Hollywood Animal (30 page)

I wondered how some United Artists executives were feeling: at a time when “the buzz” on
F.I.S.T
. was good, they had authorized the manufacture of thousands of brass
F.I.S.T
. belt knuckles, which were now, no doubt, filling up a warehouse somewhere.

When it was clear that
Flashdance
was a gold mine, Guy McElwaine called me to advise: “You are going to get avalanched with offers. Do none of them. Wait. Take all the meetings, but accept nothing till they offer you what you should have.”

I was making $275,000 per script.

“What should I have?” I asked Guy.

“Six hundred thousand a script,” he said.

So that’s what I did. I met with everyone and turned everything down. I wanted to sit down and write a new spec script on my own but I was so busy that I didn’t have the time.

It was a swirl of meetings, lunches, and dinners in both L.A. and San Francisco. Congratulatory cases of champagne and breathtaking bouquets of flowers were arriving from producers and studio heads I’d barely shaken hands with.

I was busy in Marin with my other life.

My son Steve was first in soccer and then in Little League. I went to every game. I won an award as the only parent who attended all seventeen Little League games.

Sometimes, I thought, dealing with Little League was as difficult as Hollywood. I was almost escorted off the field at a Little League game for berating a teenage umpire who, I felt, didn’t know what constituted a balk.

My daughter, Suzi, had decided she was going to be the next Dian Fossey. She was eight years old.

Gerri and I took her to every zoo and animal preserve in the area.

My father, approaching eighty, enjoyed accompanying me to L.A. He still lived in Cleveland but he was flying out a lot to Marin, and often, when I had a meeting, he’d come with me. He had friends in L.A. While I was having meetings in L.A., he was visiting his friends there. When I was free, my father and I would trip around the town together.

We made an odd couple, but we had fun: a shuffling old man in his black suit, carrying a cane, his arm held by a younger man with hair over his shoulders, a mountain man beard, and wearing tattered jeans.

We were a long way from the Lorain Fulton Theatre now, as we visited
Grauman’s
Chinese or walked the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but we still enjoyed ducking into a matinee before my meeting with David Begelman, the head of MGM.

We liked meeting at midnight, after I’d had a dinner at Morton’s with yet another producer who wanted to be allied with one of the hottest screenwriters in town.

My father and I would sit in the El Padrino Room at the Beverly Wilshire sharing a Caesar salad and talking about the old times on Lorain Avenue.

He had remarried, unhappily, after my mother died, and we talked about my mother a lot. Thanks to the movies, I was able to support him. He had been fired without warning when he was seventy-three by the Franciscan monks who owned the
Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday
. I started making money at about the time he got fired and the money allowed him to publish new Hungarian novels that he wrote—and whose publication costs I covered. It gave him a sense of worth and, more than that, it gave him something to do. Without the money Hollywood was paying me, my dad, I knew, would quickly have become a candidate for an old-age home.

Instead, I was able to show my father the better restaurants and walked around the Warner Brothers lot with him and I even got a map of the stars’ homes one afternoon and we drove around Bel Air and Beverly Hills.

“I wouldn’t know how to do this,” my father said to me one day as we were walking down Rodeo Drive, arm in arm.

“What, Pop?”

“This Hollywood business,” he said in Hungarian.

I asked him what he meant.

“Sometimes I see you at night when you come back,” he said, “and you have had meetings and lunches all day and meetings again and I see you very tired.”

“Everybody gets tired,” I said.

“Yes, but you look
very
tired. And I know in my life sometimes I have gotten very tired, but I have gotten tired from the writing and not the meetings.”

“Well, tired is tired, isn’t it?” I said.

“No,” he said, “there are very different ways of being tired.”

I thought about it for a while and then I took my father into Café Rodeo. He ordered a corned beef sandwich—they had it, thank God.

He and I laughed over something from my childhood … I felt the setting sun on my face, and I didn’t feel so tired anymore.

CHAPTER 7

Blood and Hair on the Walls

BILLY

The night is young.

The tide is red.

There are pigs in the sea.

Foreplay
, unproduced

RICHARD MARQUAND, AN
English director who had directed
Eye of the Needle
, one of my favorite thrillers, was in Marin shooting George Lucas’s
Return of the Jedi
. A wry, down-to-earth Welshman in his early forties, Richard and I were introduced by a mutual friend and were instant mates.

He and his wife, Carol, a smart, cigar-smoking woman, were renting a house in Tiburon. George Lucas was driving him nuts—“he just bloody stands there, right behind me, watching”—and Richard and I enjoyed sharing moments at local pubs dwelling on the glories of Guinness stout.

Jedi
was a big-budget, high-profile production, and Richard, who had spent many years scuffling in L.A. trying to get a directing job, was near the top of the heap. He remembered those years in L.A. all too well, though, hanging out at Barney’s Beanery—“I lived on that damn chili”—and living in a succession of ratty Hollywood Hills apartments.

“You’re only as good as your last picture if you’re a director,” he said to me. “It’s different if you’re a writer. Your profile is lower, you can get away with much more. But I can’t. And I know I can’t.”

In the course of spending time together, we talked often about our kids. We were both devoted fathers and we both felt that the children in our lives had opened inner doors which we had mostly kept shut. Our children were humanizing, softening, sensitizing influences which we both greatly welcomed and treasured in our lives.

Richard remembered a moment when he was watching Sam, his three-year-old, as Sam watched a butterfly alight on a windowsill. Sam made a movement to touch the butterfly and then held back, his hand still up in the air. As the butterfly flew away, Sam started to laugh in delight … and Richard, watching him, started to cry.

I started talking about writing a script which would be about an inheld man, a man who had walled his heart off from most people … a man who, thanks to children that he loves, finds himself reborn.

“I’ll direct that movie, Squire,” Richard said.

“You will?”

“I give you my word,” Richard said, and we shook hands.

I sat down and wrote the script and called it
Pals
, the name with which both Richard and I often addressed our kids. It was about a convict named Sam Bragg (named, of course, after Sam Marquand) who escapes and holes up in woods neighboring a farm.

The farm is run by a widow with two little kids and the story focused on the convict being brought back to inner life by the love he felt for the children.

Richard cried when he read it, formally committed to do it as his next movie, and the script was quickly sold to Paramount for $400,000.

“You’re crazy,” Guy told me when he heard about the sale. “You should have held out for $600,000.”

“It’s a labor of love,” I told him, and told him about the butterfly on the windowsill that Sam Marquand had watched.

A month after I sold the script, with Richard in post-production now on
Jedi
, he and I went to have a production meeting with Paramount about
Pals
. Richard wanted to go into pre-production right away.

“We don’t want to move quite that fast,” Jeff Katzenberg, Paramount’s head of production, said.

“Oh?” Richard said. A month earlier they had bought the script
very fast
, literally
overnight
after receiving it.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s a brilliant script,” Jeffrey said, “it’s moving, it’s poignant, it makes you cry.”

“Yes?” Richard said.

“And you are a terrific talent,” he said to Richard. “The word of mouth on
Jedi
is fantastic. It’s got a great buzz.”

Oh, oh, I thought. There’s that “buzz” word again.
F.I.S.T
. had had great “buzz,” too.

“Yes?” Richard said.

Jeffrey looked down at his desk for a moment, and Richard and I glanced at each other.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Jeffrey said. “It’s essentially a character piece set on a farm, a relationship piece on a farm.”

“That’s what it was when you bought it,” I said.

“Well, we’re just not certain that farm movies are working right now.”

“Dust,” I suddenly said.

Jeffrey nodded.

“What did you say, Squire?” Richard said.

“Dust,” I said, “there’s lots of dust on a farm. No dust.”

“No
dust?
” Richard said. He looked like a man trapped in a straitjacket now.

“No.”

The damn dust, it had me again. First at ABC Films and now here.

Our butterfly wasn’t going to flutter.

Guy McElwaine was now the number two man at Columbia Pictures under Frank Price, known as the Sphinx, a studio head made famous for passing on the opportunity to make
E.T
.

“Do you know who Marty Ransohoff is?” Guy asked me one day.

“He’s the wild boar of the business, from what I hear.”

“You’ll like him. He’s got a great idea, come on down and meet him.”

Marty Ransohoff, I knew, was one of the all-time, all-star producers in Hollywood. The producer of
The Beverly Hillbillies
and
Mr. Ed
on television, he had then produced
The Americanization of Emily, The Cincinnati Kid, The Sandpipers, Catch-22, The White Dawn
, and
Silver Streak
.

He was obviously larger than life; mythical stories attached themselves to him.

He owned much of the Big Sur coastline … he was close to the top business honchos at Columbia, especially to Herb Allen, and had been integral in the studio’s ouster of former studio chief David Begelman, caught forging a check … during the making of
The Americanization of Emily
, he had chosen to stay loyal to Paddy Chayefsky and had fired the director William Wyler … Budd Schulberg, the writer, had called Marty “The messiah of the New Hollywood” … Joyce Haber, the columnist, had called him “L. B. Mayer without the overhead” …

Knowing all of that, I still wasn’t prepared for our meeting. He was loud. He spoke in four-letter words. He had a Buddha-like gut. He wore a wrinkled Banlon top with wrinkled pants. He had a few wisps of white hair that were artistically placed across a mammoth bald skull.

“Blood and hair on the walls, that’s what I want,” he growled. “You got that? It ain’t gonna work without blood and hair on the walls.”

What he had in mind, specifically, was a courtroom drama involving a shocking, bloody crime. There hadn’t been a courtroom drama made in years. One of Marty’s favorite movies was
Anatomy of a Murder
.

“If you make it a woman lawyer,” Guy said, “I think I can get Jane Fonda into it.”

“She’s a pain in the ass,” Marty said. “What do we want to get her into it for?”

“She’s a big star,” Guy said.

“You just want to boost your boyfriend’s deal,” Marty said, nodding at me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Guy smiled.

“I’ll tell you what I’m talking about,” Marty growled. “Fonda gets attached and your boyfriend will get more money for writing the script than he’s ever gotten before.”

“You know what your problem is?” Guy said. “You’ve been in this town too long.”

He laughed; so did I.

“Fuck both of you,” Marty said.