The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (80 page)

Some critics are so shamelessly biased that they’ll even praise an actor’s performance while bashing your script—as if the performance were created by the director’s notes and not your story, character, and lines of dialogue.

Who are these miscreants?

H
ollywood Reporter
columnist Ray Richmond, himself a sometime film critic: “They are at once heavily ego-driven and desperately insecure. Film critics are movie geeks who write as much to impress other critics as they do to inform their audience. They’re obsessed with being taken seriously, which can manifest itself either via quotes in movie ads or their anointing by the critical intelligentsia as one of their own. Yet while critics sport the iconoclast’s soul, it’s mitigated by an almost child-like need to be loved—not necessarily by the public but by their peers. They pine to be members of the club and at the same time somehow outside it, but not so much that they appear to be snobbish. This is why most would never be caught dead lavishing too much worship on a mainstream blockbuster … unless of course their contemporaries did too (such as in the case of
Spider-Man 2
). Then it would be cool.”

How these miscreants see themselves
.

F
ilm critic A. O. Scott in
The New York Times
: “Criticism always contains an element of autobiography, and it is not much a leap to suggest that more than a few have seen themselves in
Sideways
. (Several have admitted as much.) This is not to suggest that white, middle-aged men with a taste for alcohol are disproportionately represented in the ranks of working movie reviewers; plausible as such a notion may be, I don’t have the sociological data to support it just yet. But the self-pity and the solipsism that are Miles’s less attractive (and frequently most prominent) traits represent the underside of the critical temperament; his morbid sensitivity may be an occupational hazard we all face.”

Critics are hustlers who want to be screenwriters
.

C
onsider James Agee, Peter Bogdanovich, Barbara Shulgasser, Paul Schrader, Jay Cocks, Paul Attanasio, among others—all critics who made it to be screenwriters or directors.

What better way to advertise that you know something about writing screenplays than to pick apart the screenplays of the movies you’re reviewing—knowing that producers and studio execs will read your review if it’s coming from a relatively prominent place.

They’ll hang you by your themes
.

I
’ve always been fascinated by the notion that we don’t ever know one another—that lovers and family members may not really know their mates or parents.

I played with that theme in
Betrayed, Music Box, Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct
, and
Sliver
.

According to the critics, though, screenwriters aren’t allowed to have themes. However, novelists and directors are.

But the critics said there was no theme to my work. I was, they said, “plagiarizing myself.”

If you write witty dialogue
…

B
e prepared for the critics to call you not a witty writer, but a wordsmith.

No matter what you do, the critics will define you
.

C
ritics have defined me as the man who writes about sleazy sex. To reach that conclusion they have ignored most of my films:
F.I.S.T., Checking Out, Big Shots, Hearts of Fire, Betrayed, Music Box, Nowhere to Run, Telling Lies in America
, and
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
.

You, too, can laugh all the way to the bank
.

I
n every bad review I got for
Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Sliver
, and
Jade
, the amount of money I received for the script was always in the review—often in the first paragraph.

William Goldman, speaking about
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
: “My very late great agent, Evarts Ziegler, had secured
400,000 for the screenplay. A lot of money today. Back then, record-shattering. It made all the papers, not just
Variety
. And a lot of people wondered what the world was coming to, a western selling for that. It’s my belief that the reason the reviews were so shitty is because of the money I got. A lot of people were pissed, a lot of these people were critics. For them the title of the movie really turned out to be this:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
400,000
.”

If they were pissed about Bill Goldman’s
400,000, imagine how apoplectic they must have gotten when I got
2.5 million for
Jade
,
3 million for
Basic Instinct
, and
3.7 million for
Showgirls
. Or how insane they must have been when the movie they’d unanimously trashed,
Basic Instinct
, became the biggestgrossing film of the year wordwide!

In the old days, they openly took bribes
.

S
yndicated columnist Jimmy Fiddler revealed that he was offered
2,500 for a favorable review of Errol Flynn’s
The Prisoner of Zenda
and turned the money down because the movie was so bad that he felt he couldn’t take it without looking like a simpleton.

Running into Fiddler at a party later, Flynn decked him—at which point, Fiddler’s wife stuck a fork in Flynn’s ear.

They can be bribed? You damn betcha
!

M
artin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and former Disney executive: “Studios know that many in the entertainment press don’t have the budgets or the scruples to turn down all-expenses-paid junkets to Disney World, to New York, or the set in New Zealand. A bag of swag, or a signed photo of the reporter in a bear hug with a smiling superstar, isn’t a guarantee against a critic’s pan, but it can’t hurt.”

They’re just damn whoors
.

M
any listen to the studio publicity people who call them and ask, “Couldn’t you say this about the movie?” and then tell them what to write.

The reason many critics listen is because they like going on those press junkets, where the studio pays for everything.

They like the Christmas gifts they’ll receive if the studio is pleased with the things they write during the year.

And they like to see their names in big letters in full-page ads paid for by the studio in
The New York Times
or
USA Today
.

Harlots, harlots everywhere
!

M
ike Medavoy: “Back in 1971
The New Yorker
’s Pauline Kael could anoint a picture like
Last Tango in Paris
simply with a review. But by the end of the eighties, there were so many movie critics that their impact had become watered-down as their opinions piled up. Every small town has its own movie critic, and there are reviewers out there working for dubious-sounding organizations who will say something great about any piece of junk just to see their names in the ads.”