The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (9 page)

S
he, too, is a lawyer. She, too, is a brilliant litigator, maybe the best in America. Behind her honeyed West Virginia drawl is a stonecold killer (whose childhood dream was to succeed Mickey Mantle in the New York Yankee outfield).

Patty Glaser doesn’t fear Bert Fields; she jousts with him publicly. She told
The New York Times
that a letter from Bert Fields was “a B.F. letter.” The whole town knew that “a B.F. letter” meant a “big fucking letter” and not “a Bert Fields letter.”

If you get a threatening letter from Bert Fields, hire Patty Glaser immediately.

Forget Bert Fields and Patty Glaser. Don’t ever—ever—piss these people off. … These are the most powerful people in Hollywood
.

S
cientologists.

Studios are terrified of them because they represent a lot of big stars.

Other people are terrified of them because they have a reputation of not tolerating anyone who, they feel, is
trying to piss them off
.

And no, I am
not
trying to piss them off!

P
ERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN WEAR SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT

I was wearing the hottest thing in town. Spielberg had one … and Geffen … and I got mine before Jeff Katzenberg did
.

They cost four hundred dollars a pair, but they were in such short supply that some people were offering a thousand dollars for them
.

They were the best pair of sunglasses Chrome Hearts on Robertson had ever made—but that’s not why everyone (me, too) wanted them. They wanted them because—if you rubbed the glass—ingrained in the glass very delicately, facing out, so you could see it if you really looked, were these words
: Fuck you.

P
ERK OF FAILURE: YOU DON’T WANT TO WEAR THIS HAT

I saw two screenwriters recently at the farmer’s market inL.A. wearing ball caps that said
DON’T SHIT ON MY HEAD
.

A Hollywood parable
…

A
Rwandan tracker who appeared in
Gorillas in the Mist
was invited to attend its New York premiere by the producers.

The tracker had never been on an airplane. He had never been in New York. He had never been in America. He had never been out of the Rwandan mountains.

But he somehow got to New York.

And there was no one at the airport waiting for him.

He
walked
from Kennedy Airport to Park Avenue, where the producer who’d invited him lived.

The doorman turned him away. The producer was out of town.

The producer got back the next day and found the tracker waiting for him—squatting beneath the emergency stairway at the back of his apartment house.

Don’t contemplate your navel
.

P
roducer Sean Daniel, after superagent Michael Ovitz left the Creative Artists Agency: “First the fall of the Soviet Union and now the fall of CAA.”

If you have to live in L.A., you simply have to have a pool
.

C
alifornia has, like, half the swimming pools in the whole USA,” said actress Drew Barrymore. “After you’re successful, you can’t
not
have a pool. Here, a house without a pool is like a neck with no diamond necklace.”

Look out! The pool underneath you is empty
.

J
im Harrison: “My friend the novelist Tom McGuane used to compare the whole Hollywood experience to being on a high board, mostly at night, and possibly the pool beneath you was empty. I habitually think of it as being stuck on a shuddering elevator, always caught between one floor or another, always in transition up or down.”

You don’t want to leave a suicide note like this one
.

A
ctor George Sanders left this suicide note: “I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

I probably shouldn’t mention that he was once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor.

And I certainly shouldn’t mention that after their divorce, he married one of her sisters.

The Movie God

The explanation for all the insane, inane, moronic, crazy, surreal, hilarious, tragic things that happen daily in Hollywood.

As in: “There is nothing to explain it except the movie God.
”

PART TWO

L
EARNING THE
B
USINESS

LESSON 2

Use Your F-Bombs!

Want money
and
fame
?

P
roducer and studio head Mike Medavoy: “Don’t
do
something to be remembered; it is the things you
do
that are remembered.”

There are some good reasons to want to be famous
.

C
omedian Bobcat Goldthwait: “Fame is like a big eraser. It’s strange, now that I’m famous, in my parents’ opinion, all the shitty things—all the wreckage of my past—is erased. … Now it’s like I was never the kid who got arrested—now I’m the wonderful son.”

You will be world-famous
!

W
illiam Goldman: “There hasn’t been a truly famous writer since Hemingway died. At a Knicks game last year, Norman Mailer was introduced to the crowd and half a dozen people around me said, ‘Who?’ and one guy went so far as to ask, ‘Who did he play for?’”

Bullshit, Bill. When I walk down the street people ask me for my autograph. In L.A., I can’t even stand in theater lines or in restaurants without being bothered. I’ve done the
Today
show half a dozen times; I’ve done
Good Morning America
and CNN’s morning show and a whole half hour of
Hardball
and Deborah Norville and Greta Van Susteren and … More people went to see
Showgirls
because of my name than because of anyone else associated with the movie.

And no matter what you say, Bill, you’re famous, too.

Nowdays, you
can
be famous
.

U
CLA screenwriting professor Richard Walter in his novel,
Escape from Film School
: “Back in the 60s, there was not a single screenwriter—not one—I or anyone beyond the industry had ever heard of. It was not that there were no great screenwriters—quite the contrary; it was merely that none had ever been heard of. Screenwriters wrote; they were not written about.”