The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (16 page)

Don’t let your urine rise to your head
.

I
t’s an old industry saying.

When the agent Michael Ovitz told me his foot soldiers would put me into the ground, he was letting his urine rise to his head.

When I told the director Arthur Hiller he was a “doddering old fuck,” I was letting my urine rise to
my
head.

Other urine risings:

The director Paul Verhoeven saying to me, “I am the director, ja? You are the writer. You will do what I tell you to do.”

And me saying to Paul: “If you use that tone of voice with me again, I’m going to come across this fucking table at you.”

(Notice how artfully I used my f-bomb in that last sentence.)

Choose your projects wisely
.

I
n the 1980s, “the Polish Prince,” crooner Bobby Vinton, asked me to write the screenplay of his “true life story.”

It was a tortuously tough decision … but I turned the Polish Prince down.

Fartland

What Hollywood executives call the Midwest, the heartland.

Mel Brooks caused the impeachment of Bill Clinton
.

T
he former president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, watched
Blazing Saddles
in the White House screening room twenty-four times.

I wonder if Mel Brooks feels responsible for what happened with Monica.

Writing during a Writers Guild strike can be extremely lucrative
.

T
he Guild strike had been going on for several weeks when the producer flew up to see me at my home in northern California.

If I rewrote the script that would soon go into production, he said, he would pay me
200,000.

He would put the money into a bank account in Dubrovnik, in what was then Yugoslavia.

No one would ever know, he said. Not the IRS and certainly not the Writers Guild, which forbids doing any writing during a strike.

Did I do it?

Ha! What are you—nuts?

If you live in L.A., don’t get involved in Writers Guild politics
.

D
on’t join any committees or go to too many meetings. The people who get involved in Writers Guild politics are people who don’t, or can’t, write all that much—or all that well, or all that well anymore.

They’ll pay you for writing nothing
.

I
made a deal with ABC Films in the early eighties to write a script about the wheat harvesters who travel from state to state in the summer.

I was to be paid
350,000.

I went off to Nebraska and Iowa for two weeks to interview the harvesters. When I got back, ABC informed me that their marketing people had concluded while I was doing research that a film about wheat harvesters wouldn’t be commercially successful.

So ABC wanted me to write a film instead about Ross Perot.

My agent said not a chance—the deal we had made called for me to write a script about wheat harvesters.

ABC Films paid me the full fee—
350,000—for what amounted to two weeks’ research.

Don’t buy the mink coat yet
.

T
his advice was given to me by
F.I.S.T
. producer Patrick Palmer after everyone involved loved my first-draft screenplay.

He was right. The movie went into turnaround; then forty pages had to be cut from the script; then
7 million had to be cut from the budget; then Robert De Niro wouldn’t respond to the studio’s offer to star in the film; then Sylvester Stallone played the lead instead of De Niro; and after all that, the movie failed both critically and commercially.

With a mentor like this, you, too, can cowrite
Predator.

R
obert McKee was the closest thing I’ve had to a mentor,” said screenwriter Jim Thomas on McKee’s Web site. Thomas is listed as the cowriter of
Predator, Executive Decision
, and
Mission to Mars
.

A screenwriter got JFK elected president
.

T
he day of the West Virginia primary, which decided the Democratic nominee in the 1960 race, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was relaxed and in the best of humor.

He told reporters he’d watched a movie the night before and had gone to bed early.

He didn’t tell them it was a porn movie called
Private Property
.

He didn’t tell them he hadn’t gone to bed alone, either.

My point is this: Someone wrote
Private Property
. Did he know that he would one day relax and perhaps inspire the future president of the United States?

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

Don’t go to bed with Hungarians.

Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Tony Curtis is also Hungarian and we were cast in the same movie. We got on very well. We shot our love scene at the studio. The script called for me to be in bed with Tony and I was seminude through most of it. After one take, the director said, ‘Let’s do another take!’

“
Whereupon Tony ruefully admitted, ‘But I can’t retake it. That would be impossible
.’ ”

Don’t step on any big toes accidentally
.

I
wrote a script about a man who kills his wife, and the film’s producer told me that if I wanted to get it made at
this
studio, I’d have to change the ending: It would have to be an innocent man falsely accused of killing his wife.

“Why won’t they make it the other way?” I asked.

He told me why: The studio head was a venerable and truly respected former producer, now a very wealthy man. But he hadn’t always been wealthy. He’d come to Hollywood as a penniless wannabe screenwriter and met a wealthy, socially elite widow. He married her and some years later she committed suicide and he inherited all of her money.

Then he met another wealthy, socially prominent widow and married her, too. And she, too, committed suicide some years later and he inherited all of
her
money, as well.

Demand your payment on time
.

S
creenwriter Dalton Trumbo to producer Sam Spiegel: “Listen, I have a gun and I will shoot you if I don’t get my money today.”

To Spiegel

To manipulate, flatter, seduce, cajole, con, like producer Sam.