The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (22 page)

“ ‘Sidney Lumet to do
Network
?’ I gasped. ‘What was the last funny movie he made?’

“In response, Paddy turned his bowl of chicken soup over on the table. “

‘You’re right, Paddy,’ I replied, ‘he’d be great.’ ”

If you make it, don’t brag about it
.

M
y fellow Hungarian, actor Tony Curtis: “It was a miserable, rainy late afternoon, my chauffeur drives me down Fortyeighth Street, and who do I see out front, standing under the marquee, but Walter Matthau. He’s got a long, heavy coat on and looks as grumpy as he’s ever looked in his life … he’s looking out at this cold miserable world he’s got to live in. He hates it. I’m getting this reading as I’m sitting in my limo, warm and comfy, looking at this poor guy on the sidewalk staring into the gutter and saying to himself, ‘What’s ever going to happen for me? Nothin’.’ You could see that on his face.

“So I say to the driver, ‘See that guy standing under the awning? Drive up to him as slowly as possible, and when we’re alongside of him, stop.’ He says okay, so we drive up, and I see Walter watching this limousine come rolling up, and it stops right where he’s standing. I roll the window down, I look at him, and I say, ‘
I fucked Yvonne DeCarlo!
’

“Then I just rolled that window back up and told the driver to get the hell out of there.”

To Do a Hughie

To trip on your own dick, like actor Hugh Grant.

The definition of “creative differences”
…

T
he producer had a reputation for having a nasty temper, so some people were surprised when he was named to take over the studio.

He soon developed a conflict with a lawyer in Business Affairs who kept questioning some of the personal expenses that the new studio head was writing off—expenses like an airplaneful of orchids sent to an actress girlfriend in Rio.

The studio head told the lawyer several times to back off. The lawyers’
friends
told him to back off.

Yet he kept after the studio head, questioning expenses in meetings—expenses like twenty thousand dollars for a party involving three girls who worked for a club in Vegas.

One day, at a meeting in a studio conference room full of executives, the lawyer nitpicked about some suspicious expense. The studio head punched him in the mouth, judo-chopped him in the throat, and kicked him in the head and ribs while the other studio executives sat there and did nothing.

The lawyer was taken by ambulance to a hospital. He recovered quickly. He left the studio and received a
5 million settlement.

Raymond Chandler, role model
…

P
roducer Ray Stark told screenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison that as a young agent one of his jobs was to get Raymond Chandler off the floor of his apartment, where he sometimes slept fully dressed in a drying pool of his own vomit.

Never hug an actress on a soundstage
.

Y
ou’ll screw up her hair, costuming, and makeup. She’ll hate you.

LESSON 5

Don’t Let ’Em Bleed on You!

You’re on your own
.

A
fter I sold
Basic Instinct
for
3 million to Carolco, Disney studio honcho Jeff Katzenberg wrote a memo lamenting the fact, and studio heads got together in meetings to discuss ways of keeping future script prices down. (
Daily Variety
reported both the memo and the studio meetings.)

The Writers Guild should have filed an antitrust action against the studios for conspiring to keep writers’ prices down, but the Guild, great on matters of health plans and insurance and awful on matters of creative rights, did nothing.

The multimillion-dollar script frenzy ended within six months, making it pretty clear that the studios had successfully put the writers back in their places: the schmucks at the bottom of the totem pole.

In 2001, the Guild threatened a strike. One of its main demands was the elimination of the directors’ possessory “Filmed by” credit.

When the Guild made progress on financial fronts, it simply—without even an explanatory statement—dropped its demands about the directors’ possessory credit, and signed a new contract with the studios.

Be an outlaw
.

J
ohn Milius (
Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry
): “I liken myself to a successful outlaw. To be worth a shit in the world, you’ve got to blaze your own trail. Nothing else is any good. Whatever you’re going to do you’re going to do alone.”

Even Mailer lost his soul
.

S
andy Charlebois Thomas, Norman Mailer’s secretary: “Something happened to him out in Hollywood. He’s talked to me about being corrupted out there. He was young, suddenly very famous, and he was wined and dined. He discovered if he did the cutest little things, people just fell all over him.”

Don’t let ’em bleed on you
.

S
tanley Jaffe, producer and former head of Paramount, would yell at people with such force that blood would flow from his nostrils.

Don’t do it
.

S
creenwriter/playwright David Mamet: “Working as a screenwriter, I always thought that ‘Film is a collaborative business’ only constituted half of the actual phrase. From a screenwriter’s point of view, the correct rendering should be ‘Film is a collaborative business: bend over.’”

Slug some more Kaopectate, Bill
.

S
creenwriter William Goldman: “It’s probably not unwise to try to remember why movie people have kept the tranquilizer business booming; after a debacle, it’s hard to get work; after two, it’s hard to get television.

Can I have a slug of your Kaopectate, Bill?

Y
our last movie has bombed at the box office. Good luck. You’re in a heap of
creative
trouble. Everyone in every story meeting or phone conference will now think that they know more than you do.

They may have thought that
before
your movie failed, but now that it has,
they
know that
you
know that you have to listen to their ideas.

Don’t be a road map
.

S
creenwriter Terry George (
Hotel Rwanda
): “Film today is more and more concentrated on the amusement park element. If a writer can attach an actor or a producer who has some clout, then you can arm yourself; otherwise, a script simply becomes a road map to attract money and talent.”

I’ve moved out of Malibu, thank you
.

S
creenwriter Milo Addica (
Birth
): “Most writers just want to get their movie made, and it doesn’t matter how. I think I am not in that category. I like to get my movies made by the right director, so that I can have a body of work I can look back on and be proud of. Otherwise, I would not be doing anything I am doing now. I would be in Hollywood trying to make my first million and move up to Malibu.”

They want to control you
.

N
ovelist/screenwriter George Pelecanos: “When I was a kid, I used to watch
Twilight Zone
, as everybody did. The reason I watched it—although I didn’t know enough intellectually then to know why I was watching it—it was written by novelists like Richard Matheson. I always wondered, Why don’t they do that more? Because, damn, novelists sure could use the work; I mean, just to get that extra thirty grand or whatever the scale is for a script and a story is a huge amount of money to most novelists. I think one of the reasons they don’t—actually what a producer told me one time is, ‘We can’t control you guys.’ ”