Hollywood Animal (35 page)

“No, sir,” one of the engineers said. “Like I said—these are real high-quality cuffs you got here.”

“Fuck me!”
Richard said.

“Excuse me?” one of the engineers said.

“It’s a Brit expression,” I said.

“Oh,” the engineer said, eyeing me oddly.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“We’ll have to call a locksmith,” one of the security guys said.

“It’s Saturday, it’s early,” the other security guy said.

“
Fuck me again!
” Richard said.

Three hours later, a locksmith took Richard’s cuffs off.

The minute they were off, Richard was in excruciating pain. With the locksmith, the engineers, and the hotel security guys standing there, I called the
hotel
doctor. He said that Richard had strained his back muscles by being handcuffed for so long.

He was flying back to England and I offered to drop him at the airport. He thanked me and asked that we stop on Sunset Boulevard for a moment first.

“Why?” I said.

“You’ll see.”

“Does it have anything to do with the handcuffs?”

“You truly are a writer,” Richard said. “No director should ever have a writer for a friend.”

I was driving down Sunset when he suddenly told me to stop.

Across from us was a gigantic billboard of
Jagged Edge
. We looked at it.

Richard said, “I just wanted to see it again.”

Six months later, the movie was still playing in New York, and one night Richard and I, there for different reasons, had dinner and a couple of drinks and as we were walking down Madison Avenue, we saw the big lighted-up marquee for
Jagged Edge
and said, what the hell, let’s go see it.

They were sold out. We told the ticket taker who we were and she didn’t believe us.

We asked her to summon the manager. We pointed to our names on the poster and the manager asked to see our IDs.

We showed them to him and he stared at us and said, “I don’t believe you guys, okay? If you don’t get the hell outta here, I’m gonna call the cops.”

Richard and I stumbled down Madison Avenue, arm in arm, howling at the moon.

Many years later, when there was a hip-hop group called Jagged Edge making hit records, my son Steve told me how much he admired my title.

“There are a lot of titles for movies that you forget, Pops,” Steve said. “But you remember
Jagged Edge
. How did you come up with it?”

My policy with my kids is to never lie to them. Steve’s question was a test of my policy.

“Well,” I finally said, “I
didn’t
come up with it.”

He said, “What?”

“My title, if you can believe it, was—
Hearts of Fire
. The studio hated it and decided to change it.”

“But then who came up with
Jagged Edge
?” Steve asked.

“They assigned some secretary at the studio to go through my script letter by letter, word by word in the effort to come up with another title. The secretary
found
‘jagged edge’ in my description of the murder weapon: ‘a knife with a jagged edge.’”

Steve smiled. “It’s
your
title then,” he said, “it was in
your
script. You just didn’t know you had it.”

My children love me.

Even though Richard Marquand and I both hated
Hearts of Fire
as the title of
Jagged Edge
, we still liked the sound of it.

We changed the title of the next movie we did together—
American Rocker
—to
Hearts of Fire
.

CHAPTER 8

It’s Only a Movie

CARL

I had me eight ice-cold Budweiser beers. I’m probably still drunk. But you know what? Everything else is so damn cockeyed … to hold on to your balance, I figure you gotta get just as cockeyed.

Foreplay
, unproduced

BEN MYRON, MY
wannabe producer friend from the Book Depot in Mill Valley, had been knocking on every door in Hollywood with my unsold spec script
Checking Out
in hand for two years.

All the doors shut in his face, and then one of them was suddenly open a crack.

George Harrison, the Beatle, owned a small film company called Handmade. George liked
Checking Out
and said he had a director in mind who was the “flavor of the month.”

David Leland was the flavor of the month. He had just written and directed a movie which whiz-banged the film festivals:
Wish You Were Here
, starring a bright English actress named Emily Lloyd. David, who had worked up through English television, was suddenly being offered everything in town.

I was more than pleased, then, when he read
Checking Out
, the story of a suburban husband and father who becomes obsessed with the notion that he is dying.

It was a dark comedy, which came from that very personal moment in my life when, at the age of thirty-three, after a lifetime of good health, I woke up one morning thinking that my heart was about to blow out of my chest like the
Alien
, called the paramedics, was ambulanced to a hospital, and told that my heart was fine, but that I had to stop smoking and drinking black coffee.

I sat down with David Leland in a suite at the Beverly Hilton with a
pool
table and a living room Jacuzzi compliments of Handmade and I said, “David, I own this script. It’s very personal for me. I want to know one thing. Please tell me the truth. You’re a writer-director. Are you going to change this script?”

David Leland, a pleasant, clear-eyed young Brit, looked me right in the eye and said, “Not one word.”

We shook hands. I agreed to sell the script to Handmade, with David directing it and Ben Myron producing; and talked Jeff Daniels into starring in it.

David started shooting. He called a couple of times a week to tell me everything was playing wonderfully. He came up on a weekend and amazed Steve and Suzi. David was double-jointed. He made magic tricks with his fingers.

He called and asked me to come down to see a rough assembly.

I stared, my jaw slack.
Not one word would he change, he had said. Everything was playing wonderfully, he had said
.

He’d lied. He’d looked me right in the eye and lied … because there were new subplots I was seeing on-screen and new characters who weren’t in my script.

Worse, much worse, tragically worse: the new characters he had created were buffoon-like and had clichéd stereotypical Jewish names.

I wrote Warner Brothers, the distributor, a letter demanding that my name be taken off. I carboned my agents, my lawyers, Handmade, George Harrison—anyone I knew who was involved in the production.

David Leland took most of what I was objecting to out and I put my name back on.

The movie was minimally distributed and bombed. The night it opened in San Francisco, there were eight people in the theater.

David Leland, double-jointed flavor of the month, went back to England.

Sylvester Stallone called to tell me how much he had liked
Jagged Edge
. He also said he wanted to do me a favor.

“I owe you one,” he said.

Well, I thought, at least he doesn’t have short-term memory loss.

He was directing a movie called
Staying Alive
, he explained, with John Travolta. It was the sequel to
Saturday Night Fever
. They were halfway through the shoot and he and John were having differences over the script. He needed, he said, a fast rewrite. A two-week rewrite and “I can get you $500,000.”

“I owe you one,” he said again.

I told him that I had no interest in doing a rewrite, and was thinking about what my next original screenplay would be.

“Come on down,” he said, “we’ll talk on the set. We’ll have dinner. We’ll put
you
up in the Presidential Suite of the Wilshire, how’s that? We’re friends. Friends help each other.”

Well, okay, I thought, so now we were
friends
.

I had called him a thief and he had said he’d been burgling my house and he’d had a picture taken of himself hitting a punching bag with my name on it … but now we were
friends
.

I flew down the next day to speak to him.

We met in Sly’s trailer. We gave each other hugs. He badmouthed Norman Jewison, and John Travolta walked into the trailer. He was wearing a black motorcycle jacket and had the emaciated look that stars often do during shooting. He struck me as a very earnest and nice … boy. Say whatever you want about Sly Stallone, he was no boy.

He and John started talking about the script. Sly wanted to do one thing with the script and John wanted to do another. Sly kept talking about emphasizing Tony Manero’s “cool” and John kept talking about his “vulnerability.” They were on different planets and were interested in writing different scripts.

“What do you think?” Sly asked me.

“I think you guys have a real problem here,” I said, “and you’ve gotta work it out.”

“You’ll help us work it out,” Sly said.

“Not me, guys,” I said to them.

“Come on,” Sly said, “you can do this.”

“No, I can’t,” I said.

For the first time I saw Travolta smile.

“Sure you can,” Sly said, “we’ll talk it through today, we’ll have dinner tonight, I got you the Presidential Suite at the Wilshire, we’ll finish up tomorrow.”

I started to laugh. Both of them watched me. John kept smiling; Sly looked puzzled.

“Sly,” I said, “you fucked me once on
F.I.S.T
. What do you want to fuck me again for now that we’re friends?”

Then John started to laugh, too, and after a moment so did Sly.

“Maybe you’re right,” Sly said. I was out of there.

I used cabs in L.A. whenever I commuted from Marin for meetings. The cabbies asked me what I did for a living and I told them the truth: I was a screenwriter.

And I discovered that most of the cabbies in L.A., including the Russians, were either writing a screenplay or had written one which they wanted me to read, co-write, or at least sell for them.

Scripts were dropped off with the concierge of my hotel. Cabbies prowled the lobby waiting for me as I got off the elevator. A Russian cabbie showed up in the bar of the hotel where he’d dropped me off—showed up with his wife, his
infant
daughter, his mother-in-law, and his script, written in a language which I discovered to be neither Russian nor English.

After a while, whenever a cabbie in L.A. asked me what I did, I said,
“This, that, or the other, you know.”
And one cabbie smiled and said, “What does that mean—criminal activity?”

But I still had a problem with those cabbies who either dropped me off or picked me up at studios, so I started using limousines on my trips—the cost didn’t matter, the studio was picking it up anyway.

My son Steve was eleven years old. We did everything together—played catch together, swam together, collected baseball cards together, and watched batting practice at the Oakland Coliseum in the bleachers together. We even caught foul balls at the ballpark together.

I started thinking about the special closeness there is between fathers and sons at this age in a boy’s life and it led me to write a script about a little boy whose dad dies unexpectedly and he suddenly has to cope with the world alone.

I sent the little boy whose dad dies, Obie, off on an adventure with a little black kid whom he meets, Scam. The script, I knew, was really a very personal gift to Steve. Obie was Steve—in appearance, shyness, and style, right down to the vernacular that skateboarding kids of his age used, words like “Sau-sage!” when they got excited about something.

I sent the script down to my agent and we decided to send it out to auction. Our expectations weren’t high. This was a little arty piece about two little kids becoming friends and discovering the world. As my agent pointed out, “There aren’t even any women in it.”

To our surprise,
Big Shots
captured the interest of both Twentieth Century Fox, headed by Barry Diller and the producer Larry Gordon, and Lorimar, headed by Merv Adelson and Lee Rich. My old ally Craig Baumgarten had found a job there as head of production.

Fox and Lorimar bid against each other for the script and, at the end of the day, Lorimar bought it for $1.25 million. It was a new record high for a spec script in Hollywood. (Jim Morgan and I had set the previous high six years ago when
City Hall
sold for $500,000.)

I was amazed. The script had been a labor of love with seemingly noncommercial qualities and now a studio had paid a fortune for it.

Lorimar needed “product” and Craig was anxious to show his new bosses that he could put a movie together, so
Big Shots
suddenly became Lorimar’s top priority. He made it his twenty-four-hour obsession to find an A-list director—someone whose attachment to the project would send a message to the town that Lorimar, with Craig Baumgarten as the head of production, was a “player.”

It was as important for Craig to find a top director as it was for Lorimar. He had had some difficulty finding a job after his porn film ouster from Columbia. After his firing hit the papers, everyone in town had quickly rented a tape.

Ivan Reitman was the A-list director he found. He was about as A-list as you could get—the director of
Ghostbusters
, of
Meatballs
and
Stripes
and
Legal Eagles
, although no one liked to talk about
Legal Eagles
. The movie, with Redford and Debra Winger, had been such a disaster that Winger had threatened to leave CAA, claiming that she’d been snookered into taking the part because the agency was more interested in putting together a “package” than considering her best interest.

With great press fanfare, Lorimar announced that Ivan Reitman would direct
Big Shots
.

Alas, an hour after meeting him, I knew that wasn’t true. His “attachment” was for Lorimar’s press release, but not for my screenplay.

Yes, there was a chance that he’d direct it, Reitman allowed, but he would probably produce it. He had a production company that he was intent on making an entity of its own, producing not just movies that he directed.