Hollywood Animal (29 page)

Simpson couldn’t believe it! “You want a
what?
” Simpson said.

“I want a stenographer. Call for one. You can get one from the studio pool.”

“What the fuck do you want a stenographer for?” he asked.

“I want every word to be on the record. I want posterity to know what asshole, stupid, benighted, moronic suggestions you’re making.”

It looked like smoke was coming out of his ears.

“Call a fucking stenographer,” he growled at Dawn.

We sat there in that room—Dawn and Jerry and Adrian and I—waiting for a stenographer, not looking at each other. Don went back and forth to the bathroom; each time he came back, his sinus condition was worse.

Fifteen minutes later, the stenographer arrived. The stenographer was a transvestite.

Don stared in dazed and blinking disbelief. I started to go through my rebuttal to his memo. The stenographer was writing everything down.

Don interrupted me. “Can I speak to you for a moment outside?”

We went outside the building. He looked like he was going to have a stroke. “We gotta do this with this fucking freak in there?” he said.

“I don’t have any problem with her.”

“Him!
Him!
Did you see the hair on
his
arms?”

“You want to call for another stenographer, it’s okay with me.”

“I don’t want to call another stenographer! I don’t want any stenographer in there! I wanna do it with just you!”

“You and me—nobody else, is that the deal?” I said.

“No—Jerry, Adrian, Dawn—”

“All they’re gonna do is agree with you. You’re stacking the deck. At least having a record will prove what an idiot you’re being.”

“I could fire you! I could fire you and not pay you out!”

I hadn’t yet been paid my full fee.

“I’d sue you!” I said.

“Fucking sue me!”

“Okay, I’ll fucking sue you!”

We went at each other like that and he finally agreed to it.

He and I, alone, would have discussions. When we were done talking about the script, we’d ask Dawn and Jerry and Adrian to join us.

We went at each other for days then—back and forth, arguing, cajoling, swearing, screaming. At one particularly difficult moment, we even walked into Michael Eisner’s office to see what he thought.

Michael seemed amused. We were like two kids taking it to daddy. He wouldn’t take a position agreeing with either one of us. He started talking about O. Henry and how much he admired him. I admired O. Henry, too, but I wasn’t sure how relevant he was to a discussion about the dreams of a flashdancer.

At the end of those days, Don and I were still somehow friends. My script was still intact, but I had agreed to make some changes that I liked.

“You’re a prick!” Simpson said as I left. “You’re a no-good fucking Hungarian prick,” and then he mock-punched me goodbye.

The project went on a very fast production track and two weeks before the start of photography, Simpson scheduled a final script meeting. It would be at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, I was told.

“Why are we having a
script
meeting at Caesars Palace?” I asked him.

“Because we’re going to be
auditioning
at the same time we’re having the script meeting.”

“Auditioning whom?”

“Dancers for the movie,” he said.

My suite at Caesars was glaring red. Red walls, red ceiling, a red shag rug—and, outside my window, a red neon sign. Simpson’s suite, the size of a house, had a Jacuzzi in the middle of the living room.

That’s how I first saw him in Vegas. He was sitting in the Jacuzzi with Adrian and Jerry on chairs nearby. He had a bottle of Tanqueray on the edge of the Jacuzzi, a gram of coke on the rug behind him, and a cigar in his mouth.

Over the next few days, we would discuss the script and interrupt our discussion to meet some nineteen-year-old nubile young woman who wanted to dance in the movie. Adrian held a full audition one afternoon where a hundred young women in bikinis and leotards bumped and grinded as the Stones’s “Start Me Up” exploded in a Caesars Palace conference hall.

One night Don held a party in his suite. It was Don, Jerry, Adrian, and I, and fifty of the most beautiful young women in Vegas, all desperate to be in the movie.

I saw him early in the evening sitting next to a voluptuous young woman in
a
see-through dress. He was earnest and shy speaking to her. She was so air-headed and stoned I’m not sure she was picking up a word of it; she had her hand on his thigh.

Around three in the morning, when I was leaving, I wanted to say good night to him.

“He’s in there,” Jerry said, pointing to a door. I opened the door and saw him. He was naked and had a naked young woman up against the wall with her back to him.

I said, “Good night, Don.”

He looked back and grinned but didn’t stop what he was doing.

We started at noon the next day, none of us too fresh. It was at this moment that Adrian launched his big creative idea. Until now, he had pretty much kept his suggestions to visual ones, but now he had a whopper.

Adrian very strongly felt that our lead character, the young woman welder who wanted to be a dancer, was raped by her father when she was eight years old.

I was trying to shake the cobwebs out of my head. I realized that we were at Caesars Palace and realized that we’d had a bacchanalian evening and that we were in a room that had a Jacuzzi in the middle of the floor, but I couldn’t have heard Adrian right, I just couldn’t have.

But Adrian repeated it. He felt she needed “motivation.” He felt the script needed “an additional layer.”

“You don’t mean just telling the actress that,” Simpson said, “you mean actually putting it into the piece—that her father raped her when she was eight years old.”

“Yes,” Adrian said.

He went on to talk about
Last Tango in Paris
, which was his favorite movie of all time.
Last Tango
had those kinds of “layers” he said.

“Adrian, this isn’t
Last Tango,”
I said. “We’re not going to have a butter scene in this one. This is a little fairy tale of a movie. It’s innocent, it’s romantic—the fact that it retains that innocence and romance in a seedy world is what makes it different.”

Don leaned back in the Jacuzzi, poured himself some Tanqueray on ice, and lighted a cigar. Jerry, as is his wont, didn’t say much.

Adrian and I went at it. “You’re destroying this movie,” I said.

“I’m giving it some solidity.”

“It’s a fairy tale! You don’t have a butter scene in a fairy tale!”

“I didn’t say anything about a butter scene!”

We went on and on until suddenly it was too much for me. I turned from them, went out the door, went up to my red suite, packed my suitcase, checked out, and went home.

Adrian, Simpson told me later, came up after me five minutes later and found that I was gone.

“He’s checked out!” Adrian said to Simpson, still in his Jacuzzi. “He’s bloody left the hotel.”

“When the gorilla shits in your face,” Simpson said to Adrian, “get out of the way.”

My sudden departure from Vegas had its desired effect.

Don was able to convince Adrian that a rape at age eight did not belong in this movie.

Auditions were also held on the Paramount lot.

A two-hour wait to get into the room … a sweltering day on the lot … a musical … a dance picture … an audition for
Flashdance
… a movie about following your dream.

She’s a dancer or so she says … auditioning for stardom … for survival … following her dream.

She’s pretty … but not all that special … skinny but still fuckable … edgy but still vulnerable … but … but … oh, Lord … she can dance.

You did great, you really did … We’ve got your phone number right here … We’ll call you … Don’t call us …
Ha ha
.

Two hours later … the audition long over … she’s back suddenly … “You won’t believe this.” She smiles … We don’t believe it … But we pretend to.

She was supposed to get a ride … her girlfriend’s clunker broke down … she wonders if any of us … are headed toward Westwood?

Yes … miraculously … one of us is.

Yes … one of us will give her a ride.

And then we’ll tell her that … she’s good … don’t … give up … ever … give up … follow … your dream.

Casting Alex, our lead character, came down to three finalists. Demi Moore, a young actress who’d been in
Young Doctors in Love;
Leslie Wing, a New York model; and Jennifer Beals, a young model from Chicago.

The studio couldn’t decide whom to cast.

Michael Eisner finally directed that each young woman do an audition reel in full costume with Adrian directing them under “shoot” conditions—the use of a professional cinematographer and lighting man.

When the reels were done, Michael Eisner, who in his heart of hearts is a Mike Todd–like showman, organized one of the most unusual test screenings in the history of Paramount Pictures. He gathered together two hundred of the most macho men on the lot, Teamsters and gaffers and grips, and sat them down in a screening room.

He got up onstage to tell them what was about to happen. That they would see a reel from three young actresses auditioning for the lead in the movie called
Flashdance
.

“I want to know one thing from you guys after you’ve seen it,” he said. “I want to know which of these three young women you’d most want to fuck.”

The men cheered and threw fists into the air and after they saw the reels they voted overwhelmingly for Jennifer Beals. She was cast in the part.

The shoot was uneventful—Pittsburgh looked glorious on-screen (I wanted to set it in Pittsburgh; when I was living in Cleveland, Pittsburgh was where we escaped to on weekends), and at the end we felt we’d have a visually startling and romantic movie.

Simpson started to work on the music. He was a genius with film music. He had an instinctive rock and roll feel and he came up with a brilliant idea. He gave the script or showed the rough cut to musicians he liked—people like Irene Cara and Michael Sembello and Kim Carnes—and asked them to write songs that might work in this movie.

Adrian, meanwhile, worked on the cut. His director’s cut was two hours and twenty minutes long. It was, I thought, beautifully done—the characters were fleshed out—it wasn’t just the story of a welder who wanted to be a dancer; it was also the story of a young comedian who fails and gives up, of an ice skater who compromises her talent, of a young man … (played by Michael Nouri after Mickey Rourke turned the part down, feeling, at the time, pre–
Wild Orchid
, that he couldn’t do love scenes) … who comes to realize what loving someone really means.

But the studio—Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg—hated the cut and insisted that Adrian make deletions. Every time Adrian made a cut, they insisted on more, until all that was left, finally, was dancing, a very bare story line, and music.

Adrian felt his movie had been raped at the age of eight.

I felt like the writing was gone from the piece. Simpson was having a nervous breakdown, especially after he discovered that Paramount had so little faith in
Flashdance
that the studio sold off 30 percent of its own potential profit to a private investors group. We all knew, of course, that studios only did that with movies that they were absolutely certain would stiff.

The weekend we opened, we stiffed. The reviews were vicious—most reviewers dismissed the movie as “soft porn.” The opening weekend’s grosses were a blip on the screen—$3.8 million—in Hollywood terms, “zilch.”

The Thursday after we opened, Simpson called me. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but something’s going on.”

Theater owners were reporting that they were getting repeat business—especially among young women. People were leaving the theaters in tears, humming the music. The owners also had to order triple the amount of popcorn they usually ordered.

“This could be a popcorn movie,” Simpson said.

“What’s that?”

“An audience picture. The audience comes, has fun, tells their friends. The movie becomes critic-proof.”

The following weekend, we did $4.3 million—it was still a very small number, but the fact that we’d gone up instead of suffering the usual second-weekend drop meant that we were getting great word of mouth.

And from then on, the movie just kept getting bigger box office each weekend.

Irene Cara’s “Flashdance” and then Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” went to number one on the
Billboard
chart. Within a month, we knew we had a phenomenon. It played in the theaters for eight months and made more than $400 million worldwide.

Everyone took credit for it, a sure sign of a huge hit. Peter Guber and Jon Peters bragged about producing it, although I had never even met them in the course of the production.

Lynda Obst bragged about developing it, although the script she worked on with Tom Hedley was junked. Tom Hedley said that he wrote it, although all that was left of his script was the title and the dance style (enough, though, in my mind: without his original creativity, there would have been no movie).

The truth is that it was really one person’s movie. It was Simpson’s baby from beginning to end and it made a lot of us involved a lot of money.

I had a very few net profit points in residual earnings, what Eddie Murphy referred to later as “monkey points”—meaning that they never paid off, that the studio accounting system was always able to deny net point participants money because no movie ever made
so much
money that they had to pay monkey points off.

My monkey points on
Flashdance
amounted to over $2 million.

When Art Buchwald sued Paramount years later, Paramount asked me to testify on its behalf. The studio needed an example to show that net points sometimes meant real dollars.

I turned the request down.

I didn’t want to be known as the one writer in Hollywood the studios wouldn’t cheat.

You’re never hotter in Hollywood than when you have a raging hit movie out in the world and
Flashdance
was so hot around the world that Europeans had a new craze: trading cards consisting of five hundred shots from the movie.