The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (51 page)

No, Jeffrey. You
should
fight it. You should write the person who sent you the notes a memo, pointing out how stupid, insipid, and benighted his or her ideas are. You should point this out at length and in great detail. And you should send a copy to all the other executives, the producer, and the director.

Your movie has been cast and shooting has begun. They want you to go to the set. What do you do?

H
ell no, don’t go.

Screenwriter John Gregory Dunne: “I think the writer’s presence on the set is just another element in what is often a volatile mix. Tension is the given of a movie, and it has less to do with ego than with the intensity of short-term relationships, a lifetime lived in a seventy-day shoot; if there are location romances, there are also equally irrational location hatreds. If the writer is hanging around, actors ask for a script fix, or why a speech from draft eight can not be substituted for the one in the scene just setting up. I also never speak to a star actor on a set unless spoken to first; this is the actor’s office and in his office he or she sets the rules.”

In my own experience, everyone will come up to you and present some dumb-ass idea to incorporate into the next scene.

If an actor is having a problem with the director, he’ll try to get even with the director by sucking up to you and trying to get you to take a position against the director.

If the director is having trouble with an actor, he’ll recruit you to talk the actor into doing the scene his way, not the actor’s.

The actor Peter Lawford saw that Dalton Trumbo was on the set of
Exodus
, the script of which Trumbo had written. He went over to Trumbo and asked if he could discuss his character with him.

Otto Preminger, the director, saw Lawford huddled with Trumbo and yelled to Lawford, “You are not to discuss the script with Mr. Trumbo. He is here as a guest and not as a writer.”

Lawford said, “Yes, Mr. Preminger,” and hurried away from Trumbo.

Don’t get too excited watching your film’s dailies
.

S
am Goldwyn said, “If everyone likes the dailies, the picture’s gonna stink.”

Try to get videotaped copies of the dailies of your film
.

D
o this for posterity, of course, and also for eBay, if times get tough in the future.

I’ve got all the dailies of
Sliver
, including three full tapes of Sharon and Billy “rutting,” as Robert Evans, the producer, termed it.

“They’re like horses at each other” was the way Evans described it.

Anybody interested?

Steal as much memorabilia from the set as you can
.

E
verybody does it. If you don’t do it, the director will.

Dick Donner has a house in Montana furnished mostly with props and sets from his movies. I visited Steven Spielberg’s house in the Palisades years ago and it was filled with what he called “toys” from his sets.

A friend of mine stole the real ice pick from
Basic Instinct
(Planet Hollywood was displaying a phony one for a while), and someone stole my old Royal typewriter—the typewriter I’d actually used to write the script and which also had a cameo in the film—from the
Jagged Edge
set.

The Theory of Creative Conflict

As defined by producer Sam Spiegel: “Films that run smoothly are colorless—only those which are produced in strife have an outstanding merit.”

A Production Fuck

An affair that lasts only as long as the shoot.

You can make sure your film will be distributed
.

A
fraid that Disney wouldn’t release
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
, I was ready to show it myself in church halls and school cafeterias.

So I had a copy of the negative illicitly duped, and then I
stole it
(a federal offense)!

I still have it in a closet in the baby’s room, hidden underneath a big box of old toys.

Sit in the back row at a studio screening of the rough cut
.

J
ohn Gregory Dunne: “Don DeLine, the head of production, was sitting directly behind us, and I wished we were sitting behind him so that we could measure his reaction, see where he took notes.”

If the Writers Guild arbitrates your screen credit
…

R
emember that the Writers Guild committee that will decide whether to award you screen credit (and more money) is made up of people like you—writers who want credit (and more money) on their writing projects.

The people on this committee
want
to award you the credit, so make it easy for them. Give them a lengthy, scholarly, lawyerly document pointing to all your plot, character, and name changes—and be sure to use a lot of yellow Magic Markers.

I know a screenwriter who, in an effort to get screen credit, sent the Guild committee a document that was longer than his script.

You might have to stand in line to get your screen credit
.

J
ohn Gregory Dunne: “Prevailing industry wisdom is that the more writers there are on a script, the better that script will be. On our version of
A Star Is Born
, eight of the thirteen writers who actually worked on the script filed for credit.

Scratch and claw for your credit
.

S
creenwriter Budd Schulberg: “The billing on
On the Waterfront
soured the sweet taste of all of it for me. There was Sam Spiegel’s billing twice as big as life, while the name of the writer, and in this case the originator of the project as well, is either left out entirely or reduced to almost ridiculous minuteness.”

Your director will try to screw you with your screen credit
.

T
wo easy and common ways:

1. Your name as screenwriter stays up on-screen for three seconds; the director’s name stays on-screen for eight seconds.
   
2. Your name on-screen—in black letters—is against a black background, so the audience can hardly make it out. The director’s name—also in black letters—is against a crisp white background, so it is glaringly visible.
   

If the movie has little to do with the script that you wrote, take your name off of it
.

U
nless you want to paint the scarlet letter on yourself, don’t let your name be on something that isn’t yours.

I realize giving up the credit may cost you money, but I argue that you will damage yourself more by feeling like a hypocrite or a hooker.

When I saw the final cut of
Nowhere to Run
(starring Jean Claude Van Damme), which was based on my script
Pals
, I didn’t recognize it as mine. I told the studio I wanted my name off of it.

The studio said no. They wanted to use my name in the trailers for the movie, running the line “from the writer of
Basic Instinct
, Joe Eszterhas.”

I went to the Writers Guild and demanded that my name be taken off, but the Guild said I couldn’t do it—I’d been paid too much money by the studio.

So I petitioned the Guild to give credit to the two guys who’d rewritten me, as well. I was told that it was the first time in Guild history that a writer had petitioned for credit for his “competing” cowriters.

The two guys who had rewritten me got credit behind me, and that way, at least, I was able to spread the blame for the mess that was on-screen.

If they ask you how you like the movie you wrote, tell ’em the truth
.

D
irector Joseph von Sternberg: “When he saw the movie he wrote and I directed, Ben Hecht told the press that he was about to vomit, his exact words being—‘I must rush home at once, I think it’s mal de mer.’ ”

Try to find something positive to say about your film
.

S
haron Stone, after the release of
Basic Instinct
: “At least it proves I’m a natural blonde.”

You might have to drink whiskey from a vase
.

I
f you’re attending the first screening of the film and you wrote the script, that is.

Tennessee Williams, attending the first screening of his film
Suddenly Last Summer
, drank whiskey from a vase and muttered, “Who wrote this shit?”

Watching your movie might hurt
.

J
im Harrison: “Sitting there in the dark before the projector starts you have the distinct feeling you might be raped by an elephant or, if your imagination is running to the sea, a whale.”

Don’t tell your friends when or where your movie will be screened
.

A
ctor/producer Danny DeVito: “I’ve heard stories where people have actually paid other people to call newspapers and say they’ve seen screenings of movies that were bad—just because they wanted to sabotage the movie. That happens all the time.”

Do whatever you can to stop the studio from market-researching your film
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce: “Then we did the first screening for a recruited audience on the lot at Paramount, as was customary for a Paramount film. The guys from a company called National Research Group, run by Joseph Farrell, would go out to malls and cinemas and recruit an audience for these previews. In Los Angeles people are pretty used to being invited. It’s a way of getting the lowdown on films many, many months before their release, and, in a town devoted to the entertainment industry, it’s also become a way for the ordinary man and woman to have their say.
They can become not just a film critic but a film executive
. The tick of their pen, the cross of their pencil, can decide the fate of the movie they’re judging. The preview audience’s power has been further increased since the late 1990s by advance reviews appearing on Internet sites such as ‘Ain’t It Cool.’”