The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (41 page)

But now he was blocked and had a big hard-on. He called his girlfriend and said he was on his way over to see her. They got into an argument when he got there and he stormed out and went home, where he sat down and tried to write. He was still blocked
.

But now, his hard-on was making him so uncomfortable that he couldn’t even sit at his desk anymore. He lay down in bed and tried to figure out how to get himself unblocked. After awhile, he found himself unblocked with one thing but not with the other
.

Don’t try to write classic lines of dialogue
.

I
f you write them, you’ll write them accidentally, not purposely. They’ll pop out of the material.

I’ve written two famous, or infamous, lines through the course of fifteen scripts.

Flashdance
: “When you give up your dream, you die.”

Showgirls
: “How does it feel not to have anyone comin’ on you anymore?”

Twenty years after I wrote that line (the former, not the latter), my parish priest told me it had been the inspiration of his life.

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

At all costs, don’t write lines like this.

Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “I adore George [Sanders] in that movie because he was so rude with women, saying the words of Somerset Maugham, like: ‘All women are like little beasts. You have to beat them and that’s when they love you.’ ”

No one can predict what will become a classic line of dialogue
.

T
he studio felt strongly that the last line of
Jagged Edge
would be an oft-repeated one.

After a bloody, nerve-racking battle between a masked Jeff Bridges and Glenn Close, private eye Robert Loggia looks at Jeff’s body on the floor and says, “Fuck him. He was trash.”

Nobody remembered or repeated the line. Some people, focus groups showed, didn’t even hear it.

A Three Beat

Three lines of dialogue—the last line (the three beat) pays the first line off.

Read your dialogue aloud to yourself
.

W
hen you think you are finished writing your script, organize a reading with your significant other and your friends. The more you
hear
the words you’ve written, the more you’ll want to polish the words to get them just right.

Play your dialogue back to yourself on tape
.

I
’m convinced that the really smart wannabe screenwriters driving aimlessly around the 405 or the 10 in L.A. aren’t doing it because they read
Play It As It Lays
.

They’re doing it because they’re listening to tapes of themselves reading their screenplays.

You’re better than a tape recorder
.

P
addy Chayefsky: “I’d like to find a tape recorder as clever as I am in dialogue. The whole labor of writing is to make it look like it just came off the top of your head.”

If you can come up with a good title, you’re halfway there
.

T
o boffo box-office heaven, that is, although the road to a good title, even a bad title, can be a circuitous, even byzantine one. Consider the following.

While everyone involved with the production agreed that
F.I.S.T
. was a great title, it didn’t matter. The movie itself didn’t work and
F.I.S.T
. tanked.

Flashdance
was a great title. Indeed, while most of his script was gone in my rewrite, Tom Hedley, the original screenwriter, had come up with that great title.

Jagged Edge
was a great title, but it wasn’t mine. My title for the movie was
Hearts of Fire
—a crazily misfired title for this tough courtroom drama. The title
Jagged Edge
was the brainchild of a studio assistant who pored through every word of my script and found the description “knife with a jagged edge” for the murder weapon.

I used
Hearts of Fire
again years later for a rock-and-roll movie with Bob Dylan and Rupert Everett. It didn’t work for
that
movie, either. Nobody saw it. The movie was so bad that it literally
killed
the director, my friend Richard Marquand.

My favorite title was
Telling Lies in America
, an offbeat piece about a young Hungarian man who wants to be a writer. The original title was
Magic Man
, and I changed the title so that studio execs reading
Telling Lies in America
wouldn’t know it was the same script they’d read ten years ago.

The only way to outwit their computers and avoid old readers’ reports was to change the title. I was pulling a scam, and the scam gave me the best title I’d ever come up with.

What do you expect from a young man who wound up making millions for the made-up stories—the
lies
—that he told to the world?

My worst title was probably
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
. Too clumsy, too gawky, too geeky. I like the movie (I’m one of the few), but I hate the title.

That was God speaking to me
.

M
y script entitled
Love Hurts
was in its brown envelope and I was almost out of the house on my way to Federal Express to send it to my agent, when I suddenly thought of another title for it:
Basic Instinct
.

I ran back inside the house, unsealed the envelope, and typed up a new cover page.

Did you see
Anhedonia?

W
oody Allen wanted the title of
Annie Hall
to be
Anhedonia
(“the inability to feel pleasure”). His cowriter, Marshall Brickman, wanted the title to be
It Had to Be a Jew
.

Save your titles
.

I
wrote a script about two little boys who go off on an adventure together. I called it
Pals
. I sold the script with that title to Lorimar Pictures. The studio didn’t like the title and came up with a new one:
Big Shots
.

Years later, when Richard Marquand and I were talking about making a movie about a hardhearted man and his relationship with two little kids, I called it
Pals
. The title was again changed by the studio, this time to
Nowhere to Run
, although the studio had previously called it
Lion on the Lam
(yup, you read it right).

Since all these years have passed, and since I have four little boys now, I am planning to write a new script about a hardhearted man and his relationship with four little kids and calling it
Pals
(just kidding).

You can recycle your titles
.

M
y movie
Betrayed
was first called
Sins of the Fathers
, then
Father of Lies
, then
Heartland
, and then
Eighty-Eight
.

My movie
Music Box
was at first called
Sins of the Fathers
and then
Father of Lies
.

You can’t copyright a title
.

I
n 1927, Ben Hecht wrote an original screenplay called
American Beauty
.

In 2000, another
American Beauty
(1999) won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

They can steal your title
.

T
he producers were working on a script with playwright Bernard Slade, who also had a play running in London that was called
Fatal Attraction
.

The producers decided not to make the script Slade was working on, then went on to work with a young writer named James Dearden on a thriller. The thriller became a hit movie.

It was called
Fatal Attraction
—nothing but a coincidence, of course, nothing at all to do with Bernard Slade’s play.

H
OW TO DEAL WITH WRITER’S BLOCK … THE BROKEN TOE SOLUTION
.

My wife bought me a heavy rock at an art fair. On it were written the words
Writer’s Block.

I kept it on my writing desk
.

One day, blocked on a script, I smashed my desk with my fist and the Writer’s Block fell on my big toe
.

It hurt like hell. I put ice on it, but it still hurt like hell
.

I went to the doctor and he said the toe was broken. There was nothing he could do, though, except put a bandage on it and tape that toe to another one
.

I hobbled back home, sat back down at my desk, and found myself, miraculously, unblocked!

I moved my Writer’s Block from my writing desk to my bedroom nightstand as a possible talismanic weapon in other creative situations
.

My big toe still hurts, six years later, when cold weather sets in. The doctor says I’ve got arthritis in it
.

There are obviously pluses and minuses, ups and downs, to a Writer’s Block
.

You’re finished writing your script—this is your greatest moment as a screenwriter
.

P
laywright Robert Anderson: “I feel best about a play when I finish writing it, just before I send it off to anybody. I’ve written it, but no one has seen it, no one can say anything about it, no one can piss in it.”

Hold on to the first draft of your script as well as all notes you may have taken in longhand
.

Y
ou never know. Most scripts will rot away in storage somewhere, but …

I still have my rough draft of
Basic Instinct
, written on my manual typewriter and entitled
Love Hurts
, with notes to myself (in the second draft) in the margins.

Last year, a French movie memorabilia freak who loved the film offered me
500,000 for it. I turned him down. I figure that by the time my grandchildren sell it, it well be worth more than the
3 million I got for writing it.