The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (4 page)

Getting to the Tit

An old Hollywood expression for making some big money.

If you sell a script, you’ll be part of a fun and glamorous business
.

W
hen he got back to London after the
Lawrence of Arabia
shoot, screenwriter Robert Bolt told the London
Sunday Times
that the shoot had been “a continuous clash of egomaniacal monsters wasting more energy than dinosaurs and pouring rivers of money into the sand.”

Dream Street

Hollywood legend: If you walk down Dream Street and somebody notices you (or buys your script), you can be a star overnight.

We have no role models
.

W
hen asked by reporters why he was a screenwriter, Ben Hecht, the most successful screenwriter in the history of Hollywood, said, “Because I was born in a toilet.”

Screenwriter William Goldman
(Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men
) described himself in the twilight of his career this way in his book
Hype and Glory
: “Couldn’t walk, couldn’t read, couldn’t do a goddamn thing but stare the night away and block out the past.”

His big brother, screenwriter James Goldman (
The Lion in Winter
), wrote this to director Joe Mankiewicz: “I need your help to write this thing. If this letter sounds prosy and dull, it’s because I’ve been reading my script.”

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, in
Adaptation
: “Do I have an original thought in my head? Maybe if I were happier my hair wouldn’t be falling out. … I’m a walking cliché. Why should I be made to feel that I have to apologize for my existence?”

In the movie
Tales of Ordinary Madness
, written by Charles Bukowski about himself, a prostitute was trying to get Ben Gazzara (playing Bukowski) to stop writing and make love to her.

Watching the movie in the back of a Hollywood theater, the real Bukowski yelled, “If that were me, I would have stopped typing long ago.”

Somebody in the audience told him to shut up.

“Hey,” Bukowski said. “I’m the guy they made the movie about. I can say anything I want to say!”

Somebody yelled, “Oh yeah? Then shut the fuck up!”

Bukowski yelled, “Oh yeah? Fuck you!”

Cops were called. They handcuffed Charlie Bukowski and dragged him out of his own movie and locked him in jail.

You’re certainly in good literary company
.

W
illiam Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Alberto Moravia, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Jim Harrison, Joan Didion, Ken Kesey, William Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Jay McInerney, and Hunter S. Thompson were all screenwriters at one point or another.

Faulkner even took a meeting with Sammy Glick
.

A
fter he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner did rewrites of these scripts:
The Left Hand of God
and
Land of the Pharaohs
. He took meetings with actress Julie Harris and producer Jerry Wald, Budd Schulberg’s model for agent Sammy Glick in
What Makes Sammy Run
?

Robert McKee is an artist
…

M
cKee: “People today don’t respect screenwriting as an art. People didn’t think this way in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. But it takes real genius to do it beautifully.”

Don’t ever refer to yourself as an artist
.

N
ovelist Sherwood Anderson said to Ben Hecht, “You let art alone … she’s got enough guys sleeping with her.”

The Revolt of the Assholes

Screenwriter John Gregory Dunne’s definition of a writer’s strike.

Faulkner was a mensch
.

A
producer, who’d begun as a press agent for studio czar Harry Cohn in the 1930s, wanted to demonstrate his knowledge of American “literatoor” for me.

“Fitzgerald?” he said. “His wife, that crazy bitch Thelma, told him he couldn’t get her or any other woman off because it was too small. And that hotsytotsy Brit gossip
kurva
he was living with out here, what was her name? Graham, that’s it.
Heather Graham
. She said Fitzgerald was so ashamed of it, she never saw him with his clothes off. And then after the poor putz died, she said she’d rather make it with the size of a chimpanzee than the size of a horse. That was almost as ugly as the stuff Sally said about Burt in Playboy … that
fageleh
stuff that everybody talked about. Anyway. Hemingway? His bullfighting friend, that American, that gay guy, Sidney, Stanley, whatever. Stanley said Hemingway was always worried about his size. Sidney said it was the size of a thirty-thirty shell. And then there was that gay-bashing thing where Ernest sees a guy across the street who’s flaming and goes across the street and beats the
fageleh
up. Faulkner? He schtupped that little secretary in town for almost twenty years. Liked her to put on little skimpy white dresses. Took her out to the beach in Santa Monica so the other guys could look through those white dresses, too. She told everybody he was a wild man—three, four times a night. Faulkner liked it here, kept coming back for the money and the pussy, just like the rest of us. Faulkner was a
mensch
.”

You don’t have to be smart to be a screenwriter
.

S
creenwriter Sylvester Stallone was thrown out of fourteen schools in eleven years.

Be proud that Rocky is your colleague
.

S
ylvester Stallone even had himself photographed for a cover of
Writer’s Digest
. He even sat in front of a typewriter. He even wore horn-rimmed glasses. He even said he was more a writer than an actor.

Then he stopped writing for thirty years and became an action figure and a windup toy.

But … at one point during those thirty years, he even smoked a pipe for a while.

He had himself photographed smoking his pipe, too, though he didn’t wear his horn-rimmed glasses at the same time.

You don’t want to turn into Sylvester Stallone … or do you
?

T
hirty years after Rocky, Sly and I were talking about writing.

“I used to love writing,” Sly said. “I don’t know what happened.”

I said, “I do. You became a movie star. You’ve had your head in pussy all these years.”

Sly said, “You’re probably right.”

You’ve got a good shot to make it
.

L
ess brains are necessary in the motion picture business than in any other,” producer Lewis J. Selznick, David’s dad, told a congressional committee.

A Hollywood High
:

To be overjoyed at the prospect of something great happening … something that will turn into shit the next day.