American Rhapsody (20 page)

[2]

David Geffen Is Angry

“I read,” Linda Tripp said, “that he spent the night at Steven Spielberg's partner's house. Castlebaum or Castleman or something.”

“Oh, really?” Monica said.

“In LA.”

“Huh.”

“I don't know,” Linda Tripp said. “I don't know who that is. I don't know anything about him.”

D
avid Geffen sat alone in the den of his Malibu estate as I walked in. He was watching the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings, although, I noted,
watching
wasn't the right word. He was scowling, glowering, glaring at the set. He looked as if he was ready to kill someone. “Can you believe what these motherfuckers are doing?” he said. “Can you believe these motherfuckers actually think they can get away with this?”

A few days later, actor Alec Baldwin appeared on NBC's
Late Night
with Conan O'Brien and called for the murder of Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde and his family. Hollywood, I feared, was
tweaking
(as, seemingly, was Alec Baldwin).

It felt odd because Bill Clinton was never Hollywood's first choice to sit in the Oval Office. First, there was war hero Bob Kerrey, the all-American liberal from Nebraska, who'd shared the statehouse in Lincoln with Hollywood's own Debra Winger. Then there was Bill Bradley. When trial balloons floated that Bill Bradley, boring and Ichabod-like, would run for the presidency in 1992, director Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford offered to give the baggy-eyed former basketball star media lessons.

It wasn't until Michael Ovitz invited the already-elected Bill Clinton to his I. M. Pei CAA fortress—souvenir mugs were contemplated with Ovitz's likeness on one side and Bill Clinton's on the other—that the town gave Bill Clinton its blessing. Clinton reciprocated by turning the Lincoln Bedroom into Hollywood's Washington commissary.

The Lincoln Bedroom was a place that other presidents had held sacred, only for the use of a czar like Universal potentate Lew Wasserman (invited there by
both
JFK and Reagan). But now even directors and out-of-favor funnymen like Chevy Chase were enjoying overnight historical dalliances with their wives there. Chevy, who'd become famous by mimicking Gerry Ford, was overnighting at the White House thanks to Bill Clinton, just another wild and funny twist of American politics.

Everyone in town knew that one of Bill Clinton's closest advisers was the TV producer Harry Thomason, who even had his own office in the White House. But anyone who mattered knew that Harry
didn't
matter—at least not in this town. He was a
TV
producer in a town that liked and gladly accepted TV money—but still viewed it pretty much like the minor leagues, a place to work if you were still trying to make it in movies or had busted out.

The town had a long-standing and self-righteous liberal tradition. Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, the entertainment industry's official Washington lobbying group, was a former LBJ White House aide, who'd begun his career by briefing the cornpone president as he sat on the throne each morning and handing him the presidential toilet paper. Norman Lear, the creator of
All in the Family,
was the founder of People for the American Way, a 250,000-member organization designed to use the medium of television to fight for liberal issues and causes. Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand and Marlon Brando, among many others, had devoted time, money, and actorly eloquence on behalf of candidates and causes. Esteemed older directors like John Frankenheimer and Norman Jewison had been involved as advisers to Bobby Kennedy's tragically doomed campaign. Most of the studio heads or VPs were sixties graduates with strong liberal leanings.

I'd found it easy, for example, to get a movie made about neo-Nazi right-wingers (
Betrayed
) and the studio was overjoyed when Pat Buchanan attacked it as “un-American.” If Buchanan felt that way, we all thought, we must have done something right. The studio's choice to direct it was Costa-Gavras, who'd never even visited the American Midwest but who, thanks to the electrifyingly brilliant Z
,
was a hero to liberals everywhere.

We were partly united within our liberalism by a belief in free speech. We were convinced that the Nixons and Gingriches of the world, blathering on about the societal impact of screen violence, had their own agenda. First, they disagreed with our politics and were trying to stir the public up to boycott or stay away from our movies and, second, they knew damn well real guns caused violence and not guns on-screen, but they were using the issue of screen violence as a bogeyman so they could keep on getting their contributions from the gun lobby. When I wrote a column for daily
Variety,
pointing out the graphic, over-the-top violence in a Newt Gingrich novel, I received congratulatory notes from many producers in town.

We also shared a loathing for the forces of right-wing repression. Richard Dreyfuss, all these years later, was still trying to get Sinclair Lewis's antifascist tome,
It Can't Happen Here,
made into a movie. There weren't a lot of conservatives in town: David Horowitz, once a New Lefty now a conservative ideologue; screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd (
The Hanoi Hilton
); fallen-star Tom Selleck; the NRA's Charlton Heston; and Arnold Schwarzenegger (he didn't count—he was a Kennedy). While the few conservatives sometimes objected publicly to what they termed “liberal propaganda” on-screen, they couldn't do anything about it. They were having enough problems getting employed. Not that they were completely wrong: The director Betty Thomas succinctly defined nineties comedies to me as “funny moments with liberal inserts.”

Hollywood had an umbilical connection—its own “action faction”—to the movement in the sixties and seventies. When the Weatherpeople went underground, the actor Jon Voight supported them. Producer Burt Schneider and director Bob Rafelson financed Huey Newton's ritzy lakeshore apartment in Oakland. Even while the Weatherpeople were on the run, director Emile De Antonio and Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler shot a documentary glamorizing them, unconcerned that the latest Weather Underground book was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan or that Bernardine Dohrn was trying to rally her army in defense of Charles Manson, referring to the people the Manson family murdered as “the Tate Eight,” saying, “Dig it. First they killed these pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!” If some people in town liked the Weatherpeople, the Weatherpeople liked Hollywood, too. Sam Peckinpah's
Wild Bunch
was their cinematic bible. Bernardine's storm troopers watched the movie's slow-motion violence over and over again, finding inspiration in the druggie, drunken Peckinpah's fixation on blood.

But no Hollywood figure had a closer tie to the sixties than Jane Fonda . . . even before she met her New Lefty ideologue from the Midwest, Tom Hayden. I met Fonda first when she was busted in Cleveland for bringing a tiny bit of weed over the Canadian border. (Her mug shot went on most of the office walls at the police headquarters on Payne Avenue.) We got to be friends after she read and liked my book about the shootings at Kent State. When I started writing screenplays, we tried and failed to sell MGM a movie about Karen Silkwood, the antinuclear activist. I liked Fonda—her intelligence, her commitment to better society—and the subtle, low-key brilliance of her acting style. But she was getting older—a staggeringly beautiful woman still in a town that discarded actresses (“leftover beef Wellington,” a producer said to me) as they approached forty.

I had an idea for a screenplay, which would become the movie
Music Box,
and asked Jane if she was interested in playing the lead. I knew she wasn't getting as many scripts as she'd gotten before. She committed to star before I wrote the script. When she read it, she was overjoyed. “It's a great role,” she said; “it's going to be a great movie.” The director, Costa-Gavras, was a friend of Jane's and had even stayed at her home. When he got the script, Costa decided Jane was too old for the part. The producer, Irwin Winkler, and I tried to change Costa's mind, but he wouldn't budge. Jane went on a campaign to convince Costa she could play the part. She redid her hair, she put on a sexy dress, and she did an audition tape. Winkler and I thought she was brilliant in the audition tape (no stars ever did audition tapes), but Costa wasn't swayed. He wanted Jessica Lange.

Jane was heartbroken. She had already signed her contract to do the film and the studio was forced to pay over a million dollars to get her
out
of the movie. Not much later, she decided to leave Hollywood. I didn't blame her. It was 1987 . . . a long way away from the sixties. She wrote me a note, thanking me for my efforts to put her into
Music Box.
It was signed, “Power to the People!”

Part of Hollywood's fervently militant liberalism came, too, from media-fueled guilt about the blacklist—a time forty years ago, when a group of screenwriters, directors, actors, and producers were prevented from making a living because of alleged Communist affiliations and their refusal to testify about them before a House congressional committee.

Horrifyingly unjust, the blacklist had been hyped by the mid-nineties to become Hollywood's own holocaust. The Writers Guild, with its own present-day creative issues to fight, seemed to think it was safer and nobler to dwell on the blacklist of the past than fight studios for writers' rights in the present. The Writers Guild was conducting an endless series of seminars and testimonials about the martyrs of forty years ago.

When Elia Kazan, who testified and snitched at the same time the martyred screenwriters didn't, was finally given the Oscar he deserved, the reception he got was as frosty as though he were Leni Riefenstahl, maker of Nazi propaganda films. The iciness of his reception came, interestingly, not just from those few aging producers and directors who were Kazan's peers but also from younger actors like Ed Harris, who wore his liberal social conscience on his tuxedo sleeves.

There were a few people in Hollywood so far out on the radical Left that they smiled when Ronald Reagan was shot. Reagan was shot by the nutcase John Hinckley, who had become obsessed with Jodie Foster in the movie
Taxi Driver.
The screenplay for
Taxi Driver
was written by Paul Schrader, who used the diary of Arthur Bremer as the basis for his script. Bremer was the nutcase who had shot George Wallace. “Two right-wing birds,” these twisted Hollywood zealots said—Reagan and Wallace—“with one stone”—Bremer, with an assist from Hollywood in the form of screenwriter Schrader.

Some people in town were professional liberals, singing the political torch songs they knew studio heads (and many critics), upstanding socially committed sixties folks, liked to hear. Oliver Stone was the most successful example. A man of too many personal excesses, Stone seemed as often stoned as he was not. (I once saw him grab a woman by her hair and pull her out of a bar.) Originally the writer of grippingly violent, sometimes farcical, four-letter-word melodramas
—Midnight Express, Scarface, The Hand—
he became a liberal holy man with his two powerful Vietnam dramas
—Platoon
and
Born on the Fourth of July.
Both were antiwar visions, our sixties protester's sensibility blown graphically onto the big screen.

But he outdid himself with
JFK
and
Nixon.
Both movies were utter and absolute lies. Worse, both movies, as far as future generations were concerned, pretended to tell the truth. Yet Stone didn't call himself a liberal propagandist; he called himself “a filmmaker depicting documented reality.”

Two different studios made the two different movies, knowing they were whopping, lollapalooza lies that would infect the brains of tomorrow's voters. I knew, though, that the movies were made not because liberal sixties folks ran the studios and believed Stone's lies. They were made because the studio heads believed Stone's lies would make money (
JFK
did;
Nixon
didn't).

I knew, too, from experience that in a head-on collision between shared liberal beliefs and making money, money always won in Hollywood. In 1998, at a time when the energized liberal town was banding around Bill Clinton, I wrote a script for Paramount called
Land of the Free,
about the resurgence of right-wing militias across the country. The studio hoped Mel Gibson would play the militia leader I'd created, a charismatic, falsely appealing man who was, at his core, a racist and anti-Semitic moral monster. Gibson turned the script down and said he didn't want to play “such a bad guy.” The studio came to me and asked me to rewrite it so my lead character “wouldn't be such a bad guy.” “But these guys
are
bad guys,” I told the studio. “They're awful guys. I don't want to do an apologia for the militias.” The studio said, “But we really want Mel to do it.” I refused to rewrite it; the studio put the project up on the shelf.

I had found myself in the same position in 1987, with
Music Box.
My script ended with the revelation that a benign old grandpa was a Nazi war criminal. Universal, offered a chance to make the movie, said it would be happy to—if I changed the ending and grandpa was shown to be innocent of all war-criminal charges. “It's going to be an apologia for the war criminals being prosecuted by governments all over the world,” I said. “It'll wind up being an attack on those agencies prosecuting these people.” The studio executive said, “Yeah, but this way we won't sell any tickets.” Luckily, producer Irwin Winkler and director Costa-Gavras and I found a studio who made the script as originally written. (We didn't sell any tickets.)

Some people flew in under the political radar and stayed there if they were successful. Who cared if producer-mogul Andy Vajna made enough money to get to Hollywood by being a Hong Kong wig merchant who'd made a deal with the Communist Chinese government to buy the hair that had been shorn off dissidents? Who cared if Mel Gibson made the most awful homophobic comments, until his PR people zipped his lip? Who cared if the guy who directed that Disney movie was a convicted child molester? Who cared if Marlon Brando made anti-Semitic remarks on
Larry King Live
—he was Marlon Brando, and Larry King, who was Jewish, kissed him, didn't he? Who cared if Bruce Willis said, “If I were black, I'd be with Farrakhan, too”? Or: “FDR knew Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked and let it happen anyway”? Bruce Willis was big box office, wasn't he? As opposed to Charlton Heston, who was dead, buried, and mummified at the box office and was also, incidentally, the head of the National Rifle Association.