The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (31 page)

LESSON 8

Ideas Are Poison!

Go outside the box
.

S
creenwriter/director Jean-Luc Godard: “A film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”

Violate everyone’s privacy
.

T
o write the way real people talk,
listen
to the way real people talk. Pretend you have a scanner in your head and, as people talk, imagine their words running across the screen, complete with punctuation marks, to “see” the words more clearly.

A friend of mine who is a screenwriter taped his own phone calls but felt after awhile that his conversations were becoming stilted because he knew he was taping them. So he put a tiny microphone into a flowerpot near a table at a bar and listened to the conversations at that table while he sat across the room with a tiny transmitter in his ear.

I have another friend, a phone repairman in L.A. He sits atop a telephone pole for hours every day listening to strangers’ conversations. He wants to be a screenwriter.

P
ERK OF SUCCESS:
YOU, TOO, CAN GET A FREE LEXUS

When I wrote
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn,
I wrote several Toyota Land Cruisers into the script
.

I got a call from a Lexus representative, who told me that if I changed the Toyotas in the script into Lexuses, I’d get a free Lexus delivered to my house in Malibu
.

In what was probably the most stupid move of my life, done for obviously perverse reasons, I turned my free Lexus down
.

W
RITE WHAT YOU KNOW …
RELIABLE SOURCES

When I was a young newspaper reporter, I covered a hostage situation where a gunman was holding his ex-girlfriend hostage
.

Twenty-five years later, I wrote the story as
Reliable Sources
and sold the script to Paramount for
2 million
.

Don’t write a Western
.

T
he odds are overwhelming that it won’t be made, and that if it is, it will fail. Almost every year or so, there is a failed attempt to do a Western—some, like Larry Kasdan’s
Wyatt Earp
, have been especially good, but the public doesn’t seem interested.

A producer said to me, “A Western in space, yes, a hip-hop Western, yes, but a Western with horses, absolutely not.

A Tender Love Story

That, according to director Jim Cameron, is what
The Terminator
was. Cameron used the very same words to describe
Titanic
.

“The worst thing that could happen” is the worst thing you can do
.

A
lot of screenwriters write scripts this way!

A man is happily married and has three beautiful children. What’s the worst thing that could happen to him? His wife dies. Okay.
Now
what’s the worst thing that could happen? His kids die, too. Okay.
Now
what’s the worst thing that could happen? He falls in love with the wrong woman.
Now
what’s the worst thing that could happen? She steals all of his money.
Now
what’s the worst thing that could happen? He becomes a homeless person.
Now
what’s the worst thing that could happen? He finds himself asleep at night atop his wife’s grave.
Now
what? He gets pneumonia.
Now
what? He dies.
Now
what? The person who receives the kidney that he left to medical science rejects his kidney and dies, too.

And on and on and on.

Do not allow that sentence—What’s the worst thing that could happen?—to enter your thoughts as you write.

No more Travis Bickle
…

I
f you want to sell your script, give your main characters lots of friends, extended families to cheer him/her on.

Studios love this—studio execs feel that if an audience sees a lead character being cheered on-screen, then the audience will automatically like him.

Studio research on
Top Gun
, for example, discovered that audiences weren’t cheering the movie at its end. The studio inserted a scene that had been shot earlier, which showed all the other pilots cheering on-screen at the end.

After that scene was inserted, audiences everywhere cheered the ending of the movie.

D
O YOUR RESEARCH …
AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM

A director came to have lunch with me at my home in Malibu. His name was Stuart Baird. He was formerly a film editor and he had just directed his first big action hit. He was a Brit who’d worked with Ken Russell and was dressed all in khaki. I liked him and we talked for hours
.

A couple of weeks later, I sat down to write
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn,
which is about a former film editor who directs his first film. My lead character, the director, Alan Smithee, is a Brit who has worked with Ken Russell and dresses in all khaki
.

When the film was released, Stuart Baird went to the producer and said, “That bloody Hungarian—he stole my whole life in one bloody lunch.”

You’re better off getting the rights
.

M
y movie
F.I.S.T
. was about Jimmy Hoffa. But United Artists didn’t have the rights to Hoffa’s life and didn’t want to pay to acquire the rights, either; so throughout the writing of the script, I had to be careful not to get too close to the details of Hoffa’s life (even though I knew and the studio knew that I was writing about Hoffa).

It was a nightmare because I had to be as concerned about what the lawyers would think as what the director, producer, and studio executives would think.

Angie Dickinson inspired
Basic Instinct, Sliver, Showgirls,
and
Jade.

I
was staying overnight in a producer’s guest house in Beverly Hills and dreamed all night about sex.

I don’t dream often about sex, but on this night I kept having a vision of endless coupling with women whose faces I didn’t recognize.

The dreams were only of the act itself—without tenderness or feeling—sporting, athletic, as though I were riding a mechanical bull.

I awoke worn-out, drenched in sweat, and with the kind of painful erection I’d had when I was thirteen years old.

The producer asked me how I’d slept, and I lied and said fine. Then he told me that his guest house had been the place where JFK trysted with Angie Dickinson when he came to town.

A couple weeks later, as I was waiting for a cab in the portico of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, I watched as a little Mercedes convertible pulled up and a stunning older woman got out and walked toward me into the hotel.

As Angie Dickinson passed me, I couldn’t help winking at her, and she gave me a knowing, dazzling smile.

Be nice to those you’ve wounded
.

D
on’t try to take credit away from the first writer, who thought the basic concept up. After I rewrote
Flashdance
, there wasn’t much left of Tom Hedley’s original script except the title and the concept of a working-class girl wanting to be a ballet dancer.

It was enough, though.

In its arbitration, the Writers Guild ruled that the credit should be: Screenplay by Hedley and Eszterhas, story by Hedley.

While in my heart I felt that I should have had story credit along with him, I understood that without him, we would’ve had nothing. So, after the arbitration was announced, I called Tom Hedley and congratulated him.

ALL HAIL