Hollywood Animal (97 page)

Dear Michael
,

Kevin’s gone, Sly’s gone, Barbra’s gone, even Seagal’s gone. The new CAA president, Richard Lovett, has allowed some folks to take a picture of his ass. Sweet Jesus, Michael, all these years after our Incident at Rashomon, they have asked me
—Me!—
what I’d do if I ran CAA. It’s as screwy as asking Bob Dole what he’d do if he ran the country!

This is what I would do, Michael. I would do anything to convince you to come back. I would buy the CAA building and give it to you. I would buy the Peninsula Hotel across the street and give it to you. I would buy Wilson’s House of Leather and give it to you. Hell, I’d go down Wilshire and buy the ICM building and give it to you. I’d buy Roy Lichtenstein and give
him
to you
.

Forget about the hobnobbing you’re doing with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, forget about the NFL franchise the papers say you’re working on—(What for? Does anybody really miss the Rams?). The town is not the same without you. It is like the Yankees without Ruth, boxing without Ali, the
Tonight Show
without Carson, the Kremlin without Stalin
.

It’s so boring that I don’t even give the CAA building the finger anymore. Now I
wave.
I had fun giving it the finger. I feel middle-aged waving
.

Nobody gets inscribed copies of
The Art of War
anymore. Nobody gets Japanese techno-gadget birthday presents. (Remember the wake-up clock and the watch you gave me?) Nobody gets the kind of expert medical care you used to provide. (Remember the acupuncturist you were going to send up to Marin County when I hurt my back in Santa Fe?)

When you were around, there was this mad, amok buzz all the time about the skullduggery that was either going on, thought to be going on, or hoped to be going on. It must have been the kind of power breakfast gossip that went on around the Borgias—deals and conspiracies and turnarounds and buyouts and princes in favor or out of favor. Michael Ovitz couldn’t even take a trip out of town without the hall mice and the
wannabe
hall mice, the sycophants and the guileful, spinning their red-sky-at-sunset theories: His assistant says he’s in Tokyo, but that must mean that he’s not in Tokyo, otherwise the assistant wouldn’t have said he’s in Tokyo
.

Michael, I saw a producer who barely knew you call Jimmy’s, the Grille, and the Palm one mid-morning to try to find out if you were having lunch there that day. I saw the man reduced to near hysterical desperation when he couldn’t get a straight answer. Do you know what he did? He went from one place to the other, hoping to find you, and when he didn’t, he went over to the Hamburger Hamlet and disconsolately scarfed down a pound of cheesy meat
.

About a month ago, a friend of mine saw you eating in the executive dining room at Disney. You were having lunch with Cruise. My friend said Cruise looked great, with that extraordinary sparkle the man has. And he said you looked
… bored.

I’ve worked with Michael Eisner, I like Michael Eisner, although I think he makes too much money. (I know, I know, people in glass houses, etc. etc. etc.) But conspiring with Michael Eisner can’t have the same jolt as conspiring with Ronnie at CAA. You and Ronnie Meyer went after the
world.
You and Michael Eisner are going after the
cash.

You are in an Elba of your own creation, Michael
.

Come on, man, gather the foot soldiers and grab the guns. I miss the sound of gunfire in the night. I miss the smoke in the air. Wilshire Boulevard has become a demilitarized zone. If things go like this, one of these days someone will graffiti the CAA building
.

Come back and kick ass, Michael. Send out the copies of
The Art of War
again
.

That’s the difference. You kicked it. Richard Lovett shows it
.

Betty Thomas had changed her mind about directing
Male Pattern Baldness
.

Paramount, naturally, was upset.

The studio had made a $4 million deal with me with Betty attached to direct it. They wouldn’t have made a deal that lucrative with me without a hot director like Betty attached.

Jeff Berg and Jim Wiatt were even more upset. This was the second time this had happened.

New Line had paid me $4 million for
One Night Stand
, with Adrian Lyne attached to direct it.

The next time we went out with a spec script, Jeff and Jimmy feared correctly
… with a director attached …
every studio would remember what had happened with Betty and Adrian.

· · ·

I had lunch with Betty at the Bel-Air Hotel to try to find out why she didn’t want to direct
Male Pattern
anymore.

She told me that she had lost faith in the script. She had organized a “reading” with some actor friends and the script, she said, “just didn’t play.”

She was also questioning who would go to see the movie.

A contemporary hit comedy, Betty said, was “laughs and liberal inserts”—whereas my script was an assault on liberal political correctness.

“Maybe the fly-over people will see it,” Betty said. “But they don’t go to movies. Hit movies are made by the two coasts and I don’t think the coast people will like this attack on political correctness … because they’re too politically correct.”

Betty said she feared the movie would fall “between the pews.”

I told her I’d heard a rumor that she didn’t want to do her next movie for Paramount and was making a case against the script so she could get out of her commitment.

Betty Thomas looked at me, smiled, and said, “Esty, I just can’t believe you sometimes.”

Sherry Lansing told me she had the hottest young director in town signed up to Paramount and he wanted to direct
Male Pattern Baldness
.

Mark Illsley had just directed
Happy, Texas
, a Sundance Film Festival hit that Harvey Weinstein had bought for Miramax for $10 million. The movie hadn’t been released yet but everyone knew, Sherry said, that it would be a big critical and commercial hit.

I asked to see it and both Naomi and I thought it was nothing special. We couldn’t believe it would be a hit and couldn’t believe Harvey had paid $10 million for it.

Mark Illsley, a pleasant young man, came to the house and told me how much he loved my script and how little he wanted to change it.

He gave me his suggestions and I responded by saying his suggestions would change the script not “a little” but “a whole lot.”

His response was to shrug and tell us that on the day Naomi and Bill Macdonald’s house burned down in Venice … Mark had been hanging around Evans’s office, heard about the fire, and drove out to Venice to see if he could help. He had carried some of Naomi’s and Bill’s scorched possessions out of the house.

Mark Illsley was clearly a nice, good-natured, and sympathetic young man. I liked him.

His suggestions were sophomoric, idiotic, and asinine.

· · ·

I considered his suggestions for a while and finally wrote Sherry Lansing a letter:

Dear Sherry
,

I have grappled for months now trying to do the rewrite with Mark Illsley on
Male Pattern Baldness.
After trying several drafts, I’ve concluded that I’ve involved myself in a process which is, simply, a mistake. It isn’t just that Mark’s vision of the third act is sophomoric … that Frank not kill himself, that the movie end with shit (literally) flying from sewers and faucet taps and fountains … it is a catastrophic diminishment and trivialization of what my script is about
.

The title of the movie is
Male
Pattern Baldness.
It is a comedic and metaphoric examination of what is happening to many men in our society today. Men are being made to feel isolated, alienated from the ethics and values which they grew up with. They are, in Susan Faludi’s terms, “stiffed.” More and more men are angry and more and more men are responding in the classic primal male way—by getting a gun and going to war with the world. It is happening over and over again—two days ago in Honolulu, yesterday in Seattle
.

It is that explosive male rage which this script taps into. But you can’t tap into something by removing the “something.” By removing the rampage and the suicide at the end of the third act, we would be castrating the script at its core. The script is timelier than ever—indeed, tragically, it seems to become timelier each day. By removing the rampage and the suicide, we are removing its very timeliness. If the script is filmed without compromise, the movie can be a shark that bites deeply into the national psyche. By removing the rampage and the suicide, the movie will be a tranquilized shark without teeth and will swim by audiences who won’t even notice its presence in the water
.

We have a script that could become a movie that forces America to pay attention. The news is our greatest ally. You say you want to make a movie about male rage and the part you want to leave out is the rage. I don’t get it
.

Sherry Lansing didn’t respond to my letter, but
Happy, Texas
was released and bombed both critically and commercially.

Mark Illsley was off
Male Pattern Baldness
.

My script went up on the shelf and is still unproduced.

A couple months after Mark’s departure from
Male Pattern
, I considered writing Sherry a note suggesting that Billy Friedkin would be perfect for it—but I started to laugh so hard thinking about it that I didn’t do it.

There was still a chasm between us and Steve and Suzi, but it wasn’t as wide as it had been.

When they came to visit, they slept in our house and we ate together, although they still had little to say to Naomi.

Now Naomi also came with us on our day-long jaunts and ate lunch with us. What gave me great hope for the future was that when Steve and Suzi visited separately or with a friend they were significantly warmer to Naomi than when they visited us together.

I thought I understood that: together, they wanted to show each other that they were being loyal to Gerri’s hatred of Naomi, but separately, they couldn’t help showing that they had always, before the breakup, liked Naomi very much.

When Mark Canton left Sony, I applied for his job. I wrote a letter to Mr. Nobuyuki Idei, the president of the Sony Corporation. It appeared in
Daily Variety
. It was headlined “I Want Mark’s Job.”

Dear Sir:

In your honor I am writing this not on my manual typewriter but on a computer
.

Since you seem to be having some difficulty replacing Mark Canton, I thought I’d tell you why I am perfect for the job
.

I realize this situation is so grave that everyone is losing hair over it. Here are my qualifications:

My father called the day after his birthday and said, “You didn’t call me to wish me a happy birthday.”