The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (39 page)

I didn’t care if I was glamorizing smoking or causing young people to start smoking.

Then I got throat cancer. I consider my cancer my personal punishment for glamorizing smoking on-screen.

Don’t bring the same karma upon yourself that I brought upon myself.

Let’s repeat that
.

K
irk Douglas: “Hollywood started me smoking, literally putting a cigarette in my hand. Who knows how many moviegoers have started smoking because of what they have seen on the screen? Too many movies glorify young people smoking. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Conflict means spinal fusion
.

T
he most important component of the spine of your script is conflict, and the dramatic tension that flows from it.

Without the introduction of conflict, you can’t hold your audience; they’ll get restless and leave what you’ve put your heart and soul into, going for the urinal or the candy counter instead.

Conflict doesn’t have to be physical, of course; it can be cerebral, understated, and subtle. But it has to be there.

You can combine conflict with attraction and create a spicy and often sexy stew that will both hold and amuse your audience. I did that in
Betrayed, Jagged Edge
, and
Basic Instinct
. There was conflict between Tom Berenger and Debra Winger, between Jeff Bridges and Glenn Close and between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone. But, as in real life, the conflict led to attraction, or attraction was part of the conflict.

The most hard-hitting of all conflicts is when the heart is in conflict with itself, when the heart is torn. In
Betrayed
, Debra falls in love with Tom even as she knows that he is a neo-Nazi murderer. When she kills him, she blasts away a part of her own heart. In
Jagged Edge
, Glenn falls in love with Jeff, saves him through her own skills and strength gained in prison, and then discovers that he is a murderer and that he’s been using her all along. And in
Music Box
, we see the deadliest conflict of the heart: A woman who adores her immigrant father winds up protecting her son from being poisoned by her father’s cruelty and racism.

When my friend Richard Marquand was shooting
Hearts of Fire
, he called me from the set one day to tell me that Bob Dylan and Rupert Everett, who played rockers vying for the same young woman, were getting along so well as actors that it was impossible to bring out the underlying conflict their characters were supposed to have between them on-screen.

Richard said, “I’ve decided just to let their characters be friends.”

I said, “You can’t do that. If there’s no conflict between them, there’s no triangle. If there’s no triangle, the movie isn’t about anything.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Richard said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. Bob and Rupert like hanging out, and every time Rupert looks at Bob, Rupert says, Bob makes him laugh. And neither of them really want Fiona. Rupert, as you know, is gay, and Bob says he doesn’t want to kiss Fiona.”

I said, “He won’t kiss Fiona? Why the hell not?” I’d had a long afternoon in New York getting to know Fiona—we’d begun with two bottles of Cristal at Tavern on the Green—and I thought her eminently kissable.

“I’m not certain,” Richard said. “I think it has something to do with his newfound Christianity. He says he doesn’t want to be seen kissing anyone on the big screen.”

I realized we had a love triangle where the two guys didn’t want the girl for different reasons and liked each other more than they liked the girl.

I feared the movie was dead. And it was. When it was released after Richard’s death, there was no underlying tension to it, no conflict—just an actor and two tired rockers making tired, friendly, “Have a nice day” faces at everybody.

Categorical Imperative

The underlying thrust of your script—the motivation that gives it power, that makes your hero go the extra mile to achieve what he wants.

Tone is everything
.

T
he tone of your script is even more important than the structure of it. It is the key to your script’s success. If your tone is off, the movie will not work.

No matter how good the structure is and no matter how sharp the dialogue, your script is hostage to its tone.

In my experience, hitting exactly the right tone comes with rewriting and polishing. It is like selecting the right volume on a stereo or like the volume of an actor’s performance: If it’s even slightly off, it’s all over.

A Built-in Spine

What the movie is about—the drama at its core.

Slug it out with your second act
.

T
he second act is the most difficult to write because the first and third acts have built-in, surefire dramatic potential.

But in the second, you have to move your story and your characters along as speedily as possible.

The director of
Jagged Edge
(Richard Marquand) and I kept taking the film out to preview audiences and getting dismal responses. But when we cut eight minutes from the film’s second act, audiences erupted at the end of the movie with applause.

Adrenalizer Scene

If things are slowing down, you inject one of these into the spine of the script.

Don’t worry about first- or second-act curtains
.

Y
ou don’t need them. Just follow a general three-act format, but you don’t have to pay off each act by giving it an ending. Your need is for one ending and one ending only—at the end of the film (the end of the third act).

Does Your Story Hang?

Does your story climax? Is it well-structured?

Don’t be afraid of ambiguity
.

T
he ambiguous ending of
Bridge on the River Kwai
was thanks to producer Sam Spiegel, who believed “that the audience should make their own choice.”