Hollywood Animal (103 page)

In early November, Senior Vice President of Publicity Terry Curtin has lunch with my wife, Naomi, and me at the Bel-Air Hotel. She is full of ideas to publicize the movie, takes copious notes, and says, “Trust me. You have an ally,” she says. “If you get Dick Cook on the phone, he’ll say yes, but you’ll never get him on the phone.”

She tells us that “Corporate Disney is a weird place to work, like a sect. I’m still trying to get used to it.” She tells us that “The reason Ovitz didn’t last at Disney is that Eisner didn’t support him and Ovitz floundered.” Naomi says, “I thought I noticed that on Larry King.” Curtin says, “Exactly. Eisner left him out there hanging.” She tells us that one of her predecessors at Disney was fired for having an affair with a top-level Disney executive (Curtin named them). Curtin says, “These old guys who pat you on the ass
and
give you a wink, so what? How does that hurt your career?”

She says that Disney is so disorganized at times that “We forgot to run an ad for
Washington Square
on opening day in one of the major markets.” She talks about how Whoopi Goldberg and her agent, Arnold Rifkin, “terrorized” Disney into giving Whoopi a $250,000 Picasso. “Whoopi got pissed off at a marketing meeting and said she wouldn’t publicize the movie. Rifkin called and said the only way to smooth her feathers was to buy her this Picasso at a New York gallery. We had to have the money there by the end of the day or she wouldn’t publicize the picture. Afterward, I called Rifkin and said, ‘Just tell me you know this was wrong.’ Rifkin said, ‘I don’t see anything inappropriate here.’”

Curtin brags about her closeness to the press, singling out Claudia Eller of the
Los Angeles Times
and Sharon Waxman of the
Washington Post—
“I’ve got them in my pocket,” she says. “I talked to Claudia this morning,” she says, “I told her I was having lunch with you and she said, “What are you having lunch with
him
for?” Curtin continues, “I got Sharon Waxman to kill a critical story about Disney the other day. She just had a baby, too. I said to her—‘C’mon, give me a break. I’m sitting here with a breast pump on.’”

Curtin finally gets back to
Burn Hollywood Burn.
“When we screened it at Disney internally,” she says, “everybody in the room was laughing. Afterward I went up to people outside the room and said, ‘What did you think?’ Everyone was afraid to admit how much fun it was. This movie is going to become one of Hollywood’s greatest guilty pleasures.”

Terry repeats her mantra—“Trust me, I’m your ally.” She says, interestingly, near the end of our lunch: “We’re probably going to be enemies when this is over.” To which Naomi responds, “I hope not. We’re tired of fighting.” Liking Terry, happy about her attitude toward the movie, we send her a bouquet of flowers after the meeting
.

Days and weeks go by. No marketing plan and no return calls from my “point man” Dick Cook. No return calls from Terry Curtin either. On November 24, hearing nothing from anyone at Disney, getting no return calls, I write a memo to Dick Cook (with carbons to Curtin and your exec Phil Barlow) which is a marketing plan. The plan includes things either Cook or Curtin talked about. I get no response to the memo from anyone at Disney, though Curtin tells my publicist she is “happy” about my memo—“Joe made our job easy for us.”

I hear nothing from Disney—nothing at all relating either to my memo about marketing or about Disney’s alleged marketing plan until shortly before Christmas when Terry Curtin comes to my home for lunch. She is brimming with excitement about the Tommy Lee/Pamela video, the size of Tommy Lee’s penis, and notes that “Pamela Lee has a lubrication problem.”

She turns to your exec Oren Aviv, who has accompanied her, and says, “Did you notice Pamela’s lubrication problem?”

Oren looks down and clears his throat
.

Curtin: “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”

Oren: “I did, but I’m too much of a gentleman to comment on it.”

She talks about Tommy Lee’s “beautiful face” and says she and her husband saw the video the night before
.

“My husband said, ‘I don’t understand how a guy like this can get both Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson
.’

“I said to him, ‘Well, you’re no Tommy Lee.’ He said, ‘You’re no Pamela Anderson.’”

Curtin talks about how, at Fox’s publicity department, she and her colleagues had a “P File.” The “P File” consisted of full-frontal nude photos of actors, taken off the outtakes of the films they were in
.

“You should see Willem Dafoe’s,” she says. “He wins the prize. His is really something.”

She talks about feeling sorry for Macaulay Culkin. “We were doing interviews in this suite. He was in the living room. We could all hear his father and mother in the next room having sex.”

She doesn’t mention
Burn Hollywood
until I ask her, once again, what marketing plans Disney has. Then she turns to Oren Aviv, who shows us two one-sheets—one of a naked girl whose breasts are covered with cans of film and the tagline “Good movie. Great cans.” I am told, thankfully—this movie is not
Showgirls—
that we are not using this one-sheet, though Dick Cook has had it in his office, “considering it” for a week
.

Terry and Oren leave, but two hours later a messenger arrives. Inside the package we find the porn video of Tommy Lee and Pamela
.

Terry calls back later that afternoon, “Tell Naomi to call me after she sees it. I want to know what she thinks about Tommy’s penis.”

I tell Terry that we never talked about marketing at our lunch. She says the plan is on Dick Cook’s desk, “You’ll have it tomorrow.”

· · ·

Tomorrow comes. No marketing plan … and no call to Terry from Naomi, who is horrified by the tape. Terry calls, though. She wants to know what Naomi
thought
of the size of Tommy’s organ. I tell her Naomi didn’t think much of the tape
.

“She’s so sweet,” Terry says
.

“The marketing plan,” she adds, “is on the way.”

At the end of December, two months after Dick Cook promised a marketing plan … five weeks after my marketing memo to Cook
… two months
before the February 27 release of the movie, I
still
haven’t heard anything from anyone at Disney. By now, we have
missed
long-lead press deadlines. I inform Rogers & Cowan that, since I’m getting no cooperation and no response from Disney, I will hire the firm at my own expense to publicize the movie
.

Meanwhile, adding to my frustration, even though very few media people have seen the movie, we’re getting positive response:

“It’s an A+,” writes Harry Knowles’s Ain’t It Cool Network, which gets 160,000 Internet hits a day. “The movie rocked … I can’t wait to take my girlfriend to see it.”

Martin Grove writes in the
Hollywood Reporter,
“One of the funniest movies to turn up in ages … what’s nice is that the movie is really not mean-spirited. With media coverage of Hollywood behind the scenes so widespread these days, a lot of what might be considered inside humor is going to get laughs from paying audiences.”

Charles Fleming writes in the
L.A. Weekly:
“The movie is hilarious … a far more savage look at Hollywood than
The Player …
unrelenting in its viciousness.”

In post-screening reactions: Anne Kolson of the
New York Times
says: “I thought it was great. Very funny in many places.”

Stephen Farber of
Movieline
says he “really enjoyed it” and will write a positive review
.

Karen Shapiro of
Entertainment Tonight
says, “Very twisted and funny. I definitely laughed.”

Trish Becker of
GQ
magazine says, “I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the premise.”

Stephanie Tuck of
In Style
magazine says, “I liked it. It was very clever. I thought it was great how it came together.”

Melissa Parvel of
Access Hollywood
says, “I really liked it. I thought it was pretty slick and funny.”

Mimi James of VH1 says, “I liked it. It was so cheesy.”

Robert Eli of
Entertainment Asylum
says, “I thought there were some very funny moments. Stallone, Whoopi, and Chan could generate a whole new following.”

My publicist calls Disney to demand a meeting with Disney. Other filmmakers don’t have to demand such a meeting; it is routinely scheduled with them
.

Disney grants the meeting and it is held January 9 in the Roy Disney Building’s third-floor conference room. It is attended by—from Disney: John Cywinski, Geoff Ammer, Terry Curtin, Kristy Frudenfeld, Gina Ross, Brett Dicker, Chuck Viane, Chris Edwards, and Oren Aviv
.

Also attending are: Andrew Shack, president of Priority Records, Dana Mason, head of Priority marketing, Alan Nierob, Christine Lamont, and Sandy Rice of Rogers & Cowan … and producer Ben Myron
.

I begin the meeting, according to our transcript, this way: “As most of you already know, I am not comfortable with the idea of Disney distributing and publicizing this movie. As a result, at my own expense, I have retained Rogers & Cowan …”

Naomi cuts in: “Can I please say something before we begin the meeting?”

Joe: “Sure.”

Naomi: “Thank you. I want to address my comments to Terry Curtin, since she is the only representative of Disney I have worked with. Terry, you sent a fax to us yesterday asking why we are angry. Well, I’d like to explain why. When we first met back in November for a four-hour meeting, I began by saying that the reason Joe and I were angry was because we felt we were being ignored by Disney. My experience in this town is that nobody ever wants to give bad news, and so instead they hide. I said that we had heard no response from Disney for weeks and we did not yet even have a distribution date
.

Naomi: “You said that if you get Dick Cook on the phone the answer will be yes, but you will never get him on the phone. But you said ‘I’m not like that. I will deal straight with you’ … Then you came to lunch with Oren. It was a three-hour lunch. You arrive and I can see again that you are really excited. You were very excited. You were coming out of your seat with excitement. But what you were excited about was the Tommy Lee/Pamela video and the size of Tommy Lee’s organ, which you kept talking about. And then you digressed to the penis file at Fox and about how you’ve got all these photos of all these guys’ penises and how big they are and I’m thinking, ‘You know, you have a meeting with Joe Eszterhas. You’re having a lunch. What’s your agenda. Oh, I know! Maybe if I talk about penises and sex for two hours, it will distract him.’”

Naomi concludes this way: “I don’t know about Disney. I have never met any of these people. All I know about Disney is that growing up I
watched
The Wonderful World of Disney
on Sunday nights. Now I have a peek inside at the people making the magic, and, to me, it’s like lifting up a big rock. All the little bugs immediately scuttle off to the side and you’re left with a big fat worm in the middle doing nothing. And the experience has been disillusioning at best and insulting at worst.”

I then say, “Let’s cut the shit here today, okay? My shit detector has really gone off. I’ve never really felt you people were allies. I think that I have done this movie myself and will continue to. But for God’s sake, let’s cut the shit
. Get your hands off my dick, all of you. Let’s just finally tell the truth.”

The bottom line of the meeting is that the entire advertising budget—all print—is $300,000. (“You’ll get plenty of print,” Dick Cook had said in October, “don’t worry.”) Three hundred thousand dollars for a nine-city opening! Three hundred thousand dollars for a $10 million budget movie! Three hundred thousand dollars—only $50,000 more than I myself was asked to invest (and
did
invest) in the movie and $50,000 more than Whoopi’s new Picasso
.

This is the advertising we have: The only full-page ads we have in the nine markets are in the
Los Angeles Times
and the
New York Times
the Sunday before opening and the day of opening
.

We have a two-line ad running at the bottom of page one of the
New York Times
which costs $400 a line (my idea). We have
no press junket.
We have
no TV ads.
We have
no radio buys.
We have
no magazine advertising.
We have an L.A. premiere, but we don’t have one in New York. We have
no opinion-maker screenings.
We have
no plans for any of the movie’s stars to do a press tour.
In the nine cities, we have one single billboard—in L.A., on Crescent Heights, partially obscured by a gas station sign
.

On January 12, Terry Curtin, writing under Buena Vista Pictures letterhead, expresses umbrage at my wife’s remarks. She calls Naomi’s remarks “vicious and misdirected.”
(Misdirected
is, I think, a telling word—What it says to me is that Naomi’s remarks were warranted, but not addressed to Curtin. Equally telling is that she doesn’t deny the
veracity
of my wife’s remarks at the meeting in her letter
.)

Curtin goes on to express “pity” for our “beautiful young children.”

In disbelief that an executive of a public company is writing these words about my children, I don’t even respond to her comments about them
.

But her remarks about “having cared” about the movie and “working so hard to convince my co-workers to treat … this project with respect”
make
me question, once again, why she had to work so hard to convince co-workers if Disney had good-faith intent to distribute the film
.