The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (73 page)

G
eorge C. Scott (
Patton, The Hospital
): “I’ve always been mellow. I have been the most mellow son of a bitch you’ve ever seen.”

Actors will do anything to upstage one another
.

Z
ero Mostel always ate a big dish of black beans and onions before the premiere of a play he was appearing in. He did that so he could fart easier (and louder and smellier) to distract the other actors.

Actors can be cheap
.

T
wo actors I’ve worked with—Ryan O’Neal and Maximilian Schell—
took
all the clothes that they wore in the film they had just finished shooting.

Ryan O’Neal left the set so quickly with his new Armani suit that he had to be chased across town to bring it back—Arthur Hiller, the director, wanted to do another take.

Actors can be pissy
.

T
his is especially true on a set, where they’re pumped full of diuretics like Diazide, which make them go to the bathroom three times an hour (that would make anyone irritable).

They take the pills to look lean and hollowed out for the camera. Some actors—like Jeff Bridges and Michael Douglas—put twenty pounds on between movies and have to go on a rigid crash diet before the shoot. And
then
they have to gobble their piss pills on the set.

To Do a Pee-Wee

To be caught in a dark place playing with it.

Actors are somewhat competitive
.

A
nna Magnani watched Marilyn Monroe accept a prize from the Italian industry and yelled this from the audience: “
Putana!
” (Whore!)

They’re so worried about wrinkles
.

W
hen Marilyn Monroe died, hair designer Sydney Guilaroff, one of her best friends, said, “I’m glad she died young. She could never have stood getting a wrinkle on her face. All she had was her beauty.”

H
OLLYWOOD PARABLE

Dr. Haing S. Ngor worked as a gynecologist in Cambodia. When the Communists took over the government, he and his wife were taken to a prison camp as slave laborers
.

He was crucified in the camps and had part of his right little finger chopped off. His wife, pregnant with his child, was beaten to death
.

He escaped to a Thai refugee camp. The director Roland Joffe met him and asked him to play a lead part in his film
The Killing Fields.
He agreed to do the part only because he had promised his wife that he would do his best to tell the world of the horrors that had taken place in Cambodia
.

He received a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for his performance, the first nonprofessional actor in nearly fifty years to win the Oscar. He played other roles in film and television but spent much of his time involved in Cambodian relief efforts
.

In February 1996, he was standing in the driveway of his Los Angeles apartment when he was shot to death by three young men. They were members of the Oriental Lazy Boyz street gang and were trying to rob Dr. Ngor
.

He resisted. He didn’t want to give them the locket around his neck. Inside it was a photograph of his dead wife
.

If an actor has good lines, you’d better believe that he improvised them
.

D
irector Richard Marquand and I loved Robert Loggia’s performance in
Jagged Edge
because he was the ultimate pro. He hit all his marks, said all his lines, never asked a question about his character’s motivation, and never improvised.

When the movie became a big hit, Bob Loggia told his many interviewers that he had improvised
most
of his lines.

He stopped saying it when Richard told him that if he said it one more time, “I’m going to tell the press that you’re a bloody bald-faced liar.”

Robert Loggia was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in
Jagged Edge
. He thanked neither me nor Richard.

In the beginning was the word
.

A
ctor Chris Cooper (
Adaptation
): “Last night I tried to make a little bit of a joke at the very opening of a speech. I’m a guy that always needs a script. I can’t talk off the cuff and be witty.”

Who do you want me to be?

A
ctor John C. Reilly (
Chicago, Gangs of New York
): “I don’t know who I am unless you tell me who I am—or who you want me to be. I’m still figuring out who I am, you know?”

Sometimes it’s up to you to convince an actor to take the part
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce (
Sliver
) describes a meeting he and I had with Sharon Stone to convince her to take the part of Carly Norris in
Sliver
: “On that occasion, which was quite tense going in, Sharon asked Joe if he’d like a massage. … It’s true that I stopped talking. But not because I was sexually moved by the sight of a fifty-year-old man lying on the floor moaning as Sharon Stone was massaging him while sitting astride him. I stopped talking simply because he was so grotesque in the sounds he was making that it seemed ridiculous to continue trying to convince Sharon to do the part. And so I stopped talking and let the two of them play with each other on the floor. After massaging Joe, Sharon agreed to take the part of Carly.”

If you have actor friends, try to get them to do a reading of your script
.

S
creenwriter Nicholas Kazan: “A reading won’t always validate the writer’s view … and that’s its beauty. It simply exposes the text, usually revealing problems of some sort.”

You don’t want Edward Norton starring in your movie
.

H
e was so disgusted by the quality of the scripts he was getting that he took Robert McKee’s course, too, and he now
rewrites all the scripts he agrees to act in
.

Since he is a star, directors and studio execs try to flatter him into starring in their film by letting him do whatever he likes to the screenplay.

Try to stop Dustin Hoffman from being cast in your film
.

D
usty is a huge fan of improvising a script. He will take a scene in the script that takes a minute and use it as a basis of improvisation with the other actors. They’ll improvise for a half hour and then ask the writer to rewrite it in a way that they discovered while they were improvising.

Penis Extension

A Robert Evans phrase for a male star with “eruptability and swagger.”

If Warren Beatty has anything to do with your film, stop working on it
.

T
he joke in Hollywood is that Beatty, the great auteur, can turn a “go” movie into a development deal.

He’ll get involved, work with six writers, rewriting your script, then
pull out of the project
.

He wanted to play the lead in my film
Jade
, but the director knew that if Beatty got involved, he (the director) would be out of a job. So he blocked Beatty from getting involved by making sure the studio didn’t make Beatty’s very expensive deal. The way he made sure of that was by discussing it with his wife, who ran the studio.

The director was Billy Friedkin, his wife Sherry Lansing.

Beware the unprepared actor; he could give you the performance of a lifetime
.

M
arlon Brando arrived on the set of
Apocalypse Now
without having read either the script or the novel on which it was based. He was so overweight that he could be shot only from the neck up.

Oh, but to be a star
.

H
edy Lamarr: “To be a star is to own the world and all the people in it. A star can have anything: if there’s something she can’t buy, there’s always a man to give it to her. Everybody adores a star. Strangers fight just to approach her. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.”

If an actor is looking for you
, run!

K
eanu Reeves was looking for a writer on the Academy Awards show.

“You’re one of the writers, right?” he said to Bruce Vilanch, holding a script.

“This is really important. In this line ‘This shocking, brutal, hilarious adventure is called
Pulp Fiction
.’”

Keanu looked at Vilanch.

Vilanch said, “So?”

Keanu said, “I want to change it.”

Vilanch said, “You want to change it?”

Keanu said, “Yeah.”

Vilanch said, “What do you want to change it to?”

Keanu said, “Can I say ‘entitled’ instead of ‘called’? ‘Entitled
Pulp Fiction
.’ ”

Vilanch said, “I don’t see why not.”

Keanu said, “Okay, good.”

Maybe you can learn to eat glass
.

A
gent Swifty Lazar: “One night a well-respected French writer named Joseph Kissel was a guest at the home of Lewis Milestone, a fine director who did
All Quiet on the Western Front
. Kissel, a monster of a man, had mastered the art of eating glass.