Hollywood Animal (38 page)

“I want you to rewrite it,” Richard said.

I read it and told him I thought it was awful. And I didn’t understand why he wanted to do it.

“You’ve just had a big hit movie,” I said, “you can do anything you want to
do
. And you want to do
this
?”

He told me how much he had always loved rock and roll—one of his early directing efforts was a brilliant little film about the Beatles for the BBC which I had admired. This script was about a young woman who wanted to be a rock star.

“There’s never been a really good rock and roll piece,” Richard said. “I like
The Rose
very much, but even that didn’t quite completely work.”

He told me that Craig Baumgarten and Lorimar wanted to make a big deal with him to put the movie on a fast schedule for distribution.

“We’re not going to have much time,” Richard said, “they want to put it into the pipeline quickly. They need product.”

I was against it.

“I don’t think there’s a movie here, Richard,” I said.

“I can do it if you help me,” he said. “Besides, it’ll give us a chance to be together. I miss you. I know you’re gallivanting about with these world-renowned directors, but I miss you.”

I missed him, too, and besides, I found it almost impossible to purposely disappoint him. We had shared too many laughs and good times together.

“Aw, fuck it,” I finally said. “Okay, I’ll do it, what the hell.”

He laughed.

“You’re the only man I’ve ever met who can accept an absolute fortune so ungracefully.”

We sat in the rain in Palm Springs for a week going over the Scott Richardson script, which, I thought, was basically an excuse for Richardson to put some of his songs—which were quite good—into a movie.

During our discussions, we evolved a romantic triangle featuring a young rock singer who wants to be a star caught between an English pop idol and a washed-up and retired American rocker.

In my more frustrated moments, I kept muttering, “This is a mistake, Richard.”

And Richard smiled and said, “We’ll work it out.”

I had to have the rewrite done within two weeks. I met the deadline, but hated what I’d written. Richard liked it, Lorimar liked it, and we went right into casting.

For the part of the young woman, we cast Fiona, a New York club singer who the record companies were convinced would be a big star. I looked at her screen test and said she couldn’t act. Richard and Craig felt she was fine.

For the part of the English rocker, we cast Rupert Everett. I couldn’t argue with that; I thought him to be a marvelously gifted actor. And for the part of the washed-up American rocker, we cast … ta-dum!
Bob Dylan
.

“Can Dylan act?” I asked Richard.

“No, certainly not.”

“But we’re casting him.”

“We are. All he has to do is to be himself.”

I repeated my mantra.

“We’re making a big mistake here, Richard.”

“Do you like Bob Dylan?” he asked.

“I revere Bob Dylan,” I said. “I have every single one of his albums. I have every single one of his bootleg albums. I will travel a thousand miles to see him in concert. But I don’t think we should cast him in this movie. I don’t think we should do this movie. I think we should give them their money back and pull out of this movie.”

“You wrote a brilliant script.” He smiled.

“Aw, fuck you,” I said.

He knew damn well how I felt about my script. I kept trying to rewrite the damn thing behind Richard’s back even though it had been cast and budgeted.

We met Dylan at a sushi place in Malibu to discuss the script. He was wired and uptight—he wore black leather and motorcycle boots—and hardly said a word. His leg kept jiggling. He hardly ate and then he left.

We met him again in Denver, where he was appearing in concert at Red Rock with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He was friendly and seemed pleased that we had flown in to talk to him.

“What’s your favorite Bob Dylan song?” he asked me almost shyly, phrasing it exactly that way and I told him it was “Mr. Tambourine Man.” To my delight, he played it at the concert that night, introducing it only with the words “Hey, Joe, this one’s for you.”

We congratulated him after the show and agreed to meet at the bar of his hotel that night to talk about the script. But when we met at the bar, Bob Dylan said, “Can you fly to Portland? We’re in Portland next.”

Richard and I both knew a thing or two about game playing, so Richard said, “Bob, we have flown
here
. To Denver. We will not fly to Portland. We have flown to Denver. We are
here
.”

When Richard said it, he sounded like Richard Burton, which made sense, because for a time in his career he had served as Burton’s professional voice, filling in for him at looping and radio interviews that Burton didn’t want to do.

Bob Dylan grinned when Richard said that and said, “Yeah, you’re
here
in Denver, that’s
true
,” and we agreed to meet him in his hotel suite at eight o’clock the next morning.

When Richard and I walked into the suite the next morning, greeted by a roadie, we were told to sit on the couch, Bob would be right out. There was a
quart
bottle of Jim Beam on the table, about a quarter gone. We waited for about ten minutes.

When Bob did come out, he was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of jeans. He said “Hey” quite affably, reached for the Jim Beam, took a huge slug, and sat down facing us.

Richard did the talking. He said that it was very important within the dynamic of the script for him to meet Fiona as soon as possible, since his love story with Fiona was at the heart of the piece.

“I don’t know about that, man,” Dylan said. “I can’t kiss her. I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“You don’t believe in kissing?” I asked.

Dylan thought that was hilarious and started to laugh. “Not kissing her, no,” he said. “Not up on-screen. I don’t do that.”

Richard kept going on and Dylan kept laughing and slugging on the Jim Beam and then he said he was sorry, he had to get ready, “The bus is heading to Portland.”

Richard told him that we really did need more time to talk to him and Dylan said, “You want to fly into Portland? I can see you in Portland. I know you’re
here
and I’m
here
, but I’m going to
Portland
.”

When we left, Richard said, “Don’t worry, it’ll work out.”

“How?”

“I’ll talk to him on the set.”

“What if you don’t convince him on the set?”

“I will.”

“You know, this is
Bob Dylan
here,” I said to Richard. “It may not be that easy to convince him.”

“Trust me,” Richard said.

He went to England to shoot the movie and every time he called me he told me how wonderfully it was all working out. Fiona and Dylan and Rupert Everett, he said, were great friends.

“Dylan and Rupert are friends?” I asked.

“Great friends.”

“They’re not supposed to be,” I said. “They’re supposed to hate each other.”

“Well, they do, sort of, in the script.”

“
Sort of
? This is a romantic triangle. Where’s the drama going to come from if they don’t hate each other?”

“Don’t worry,” Richard said, “trust me.”

He brought the rough assembly to L.A. with his editor and showed it to me along with three or four Lorimar executives. He and his editor kept laughing at moments that weren’t funny.

Bob Dylan did not kiss Fiona on-screen. He and Rupert Everett did not hate each other. The romantic triangle was gone. The movie had no humor, no energy, and no dramatic tension.

The Lorimar executives, including Craig, made their usual disingenuous disclaimers—
It’s great, but it needs some work
—and quickly left the room.

I didn’t say a word until Richard and I wandered outside and were alone.

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” he said.

“It is,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it is.”

He had tears in his eyes.

“I blame myself first,” I said. “I never gave you a script that was any good. Fiona can’t act. Dylan can’t act and it’s not Rupert’s movie. I’m sorry, Richard.”

“Is there anything we can do to fix it?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

We tried everything—recutting, tightening, expanding. I wrote some new scenes, but we couldn’t persuade Lorimar to do any reshooting—no good money after bad money, the rule in Hollywood says.

Richard took the negative back to England with him and would work on it until dawn, exhausting himself, trying everything he could think of.

He called me near dawn one day and he was crying. “Nothing works,” he said. “It’s just a bloody bad movie.”

“It’s only a movie, Richard,” I said. “Remember that. Please. We’ll have some hits, we’ll have some misses, but it’s only a movie.”

He called me about a week later to say he had thought about what I’d said to him and was going off to Greece with Carol to sit in the sun for a week, swim, and walk in the sand. He sounded good for the first time in a long time.

“Think about what we should do next, Squire,” he said. “I’ve got some thoughts myself.”

I said I would and said that I was happy he was taking the time off. He had a wonderful wife, beautiful children, he was one of the most successful directors in the world and this was—

“Only a movie,” he said at the same time that I did.

He called from London two weeks later to tell me that he and Carol had had a delightful time in Greece.

“I feel like I’m twenty years old again,” he said with a laugh.

Carol called me the next day to tell me that he had sat down to dinner after my conversation with him and during dinner he had stood up suddenly and then collapsed.

He had suffered a massive stroke. A few days later, my great friend Richard Marquand was
dead
. He was forty-eight years old.

· · ·

I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock. I lost myself in a whiskey fog for days. I cried and grieved for the man I had loved.

I understood the full horror of the lesson here: If you allowed Hollywood to infect your soul … not your brain, not even your heart, but your
soul
… you became vulnerable to the
shiv
with which Hollywood could kill you.

Hollywood had handed my friend Richard Marquand that platinum and diamond shiv and he had taken it and plunged it into himself. He hadn’t died of a stroke after all. He’d been killed by a very bad movie called
Hearts of Fire
.

Lethbridge, Canada, where Costa was shooting
Betrayed
, is farm country two hours south of Calgary in the Canadian West, where the jukeboxes blared Anne Murray and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and where the big deal on a weekend night was to get rip-roaring “toasted” on tequila shooters.

The driver who picked me up at the Calgary airport was a longtime Lethbridge resident who gave his twisted version of a Junior Chamber of Commerce speech.

“We’ve got a real nice town,” he said, “this part of Canada has the lowest AIDS rate in all of North America. We’ve never had a movie filmed here, most of our residents don’t do a lot of traveling, and we have some damn pretty women. You feel free to enjoy yourself.”

As he drove me to the Lethbridge Inn, where I was to meet Irwin Winkler, I saw that the town was decked out and ready for the film crew. The liquor store had big signs that said: “French
champane.”
The restaurants had signs that said: “Caesar salad now being served.”

Irwin had called and asked me to come. “Something’s up,” he had said in his laconic way. He was already in the dining room of the inn, waiting, when I got there. He looked strangely pensive. Irwin Winkler’s usual style is cool, inheld, and controlled.

We had a problem, Irwin explained. Costa was about halfway through the shoot and he and Irwin suddenly realized that the script was too long. If Costa shot the rest of it as it was written, the movie would be two hours and forty-two minutes long.

“Didn’t anyone time the script before he started shooting?”

Irwin shrugged.

“Evidently not. Or if someone timed it, they timed it wrong.”

“What can we do?” I asked.

“We have to cut from the scenes that have not yet been shot,” Irwin said.

“That’s nuts. It’s bad enough to have to cut so much out, but to have to cut from only what hasn’t been shot—it can throw the whole balance of it off.” Shaking my head, I said, “Is there any good news?”

“Plenty.” Irwin smiled. “The dailies are terrific and Debra’s a dream.”

Winger, he said, was the ultimate pro. All that talk about how difficult she
could
be was just talk. She was going through a tough time, too. She had recently given birth, put herself on a crash diet to be ready for the movie.

When the shoot began, Irwin said, Tom Berenger was obviously intimidated by her. Debra noticed it and started going out of her way to put him at ease. She’d make coffee for him and kid with him. The crew, Irwin said, was terrified of her. Winger started playing poker with them—on the night when they got paid. Now the crew was in love with her. They had discovered that Debra Winger was an ace poker player. They didn’t even seem to mind losing most of their money to her.

I saw how much Winger was the heart and soul of the set the next day, when I arrived on location. It was 12:30 in the afternoon when I finally got there and Debra was in the middle of a scene.

She stopped cold when she saw me and very loudly said, “Well, look who’s arrived. At 12:30 in the afternoon.
The writer
has graced us with his presence. Will somebody
please
get him a cup of coffee?”

I started trying to cut the script from what had not yet been shot. It was a terrible, frustrating process that kept me at it in a small office behind a loading dock until well past midnight every day.

As I worked, I saw what made Irwin Winkler such an exceptional producer. He was on the set every day, from seven in the morning till seven at night. It was 100 degrees outside and under lights inside a barn it was much hotter than that, but Irwin was there for every moment. One day he was so exhausted and dehydrated that he got very dizzy.