The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (59 page)

Anatole Litvak!

Yes, he was a director … but we’re hailing him anyway for creating one of old Hollywood’s legendary moments.

One night at Ciro’s—as fancy and celebrated then as Spago is now—Anatole Litvak sank to the floor, put his head in Paulette Goddard’s lap, and did naughty things there.

Don’t be so sure you can direct
.

A
fter a week’s production on
Personal Best
, screenwriter turned director Robert Towne was a month behind schedule.

Directors
know
there are screenwriters out there who hate them
.

S
teven Spielberg, Bob Zemeckis, and Michael Mann describe themselves as “weapons enthusiasts” and can sometimes be seen at various L.A. “shooting clubs.”

All three also describe themselves as liberal Democrats who “believe in gun control.”

Let’s hope David Benioff doesn’t hate any directors
.

S
creenwriter David Benioff (
Troy
) describes himself as a “weapons enthusiast,” too; and according to gun club owners, he can outshoot Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Mann.

Was he a screenwriter?

P
olice arrested a man trying to break into Steven Spielberg’s Pacific Palisades mansion. The man had a gun, a knife, rolls of duct tape, whips, a dildo, and various objects described by police as “torture instruments.”

The man told police he wanted to rape Spielberg and kill him.

PART EIGHT

W
ORKING WITH THE
P
RODUCER

LESSON 14

Is His Heart Full of Shit?

Your producer can be your greatest ally
.

W
hen a woman got up at a
Betrayed
screening and started yelling about how much she disliked the movie, producer Irwin Winkler, a literate and sophisticated man, yelled this at her: “Shut up! Sit down! Throw her out! Get her the fuck outta here!”

Pray for a good producer
.

I
got very lucky with two of my scripts—
Betrayed
and
Music Box
. Irwin Winkler produced both of them.

I saw what made him a great producer on the
Betrayed
set. He was there from seven in the morning until seven at night every day. It was a hundred degrees outside, and under the bright lights in a suffocating barn, it was much hotter than that—but Irwin was there for every single day of the shoot.

One day he was so exhausted and dehydrated that he got dizzy and had to be driven back to his hotel. I warned him about his health, and Irwin said, “I know. But all directors are a little nuts. The best directors are more than a little nuts. I want to be there to make sure we don’t experience any unexpected improvisations or unwarranted flights of frenzy.”

Irwin was talking about Costa-Gavras, a man we both loved and greatly respected, but still…
he was a director
.

The definition of a good producer
…

N
ovelist/screenwriter John Gregory Dunne: “If Don Simpson didn’t like something, he hit you right between the eyes with it; he did not send eleven pages of notes to an agent, with orders not to show them to the writer, and then go pissing and moaning to the studio. Okay, he said, let’s fix it, and we would sit down and do it. What the really good producers do is make you enthusiastic by the sheer force of their personalities about the most problematic ideas.

If your producer is pissing you off, remember that you’ve got him by the balls
.

P
laywright/screenwriter David Mamet: “The problem for them is, the story is the one thing that producers can’t do.”

The most respected producer
.

S
am Spiegel is admired by today’s producers as the “producer of all producers.” He produced
The African Queen, The Bridge on the River Kwai
, and
Lawrence of Arabia
. He won
three
Oscars.

When he first came to America from Europe, he told his sister, “I’ll either become a very rich and famous man or I’ll die like a dog in the gutter.”

He bounced checks constantly. He even pimped for a while. He even went to jail in San Francisco for fraud.

Sam Spiegel’s résumé
…

B
efore Sam Spiegel produced any movies, he had an affair with a wealthy divorcée. He stole her George Bernard Shaw first editions, he stole her car, and he stole her ex-husband’s walking stick.

He was arrested in England for fraud: the nonpayment of his apartment bill. He went to Brixton Prison and was allowed one phone call.

He called a studio executive in Hollywood and tried to set up a film deal.

If your producer asks you to send him your script before you send it to the studio
.

D
on’t do it. Your deal isn’t with the producer; it’s with the studio—and by contract, you have to deliver the script to the studio. What the producer is trying to do is to get a free draft of the script from you.

If you send it to him first, he will tell you how you can make it “better” before the studio sees it. Chances are, if you listen to his ideas, your script will be worse than it was before he told you his ideas.

“Tell me everything you have in mind.”

T
his is William Goldman’s spin on what to say to a producer. Take out a notebook and say this to the producer, who will have nothing to say that he would want written down … so your meeting won’t last long.

Producers want to get paid, too
.

I
f you’re a screenwriter, you’re paid when you start writing the script or when you sell it. But if you’re a producer, you’re paid only when the movie starts shooting.

Consequently, the producer will do everything he can to get you moving along on the script as fast as possible—so he can get paid.

You’re better off ignoring his notes
.

S
creenwriter/novelist James Brown: “The producer is an articulate, intelligent man, and during the course of our meeting he gives me several pages of notes, all of them insightful. I want to do a good job, and once more I’m willing to mercilessly cut and chop, create new scenes and eliminate others. Inside of six months we have a strong screenplay with the original vision of my novel still intact. The producer shops it around to actors, directors, and studio executives. A year passes. No luck. The call comes from Vermont, where he is vacationing, and I can sense by the tone of his voice that he’s given up. ‘You wrote a good script,’ he tells me, ‘but they’re all saying that it’s too soft.’

“My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears from the bookstores. I think it’s all over and then out of the blue he phones again to tell me, in short order, that I’m fired.”

ALL HAIL