Hollywood Animal (105 page)

CHAPTER 32

The King of Cleveland

BILLY MAGIC

Mistake on the lake.

OLD MAN

What’d you say?

BILLY MAGIC

“Mistake on the lake”—that’s what they call this place, ain’t it?

OLD MAN

Hell no! Where’d you hear that? They call this “The Best Location in the Nation.”

Telling Lies in America

THERE WAS ALWAYS
some damn movie being filmed at night on the beach below us in Malibu keeping us awake.

And Joey found a used hypodermic to play with on the local play-ground.

And we were forced to buy what we called our “Brinks Mailbox” because someone in the neighborhood was stealing our mail.

And an Alaska Airlines jet crashed a few miles out at sea and the beach beneath us was awash for weeks with body tissue and suitcases.

And we’d fired one of our nannies because L.A. sheriff’s deputies had caught her threatening and stalking the television actor Robert Conrad.

And yet, that wasn’t really what was wrong. Something was very wrong, I felt, but none of those things, added together, summed up the problem.

I
was the problem. Something was wrong
with me
.

· · ·

In some deep part of me, I didn’t want to be here anymore. I didn’t want to go to the wall and fight the battles … and do the seductive, empty chitchat at Morton’s. I still wanted to write screenplays, but I didn’t want the rest of the package: the fights with directors, the paparazzi at the premieres, the limos, the best table at Spago, the weekends in Palm Springs or Laguna.

I felt like I’d befouled myself somehow, like I had turned into something I didn’t want to be: the screenwriter as Hollywood Animal … not as victim and servant and peon and whore … but as the Hollywood Animal, the gun in my hand.

An ancient Hollywood equation says that in the beginning of a project, the screenwriter has the gun and when his script is finished he hands the gun off to the director … and when the director’s cut is finished, the director hands the gun off to the studio … and when the studio has the gun … the studio fires the gun and kills the screenwriter and the director with it.

Well, not me! I had the gun and kept it and could even aim it at studio heads and get them to throw their hands up and give me what I wanted!

Hollywood animal behavior. Another symptom of the same disease that had caused a producer friend of mine to slap his maid bloody for not moving fast enough at a dinner party, or another producer friend who viciously beat up his fiancée two weeks before their wedding date—a date he kept, but with another woman.

You’ll never work in this town again
was blackmail and extortion, because there was always an “if” attached to that time-worn sentence … “If you leave CAA,” Michael Ovitz had said to me …

And now I was engaging in the same sort of blackmail and extortion. I was a Hollywood animal, I feared, just as much as Ovitz, pulling the same gangster tactics on the town that he’d pulled on me. I had become what I detested.

“So do whatever you want to do,” I’d written to Ovitz, “and fuck you,” more than implying that he was trash, Hollywood scum, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Now I was off my high horse, muscling and browbeating the other players in the gutter.

I felt like I should send myself the same letter I’d sent to Ovitz. There was no doubt in my mind that the Ovitz jacket I saw myself wearing fit to a tee: Michael had even turned on Ron Meyer, his best friend, the way I’d turned on Guy McElwaine.

I found myself reconsidering and reevaluating my whole battle with Ovitz. Was it really wanting Guy back in my life that made me resist Ovitz eleven years ago? Or was it me saying:
You’re candy, frat boy. Welcome to Lorain Avenue. You don’t have a chance. I’m gonna hit you in the fuckin’ head with a baseball bat …
because
I’m the real Hollywood animal, asshole, I’m the real Thousand-Pound Gorilla!
”

The longer I’d lived in this town the worse I’d become … until I was out of control, amok in Malibu.
Wildlife
. A barbarian hanging scalps and check stubs off his figurative dick. There was something about this cursed and glitzy town that infected you and fired you with delusions. Living here was like functioning on low-desert meth cut with just a crust of PCP.

L.A. was a separate
nation
, not a state within the United States … but a separate nation between the United States and Mexico whose Twin Towers was the Industry. It was impossible to imagine this separate nation without the Industry because the Industry was its big, beeping, buzzing, glowing sacred heart.

Everyone wanted to be a part of the Industry … as a screenwriter, actor, producer, gofer, gaffer, whatever
—it didn’t matter
. As long as they could be a part of it and suck off its glamorous, poisonous, siliconed, corrupt tit.

Jeremy, Naomi’s forty-year-old little brother, made a lucrative salary. He was a brilliant PR man, a talented singer and songwriter. Yet one day, out of the blue, he suddenly decided to write screenplays with a friend. Why? Because if Ben Affleck and Matt Damon could do it …

Jeremy read the trades too, tried to get invited to “industry events.” He kept a list in his office of movie stars he and his co-workers had glimpsed in the outdoor cafés of the Sunset Strip.

A
screenwriter!
He was a screenwriter now!
Boom! Just like that! Out of the blue!
Even though he’d never written anything but songs and PR releases before. Even though he got so jittery sitting in one place for twenty minutes that he had to get up and pace around the room.

Naomi and I loved Jeremy and we feared this deadly suckhole of a town was sucking him in, too. He drove a hot car. He went to the gym each day. He was on his cellular all the time. He didn’t check his at-home mail for a week, but he checked his e-mail at his office every hour.

The truth was that in the Nation of L.A. you
… didn’t matter …
if you weren’t sucking off the Industry tit. You were nothing even if it seemed that you were something.

A producer friend was introduced to Richard Riordan, who at the time was the mayor of Los Angeles, at a cocktail party.

The mayor took my friend aside and said there was something important he wanted to discuss with him.

My friend, a politically active man with a bubbling-over social conscience, was excited. Would the mayor ask him to be a part of some cultural commission? Would he ask him to be part of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Fine Arts Outreach program?

Mayor Riordan took my producer friend out on the lawn next to a gazebo and looked around to make sure no one could overhear him. Satisfied, the mayor
pitched the plot of a screenplay he was writing
.

This was the mayor of the Nation of L.A. acting this way, wanting to be a screenwriter instead of the mayor … a powerful man eager, his politician’s mouth wide open, to suck on the tit … so eager that he was willing
to transmogrify himself into a powerless screenwriter …
just to get a taste of the tit.

Or maybe he, like Bono of U2, just wanted to grow up to be Joe Eszterhas … at the same time that Joe Eszterhas was looking into the mirror and trying to avert his eyes from Frankenstein’s monster he had willed himself to become.

On a day when the beach beneath us was awash with detritus from the Alaska Airlines crash, I turned to Naomi and said, “You know, we’ve really got to get out of here.”

I wasn’t one of those Malibu New Agers anyway … standing on my cliff with Sharper Image or Hammacher Schlemmer binocs pressed to my eyes watching spouting whales. No, hell no, I didn’t plop myself in the sand at sunset watching the smog-painted setting sun. Nor did I play Gregorian chants or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on my back-deck speaker, setting off dog howls as far north as Palos Verdes.

I was an aging street kid who prided himself on having come from Cleveland, a steel city, a rust belt pit, where the flame above the mills burned all night and bars stayed open after hours serving boilermakers and Cleveland martinis: a shot of Southern Comfort and a cold Bud.

Spouting whales? Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?
I preferred a honkytonk with a choking haze of viscous cigarette smoke, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Killer, stomping away on the jukebox, telling that little red-lipsticked high-ass sweetie to move it around just a little bit.

No New Age spirituality for me, thank you—even if Kenny G himself lived around the corner from our playground and scared my little boys shitless with the studio-quality special effects at his annual neighborhood Halloween party.

New Age spiritualism be damned!
I still believed that iodine was more effective than Mercurochrome because iodine hurt. I understood Mike Tyson when he said he bit Holyfield because Holy kept butting him. I preferred the Stones to the Beatles; Howling Wolf to Yanni; Canseco to McGwire; Bukowski to Grisham; David Alan Coe to Toby Keith; Kinky Friedman to Robert Parker.

Sean Penn was another reason we began making plans to leave Malibu … for someplace.

He was over at our house chain-smoking and waiting for the steak I was
grilling
him and he told us that he had grown up right on this bluff and this beach.

He looked at the riptide surf outside our wall-high window and he glanced at Joey and Nick playing together, their hair long and bleached almost yellow by the sun.

It wasn’t the Malibu sun—we had recently spent a month in Maui to warm up and get away from Malibu.

Sean asked, “They learn to surf yet?”

Naomi and I looked at each other and then at Sean like he was some kind of freak.

Sean saw the look and laughed.

“Let me tell you guys something,” Sean said. “You guys may not go down to the Viper Room. You guys may not even know where the Viper Room is, but in a couple years Joey and his brother will.”

That night before we fell asleep, Naomi said, “You’re right. We’re getting out of here!”

A couple of months later, Sean Penn’s wife, Robin Wright, and Sean’s kids got carjacked in Santa Monica.

Sean got out of L.A. fast with his wife and kids. He moved to the village of Ross, in yuppified Marin County, where I’d lived for twenty-two years.

We were having lunch on the patio at a little Italian place in the Cross Creek Center in Malibu … Steve was visiting us from Oregon … and word swept by the tables like a firestorm that Pamela Anderson Lee was down at the playground by the swings.

Steve, who was twenty-four, excused himself and went down to the playground. A mop-haired friend of Joey’s from kindergarten came by our table and said to Joey, “
Dude! Pamela Anderson!
”

Joey, who was six, went down to the playground to join Steve.

We could see the two of them from our table, trying to look cool like the hundred other men and boys down there, watching Pamela Anderson in a cowboy hat and tight jeans and a T-shirt as she played with a baby on a swing.

“Oh boy,” I said, “oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!”

“I know,” Naomi said.

There were times when Naomi and I contemplated a life away from movie sets and television interviews, from the chitchat at the local market about how poor Pierce Brosnan’s son got hurt in that wreck over the weekend. Times when we didn’t want Johnny Carson or Cher or Barbra as our neighbors anymore. When we didn’t want our boys trick or treating at Kenny G’s or Gary Busey’s house.

Sometimes we didn’t even want to hear the surf crashing outside our windows anymore. The surf made us uneasy as we watched our boys watching it or skipping through it.

We kept thinking about what Sean had said about the Viper Room.

We didn’t want them anywhere near the Viper Room.

She was a beautiful little girl with baby blue eyes. Her parents, friends of ours, dressed her in clothes special-ordered from Milan, strolled her down Rodeo in a gleaming English pram, backpacked her up and down the Santa Monica Promenade.

Her dad was an agent who showed up at all the charity dinners. Her mom was active in the Free Clinic, the Rape-Crisis Center, the Breast Cancer Foundation. Their friends were so happy for them. After eight years of trying to have a baby, after three miscarriages, they’d adopted this little angel.

When she was two years old, she started throwing up and falling down, screaming all the time, holding her beautiful blond little head. Her parents flew her to a pediatric hospital in Boston where it was determined that she had a congenital degenerative brain disease that would only get worse.

Her parents were heartbroken but resolved they wouldn’t allow this to ruin their lives.

They have a beautiful little dark-haired angel with twinkling brown eyes now. The adoption agency was happy to make the exchange, happy to avoid costly litigation.

I was tired—more tired than I’d ever been in my life. My divorce from Gerri had drained me, as had the critical evisceration that had greeted
Showgirls
and
Jade
.

I was doing things now like giving speeches at the Hollywood Women’s Press Association and at a roast for Peter Bart, the editor of
Variety
. I was autographing hundreds of Xerox copies of my scripts for sale at charity auctions across America. I was making highfalutin
pronouncements
at screenwriting seminars and doing interviews with publications like
People
and
Us
about things like my diet plan.

I was doing all those things instead of doing what I was telling young screenwriters to do in my pronouncements: sitting on my butt at my desk—
sitzfleisch
—and writing scripts.

And I had allowed myself, on my last movie,
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
, to become the whacko filmmaker I had created in my screenplay.

Like Alan Smithee, I got into a hellacious pissfight with a production company.

Like Alan Smithee, I actually stole a negative of the film, intending to screen it myself if I had to.