The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (19 page)

Get arrested
.

S
creenwriter Stuart Beattie (
Collateral
): “My business manager once gave me this great advice. He said, ‘If you are not kicking down enough doors to sell your script and knocking on enough windows to get arrested, you are not trying hard enough.”

Beware of the back pat
.

I
f a director or producer shakes hands with you and at the same time reaches around you and rubs your back with his left hand, run.

He’s looking for the soft spot where he can best stick the knife in your back.

You, too, can give a studio head an orgasm
.

J
aws
producer David Brown: “The only orgasm that Lew Wasserman [the longtime Universal chieftain] ever had in his life was when he saw the opening numbers for
Jaws
.”

This is what your brilliant, literary script is really about
.

P
roducer Scott Rudin: “A movie is about two movie stars.”

Avoid spending time with Sherry Lansing
.

R
aymond Chandler: “These Hollywood people are fantastic when you have been away for a while. In their presence any calm sensible remark sounds faked. Their conversation is a mess of shopworn superlatives interrupted by four telephone calls to the sentence. Ray Stark is a nice chap. I like him. Everybody at the brothel is nice.”

They’ve made us settle for a Polish starlet
.

F
rank Pierson, screenwriter (
Dog Day Afternoon
) and Writers Guild president: “Screenwriters have accepted the idea of being third-class citizens, the industry’s pain in the ass. Our position is that maybe someday we could forget the old joke about the Polish starlet. You know, she thought she could get ahead by fucking the writer.”

I struck out with the Polish starlet
.

I
tried like hell to get Polish starlet Joanna Pacula to leave a party at Robert Evans’s house with me and go back to my hotel room, but it was no-go.

These are our male role models
.

M
any screenwriters have bedded movie stars: Charles MacArthur teamed up with Helen Hayes, Norman Mailer with Shelley Winters, Thomas Wolfe with Jean Harlow, Paddy Chayefsky with Kim Novak, Arthur Miller with Marilyn Monroe, Pete Hamill with Shirley MacLaine, John O’Hara with Marlene Dietrich, Robert Graves with Ava Gardner, Romain Gary with Jean Seberg, Tom McGuane with Elizabeth Ashley and Margot Kidder, Tom Green with Drew Barrymore, Peter Viertel with Deborah Kerr, James Jones with Montgomery Clift, John Monk Saunders with Mary Astor.

Get in touch with your feminine side
.

T
he only good artists are feminine,” said Orson Welles. “I don’t believe an artist exists whose dominant characteristic is not feminine. It’s nothing to do with homosexuality, but intellectually an artist must be a man with feminine aptitudes.”

Norman Mailer has a feminine side
.

S
aid Shelley Winters of Norman: “Norman’s not capable of sleeping with a starlet and using her and then just saying ‘That was great, kid. Goodbye.’ Unlike most men in Hollywood, he’s actually a feminist. He sees women as people, not just sex objects. He reveres women. He feels there’s a kind of respect they must have. He didn’t treat me like a dumb starlet, he just couldn’t do that. In fact, I remember times when he was in a restaurant with me and Burt Lancaster. Pretty, sexy girls would come over and sit down and be introduced to ‘Norman Mailer, the writer.’ And Norman would cool it. He wouldn’t be rude or anything, he’d be charming and with that funny little grin of his he has, he’d flatter them and compliment them. But as far as I could see, he wouldn’t make dates with them. Now maybe he tells people different, but from what I saw over the years in Hollywood, my impression—from a woman’s point of view—is that he never treated a woman like a hunk of meat.”

Find yourself a smart mate
.

I
take my wife, Naomi, into most studio meetings with me. Before he was the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger relied on his wife, Maria, the same way.

Says studio head Mike Medavoy about trying to get Arnold to star in the
Sixth Day
: “Maria Shriver made notes on all the drafts of the script. She saw her role as her husband’s advisor and protector. In one meeting, she was the only one who had problems with the material, so I began addressing my questions to her, as if she were the one who had to be fully sold on the material. In a way, she was. No matter how much money we paid Arnold, he wasn’t going to do the movie unless both he and Maria felt comfortable with the script.”

Does anyone realize that Maria Shriver is running the state of California?

We all have our own trophies
.

I
’m jealous that Bill Goldman has won two Oscars and I’ve won none.

But I bet Bill Goldman is jealous that I’ve bedded Sharon Stone.

Larry McMurtry says what you’re doing isn’t even hard work
.

S
creenwriter/novelist Larry McMurtry: “So much has been written about the miseries of screenwriting or, more precisely, about the miseries of the screenwriter’s lot, that I, for one, am sick of reading it. I think it is time to redress the balance, to treat Hollywood fairly, and to suggest that screenwriting, far from being hard work, might actually be considered to be a form of creative play.”

P
ERK OF SUCCESS:
YOU CAN MAKE THEM BABY-SIT YOUR DOG

Screenwriter John Milius, at the height of his success, forced producers to make side deals with him. Not only did they have to sign a contract for him to write the script; they also had to baby-sit his dog on certain days so he could write that script
.

ALL HAIL

Harlan Ellison!

After he won a copyright court battle with Paramount over a TV show, the screenwriter/novelist bought a billboard just outside the Paramount lot.

It read
WRITERS—DON’T LET THEM STEAL FROM YOU
.

Unemployable

The biggest scare word in Hollywood—as in, “You’ll never eat lunch in this town again.” As in, “NO—MORE—MONEY!”

Your film can become a joke at the Oscars
.

D
iscussing my film
Showgirls
, Whoopi Goldberg said at the sixty-eighth Academy Awards, “I haven’t seen that many poles mistreated since World War Two.”

Make ’em feel smart and you’ll get your way
.

I
learned this trick from screenwriter Waldo Salt (
Midnight Cowboy
). He’d finish his script and then tear six or seven pages out of it and turn the script in to the studio.

The studio execs would sometimes—not always—notice that something seemed to be missing from a sequence and suggest that he fill it in with some scenes.

Seemingly acting on
their
suggestions, he would then put the pages that he had torn out
back
into the script.

The studio executives would then praise him for listening to, and acting upon,
their
suggestions.

When you’re not writing, read stage plays
.

R
eading plays is great training for writing dialogue; think of it as doing push-ups for the ear.

Don’t, however, read playwrights like Mamet or Pinter and Beckett, who are so stylized that their style can creep into your head and stylistically affect what you write.

Reading plays from the thirties and forties is ideal training because plays in those days were much more accessible than they are today.

Hollywood won’t corrupt you, but your family might
.

S
creenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “I begin to realize why people believe the legend that Hollywood corrupts writers. But they’re quite wrong. All Hollywood does is give them enough money so they can get married and have kids like normal people. But it’s the getting married and having kids that really corrupts them.”

Pay for your own drinks
.

I
f a studio has flown you to L.A. for a meeting and is picking up your hotel bill, don’t put any drinks you may have had in the bar on it.

A studio accountant will let the executive in charge of your project know how many drinks you had. If you had more than a few, the studio will decide that you have a drinking problem and will not hire you for the project.

And, obviously, don’t charge to your hotel bill any hookers, sex toys, or jewelry bought in the store in the lobby, either.

See
Thunder Road.

H
unter S. Thompson: “Between Mitchum and Burroughs and Marlon Brando and James Dean and Jack Kerouac, I got myself a serious running start before I was twenty years old, and there was no turning back. Buy the ticket, take the ride. So welcome to
Thunder Road
, Bubba. It was one of those movies that got a grip on me when I was too young to resist. It convinced me that the only way to drive was at top speed with a car full of whiskey, and I have been driving that way ever since, for good or ill.”