The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (27 page)

P
ERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN GET THE BEST TABLE AT SPAGO

I do, sometimes on only an hour’s notice. And Wolfgang always comes over to my table and often
he even sits down. Hallelujah!

We even had dinner together while vacationing in Hawaii. He even gave me career advice: “Don’t ever turn your back on Michael Ovitz! He never forgets.”

Wolfgang is a good guy. He has the same respect for screenwriters that he has for directors and movie stars—as long as they’ve all had some hit movies
.

Leni Riefenstahl smiled in her grave
.

T
he Writers Guild gave its Best Original Screenplay award to the liberal propagandist Michael Moore for his script of
Bowling for Columbine,
a documentary.

In other words, Moore didn’t write it; he interviewed people and edited what
they
said into a political polemic.

Memo to Michael Moore
.

O
ld Hollywood saying: “If you want to write a message, use Western Union.”

Don’t let
anyone
impugn your integrity … not even Farrah Fawcett
.

I
n the book
American Rhapsody,
I wrote that Farrah Fawcett pooped on the front lawn at a party she was attending. In an interview with a New York gossip columnist, Farrah denied it. I wrote the gossip columnist a note:

“I sure don’t see why she’s denying it. In an interview in the September
Movieline
magazine she said, ‘If I’m on location in the woods and my trailer is miles away, I will go to the bathroom in the bushes. There’s no way my makeup lady would do that, for instance, but that’s who I am.’ Farrah clearly loves nature; she is, after all, a country girl from Texas.

“Let me say in defense of Farrah that we’ve all been in situations like that. It’s tough when nature calls so rudely. As they say in Ohio, where I’m from, ‘When you gotta go, you gotta go.’ I remember nearly causing an international incident once—when I asked a limo to pull over between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and took a hike into a field.

“Also, this party where nature called Farrah so rudely was held at the agent Arnold Rifkin’s house. I was at a party on another occasion at that house and I remember my wife, who was very pregnant at the time, had to use the bathroom. But the bathroom was locked. Some sniffling people were having a lengthy Hollywood conference in there. So I certainly understand the same thing could have happened to Farrah. Some sniffling people may have been having a lengthy Hollywood conference in the bathroom and Farrah couldn’t get in there and nature called.”

A pratfall is better than a kiss
.

I
f you want to write a hit movie …

Remember screenwriter Preston Sturges’s (
The Power and the Glory, Strictly Dishonorable
) eleven rules for writing a hit movie:

1. A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
   
2. A leg is better than an arm.
   
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
   
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
   
5. A birth is better than a death.
   
6. A chase is better than a chat.
   
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
   
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
   
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
   
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
    
11. A pratfall is better than anything.
    

Don’t write a script set in a jungle
.

A
ctors will avoid your script. Actor Christopher Walken: “Just a month ago I shot in a place in Hawaii where they made
Jurassic Park
. I mean, I didn’t know there was a place like that: it was so pristine. … But I’ll tell you, I would have to really need money to do another jungle movie. I’m never going back to the jungle. It’s a nightmare. Getting up at night and turning on the light in the bathroom? You see lots of, you know, scary things. I’m never going back.”

They were honorable hookers
.

D
uring the blacklist, screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo sometimes wrote ten scripts a year under pseudonyms for relatively little amounts of money.

Because it was so difficult for them to get work, they did what Trumbo did. Trumbo agreed to rewrite and rewrite until the producer was “satisfied”—no matter how many drafts the producer wanted him to do and no matter
what
the producer wanted him to write.

Trumbo didn’t care. He just wrote what he was told to write.

Since this became somewhat common practice during the blacklist, some producers ever since have expected “their writers” to write this way. If you’re ever asked to do this, tell your producer you want to check it out with your lawyer.

You’re a bust-out loser if you do this
.

D
alton Trumbo: “In order to earn what I do earn I have felt compelled to make a policy of absolutely guaranteeing my work. Thus I may rewrite a script three or four times. Certainly it’s not worth it for the one fee involved, but the man comes back if he gets this kind of service, and thus I am assured of a continuing income.”

Those old lefty screenwriters really were hacks
.

S
creenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “I am obliged to warn you in advance that an original screenplay, designed for sale on the local market, involves a combination of prose and conviction and sentimentality that appalls even me, who am used to it, and would appall you even more. The only thing which makes it possible for a self-respecting writer to engage in such an enterprise is that the story is never published, and is read only by Hollywood.”

Those old lefty screenwriters had some big balls, too
.

D
alton Trumbo: “And so it chanced in Hollywood that each blacklisted writer, after swiftly describing that long parabola from the heart of the motion picture industry to a small house in a low-rent district, picked himself up, dusted his trousers, anointed his abrasions, looked around for a ream of clean white paper and something to deface it with, and began to write. Through secret channels, and by means so cunning that they may never be revealed, what we wrote was passed along until finally it appeared on a producer’s desk, and the producer looked upon it and found it good, and moneys were paid, and the writer’s children began contentedly to eat. Thus the black market.”

Free at last, free at last
.

B
lacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, writing to a friend: “Perhaps I should not be as angry as I am against the weaklings, cravens, and liars who have succeeded in banning me from motion pictures. For I feel a sense of relief and a sense of buoyancy at no longer being an employee, at no longer being under the absolute necessity of earning, say,
75,000 a year. I’m sure I should never have had the courage—or perhaps one should say foolhardiness—to have left it voluntarily. My feeling now—as of today, that is, with the hope of succeeding elsewhere still strong in me—[is] that I shall never return to films, that if Metro asked me back tomorrow with all forgiven, I should refuse. Hunger, of course, could in time alter that decision. But for the present it stands.”

There are no heroes
.

S
aid agent Ingo Preminger: “Nobody used blacklisted writers for the sake of giving them a chance, or for being interested in justice—everybody—whether it was Kirk Douglas with
Spartacus
or my brother Otto with
Exodus
—they all did it for business reasons. These blacklisted writers were bargains. You go to a bargain sale and the blacklist was a bargain.”

My friend Phillip Noyce is part of a vast Commie conspiracy
.

W
hen he read the script of his novel
Patriot Games
, author Tom Clancy faxed the producer, expressing his belief that “Hollywood was under siege from Communist infiltrators.”

Said director Phillip Noyce: “As soon as Clancy read the script he sent us a massive fax accusing us of running some sort of Hollywood, left-wing, liberal fellow-traveling club.”

If your film wins an Oscar, they’ll probably “forget” to thank you
.

O
n
Forrest Gump,
everyone involved with the film who went up onstage forgot to thank the man whose novel it was based on: Winston Groom.

And on
American Beauty,
the director and the star forgot to thank the man who wrote the original screenplay, Alan Ball.

An Oscar is a pain in the
…

S
teven Spielberg, his Oscar in hand: “You know what gets tired? You think it’s your legs that’ll get tired, but it’s not. It’s your arm. Your arm gets tired holding it.”

Listen up, Michael Moore
.

P
addy Chayefsky said this when accepting an Academy Award: “I would like to say, personal opinion, of course, that I’m sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal propaganda. I would like to suggest to Miss Vanessa Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.”

If you’re walking down a red carpet and the paparazzi are taking your picture
.

G
oldie Hawn: “Just turn your head and smile, but don’t stop. Never stop.”

At least your script can’t get flashlighted
.

U
ntil a few years ago, at Academy screenings for best documentary, committee members voted with flashlights. If, at any given point, three-quarters of the flashlights in the room were on, the documentary was stopped and shitcanned.

Make sure you’ve really won the Oscar before you go up there to get it
.

W
ill Rogers, host of the 1933 Academy Awards, announced best director by saying, “Come on up and get it, Frank!” Frank Capra got up and was on his way to the stage when he realized that the award was Frank Lloyd’s.

Make ’em use their rubber bullets
.

T
he Academy Award producers have a serious contingency plan in case someone flips out up there in front of 600 million people and won’t stop talking.

They begin with blinding spotlights and end with rubber bullets—really.

His nomination got Trey Parker laid
.

S
creenwriter Trey Parker: “I was in a strip club in Vegas at four o’clock this morning. I was pretty fucked up, but I do remember looking at a stripper and yelling, ‘Hey, you wanna go with me to the Academy Awards nominee lunch tomorrow?’ And she looked down and yelled ‘Sure!’ ”

If you desperately want an Oscar
…

T
hree statuettes ripped off in the late 1990s were never recovered by police. They’re out there somewhere—all you need are connections.

If you win an Oscar, display it proudly
.

S
creenwriter Ben Hecht used his as a doorstop in his home in Nyack, New York.

If you’re not nominated for an Oscar
…

H
ungarian composer Béla Bartók said, “Competitions are for horses, not men.”

I’ve never been nominated for an Oscar, but
…

J
on Bon Jovi asked me to fly to Budapest, Hungary, with him and introduce the band onstage in the Hungarian language. And Sam Kinison dedicated a CD to me.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a screenplay!

A
t the sixty-sixth Academy Awards, a screenwriter hired an airplane that towed a banner behind it proclaiming
WORLD’S FUNNIEST SCRIPT
, along with a phone number.