The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (46 page)

W
hen I was in a public battle with agent Michael Ovitz—and he was denying the threats he had made to destroy my career—I asked the Writers Guild for support.

The Writers Guild issued a statement saying that “if Ovitz did the things Eszterhas alleges,” he was wrong.

In other words, instead of supporting me, the Writers Guild was publicly questioning my integrity. And, of course, they launched no investigation of Ovitz or agency tactics.

The president of the Writers Guild at the time was George Kirgo, a television writer represented by the Creative Artists Agency, headed by Ovitz.

We’ll Kill for You!

The sentence with which superagent Michael Ovitz concluded his pitches to prospective clients.

I tried that same phrase out on a literary agent who wanted to represent the books I wrote. “I want you,” I said, “
to kill for me
!”

The agent, Ed Victor, urbane, sophisticated, and very
literary
(he lives in London) blanched, and looked like he was having cardiac arrhythmia.

This is the agent you need
.

G
eorge Shapiro, a William Morris agent, had his assistant answer the phone by saying, “George Shapiro’s office—kill for the love of killing.”

Most agents don’t read books
.

W
hen Julius Caesar Stein was running MCA, the superagency of its day, he decorated the building with antiques he bought in England.

The bookcases he bought needed books, so he bought roomfuls of leather-covered books he called “furniture books.”

No one who worked at MCA ever read the leather-covered books, but Tennessee Williams, who was represented by MCA, told his friends, “If you’re ever in the building, take five or six books. They’ll never miss them.”

Your agent can screw up
.

A
gent Swifty Lazar: “When I sold
Rich Man, Poor Man
, I made a great mistake—and, over time, it cost me my friendship with Irwin Shaw [the author]. The lowliest writer who sells his book to television gets, by union contract, at least a guaranteed minimum for repeat showings and spin-offs. In Irwin’s contract, there was no such provision. I know what I was thinking—I’d had such a struggle selling it that I believed it would never get beyond the option stage—but I should have protected Irwin better. I had no excuse.”

It’s okay to fire your agent
.

S
ean Penn: “Changing agents is like changing lounge chairs on the deck of the
Titanic
.”

If you make it big, you don’t have to return your agent’s call
.

S
ydney Pollack on not returning agent Michael Ovitz’s calls: “Sometimes I didn’t take his calls. And he would say, when I finally did, ‘Did you get my message? You didn’t return my call.’ And I would tell him, ‘I didn’t return your call, Michael, because there’s nothing to say. All you want to say to me is, ‘I’m just checking in.’ ”

If you’re angry at your agent
.

D
irector Sam Peckinpah liked to get drunk and then hurl knives at a dartboard. He’d ask his agent over sometimes to hold the dartboard.

If you’re successful enough, your agent will clean up the poo-poo
.

M
ae West told her agent, my fellow Hungarian Johnny Hyde, who would later make love to Marilyn Monroe, to clean up the poo-poo whenever her pet chimp had diarrhea.

I told that story to one of my agents, and she said, “That’s what we do all right; we work with chimps and clean up their poo-poo.”

But it might be smarter if
you
clean up the poo-poo
.

T
oday’s agent might be tomorrow’s producer and next month’s studio head.

Mike Medavoy: “In the entertainment industry, people change jobs faster than they change cars, girlfriends, clothes, sometimes even underwear.”

Underwear?

If your agent dies, forget about him
.

A
gent mogul Julius Caesar Stein of MCA asked in his will that his clients Benny Goodman and Dinah Shore perform at his funeral.

When Stein died, both Goodman and Shore declined, citing previous commitments.

PART SIX

F
ILMING THE
S
CRIPT

LESSON 11

Steal As Much Memorabilia from the
Set As You Can!

Your new agent has submitted your script to a studio. He tells you that a “studio reader” is reading it. Who is a studio reader?

T
he studio reader who first gets your script and either recommends it or not to the studio execs is your worst enemy.

This person is a wannabe screenwriter trying desperately to break into the business. He wants to shout out his own erudition and cinematic skills by impressing the studio execs—by deconstructing, castrating, disemboweling
your
script—and telling the execs how
he
could and would make it better.

Few readers ever
praise
a script, because they know that very few scripts ever become hit movies. They don’t want to put their own pimply, pale skinnies on the line in support of a script that will probably never be made and would probably be a disaster even if it were made.

When I auctioned the script of
Basic Instinct
, a reader at Warner Bros. trashed the script and advised the studio not to bid on it. When the studio discovered a few hours later that everyone else in town was bidding on it, the Warner’s executives decided to bid on it, too, although they hadn’t read it and their reader had advised against it. The reason, of course, was that they figured if
everyone else
was bidding to buy it, the script
had to be good
and their loser reader/wannabe screenwriter
had to be wrong
.

The execs could have shut themselves off in their offices and read the script; it would have taken them an hour to two (even if they moved their lips while reading).

But since they all hated to read, they didn’t read it; they just automatically
bid on it
. They ultimately bid
2.5 million; it sold for
3 million. And when the auction was over, they fired their reader/wannabe screenwriter for making an obviously bad call.