked to the press is to take credit
away
from those writers who
really wrote
the script and who may have gotten into defiant creative disagreements with the director or the studio.

Don’t take a screenwriting course in Cleveland, Ohio, either
.

B
ob Noll teaches screenwriting at both John Carroll University and the Cleveland Play House. His credits? Producer and co-director of the local weekly children’s show
Hickory Hideout
on Cleveland’s Channel 3.

He was also a child actor and worked in local theater.

His advice about how to write a good script?

“Step one: Put a character in a tree. Step two: Shake the tree and let loose ravenous animals to prowl beneath it. Step three: Get the character out of the tree—survival optional.”

Sometimes everything goes wrong on your movie
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce, on
Sliver
: “On
Sliver
I just became so tired I couldn’t get off the floor. I had to have doctors constantly injecting me with vitamins. I was trying to give up smoking at the time and I don’t think I was all that stable myself, as I had been inhaling up to six packs a day previously. … I was terribly addicted and had decided to give up before
Sliver
. This probably wasn’t a good idea for my equilibrium. But every day of pressure on the
Sliver
set caused bad nicotine-induced panic attacks, so the chaos of the whole thing was not something I could blame on others. The film had become a Hollywood nightmare—with a producer [Robert Evans] who, from the beginning, had dreamt of his movie being directed by someone else, a writer [Joe Eszterhas] who had abandoned a best-selling novel to pen his own version of the story, an actress [Sharon Stone] who I couldn’t communicate with and who loathed her co-star and producer, and a cinematographer [Vilmos Zsigmond] who was creating beautiful images at a snail’s pace, on a set that made more noise than the actors when they spoke their lines. At night I dreamt of turning up at a schoolboy rugby match and then running onto the field only to discover I’d left my football boots at home. I’d wake with a deep sense of dread. Facing another day at the factory that filmmaking had become.”

Never mind all that, the real reason
Sliver
failed
.

T
wo of the key elements (screenwriter and cinematographer) were Hungarian.

Time is your best ally
.

W
hen
Betrayed
was released in 1988, the critics said it was “an unrealistic apocalyptic vision.”

Just a few years later, neo-Nazi Timothy McVeigh, the spittin’ image of the Tom Berenger character in
Betrayed,
blew up the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City.

When
Showgirls
was released in 1995, critics said it “maligned and libeled” Las Vegas, “a place of family values.”

Just a few years later, Vegas casinos were playing topless stage shows and casino buses were taking tourists to lap-dance bars.

If you get lucky, you’ll find partners
.

I
hooked up with three directors twice: with Richard Marquand on
Jagged Edge
and
Hearts of Fire
; with Costa-Gavras on
Betrayed
and
Music Box
; with Paul Verhoeven on
Showgirls
and
Basic Instinct
.

I hooked up with the producer Irwin Winkler (
Rocky, Raging Bull
) four times: on
Betrayed, Music Box, Basic Instinct
(he was replaced by Alan Marshall), and
Sacred Cows
(unproduced).

ALL HAIL

Harlan Ellison!

The screenwriter/author claimed that the script of
The Terminator
was a rip-off of both a novelette and a TV script that he had written. He sued and won.

After he won, he bought a full-page ad in the trades, which said, “The film acknowledges the works of Harlan Ellison.”

Use Frank as your role model
.

I
was appearing as myself in
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn,
and Arthur Hiller, the director, did two takes and wanted to do more.

I said no, that two were enough, then got up and walked off the set.

Arthur gaped, but what could he do? I wasn’t going back to do any more takes.

I learned that from Sinatra. Frank did two takes—no matter who the director was—and no more.

Can you be a person of integrity as a screenwriter?

S
creenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “All progress in the art of the screenplay depends on a very few people who are in a position to fight for excellence. Hollywood loves them for it and is only too anxious to reward them by making them something else than writers. Hollywood’s attitude to writers is necessarily conditioned by the mass of its writers, not by the few who have what it calls integrity. It loves the word, having so little of the quality.”

Keep everything close to your vest
.

P
roducer David Merrick once got a phone call telling him his building would be blown up in two minutes. He told no one else, ran out of his office, yelled, “Take any messages!” to his assistant, then scurried to the elevator and out of the building.

Hit ’em back
.

W
hen MPAA president Jack Valenti told people that I was “desperately ill and needed immediate medical attention,” I reminded people that Jack Valenti was the White House aide who briefed Lyndon Johnson in the West Wing bathroom each morning and handed him the toilet paper under the stall before he got his gig at the MPAA.

If they kick the living shit out of you, smile and say, “Is that the best you’ve got?”

I
won the Hollywood Women’s Press Association’s Sour Apple Award—following in the footsteps of Norman Mailer and Howard Stern … for acting boorishly and believing my own publicity.

When I received the award at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, I said this:

“Mel Gibson said that if I came here to accept this award, I should wear a bulletproof vest. I’ve brought my wife with me instead. I pity any potential assassin who may be lurking here. Naomi keeps a riding crop next to our bed, you know.

“I know that this award is given for believing your own publicity and I thought what I’d do here today is share some of my recent publicity with you. I’m doing it, of course, so that you will have no lingering doubt in your minds that you have given this award to the right person.

“The Portland
Oregonian
said about me: ‘He is an imbecilic ape of a screenwriter.’

“
Time
magazine said, ‘His movie is ludicrous, he can’t write.’

“
The Boston Globe
said, ‘He types, he doesn’t write, and if the stories about his manual typewriter are accurate, he can’t type very well, either.’

“A small-town paper in Florida said, ‘He is the overwriter—overweight and overpaid.’

“
The Miami Herald
said, ‘It’s hard to believe this is the same man who wrote
Music Box
and
Betrayed
. With age, his brains seem to have lowered gravitationally to another part of his anatomy.’

“Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to thank you. I am proud of you for giving this award to a screenwriter instead of Jim Carrey, the actor who was my main competing candidate. This is a landmark day for screenwriters! Good Lord, I have defeated the biggest movie star in the world!

“Eat your heart out, Jim. The apple is mine!”

You’ll need some K-Y jelly
.

P
roducer Robert Evans: “You’ve gotta scare the piss out of ’em to close a deal. You’ve gotta make ’em feel that if they don’t do the deal, you’ve got somebody waiting in the wings who will. Fear is the K-Y jelly that gets the fucking done. Without that jelly, the deals don’t close.”

Mark Twain, Homer, and Shakespeare were in the same boat you’re in
.

N
ovelist/screenwriter Raymond Chandler: “No writer in any age ever got a blank check. He always had to accept some conditions imposed from without, respect certain taboos, try to please certain people. It might have been the church, or a rich patron, or a generally accepted standard of elegance, or the commercial wisdom of a publisher or an editor, or perhaps even a set of political theories. If he did not accept them, he revolted against them. In either case they conditioned his writing. No writer ever wrote exactly what he wanted to write, because there was never anything inside himself, anything purely individual that he did want to write. It’s all reaction of one sort or another.”

Thank God for television
.

M
ike Medavoy: “The audience certainly recognizes a second-rate product when it sees it. It ought to: it grew up watching second-rate stuff on television.”

Don’t become a complete cynic
.

H
ave a touch of cynicism, but only a touch,” wrote Raymond Chandler. “The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won’t get it.”

Some people might begrudge you your success
.

W
hen he heard that
Time
magazine was thinking of putting producer Robert Evans on its cover, studio chief Frank Yablans said to Evans, “If you’re on the cover of
Time
without me, I will make each hour of each day of each week that you’re here so miserable you’ll be sorry you’re alive.”

Help those who’ve helped you
.

T
wo young guys wrote a script that was butchered by the director and the studio. The producer stuck up for the writers but couldn’t protect them from the director and the studio.

The script that was butchered was called
Assassins,
starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. The screenwriters were Larry and Andy Wachowski. The producer was Joel Silver.

Because Joel Silver stuck up for them, Larry and Andy gave him their next script. It was called
The Matrix
.

P.S.
Assassins
was a disaster.

This can metaphorically happen to you
.

A
t first I was shocked,” Marilyn Monroe said. “I hadn’t been around enough to know what was going on. He had a suit on, so I didn’t think he could hurt me. When I started thinking about a new dress I wanted and couldn’t afford, well … I was pretty drunk, too, so I said okay. I still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He asked me to take off my clothes. I thought that was a pretty good deal for fifteen dollars.”