The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (34 page)

The kind of nudity on-screen that is usually rated R but tries very, very hard to get a PG-13.

D
O YOUR RESEARCH …
JADE,
BASIC INSTINCT, AN ALAN
SMITHEE FILM

We had both come and we were smoking our obligatory cigarettes in a motel overlooking Venice Beach. A four-story mural of Morrison as the Lizard King was outside our window. Some guy down on the beach was playing his bongo drums
.

I was with a producer’s wife who had once wanted to be an actress. She had picked me out at a dinner party, asked for my phone number, called me, set up the date, and made the reservation at the motel under a false name
.

I asked her why she was crying
.

Because she came here often, she said, with guys like me.

Sometimes, she said, she cruised Pico or Ocean in her black Porsche and picked guys up, usually Latinos, right off the street and brought them here for the afternoon
.

I laughed and told her not to worry about it. Vivien Leigh, I told her, used to drive to bars in Compton and pick guys up and do them in her Bentley. Clara Bow used to pick guys off the street in a red convertible roadster. Jean Harlow did cabdrivers while wearing a black wig
.

“
Guys
cruise the streets all the time,” I said to her. “What’s the big deal? Women in Hollywood have always been more empowered than in other places.”

She stopped crying and smiled at me. “You’re really very sweet, aren’t you?” she said, and we went back to doing what we’d been doing before
.

The guy on the beach was still bambing away at his bongos
.

They’ll confuse you with Larry Flynt
.

D
irector Milos Forman: “When the Nazis and Communists first came to Czechoslovakia, they declared war on pornographers and perverts. Everyone applauded: who wants perverts running through the streets? But then, suddenly, Jesus Christ was a pervert, Shakespeare was a pervert, Hemingway was a pervert. It always starts with pornographers to open the door a little, but then the door is opened wide for all kinds of persecution.”

Cover your own ass
.

C
over yourself. Before each sex scene write, “It is dark; you can’t see clearly”—just in case the director wants to shoot your script as an NC-17 or “a deep R” … and blames you for pornography if the movie fails.

You’re asking for trouble if you write a scene with male frontal nudity
.

D
irector Jean-Jacques Annaud: “The penis is a terrible, terrible actor. It is an actor who overacts.”

And stay away from that backdoor hanky-panky
.

L
ouis B. Mayer: “A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatergoers.”

You can be your own test market
.

I
f you’re writing a script with a sexual content and find yourself getting a hard-on or a wet-on, it’s okay. If you’re getting turned on, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the viewer of the film might be turned on, too.

If, however, this happens to you while you’re writing something without
any
sexual contact, seek company … or the company of a shrink.

Don’t write a script with a lot of sex
.

Y
ou won’t get it made. They don’t make movies like
Midnight Cowboy
and
Clockwork Orange
anymore.
Eyes Wide Shut
and
Crash
and
Henry and June
and
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
and
Showgirls
all failed at the box office.

Showgirls
(my film) was the greatest commercial and cinematic disaster since
Heaven’s Gate
and
Ishtar
. It failed because of liberal political correctness and conservative fundamentalism and because it was a bad movie.

I deserve the credit for it: I almost single-handedly killed off the sexualcontent movie in America.

Violence is still fine, though—the bloodier and the more sexless (witness Tarantino) the better.

But you can go absolutely apeshit on the violence
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce, discussing
Sliver
: “The MPAA have a phobia about seeing people joined together in lovemaking. So they wanted us to cut down on the amount of material where Sharon and Billy seemed to be truly coupling. I would cut it and they would say, ‘No, no, no still too much.’ I would try cutting it again. ‘No, no, no still too much’—and this went on endlessly. Yet in any film that I have made in the U.S., there has never been any discussion with censors about violence.”

Try to write a French movie
.

R
on Shelton: “The French can make comedies about someone sleeping with their cousin. If that happens in an American movie, somebody gets their heads blown off.”

If you write a violent movie
…

Y
ou’ll need some very good reviews to give it some respectability. That way, audiences can feel they’re buying a ticket not because they want to see bloody, gruesome violence but because they want to see artistic accomplishment.

This doesn’t mean that even without good reviews your violent movie won’t be a hit—witness
Jagged Edge
and
Basic Instinct
.

Don’t write another
Dirty Harry.

N
ovelist/screenwriter George Pelecanos (
King Suckerman, A Firing Offense
): “You could never make a picture like
Dirty Harry
today because it’s about a cop who, you know, shoots unarmed people and steps on ’em when they’re wounded and beats ’em up and so on. And on the page [the studio executives’ notes] say:
‘Well, I don’t really like this guy’
—like everybody has to like the protagonist of these movies. I don’t understand that. Is that person interesting or not? That’s what matters.”

Crash-and-Bash Pictures

You know what they are. Please don’t write them. Please don’t want to write them. Everybody is writing them. Be the exception.

Whiz-Bang

As in, “We need a little bit more whiz-bang in the opening sequence,” meaning action, visual pyrotechnics, more smoke and wacko camera angles.

The Whammo Chart, aka the Eleven-Minute Commandment

A formula invented by producer Larry Gordon for action films. The chart calls for an action sequence every eleven minutes. Time Joel Silver films like
Die Hard, Lethal Weapon
, and
Predator
and you’ll see how religiously Joel believes in Larry Gordon’s eleven-minute commandment.