The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (84 page)

The definition of Hollywood burnout. For example
:

The writer who has writer’s block.

The director who wants to himself rewrite the script.

The studio head who is afraid to say yes or no to a movie.

The agent who drives out to Joshua Tree in his new Porsche and sits in the car for three days drinking vodka and popping pills, watching the sunsets and sunrises.

The superstar actor who becomes a shoemaker’s apprentice in Italy.

The actress who gets a nose job that ruins her career.

The producer who decides, at the age of sixty-two, that he’s gay.

There are a thousand other symptoms of the same malaise.

The only cure?
Get the hell outta Dodge—now
!

If you get discouraged
…

R
emember that when a screenwriter changed the title to something else, put his own name on it, and sent it to most of the production entities in Hollywood, there were no takers.

The original title of that script was
Casablanca
.

If you can’t sell your script, enter the competitions
.

S
ome agents read the scripts of competition winners and some producers assign readers to the winners’ scripts, too.

There seem to be more and more of these competitions each year, but some of the more established ones are the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, the Chesterfield Film Company’s Writer’s Film Project, and the Writer’s Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition. Check the Internet for others.

If things go bad screenwriting, you can always try to write a novel
.

T
here is no director, producer, star, or studio head to work with. You will get no “notes” from anyone. You will have an editor who will make “suggestions” to you. You can take those suggestions or leave them. No writer will replace you if you leave the publisher. You’ll be paid whether you listen to the suggestions or not.

Sounds like bliss, right?

You can free yourself by writing a novel
.

S
creenwriter/director/novelist John Sayles (
Matewan
): “There’s a basic structure to movies. It’s rigid and reductive. In a movie, you only deal with core relationships: a protagonist, an antagonist. But in a novel you can do whatever you want. You can introduce characters that disappear for a hundred pages, you can have a dozen plot lines that interweave and overlap. In a novel, you get to be God. That doesn’t happen in the movies.”

Steven Bochco thinks writing a novel is fun
.

B
ochco (
Hill Street Blues, Death by Hollywood
): “Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can’t really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience. Once you have your map, once you know your final destination, you can take all these pit stops along the way. You can take side trips and digress, riff on something and come back to the main road. It’s so much fun.”

If you write a novel, you gotta go platinum or else
.

J
ohn Sayles: “Getting a second novel published is even harder than getting a first novel published. It’s no longer enough to be a good writer; now you have to be a good writer whose first book went platinum.”

It isn’t bliss
.

P
ublishing isn’t what it once was. By their preorders, booksellers determine how many copies of a book a publisher will print.

In film terms, that’s letting the exhibitors, the individual theater owners, determine how many prints a studio will make.

If you’re already writing your novel
…

R
emember that booksellers have so much power that they can determine the jacket of your book. This is what often happens when Barnes & Noble doesn’t like a cover. The publisher prints up a new one.

Another reason not to write novels
…

O
ne time when Irish author Carlo Gébler was doing a book reading, a group of drunken students in the audience started fighting.

“Do you want me to finish?” he asked.

“Not really,” someone yelled.

Carl Hiaasen, my favorite mystery novelist, went to a book reading in Arkansas and discovered that an Arkansas Razorbacks game was taking place at the same time. He did his book reading for the few book salesmen who showed up.

Novelist William Trevor went to a reading, found no one there, and read for the cabdriver who’d brought him. He discovered after he finished reading that his cabbie had charged him for his reading time.

You might want to try gay porn
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Gigi Grazer (
Stepmom
,
The Starter Wife
): “Writers, or any artists, should constantly be reinventing themselves, whatever that means—plays to screenplays to novels and back again, or second wife to mistress to third wife to gay porn, whatever works. Life feeds us. If we stagnate, there is no material.”

Be proud of being a screenwriter
.

D
on’t take any shit from anyone who asks you why, if you’re so unhappy being a screenwriter, you’re not writing novels instead.

Paddy Chayefsky: “I consider writing novels déclassé. After all, drama has been around since the Orphic rites; the novel has been around only since Cervantes or thereabouts.”

If you wind up writing television because you can’t get a film job
…

Y
ou’re in good company.

David O. Selznick, the greatest creative producer in the history of Hollywood, wound up working in TV after he went broke.

If you can’t write screenplays, then take over the studio
.

T
hat’s what the legendary studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck did.

When he began his career, he was a screenwriter on the Warner Bros. payroll, making a hundred dollars a week.

If you can’t make it as a screenwriter, there’s still hope
.

I
f you’re Tom Cruise or Jack Nicholson or Barbra—one of
those
people—what are you supposed to do? Stand out there on the side of the road on the 405 or I-10 and change the tire?

Yourself? Getting your hands dirty
? Dirtying your new Gucci embroidered jeans?

That’s what gave my friend Hank an idea. He had been writing and trying to sell screenplays for eight years, without success. One year, he even slept in his car; his office was the Kinko’s on Lincoln Avenue.

Then, one beautiful socked-in L.A. day, he was driving along the 405 in his beater and there was a brother standing on the side of the road next to a Rolls-Royce. Hank saw that it was Eddie Murphy, and that got him thinking.

Hank had a friend who had a friend who was an accountant for people like Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss and a lot of other big-time directors and producers. He went to his friend, who went to
his
friend, the accountant, and got Hank an appointment with him. And the accountant
loved
Hank’s idea.

The accountant gave Hank’s number to all of his clients and the clients gave his number to big-shot friends of theirs, and pretty soon Hank’s phone started to ring.

If they needed to take any of their cars (some had six or seven) to be serviced, Hank took it for them—drove it there, had the work done, and drove it back home for them.

If they broke down on the road, or had any other difficulty, Hank drove to the scene, fixed the car if he could, or drove it to the shop if he couldn’t and then waited with them while the limo he had called for them arrived.

Hank has a staff of four now. As a sideline, he’s starting his own limo company. A good-looking guy, he’s even dating a couple of his clients, sometimes even showing them one of his scripts.

You don’t want to die like Clifford Odets did
.

T
he world-acclaimed playwright was employed as a segment writer for the television show
Paladin
, starring Richard Boone, when he died of cancer at age fifty-seven.

A friend said, “He was miserable out there. All of his dreams were of escaping from it, of writing plays and coming back to the theater. He never made peace with his defeat.”

Go get some rhinoplasties
.

T
revor Mills, a screenwriter who lives in Austin, Texas, couldn’t sell a script, so he spent nine thousand dollars on a chin implant and two rhinoplasties to make himself look like Keanu Reeves.

He still couldn’t sell a script after his surgeries, but he was thinking about studying acting.

Jim Harrison wants to be Jack Nicholson
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison was on a Mediterranean cruise with Jack Nicholson. Harrison said later, “It would be a tiny port and there would be all these women screaming ‘Fuck me, Jack! I love you, Jack! I’m yours, Jack!’ I remember thinking, What does that do to your head?”

Kevin Costner does Jim Harrison a favor
.

J
im Harrison and Kevin Costner were sitting together in a bar. Jim pointed out to Kevin after their third beer that Kevin had gotten a dozen notes from ladies in the bar and that he had gotten none.

To make him feel better, Kevin offered to give Jim some of his notes.

Your teeth can be discolored and you can still score big-time
.

P
addy Chayefsky, by all accounts, was a singularly unhandsome man—small, overweight, his teeth discolored, his hair balding. He usually reeked of tobacco and garlic. Yet he got the sex symbol of his age to go to bed with him.

Does anybody think that had a little to do with the quality of his writing?

I don’t flatter myself, either. In the period of my life when I bedded the sex symbol of my age, I, too, was an unhandsome man—overweight, my teeth discolored, my hair down to my butt. I usually reeked of tobacco, garlic, and alcohol. And yet the sex symbol of my age slept with me, too.

If you keep writing, if you don’t give up, then you, too, can follow in our footsteps.

Billy Wilder was a gigolo
.

I
f you can’t sell your script, maybe you can sell yourself.

That’s what Billy Wilder did when he couldn’t sell his scripts in Berlin. He became a gigolo.

If you get discouraged
…

P
addy Chayefsky said, “In spite of everything, screenwriting is better than threading pipe.”

You don’t want to get old in Hollywood
.

B
ert Fields, one of the most powerful attorneys in Hollywood, wrote this in a short story entitled
The Heart of the Matter
: “On his sixty-fifth birthday, the actor sits alone on his terrace finishing a bottle of Cristal. The city lights stretch out before him. Millions of homes, millions of families. Husbands coming home to wives, kids, even dogs. He’s got his butler … and sometimes his lawyer. His agent has died. It doesn’t matter. No scripts come in anyway. He shakes his head, smiling sadly … remembering. He wonders whatever happened to his wife. He feels the need for people, noise, something. He dials his lawyer, gets an answering machine. He dials his favorite restaurant. They’re fully booked. For a few minutes, he stares out at the city. Then he rises slowly from the chair, blows a kiss to the lights, and climbs the stairs to the bedroom, where the .38 special lies waiting in the drawer.”

Unless you’re Clint Eastwood (who’s Marilyn in drag)
…

C
lint: “Some people glow really early, in their twenties and thirties, then in their fifties they are not doing as much. But I feel that growing up and maturing, constantly maturing—aging is the impolite way of saying it—I like to think there is an expansion going on philosophically.”