Hollywood Animal (45 page)

I thought:
Beg!

I gave Gerri the hand signal and she hung up on him again.

He called again mid-afternoon.

“Gerri,” he said, “I know you’re going to hang up on me. Please don’t. Tell Joe I’m sorry. I’m very very sorry. I just want to come up and talk to him for fifteen minutes.” His voice was plaintive and defeated this time.

Gerri hung up on him again.

I got calls from other agents at ICM throughout the day so I knew news of the letter was already making its way around the agency, but the call I was waiting for came the next day.

It was John Ptak, Costa-Gavras’s agent from William Morris.

“I opened your note to Costa,” Ptak said. “I hope you don’t mind, but the envelope wasn’t sealed.”

He expressed his outrage over what Michael and Rand had said and praised me for not giving in to their threats.

And then he said, “Would you mind if I share this with my colleague Sue Mengers?”

“No,” I said, very casually, “that’s okay.”

The next morning, by Federal Express, I received a letter from Michael. It said:

When I received your letter this morning I was totally shocked since my recollection of our conversation bore no relationship to your recollection. Truly this appears to be one of those
Rashomon
situations, and your letter simply makes little or no sense to me
.

As I explained to you when we were together, you are an important client of this company and all that I was trying to do was to keep you as a client. There was no other agenda. If you have to leave, you have to leave and so be it. I have talked to Guy and told him that whatever we can do to be helpful in this transition we will do. Of course, as you assured me, I am expecting that you will pay us whatever you owe us
.

I am particularly sensitive when people bring families and children into business discussions. If someone said to me what you think I said to you, I would feel the same way as you expressed in your letter. I think your letter was unfair and unfounded, but it does not change my respect for your talent. I only hope that in time you will reflect on the true spirit of what I was trying to communicate to you
.

I want to make it eminently clear that in no way will I, Rand, or anyone else in this agency, stand in the way of your pursuing your career. So please, erase from your mind any of your erroneous anxieties or thoughts
you
may have to the contrary. Best wishes and continued success
.

Never mind how plaintive and defeated he’d sounded over the phone, now I was enraged all over again.

Rashomon? Erroneous anxieties? Unfair and unfounded? The true spirit of what he was trying to communicate to me?

I found one sentence especially slick. In no way, he wrote, would he or Rand stand in the way of my “pursuing” my career. He couldn’t stand in the way of my
“pursuit”
of it.

I wrote him another letter in response to his!

A brief response to your letter dated October 3, 1989
.

By noon of the day after John Ptak called me, Guy called to tell me that people all over town were faxing around my original letter to Michael.

People were Xeroxing faxes and then sending them on again.

Debra Winger, who’d had her own problems with CAA, was in the Middle East desert filming
Sheltering Sky
when her fax machine kicked out my letter to Ovitz.

Marvin Josephson, the corporate head of ICM, was in the South of France. His wife read it to him in the back of a limousine and he started clapping his hands.

Producer Ray Stark, whom I’d barely met, got his fax and sent Guy a $2 million check made out to me—“no strings”—so I could buy our new house. (I called Ray and thanked him but said no thanks to “the most generous thing that’s ever happened to me.” “You’re an idiot, take the money,” Ray said.)

Producer and old friend Don Simpson sent me a note that said, “Read your Ovitz letter. My pulse is at 200 beats a minute. You are a
bad
motherfucker!”

· · ·

Shortly thereafter, the
Los Angeles Times
led its Calendar section with an account of my letter. The wire services picked it up and I was suddenly besieged by
Stern
and the
Times
of London and
Paris Match
, who all wanted to run it. (The next issue of
Harper’s Magazine
would run it in full.) It was turning into a media circus.

Liz Smith quoted the letter and talked about Ovitz’s “gangster tactics.” The
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
, trying to find follow-ups to the story, found a young screenwriter who’d been threatened by CAA the same way and had audiotapes to prove it.

Ovitz denied to the press that he had ever said those things to me … no threats … I’d made it all up.

He had friends like Michael Eisner and Sydney Pollack quoted about the “theatricality” of my letter’s account of what had “allegedly” happened. Interestingly, I noted, Rand Holston issued no denials and sent me no letter denying my allegations.

Meanwhile, I started getting phone calls and letters from others who’d been similarly threatened. The producer Bernie Brillstein even remembered similar words being used to him.

The producer Edward Feldman, who produced
Wired
, the John Belushi movie taken from Bob Woodward’s book which Ovitz was desperate to stop, remembered the same threats.

The actor Mark Harmon wrote me a chilling letter detailing the things CAA agents had done to damage his career after he left the agency.

I had dinner with Irwin Winkler, now back in L.A. He picked the place and the one he picked was odd.

Irwin liked places like Spago and Morton’s and Le Dome, places where, I always felt, we were showing each other off. This time he picked an obscure little neighborhood Italian place on Pico.

He wasn’t happy. And he was frank about being in a difficult position. He told me how close Ron Meyer had gotten to him and his family, how often Ron stayed with them as a house guest. Irwin disagreed with what I had done, with both my decision to go back to Guy and with my letter.

“He’s wounded,” Irwin said about Michael. “He’s not a guy you wound. He’s very upset. Judy [Ovitz’s wife] is very upset. He’s worked hard on his image. He wants to be known as a good guy, a philanthropist. He gives a lot of money. He wants to be a captain of industry. He might even want to be president someday. You ruined his image. It’ll never be the same for him.”

Irwin said the smartest thing I could do would be to get out of the business for a couple years.

“Go to Europe and write a novel,” he said.

· · ·

No star clients, meanwhile, were deserting CAA.

Robert Redford, so it was said, was upset by my letter and flew into town to meet with Michael. Michael convinced him that his
Rashomon
account was the truthful one.

I knew from several sources how enraged Michael was as he was forced to keep making his denials. Judy Ovitz, at lunch one day, went across the room to a table with Tom Cruise and screenwriter Robert Towne and, with no preliminaries, said, “Can you believe the lies this horrible man is telling about Michael?”

A CAA agent had told me that Michael had bought a new sculpture of a Cadillac wrapped around a telephone pole.

“You see that?” Michael said to friends. “That’s Joe Eszterhas’s career.”

I wrote Barry Hirsch a brief note telling him I was firing him but stating no reason.

Now,
right
now, under these circumstances, I
really
needed a lawyer and I needed a powerful one, somebody who had the will and the strength, if needed, to stand up to CAA.

I asked Guy which powerful entertainment lawyer disliked Ovitz.

“You mean which one will
admit
to disliking him,” he said with a laugh.

I spoke to Skip Brittenham, a fiercely independent man and the head of one of the most powerful firms, and while Skip didn’t admit to disliking Ovitz, he did say that he thought what Ovitz had done to me was wrong and he had no doubts that Ovitz had said what I was alleging he’d said.

“If I represent you,” Skip said in his mild-mannered way, “it’s going to cause me business problems, but I’m going to do it.”

We shook hands on our agreement and when word got out the following week that Skip was representing me, Bill Haber, one of CAA’s top agents closest to Michael, called Skip and said, “If you represent Eszterhas, you are never getting any business from this agency.”

And Skip, in his mild-mannered way, said, “Oh, fuck you.”

Haber meant it. Skip’s firm got no CAA referrals for years.

About a month after my letter became public,
Music Box
had its Hollywood premiere at the Academy Theatre on Wilshire. I was curious how I would be treated at this gala industry event and I got my answer as soon as Gerri and I walked in with Steve and Suzi.
People fled from us
.

Studio executives I’d known for a decade looked right through me. Even Jessica Lange, a tough cookie, looked nervous around me, and I suspected it was because of the hovering presence of Pat Kingsley, Jessie’s PR person (also CAA’s favorite), who was casting daggers at me.

Dawn Steel, my old friend from
Flashdance
, a woman I greatly admired, was
the
only person there who didn’t seem frightened or embarrassed by my presence. She nearly ran across the lobby, hugged me, and then hugged Gerri and Steve and Suzi, whom she had never met.

But something strange happened inside the darkness of the theater. As the credits rolled and my name came up, the applause was explosive … more applause even than for Jessie or Costa, an unheard of position for any screenwriter to be in.

It told me there were a lot of people here who admired what I’d done—that was the
good
news.

The
bad
news was that, considering the way they’d treated me in the lobby, there were a lot of very frightened people here, too.

Afterward, at a Wolfgang Puck–catered reception at Irwin Winkler’s house, I saw how nervous Irwin was, too. He seated us at the far end of the tent, about as far away from the main table as he could. And he hardly spoke to us all night. I was hurt but tried to understand it: I counted at least six CAA agents, including Ron Meyer, inside Wolfgang’s elaborate tent.

Stephen Farber, the writer and critic, told me this story: “I was teaching an adult education film course at UCLA. When your letter to Ovitz surfaced in the media, I did a lecture in class about Hollywood agents and how much I admired your letter. I got a phone call from Mike Ovitz a few days later. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never met Mike Ovitz. I didn’t even know anybody who knew Michael Ovitz. He asked me to have lunch with him at his office.
Wow!
I was stunned.
Lunch with Michael Ovitz at his fancy CAA office? Who? Me?

“The lunch was catered. Very elaborate. Ovitz was charming and very curious about me. He even asked me if I had any scripts in the drawer I wanted to sell. Then he got to what he wanted. He wondered if I could do another lecture about your letter and Hollywood agents. A lecture that wouldn’t be quite as one-sided in your favor as the one I’d done.

“Why? Why was it so important what
I
said in a classroom about him and you? Because his father was in my adult education class. His father’s feelings had been hurt by the things I’d said.

“I found that quite touching. Mike Ovitz may have been the tough guy super-agent, but he really loved his father.”

I stayed as far away as possible from Hollywood for the next few months, working on scripts to fulfill my United Artists contract. Three months after I sent Ovitz my letter, I saw a headline in the
Los Angeles Times
that got my attention.

A front-page story announced that a screenwriter had set a new record price for a screenplay in Hollywood. His name was Shane Black. The title of the script was
The Last Boy Scout
. He had received $1.75 million for it.

The story didn’t make me happy. I had held the record for a screenplay price in Hollywood since 1980, when I had sold
City Hall
for $500,000. I had stretched that record in 1986 to $1.25 million for
Big Shots
.

I had no problem with any other writer making lots and lots of money. I wanted
all
writers to make lots and lots of money and rooted for them to do so. But I was competitive.
Very
competitive.

I was thinking about film noir. I’d never written film noir but I loved the genre and thought writers like Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis were twisted, possessed geniuses.

In an effort not to be pigeonholed in Hollywood … and to keep challenging myself … I’d cut across a lot of genres.
Flashdance
was a musical,
Big Shots
was a kid’s movie,
Checking Out
was a dark comedy,
F.I.S.T
. was a historical drama,
Jagged Edge
was an old-fashioned mystery,
Music Box
was a political thriller.

So I started thinking about a noir piece with a strong sexual content. I had also written three movies where men manipulated the women who loved them—
Jagged Edge, Betrayed
, and
Music Box
.