The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (78 page)

B
ogart once said to his cinematographer, “I like my lines and wrinkles, so don’t try and light them out and make me look like a goddamn fag.”

Dustpan is a hypocrite
.

H
e starred in
Straw Dogs
, one of the bloodiest of all the films directed by Sam Peckinpah. Years later, he first turned down
Captain Hook
, the Peter Pan remake to be directed by Steven Spielberg, because, as Dusty’s agent said, “The script is too violent.”

Montgomery Clift in
The Bridge on the River Kwai …

P
roducer Sam Spiegel was interested in casting Montgomery Clift in
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. He asked him to dinner in New York.

Clift arrived sky-high on pills. He would say things out of the blue, like “The sky is blue.” He ordered a martini and then ordered two more. He ordered both steak and lamb chops—rare. He ate the steak and the chops and spit meat and blood all over the table. Then he lay down in the booth and went to sleep.

The producer changed his mind about casting him.

Only if it’s a real honker
…

W
hile nose jobs hurt the careers of Jennifer Grey, Carol Burnett, and Roy Scheider, Peter O’Toole had such a beak of a nose that he would always have been a character actor without surgery.

Brando was stupid
.

B
rando not only sold off his gross points in
The Godfather
for
100,000 but then asked for
100,000 to attend the twenty-fifth-anniversary party of
The Godfather
’s release.

He didn’t get it and didn’t go. He would have received at least
8 million had he not sold his gross points.

Kate Nelligan was too smart
.

S
creenwriter/playwright Harold Pinter: “The porter called to say that a young actress named Kate Nelligan was on the way up to meet us and I can always remember Mike Nichols saying ‘I feel sorry for young actresses. Can you imagine coming up to meet Sam Spiegel, Harold Pinter, and me—it must be terrifying.’ And the next thing we knew, she walked into the room and took us to the cleaners. She was totally self-possessed, absolutely on top of everything, and made us feel that we didn’t know what we were doing.
She didn’t get the part because of that
.”

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

Zsa Zsa killed Clark Gable.

Zsa says that Clark’s favorite food in the whole world was the artery-busting Hungarian favorite
kolbasz,
smoked and dried sausage
.

She introduced Clark to it and he loved it so much that she would take a bunch of it over to his house each week—even the week that he died of a massive heart attack
.

Elizabeth Taylor killed his dream
.

R
ichard Burton, who said he was “a pockmarked boyo from Wales,” didn’t want to be an actor. He said he should have been a coal miner.

His dream was to own a big house filled with books and little else. He wanted to spend his life reading his books.

The Italian dwarf, movie star
…

H
e is the actor whom Paramount executives referred to as “that Italian dwarf” before they cast him in
The Godfather
.

George C. Scott was George Lincoln Rockwell
.

G
eorge C. Scott hated black people so much that
Islands in the Stream
had to be shot in Hawaii, on Kauai, where there were no black people—so Scott wouldn’t get into trouble in the bars at night.

The few blacks necessary for scenes in the movie, set in the Caribbean, had to be flown in.

Vacuum the Dustpan
.

D
usty went to story meetings for years with his own personal “dramaturge”—the playwright Murray Schisgal. Dusty wanted screenwriters he was working with to “work with Murray” as they wrote their scripts.

After they had worked with Murray and the script was finished, Dusty often brought in another personal pet writer just to rewrite his character’s dialogue—that’s how Malia Scotch Marmo wound up getting a shared screenplay credit on
Hook
.

The moral of the story: After Dusty and Murray and Malia are done with you, you might not recognize your own script.

Kim Novak almost killed Sammy Davis, Jr
.

C
olumbia studio czar Harry Cohn once asked mobster Mickey Cohen to kill Sammy Davis, Jr., because Sammy was having an affair with Columbia star Kim Novak.

Cohn worried that if the affair became public, Novak’s career would be finished.

Drew’s father was an actor, too
.

A
ctress Drew Barrymore: “My father said, ‘Hey, Drew, you want to give me an autograph, too? How about putting it on a check?’ ”

David Caruso sleeps with a mirror
.

M
y lead actor in
Jade
, David Caruso, said, “I’m nowhere near as sexy as I come off on-camera. Film just loves me.”

Sandra Bernhard defines whores
.

I
cast her in
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
. I think she’s a brilliant actress.

She once said, “I find people in the porn world are very lively and animated. So what if they screw for a living? I like a lot of them better than the actors in Hollywood—who are the real whores, to be perfectly honest with you.”

I wonder if Grace Kelly ever slept with Joe Mankiewicz
.

G
ary Cooper told friends that Grace Kelly liked going to bed wearing nothing but white gloves.

Coop said, “She gave the impression that she could be a cold dish until you got her in bed … then she could really explode.”

Tim Robbins is full of … himself
.

A
ctor Tim Robbins: “The best directors I’ve worked with would never consider themselves auteurs or experts or anything. Those experiences taught me that the open ear, the open mind, the open heart can produce such great work from the actor. If an actor comes on the set and the director is viewing themself [sic] as the person who knows everything, the person that has all the answers, then you’re not going to create an organic performance. You’re going to create someone’s idea of a performance. And the really great directors know that and are able to inspire their actors to create by giving them a confidence in themselves and a worth in themselves. Then actors feel like they belong there. They feel like they are contributing something significant, that they aren’t just saying lines, that they are bringing who they are as people to the project and are fully appreciated for that.”

A Quality of Eruptibility

Absolutely necessary for a lead male part, making every female viewer believe that the actor playing the part would go to bed with her.

A Quality of Availability

Absolutely necessary for a lead feminine part, making every male viewer believe he could bed the starlet playing the part.