The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (15 page)

Harlan Ellison!

The screenwriter/novelist did an interview with a magazine and posed for the photograph accompanying it. He was nude.

The caption read, “The writer at work; naked and unashamed.”

“Fuck You” Money

You know you have “fuck you” money when you tip the bathroom attendant ten bucks for handing you a towel and then, after he looks at you quizzically, you hand him another ten and smile as you walk out the door.

Sit on your damn butt
.

W
hat’s the key to being a successful screenwriter?

I say it’s “
sitzfleisch
”—a German term that means the ability and the strength to sit on your ass.

According to my writer/producer friend Bill Froug, it’s “the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

Ego is good
.

P
addy Chayefsky: “The most impure motives are useful to a beginning writer. Just to get your name in the papers is not an improper motivation for a writer, when you’re a kid, when you’re young. The need for fame and notoriety, I think, is part of the package that brings you into show business.”

When Paddy was at the height of his fame, he was the only screenwriter to get his picture—of him beating away at his typewriter—on the posters for his movies.

I tried like hell to equal that but couldn’t do it. I did get the line “From Joe Eszterhas” splashed across the poster for
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
. I also got the same words onto the T-shirts made to promote the movie, which, alas, was a critical and commercial disaster.

Hollywood is the kingdom of greed
.

I
t doesn’t matter if you are a convicted child molester; it doesn’t matter if you once pissed on a studio executive’s new Tibetan rug; it doesn’t matter if you bitch-slapped David Geffen at the Ivy; it doesn’t matter if you told the press how Sherry Lansing saved the best Paramount scripts for her husband to direct.

All that matters is that someone who reads your script believes that money can be made making it into a movie.

Be polite at all times
.

M
y fellow Hungarian, actor Tony Curtis: “Universal sent me to Chicago on tour for a picture. I made an appearance at a theater, and while I was there I met a beautiful girl who worked in the Universal distributing office, and I asked her if she’d go out with me after I finished the tour that day. She said yes, so we had dinner, and I took her up to the hotel room. We necked on the couch and got semi-undressed, and she started to go down on me. About the fourth stroke, she stopped and looked up at me and said, ‘If my mother could only see me now.’ I said, ‘Darling, it’s not polite to talk with your mouth full.’ ”

When speaking to people in the industry, try to put things in Hollywood terms
.

P
roducer Robert Evans to director Larry Kasdan: “I’d give up a blow job to direct this picture.”

Practice humming
.

Y
ou, too, can sound authoritative.

Producer Robert Evans says his deep baritone is a result of many years of practice.

Humming, Evans says, deepens the voice.

Evans hums all day, every day.

Never stand anyone up for a meeting
.

I
had a breakfast scheduled with agent John Gaines, but I got back to my hotel at five o’clock in the morning, after extensive latenight research. I knew I’d never make the breakfast. So I called to cancel. At five in the morning. To cancel an eight o’clock date.

John said, “I’ve never had anyone call me at five in the morning to cancel breakfast.”

I said, “I didn’t want to be rude and stand you up,” then hung up … and laughed myself to sleep.

Always treat superstar actors with the proper respect
.

W
hen screenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski met Arnold Schwarzenegger, he said, “You’re a piece of shit.”

You, too, can be Jack Nicholson’s bodyguard
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison: “Several times when traveling with Jack Nicholson, I suppose partly because of my poor tailoring and thickish appearance, I had been mistaken for his bodyguard.”

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

Don’t let yourself get horsewhipped.

Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Once she arrived in America, my sister Magda also started acting, winning parts in several plays. Then she married an Irish screenwriter. Unfortunately, though, he was continually drunk. Magda complained to Father, who promptly horsewhipped the screenwriter and arranged for Magda to divorce him.”

Your time is more precious than theirs
.

A
producer sent me a two-page outline of a story he wanted me to write. To each page was attached a thousand-dollar bill.

I read the two pages and then, just to be fair to the man, reread the two pages.

I didn’t like the story and wrote him a note telling him that … and also thanking him for the “beer money.”

You, too, can be Robert Evans’s writer
.

R
obert Evans took two writers with him to the island of Maui, where they all stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, which overlooked the sea, and helped Bob write his autobiography.

One “writer” was sixteen, the other seventeen. They looked like corn-fed farm girls. During the day sometimes, while Evans slept, gathering his energy, they enjoyed manicures and pedicures in the hotel salon.

Evans introduced them to everyone they met as “my writers.”

A Mush Pit

A place where a lot of women looking to become stars hang out to meet powerful men in the industry—to get a knee up the ladder. Producer Robert Evans’s house is a well-known Hollywood mush pit.

You won’t get a Land Rover, either
.

O
n
Lethal Weapon 3
, the studio gave the director, Dick Donner, and the star, Mel Gibson, gift Land Rovers.

Shane Black, the screenwriter who invented the entire franchise, didn’t get one. He didn’t even get to write the sequels.

If you make it, they’ll ask you to steal from yourself
.

M
ike Medavoy: “The natural instinct of studio executives is to pigeonhole creative people and ask them to repeat themselves.”

I got pigeonholed
.

I
had a meeting with Cuba Gooding, Jr., about playing soul singer Otis Redding in my script
Blaze of Glory
.

I wrote it after
Showgirls
and
Jade
and was happy that since the critics had clobbered me for excessive sexuality, there was no sex in this script.

“I want to talk to you about that,” Cuba said. “You’re the guy who wrote
Showgirls
and
Jade
. That’s what you do—I mean, can’t we put some sex in this script?”

P
ERK OF SUCCESS
:
YOU DON’T HAVE TO GET YOUR TEETH FIXED

“I could never be attracted to a man who had perfect teeth,” Marilyn Monroe said. “A man with perfect teeth alienates me. I don’t know what it is, but it has something to do with the kind of men I have known with perfect teeth. They weren’t so perfect elsewhere.”

Learn all you can about modern art
.

S
teven Spielberg has an extensive collection; the real reason producer David Geffen and once-superagent Michael Ovitz hate each other is because they are jealous of each other’s art collections; and—get this—director Arne Glimcher (
Mambo Kings
) was an art dealer (Ovitz’s) when he began directing movies.

Don’t write an adaptation of
The Great Gatsby.

G
atsby
has been filmed four times. It has failed at the box office four times. Being assigned to adapt
Gatsby
for the screen is the filmic equivalent of what city editors on newspapers used to do to rookie reporters: assign them to interview the mother of the Unknown Soldier.