Hollywood Animal (95 page)

Don is thinking, as he mumbles soulfully about his upbringing, about the body parts the bimbos will give him in exchange for the heartbreaking stories he is telling them.

What he doesn’t know, though—or won’t admit to himself—is that he doesn’t have to tell his Dickensian stories … he doesn’t have to betray his parents to these bimbos … he doesn’t even have to
talk
to them at all … they’ll give him their body parts just to get the parts he can cast them in.

So Don treats them not like bimbos but as young ladies … pretending he needs to seduce them … pretending he has to break their hearts with his stories.

The bimbos pretend that they
have
hearts and Don can pretend to kiss them as he grabs hold of their proffered body parts.

Relations between Sherry Lansing and me were—understandably so—somewhat strained until she called me one day and asked me for a favor.

“This woman is doing a photo book on famous directors,” Sherry said, “and Billy needs a writer to do a short essay on him praising his work. He’s too embarrassed to ask you himself, but do you think, honey, as a favor to
me
, you can write some nice things about Billy for the book?”

I wrote the essay for her.

Right back at me!

I told you I was a Hollywood animal, didn’t I?

I was sitting at a table with a group of people at an old-time Hollywood kind of place with leather booths and twinkling little lights near the Burbank Studios.

I glanced around and saw Guy sitting with his back to me on the other side of the room. He was reading a script.

I went over to him and we hugged and he asked me to sit down. We hadn’t spoken in a long time. He looked tired.

He was trying to make a production deal with a studio, he told me, but wasn’t having any success. The house in Beverly Hills was gone; he was living in an apartment on Wilshire.

He asked about Naomi and the boys and I told him to come over and see us sometime. He nodded.

I asked him for his phone number and as he gave it to me he said, “You won’t call me.”

I said of course I would call him.

“We had a helluva run, didn’t we?” Guy said and we hugged again and he walked out with his script under his arm.

I didn’t call him.

In Marin County, Gerry Eszterhas had me back in court, trying to get an equal share of all my
future
earnings (the premise being that she had inspired me as a writer, so my output was really due to her).

She presented her expert witnesses: screenwriting professors, mostly from UCLA, who took Gerri’s money (mine really) and parroted her point of view on the stand:

That the
idea
is what’s important, not the screenplay. That I was being paid these astronomical amounts of money not because my scripts were good, but because the ideas were.

I hated these smug academics, failed screenwriters or failed television writers who then turned to teaching kids what they themselves didn’t know and couldn’t do. There they were, pontificating—and being paid to try to damage someone who had succeeded at what they had failed at.

The only part of it I enjoyed was my lawyer’s reiterated question to each one: “What screenplays or teleplays have you written?”

They responded by haltingly listing unproduced scripts or low-level TV productions from thirty years back or collaborations without credit on someone else’s screenplay.

I smiled during these moments as their faces turned red or as they set their dewlapped jaws.

I laughed out loud once as a “professor” shamefacedly mentioned his paltry credits and then reached for his glass of water with a trembly hand.

We flew back to L.A. together—Naomi, my lawyer, Gerri’s lawyer, and me. Gerri’s lawyer was across the aisle from us.

I couldn’t stop myself, of course, and started talking loudly about odd plane crashes where only one side of the plane … the one Gerri’s lawyer was on …
suffered
fatalities.

At LAX, I was standing outside, smoking a cigarette, waiting for Naomi, when Gerri’s lawyer passed me.

“Merry Christmas,” he said and smiled.

I smiled, too. And said, “Fuck you!”

The lawyer actually looked hurt … like he didn’t understand why I’d say something like that to him.

As Christmas approached, a mutual friend called to tell me that Guy wasn’t in very good shape, not even coming over to his house for the Sunday football games.

He was going to ask Guy over for Christmas but had decided to go out of town instead and wondered if
I
could invite Guy over to my house.

I hadn’t seen Guy in a while but called and invited him. He seemed choked up and accepted the invitation.

When he was an hour late on Christmas Day, I called him but got no answer. We waited another hour but the kids were hungry and the turkey was already overdone, so we ate without him.

He never showed up.

In its overview of the 1995 year in film, the
New York Times’s
big headline read “FROM AUSTEN TO ESZTERHAS.”

Janet Maslin castigated “nasty, irresponsibly super-violent, sleaze-filled exploitation films (here’s the moment to mention Joe Eszterhas) that Bob Dole had no trouble making a campaign issue out of.”

A screenwriter of my acquaintance who hangs out at the Rose Café in Venice made a list of three hundred hit movies. He put each movie on an index card, mixed the cards together, and put the cards into a hat.

He pulled the individual cards out of a hat and matched them into twos indiscriminately. These are some of the combinations he came up with:
Rocky
and
The Turning Point; Cliffhanger
and
Clueless; Top Gun
and
Ace Ventura; Network
and
The Fight Club; Midnight Cowboy
and
As Good as It Gets; The Sixth Sense
and
Flashdance; The Usual Suspects
and
Star Wars; Jerry Maguire
and
Deliverance; The Towering Inferno
and
Dressed to Kill; The Godfather
and
The Blair Witch Project; Pulp Fiction
and
All About Eve
.

He pondered his combinations for several days at the Rose Café and picked three:
Jerry Maguire
and
Deliverance
(a young agent with a wife and child finds himself on vacation in the Carolinas, where he has to defend his family from a backwoods madman),
The Towering Inferno
and
Dressed to Kill
(a homicidal maniac sets a fire in a high-rise, trapping the victims he picks off one by one),
Pulp
Fiction
and
All About Eve
(a blue-collar girl who is a street hood schemes to become the star of her high school play).

He pitched all three to different studios and sold all of them for a total of $1.7 million. All three went into studio development but none of the three has so far been made.

My father kept calling us at three and four o’clock in the morning.

My heart almost stopped every time the phone rang at that time for fear that something had happened to Steve or Suzi.

He claimed to have forgotten the time difference each time.

I said, “Pop, there are babies in this house. You wake them up and you scare the hell out of me.”

“Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry, but this is very important” … and would then tell me some absurdity involving his nurses. They were stealing his cans of Coke or nibbling at his dried Hungarian sausage or purposely giving him the wrong medication.

The middle-of-the-night phone calls kept happening—but he would hang up when I picked up. I knew it was him because we had caller ID.

I called him back each time he hung up on me and he denied that he’d called.

“Pop,” I said, “I know it was you. I have this thing on the phone that tells me.”

“It must be malfunctioning,” he said.

“Please stop calling me at these times,” I said.

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

We finally got an answering service. My father was checkmated now. The service picked up at three and four in the morning. We weren’t bothered.

He even conned the service once or twice into putting him through, telling them that it was an emergency and that we had just called him.

I had to leave instructions with the service: Even if my father said it was an emergency, they couldn’t put him through. At least one operator, I knew, considered me heartless.

Then he started calling eight or ten times a day and leaving messages with the service. Sometimes I’d call him back two or three days after the first call—and there’d be thirty messages from him in total.

He was angry when I finally called him.

“Why don’t you call me back? You’re my son!”

“I do call you back, Pop, but sometimes I get busy.”

“Too busy to call your own father back?”

“All right,” I said, “sometimes I’m not busy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like calling you back. What is it? Why did you call me, Pop? What do you want?”

He said, “I wanted to hear the sound of my son’s voice.”

I said, “Well I don’t want to hear the sound of
your
voice right now.”

“Then you won’t hear it,” he said, and hung up.

The screenwriters sip their cappuccinos at the Rose Café in Venice, their brows knit, their laptops overheating, as they wait for their muses to unearth box office gold.

They are there in the mornings but never after dark, when the kids from the projects two blocks away come by with their Uzis and perform Sam Peckinpah drive-bys.

But in the mornings, when the gangstas are still asleep, the screenwriters create and kibitz and dish and crank themselves high with dreams and caffeine. Sometimes they even ask each other to read and criticize a scene and engage in lengthy dialogue about the relative merits of dialogue and spine.

But oh, if they’d only stick around until the gangstas came by or if they’d only see the blood in Venice’s streets, oh the stories these screenwriters would be able to tell! Though they also know they’d be stories they wouldn’t be able to sell.

Endings don’t end happily in Venice after dark.

Young, hip, no dummies, by mid-afternoon the screenwriters get the hell out of there.

I wrote a script called
Male Pattern Baldness
about a man in Cleveland who literally winds up going to war against the forces of political correctness.

It was a dark, satiric comedy and my gut told me it had potential to be a hit movie.

I called Arnold Rifkin and told him I had written a new spec and how excited I was about it and he said, “Send it over right away.”

Then he said, “Hold on a minute,” and put me on hold.

He came back and he said, “I’ve checked my calendar. I’ll read it on”—and he gave me a date.

The date he gave me was two weeks away.

I didn’t think I’d heard him right.

“That’s the earliest date I’ve got to read anything,” he said.

I wanted to say: It takes about an hour to read a script—you don’t have an hour in your day for two weeks?

I wanted to say: Do you move your lips when you read, Arnold?

I didn’t say those things and Arnold Rifkin said, “Gotta go. Congratulations. Send it over. I look forward to reading it.”

I thought: Way, way forward.

Two weeks forward!

· · ·

I sat in my den and thought:

I was the highest-paid screenwriter in town. I’d been paid astronomical, record prices for my scripts. Every spec script I wrote turned into an event. The last one,
Blaze of Glory
, wound up on the front page of the Calendar section of the
L.A. Times
for
… not
selling.

Half the producers in town would have made trips to Malibu to read the script if I had let them.

And yet my own agent wouldn’t read it for two weeks.

Because he was too busy.

Too busy
for two weeks
to read something
for an hour
.

I was hurt.

He loved having me in his life, huh?

Would he have been too busy to see Bruce Willis’s dailies?

Too busy
for two weeks
to see Bruce Willis’s dailies?

I fired Arnold Rifkin.

Not in person. (I was too busy.)

Not by phone. (I was too busy.)

By fax.

Right back at ya!

My fax to Arnold Rifkin said:

Dear Arnold
,

It has, unfortunately, become painfully clear to me that due to your other responsibilities and obligations I am not receiving the kind of representation I deserve. I have, as a result, decided to leave the William Morris Agency. I wish you the best, both personally and professionally
.

Sincerely
,

Joe

I didn’t know then what I would learn with the passage of time:
Firing Arnold Rifkin was a mistake, too
. Certainly not a grave mistake like firing Guy McElwaine, but big enough that over the years I came to regret it.

Arnold wasn’t my brother,
but he was a goodhearted friend
. He got too busy sometimes, that’s all … and it took him too long to read a script.

I needed an agent and I thought about my old friend Bob Bookman. Bookie was one of the few people in town who read. He loved Proust and Flaubert and spent as much time as he could out of town … preferably in France.

The only problem was that Bookie’s agency was CAA and it was still headed
by
Michael Ovitz.

It had been nearly ten years since our bust-up but I remembered Wolfgang Puck’s advice—“Ovitz never forgets”—and was wary.

I had lunch with Bookie at my house and asked him to sniff out how Ovitz would feel if Bookie represented me.

Bookie called back quickly and said Ovitz had no problem with it.

I said I’d do it only if we sent out a joint press release which I’d co-write.

Bookie called back and said Ovitz agreed.

We went back and forth on the press release. Everything was fine until I added this sentence.
“Ovitz said, ‘I have always admired Eszterhas’s talent
.’”