The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (86 page)

I have been to every focus-group preview of my films, flying on the corporate jet along with the director, the producer, studio people, and sometimes even the star to sneaks in Chicago; Paramus, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Kansas City, Missouri.

Why does the studio ask me to participate in these things while shutting out Bill Goldman?

One reason may be that everyone involved with the films knows that I care passionately about them—I am not already thinking about THE NEXT JOB (Bill’s caps).

Another reason may be that everyone knows I’m perfectly capable of badmouthing the movie publicly—and getting lots of media attention—if I’m shut out of the process.

Keep on writing and writing
.

S
creenwriter Dan Harris (
Imaginary Heroes
): “Life is hard, and it often pulls no punches. Sometimes when you think it cannot get any worse, it does. Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel dies just as you approach it. But sometimes there is healing in catastrophe. Sometimes people are given a second chance.”

Don’t let the bastards get you down
.

P
addy Chayefsky, in a letter to a friend: “I’m out here in California trying to make a movie, which has been a horror show from the beginning. We started shooting the fucker last Friday, and the director not only has turned out to be a monster, but a monster with not enough talent to make it worthwhile. Man, I’m tired of battling. I truly am.”

You have to be the toughest person in the world
.

S
creenwriter/director Ron Shelton: “You have to be the toughest person in the world. If writers take the passive role, they become victims. I tell writer’s groups—don’t complain. If you’re good enough at your work and your craft, get a lot tougher. You have to be ruthless. Writers aren’t tough enough.”

Don’ let anyone walk over you
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “I have fought many hard battles in my life and I never found that there was any way to fight them except directly, accepting the risks, knowing that all I had to fight with was my brain and my courage, and that I could easily lose against much more powerful people than myself. But I did not become one of the three or four highest-paid writers in Hollywood by letting anyone walk over me.”

Write messages from your soul
.

W
riter/producer William Froug: “In the final analysis of our lives, as well as our writing, what else do we really have to listen to but the messages from our own souls, psyches, guts, instincts, muses, whatever you call it? This is where our personal truth, our themes, our creativity lies. The writers who fearlessly kept writing what they truly believed, in my experience, are the ones who have gone on to the greater glory—not merely money or fame, but something far more basic: inner peace and genuine fulfillment.”

Go see your movie in your neighborhood theater
.

C
olumbia Tristar once released a film nationally—
The Bloodhounds of Broadway
—with a whole reel missing from it. No one noticed.

Develop a short memory
.

P
roducer Ben Hecht: “They can screw you, and you can screw them, but if you want to keep on working, both of you need a short memory.”

You can make God smile
.

D
alton Trumbo: “Once in a while when God smiles and the table is tilted just slightly in our favor, something happens. It comes from inside and reveals what we really are.”

Just keep writing
.

A
nd writing and writing … and if you are good to your fellow humans and if God smiles, the day will come when you are writing something and
you
will stop and smile and jump up and down because it is working, because you know that what you are writing is
good
!

But until that magical sun-kissed moment comes, hang in there and
just keep fucking writing
!

Keep writing even if you’re hurling
.

F
or the first couple of years that I wrote screenplays, I was so nervous about what I was doing that I threw up before I began writing each morning.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s much better than reading what you’ve written at the
end
of the day and throwing up.

P
ERK OF SUCCESS: FEAR

My biggest fear
…

After thirty years of writing scripts, it’s a fear that I know you don’t have, thank God
.

I can’t operate a computer. Oh hell, I can’t even work an electric typewriter—I hit the keys too damn hard
.

I’m a two-finger typist and I slam away at my manual Olivetti with both middle fingers (a lot of critics have made too much about the significance of writing with my two
middle
fingers, thank you)
.

The trouble is that one of these days they’re going to stop making Olivetti manual typewriters. The only reason they still make them is because there’s a big market for them in retirement communities
.

Well hell, I don’t live in a retirement community. I’ve got four boys under the age of ten, for Christ’s sake. And I’ve got a lot of script and book ideas for the future
.

So what’s going to happen to me when Olivetti manuals become obsolete? Well, I have ten brand-new (still in the box) Olivetti manual typewriters in my closet, ready to go. But they’re made in all kinds of Third World places (like Hungary) and sometimes I beat these machines to death in a matter of months with my slamming middle fingers
.

And, get this: I discovered recently that they have already stopped making Olivetti ribbons for manual typewriters. Naomi has patiently hunted the Internet and we now have sixty-three new Olivetti ribbons in the closet with the ten machines
.

But what happens when I’ve killed all the machines or used up all the ribbons for the machines? Do I then have to learn how to use a word processor or the dreaded computer?

Or do I hang it up and say God (and all my critics) has silenced me?

I tell you this story to put all
your
fears into perspective. All you have to do is write your script. All you
really
have to do is write the first page of your script, because then you’ll already be rolling
.

I have to figure out
my entire future!

No matter what, try to be optimistic
.

S
creenwriter William Faulkner said, “You have to live so that you can die.”

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

“If you get depressed,” said my Hungarian compatriot Zsa Zsa Gabor, “take a bath and wash your hair.”

Don’t give up
.

P
addy Chayefsky’s mother said to him, “Listen, you want to be a writer, you’ve got to write. You submit, and they’ll reject. But you’ve got to keep writing.”

Don’t ever give up on selling your script
.

W
arren Beatty said this about trying to bed every woman that he met: “You get slapped a lot, but you get fucked sometimes, too.”

You’ve still gotta believe in happy endings
.

W
hen he was an old man, several of producer Sam Spiegel’s Oscars were stolen by the prostitute who frequently came to his home.

But it’s never too early to consider your epitaph
.

T
his is one Marilyn Monroe wanted: “Here lies Marilyn. No lies. Only lays.”

If I made it, you surely can
.

C
onsider the following:

English is my second language. Some critics have said I butcher it.

I stole cars and carried a knife when I was a kid; I almost killed another kid with a baseball bat and almost went to jail.

I flunked both algebra and biology in high school and had to go to summer school two years in a row.

I was a
C
student in high school.

I didn’t graduate from college because I was on both academic and disciplinary probation.

I was a
D
student in college, although I won every writing competition I entered.

I started drinking when I was fourteen and was a functional alcoholic by the time I was in college.

I’ve never believed in chitchatting and networking—I’ve been a loner all of my life.

Naomi says I’m abrupt, direct, sometimes downright rude, occasionally antisocial.

For much of my life, I’ve looked and dressed like a Hell’s Angel.

I’ve always preferred reading a book to seeing a movie.

But I’ve always preferred having sex to reading a book.

For many years, I preferred having a drink to
anything
, but I don’t drink anymore.

I’ve named my company “Barbarian, Ltd.”

Hollywood has paid “Barbarian” many, many millions of dollars through the years.

Don’t let ’em take your mojo
.

T
hey’ll try to beat it out of you—depress you, disillusion you, corrupt you.

Keep your mojo hidden deep inside yourself. It’s your heart and soul. It’s what makes you tick, what makes you write, and what makes you special. It’s the source of your work, your worth, and your talent.

Fight the fuckers with every breath of your being. And if, after you’ve fought the good fight, you lose—if your movie stinks or you’re rewritten by five other writers or you feel betrayed by people you thought were friends or thought cared about you—get a good night’s rest and sit down at your laptop the next morning and start making up a brand-new story. And fight the fuckers all over again with every breath of your being.

Because
you’re
a writer. And
they’re
not.

And if you fight hard enough, and write enough stories, one of these days you’ll see your work up on-screen just the way you wanted. And you’ll change the lives and better the lives and make more enjoyable the lives of the people who see it.

Your
film. Your
mojo
. Up there on the big screen.

Epilogue

I
had a three-script deal with United Artists. The first script was
Betrayed
, the second was
Music Box
, and the third was going to be
Media Mogul
, a roman a clef about Rupert Murdoch. But as I started writing the third script, it didn’t go anywhere for me, and I gave up on it. It had been producer Irwin Winkler’s idea anyway to do a filmic assault on Murdoch, not mine.

I started writing another script instead without telling anyone that I was writing it—not even Irwin, who was going to produce all three scripts. The new script’s genesis was my unwavering and no doubt naïve belief that someday America would have a president who would tell the American people the truth, no matter how difficult that truth was.

I wrote it as a black but Capraesque comedy. Sam Parr, in his late sixties, the liberal Democrat president of the United States, is running for reelection against a right-wing McCarthyite demagogue. Sam Parr has always screwed around on his long-suffering wife and he’s the kind of man who enjoys his Jack Daniel’s. One misbegotten day during the campaign when everything goes to shit, he finds himself on the Nebraska farm where he grew up, tilting his Jack Daniel’s bottle, and dozes off in the barn. He wakes up more than a little randy and does what he did as a boy. He, um, pops the nearby cow. Yes,
cow
—literally.

A right-wing spy takes a picture of him
in flagrante
. First the right-wingers try to blackmail Sam Parr to drop out of the race and then they release the picture to the tabloids. Sam Parr decides to tell Americans the truth. “Yes, I popped that cow!” he says. And,
mirabile dictu
, every farm boy or suburban ex–farm boy who ever popped a cow or a chicken or a cat in a boot votes for him.

Because he told America the truth
, he is reelected to office by a landslide.

I wrote the script in 1989, during the Bush, not the Clinton, presidency; during the era of “Read my lips—no new taxes,” before Lewinsky’s lips and news of that infamous cigar.

I sent Irwin Winkler the script with a title page that said in big letters,
SACRED COWS
.

He called me when he received it and said, “I thought we were going to call this
Media Mogul
.”